Most likely the pictures I show here won't be the best, but hey, it was a pretty amazing ride.
If you read my last post I made in this community, you will know that 1 week ago I managed to move from my native country, Venezuela, and I am currently in Bogotá, Colombia.
It was an amazing trip, it was my first trip by plane and it was also my first trip out of the country. I have no words to describe how happy I am at the moment and how much I am looking forward to come back to Hive like never before and share all my time here.
Before I go on, I thank absolutely all the friends I have made here. Especially to @derangedvisions, who has advised me and helped me with every decision I have made within Hive and also to @acidyo and @perceval for helping me to buy a new computer to publish in Hive and get back to my daily activities here.
Many thanks to ocdb for all the support while I could not dedicate all my time to the community, I will never get tired of thanking the people who have been supporting me from the beginning and I certainly hope to return the favor in the near future.
The photos above are not a direct flight to Bogota. International flights are incredibly expensive for a Venezuelan, so for obvious reasons, we could not afford to go that way to another country. Our plan was to travel to the Venezuela-Colombia border and from there to Colombia on foot across the bridge that connects the two countries.
Obviously not everything went as planned, but that made the trip more exciting :P
Spam of pics from an airplane incoming
There was a moment where we entered a cloud and that caused a bit of turbulence, the truth is that I am surprised how calm I felt despite being my first trip on a plane. I couldn't stop looking out the window and thinking that taking pictures of anything was going to be a good idea haha.
I didn't want to take the phone out too much because at one point my ears were clogged from the pressure and even started to hurt as we were about to reach our destination, so I wanted to rest a bit. Once we arrived at the Santo Domingo de Táchira airport our cab was waiting to take us to San Antonio de Táchira to cross the border. The truth is that the airport where we arrived was not as nice as the one in Margarita (the island where I lived).
Once we took our cab another stage of our trip began. It is a real pity about the whole economic situation in Venezuela. It is really a beautiful country and quite diverse.
Something really miserable is the number of police posts that all people encounter on these roads. These posts are not there to control or take care of the people who travel on these roads, they are only there to take money from the drivers. I could see before my eyes how a guard told the cab driver that he knew what would happen if he did not leave some money. Our cab driver already knows all this and he was responsible for this kind of bribery. But this is just a sample of the decadence of the society that exists in Venezuela. It is all disgusting corruption.
From this moment on I didn't take any more pictures due to all the tiredness and dizziness I had because of the road we had to take. Another problem we had was that we didn't eat anything most of the way because the }food was not enough and we didn't want to spend a lot of money on the road either. We made a stop in San Cristobal because our cab was hungry since he hadn't eaten all day, so we ate too to have energy for the rest of the trip.
We arrived at the border and could not pass through the bridge because it was very late and at that time was not allowed to pass, while we could not stay in a hotel and wait for the next day because we had no money and due to a regulation that exists when passing from Venezuela to Colombia in bridge, similarly we could not pass the next day because our ID number was not allowed to pass even if we stayed (something a little complicated to explain).
So we had to pass into Colombia through "la trocha", basically an illegal road that connects both countries and that many people use to cross the border every day. It is not so illegal since the Colombian and Venezuelan police let this road exist, maybe they have economic interests here? Nobody knows.
It was 6-7 pm by the time we decided to take this road and I must admit that I was scared to death because of the type of people here. They all had traits of people who could easily rob you and do whatever they want with you, and since we were in a rural area, no one was going to know that we died there. Apparently all this is controlled by organized crime and the Colombian guerrilla, after we passed the halfway point, some people who are dedicated to check everything that people carry stopped us and I must admit that I got scared.
They were people with gloves, radios and guns. Apparently it is quite common for them to go through everything that passes through that road, but they are not thieves as they did not take any of our belongings. I am completely sure that there is some kind of relationship between the police forces and this kind of organizations since they only asked us if we had national products (from Venezuela) since we cannot pass them to Colombia for obvious reasons. After they checked us we continued on our way and arrived in Cucuta, Colombia.
At no time did it occur to me to take out my phone because the atmosphere was very dangerous, something told me that I should not take out anything of value so I kept a low profile, so I did not take pictures of anything. I preferred to stay safe and also save my phone battery.
Here I will skip a big part of the story because I don't have pictures to complement, but, a piece of advice: NEVER buy bus tickets if it is not in an official agency. We made the grave mistake of not doing so and were from 6-7 pm until 11 pm without food and stranded on a highway waiting for a bus to come and pick us up. It was a horrible experience, but something I had to live to learn. At least everything went well and we were able to embark on the next stage of our trip: The great bus trip.
Once we were on the bus we could breathe easy because all the bad things had passed and we were already in the penultimate stage of reaching our destination. As soon as the bus started its journey, the dizziness soon became noticeable so I decided to sleep straight away so as not to feel so bad. Keep in mind that by that time I had not eaten for about 7-8 hours and I still decided to sleep.
Something that surprised me about this bus was that it had wifi and even tablets where there were movies, games and it even told us the stops where the driver would possibly go to eat. Too much technology for me haha.
When I woke up, it was already 6-7 am and I felt terribly hungry. We hadn't eaten in a long time and this caused me to feel pretty bad haha, but it's a sacrifice we had to accept. The views were incredible and the only really cool thing about this trip was all the scenery we were able to see along the way.
Up to this point we were already incredibly close to Bogotá. There was a lot of traffic and for the first time I saw how they were carrying cars in a truck that reminded me a lot of a Fast and Furious movie XD. I assume they are cars that lead to a car store, I felt like I was in another world.
We arrived in Bogota around noon and for some reason everything looked darker. The truth is that I felt really happy when we arrived and I knew I was really going to like this place, the streets are completely different from Venezuela and I felt like I was in a first world country (and it's funny because Colombia is not even close to being considered a first world country).
Here we had already arrived at the Salitre Terminal, basically a bus terminal. Here I started to notice the cold that I have always been warned about and I noticed that I felt much more tired than usual, I guess because of the exhausting trip and also because of the change of weather. (Oh, I forgot to mention that there was a moment where the bus made a stop for lunch and we also got off). The total bus ride was about 16-18 hours.
We took a cab to our apartment and knew it was all over. We arrived at our destination and have been getting to know everything ever since. Bogota is a very beautiful city compared to where I come from and I am very happy to be able to walk these streets and have this great experience.
My plan is to work completely on things online. I hope to be able to go back to Hive and dedicate myself 100% to this as I want it to be my main income. I have been here for 1 week now and I am very excited about the great amount of opportunities I will have on the internet thanks to the incredible internet speed here compared to Venezuela (it's funny because we have a basic plan and it is 30 times faster than our connection in Venezuela). I also have a new computer that I'm pretty sure will allow me to record, stream and do a lot of things that will help me to make better content on Hive. I'm pretty excited for what's to come.
Again, thank you Hive for making everything possible and many thanks to those acquaintances who have helped me so far. I am quite happy to belong here and hope to be here for a long time to come.