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As we had been told that crossing the border into Colombia from Ecuador late in the afternoon is not ideal, we headed off relatively early from Quito. We caught a taxi from our hostel for about 8 USD to the bus terminal to catch a bus to the town of Tulcan. The option is there to take the metro to the bus terminal but as we left at peak hour we didn’t fancy the idea of squeezing onto a carriage with our large backpacks. 

The bus ride was a pretty uneventful 4 or 5 hours. We arrived in Tulcan jumped straight into a taxi for about 3 USD and headed to the border. 

The border crossing is very painless. You get stamped out, walk 100m through no mans land and wait in line to get stamped into Colombia. We exchanged a small amount of money at the border with a man outside immigration and jumped into another taxi for a set price of 8000 COP to the nearby town of Ipiales. We headed straight for the bus station to book an onward ticket and leave our bags in storage while we visited the church. (Storage cost $1 per bag) 

The main draw of Ipiales is the beautiful church set in a valley. It is worth a visit if you have the time but other than that there didn’t seem like much else to do. Most people spend a few hours in the town, visit the church and get transport out. 

From the bus station to the church is approximately 15 minutes in a taxi and about 10,000 COP and the collectivo taxis will charge 2000 COP per person. 

We decided not to spend the night in Ipiales, although if you do decide to lay over there seemed to be few places to spend the night close to the church.

 We decided to make our way to Pasto. The drive to Pasto is very scenic and if you get a chance to do it in the afternoon the views are quite picturesque. 

Be wary of arriving late in Pasto, we cottoned on pretty quickly to a lady trying to pick pocket us whilst waiting for a taxi. She was harmless and more of an annoyance than anything. I swear she thought she was wearing an invisible cloak because Em just kept starring at her and she just kept trying. We should have just given her some pesos for the effort. 

We spent the night at the Koala inn right in the centre of town. Good enough for 22,000 pesos for a large private room with hot water. 

We were all pretty tired after a whole day on the road so we opted for some takeaway pizza and crashed out for the night. 

We had heard that a lot of these towns are just transit towns so we opted to head off the next day. We wondered around the town in the morning and honestly there is not much to really write about, in saying that we didn’t look to hard.

From Pasto you have a lot of different options on which route you want to take. You can head north east to San Augustin or keep on the same path towards Salento. We opted for the path to Salento as we had heard about a town called Chachagui along the way. Pronounced “chacha-wee). It is a local coffee region with some nice coffee farms great scenery and good mountain biking apparently. We stayed in Hostel Kundur. A nice and clean hostel with a pool, nice views and friendly, informative owners. Its a great place to stop to break up the journey and the coffee farms have some very cheap coffee. 

You can spend a couple of days here exploring the canyon and walking through the coffee farms apart from that the town is a very small, local town with an authentic feel. Keen to get to Solento we headed out the next day after lunch.  

We made our way to Popayan, a pretty colonial town with white washed buildings lining the centre. We had the option of heading here or to Cali as a connecting town on our way to Solento. We opted for Popoyan because we hadn’t heard great things about Cali and decided we would be happy to skip the city. 

Keen for a drink we ventured out to find a local pub and and experience the local nightlife. We found a great little local pub. I think they were all a bit surprised to see some foreigners in there. The beers were cheap, and you can tequila by the bottle. Its had a great atmosphere where everyone is chatting and phones and wifi are non existent. 

We jumped on a bus from the bus terminal and made our way to Armenia to catch up with a friends family before heading out to Solento. Armenia doesn’t seem like much on first glance but after spending the day being shown around by locals it is a small, very friendly city worth a day or two. We thought so anyway……. although it may have been because we had some great guides!