Paragliding in Medellin!

I slept amazing last night. We woke up and packed most of our stuff, then went to reception to check on the paragliding. It's a go. The taxi will pick us up at 10:00 to take us.

We walked around the neighbourhood and found a small place for breakfast, then back to the hostel and decided to book a flight to Santa Marta instead of a bus, as a bus would be a night bus and be around 15 hours.

At 10:00, the taxi picked us up and it was about a 40 minute ride up the hills to the paragliding place. Talk about steep roads. A road inn New Zealad claims to have the steepest road in the world, but some of the roads in Medellin would give the New Zealand road a run for its money on that title.

We paid 80,000 pesos each and then had to make a hike up the hill to the takeoff point. There was a younger guy there training. He introduced himself to us and spoke good english. We met our pilots and got the suit on, and I was the first to go. It was awesome, flying over the hills and valleys near Medellin. I had done this before in Nepal, so I knew what to expect, but this was Ryan's and my dads first time. Once I landed, I was able to record Ryan and dad coming in and landing as well. The landing location was a field in the suburbs and there were a whole bunch of kids around watching us come in, some of them even helped us land and pack everything up.

Dad loved it, he had a permagrin on his face. This was the one thing he wanted to do most in Columbia, so it's great that eveything fell into place.

The taxi driver was late getting to the landing spot, so we had to wait for a while for him to come.

The taxi driver took us back to the hostel, then we grabbed our stuff and he took us to the airport. The flight from Medellin to Bogota was ridiculously short. They didn't even get a chance to finish off the drink service, so Ryan was left complaining about lack of coffee again.

We had about 3 hours in Bogota airport and the only food option was Dunkins Donuts or a block of cheese. I chose Dunkins Donuts. They also kept changing gates and info, and making the announcements in Spanish. We had no clue was was going on! We just followed everybody else.

The flight was late and we arrived in Santa Marta sometime after 11:00pm. We got a taxi to the hostel, he was driving like a crazy man. We got the hostel and found out that I screwed up on the reservation and only made it for one person and they didn't have room for the three of us.

We went to a hostel next door and got a private room for the three of us and got settled. We then headed to the main waterfront road where apparently there was a restaurant still open. Sure enough there was, so dad and Ryan had some food, then back to the hostel and to bed near 1:00am.