I headed out of my Rio hotel at 4.30am in the morning to get to the airport for my 7.20am flight to Cartagena with a connection by Bogota with Avianca Airlines. All was smooth with the transfer and I was looking forward to heading to another country and getting to see the Colombia coast and the walled city of Cartagena. That was my plan, but Colombia says no.

Unbeknown to me, if you are travelling to Colombia from Brazil you are required to have a Yellow Fever vaccination certificate. It is not something that is required if you fly to Colombia from USA, but it is if you arrive from Brazil. My booked flight and booked hotel were all useless and unfortunately money lost. As they say, if I knew then what I know now, but in my searches for travel requirements this just did not come up. Simple mistake, causing big problems.

At such an early hour I had to come up with a plan B. Given that there was no potential for Colombia it made little sense to consider any other options other than flying back to Seattle, somehow. At this point I started feverishly looking into possible options because Rio is still 11,000 miles from home.

The most credible option seemed to be to fly with Copa Airlines to Miami. I found and booked that flight. That is where the good news ends because this flight is 1.37am the next day, just a mere 20 hours waiting time in the airport. Painful. As I type this blog I have been sitting in various airport seats for over 16 hours, you can imagine the joy!! I can’t check in quite yet, but once I am able to do that I can hand off my luggage, get through immigration and see a different part of this god damn airport.

On the side I have been all day the public are present, what that means here, taxi driver and shoe shine men. If I had a dollar for every time I have been asked ‘do I need a taxi’ or ‘want a shoe shine’, I would be loaded, absolutely loaded. It has been so annoying I have lost my patience more than once.

Anyway, back to the waiting joy.. I wait.

My first flight will be to Panama and that will be later connect to Miami, having me into Miami mid morning. In the afternoon I will head to Houston and the final leg will have me onwards to Seattle by 8.30pm Tuesday night. I do gain 5 hours in time difference along the way, so I have still got a whole heap of time coming up, but hopefully, I will be on the move. Fingers crossed there are no more spanners in the works and I get to go home.

It took 47 hours to get home from first arriving in Rio airport on Monday morning. I did get home safely after such a long wait in the airport and followed by four flights. I arrived home to some additional good news, the Colombia hotel had kindly given me back 80% of the cost of my booking, which was well received.

I did over 200 miles wandering around the various countries, saw some great places, enjoyed the experience, learned a few things and will be all the better for it. Panama allowed me to experience a thunderstorm like I have never seen before, Ecuador was great in so many ways, Chile grew on me and I loved Valpariso and Vina Del Mar, Rio, oh Rio, it’s hard to explain, for quite a bit of the time it didn’t feel safe. Thing is, if I didn’t like to wander so much I could have avoided this, but I don’t want to avoid seeing a place, so I didn’t, and it worked out ok, a bit questionable at times and I am definitely glad I went.