SFO –> IAH –> BOG

Oooh… she has the magic card! This comes from three tipsy British guys standing behind me in the elevator. They’re referring to my Marriott card that grants me access to the executive floor and lounge in any Marriott hotel. I pulled it out and inserted it into the elevator wall on my way to the “magic” floor to get water.

I wasn’t sure what to say. I was filthy, tired, sick, thirsty, and at times… giggly. Yes… giggly. It seemed rather ironic to me to be standing in the middle of a posh hotel in my current state of disarray. I was afraid to open my mouth because if I did, I’d start laughing hysterically and scare the life out of the poor fellows in the elevator.

I’m in Bogotá and just getting here was a journey… a long one. 48-hours earlier I was slapped, out of the blue, by one of the worst sore throats and head colds that I’ve experienced since this episode two years ago. For an entire day, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed, let alone get on a plane and travel for 10-hours… and get into a country looking like a candidate for Ebola. My bedside table was riddled with a pile of used and balled up Kleenex tissues. I couldn’t speak because it was too painful. I wished for one of the magic yellow pills from India.

At one point I had an epiphany and wondered, what do pilots do when they get sick? So I Googled my question and apparently they use this wonderful British invention called Mucinex, which basically liquefies mucus and eradicates all aspects of a cold. This combined with earPlanes and I was miraculously golden. I wish I’d known about earPlanes in the early years of travel with La Niña (there is a child-sized version). They work like earplugs but have a ceramic valve that controls the pressure out to allow congested ears to regulate slower… thus saving your eardrum from trauma during landing.

With the magic combo, I was on my way.

Arriving in Bogotá is not what I expected… and this would become the theme for the entire journey. I expected more guns, bag scanning, and questioning. Instead, I found a beautiful airport, polite border guards, and dogs. My Spanish is REALLY rusty. I had an uno momento episode at customs where my brain rapidly switched between French and Spanish but clicked on neither and I couldn’t answer any questions in anything but slow, unsure, monosyllabic responses. It took over 24-hours for Spanish to force itself out of the deep dark recesses of my head and when it hit me it was like the moment when Trinity downloaded the instructions on how to fly a B212 helicopter in the Matrix.

Customs and immigration in Bogotá are rather efficient and before long I was whipping through traffic in a hired car. I’m the kind of person who will happily try and figure out the local transportation situation (remember… I find the Tube in London soothing) but because I arrived in the middle of the night and I’d been bombarded with so many stories about people being kidnapped in taxis on the road to and from the airport that I decided to cough up the extra cash and hire a car to take me to the hotel. As it turns out, this is a much faster way to get out of the airport because the taxi queues are really long.

Now, while I didn’t find armed guards at the airport… I did find them at the hotel… with dogs. Everything that goes into the hotel has to pass the sniff test. This practice dates back to the days when hotels were stormed and people were kidnapped by guerrillas. I don’t think that still happens, but the dogs and guards stick around to make people feel safe.