The beginning of the usual travel weekend craziness. Went over to the office to work for most of the day. Had a quick lunch across the street at Burger Town. Productivity really tapered off in the second half of the day, though, as I got distracted looking into trips to Patagonia when I’m down in Argentina. In the evening I had one of my favorite types of events which was a dinner with locals at La Cervecería. Talked to a girl who is working on a social-travel app called NoMoFoMo that sounds really cool. After this we had our usual farewell craziness. Rented a party bus and drove all around Bogota until some indeterminate time. I called it before the party was over and considering my early start time the next day I’m glad I did.

Another pretty standard weekday today. Went over to Work&Go and worked from there all day. Had lunch at Capital Bagels across the street where I was sad to learn that the breakfast bagel I ordered to-go was “some assembly required.” But I powered through. In the evening I had a neat event where we went over to the offices of APES and learned about their business and the general state of entrepreneurship in Colombia.

Settled back into life today and worked on catching up on the work that I should have been doing yesterday. Pretty uneventful, just went over to the office and worked there until the evening. Then some of us went to WOK, an Asian place that serves… literally every Asian dish ever conceived of.

Heading back to civilization today and most of us had work to do. In true digital douche bag fashion we all swarmed the lobby of the hotel to use the wifi and try and be productive. I lasted about… one hour before the heat sapped all my motivation. We had some time to kill so we walked up the street and got ice cream. After a bit we went over to the tiny Leticia airport where we were all crammed into one room waiting for our delayed flight. That wasn’t pleasant but our flight back was super quick. Then of course we had to fight Bogota traffic back to our part of town which was another… hour or two drive. When we finally got home some of us were craving pizza so we went for pizza at La Fabbrica and then some friends of a friend joined us for drinks afterwards.

After a pretty aggressive day of paddling yesterday today was much more low key. We took a motorized boat up the Amazon today to look for wild life. Our first stop was at “Monkey Island”… Actually I think that’s the real name. This place was pretty cool. It was swarming with this squirrel monkeys and if you had any kind of food they’d be all over you. They’ll climb up you and jump from person to person. It was pretty hilarious. After that we headed back downriver to try and spot dolphins. The Amazon River has a species of pink freshwater dolphins that exist only here. We spotted a few normal grey ocean dolphins and finally caught up to some pink dolphins. It was suggested to us that they were attracted to splashing so naturally everyone jumped in the river (piranhas be damned). The dolphins stuck around for quite a while but did keep their distance. After this we hiked inland to try and spot some sloths. Despite the fact that it was a pretty short trek it was fierce. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many mosquitoes in my life. While we didn’t spot any sloths we did see some really cool tarantulas and gorgeous butterflies. As well as an assortment of plants that would kill you if you so much as looked at them. Once we got back on the river we unsuccessfully tried our hands at fishing and then called it a day. We tried to go back to our Legends of Rock Bar for dinner but it was closed so we just ate at the hotel again and called it an early night.

The first day of our small expedition into the Amazon was kayaking. Somehow I thought that by being in a boat I’d manage to stay relatively dry. Not so… as soon as I sat down in the kayak (which was already mostly filled with water) I was soaked. This coupled with the fact that it rained for much of the day (who’d have thought there’d be rain in the Amazon?) made it a thoroughly wet day. But paddling through the rivers that make up the Amazon was cool. But, the really neat parts were the moments when we were going through flooded portions of the jungle and weaving around mangroves. We stopped for lunch with some parrots but for the most part we set a pretty aggressive pace that left me pretty beat by the time we got back.

After a much needed shower we were pretty hungry so naturally we decided to walk to Brazil for lunch. After searching in vain for some pizza we ended up at a Chinese/Peruvian restaurant which was… about as good as it sounds. However, our expedition redeemed itself on the way back with a stop at a place that I think was called the “Legends of Rock” Bar. That’s what we called it anyway. It was a cool place that played American rock music videos. At some point we ended up at some other tiny Leticia bar but after such a long day we all called it a night pretty early.

Finishing touches on some work and then off to the airport this morning. I started out making good time but then my Uber driver took me to the wrong terminal at the airport so I had to get him to fix that. Worth mentioning at this point that Uber is not legal in Colombia. So on the way to the second terminal we got stopped by the police… forever. Started to worry that I might not even make my flight but my limited Spanish was enough for me to confirm my drivers cover story so they finally let us go. From Bogota it’s a two hour flight to the tiny town of Leticia which is the southern most city in Colombia and sits right on the Amazon river. This is actually the intersection of three countries. Across the river is Peru and just a couple of blocks walk from my hotel is Brazil. I stayed at the Decameron Decalodge Ticuna which was nice and thankfully had air conditioning. Our first afternoon we didn’t do much. Settled into the hotel and then had dinner there.

Today the focus was on getting all my work done for both tomorrow and Monday as we are heading out into the Amazon and I didn’t want to be having to worry about finding internet and constantly having my laptop around. I stopped for lunch at a little quesadilla place, Chidas Quesadillas, on the way to the office and then basically powered through work all the way until the evening until I had to head home to pack for our excursion.

It has been brought to my attention that many people have goals for this year on the road of ours. Truth be told I didn’t set out with any goals for the year. I was just looking to fill the gap in excitement created by not working on a Presidential campaign. In early days we were put on the spot on to list some goals and I just tossed out “learn Python.” …so I’ve been working on that, which meant this was another day with my head down trying to figure out how to get the code I was writing to work. The whole day flew by and before I knew it, it was time for dinner. In what is becoming a wee tradition I met my roommate from last month for “date night.” We went to Criterion which I belatedly remembered is on the Latin America Top 50 list. As you’d expect it was excellent. Then after dinner drinks at Apache (since the first two places we tried to go were closed) also a cool rooftop bar worth checking out. …even though it is full of hipster nonsense.

Pretty uneventful day today. I remained completely caught up in this little coding conundrum so after heading over to the office I looked up and the next thing I knew it was nighttime. I hadn’t given any thought to dinner plans so I just walked down to Parque 93 and saw Osaki sushi which I’d heard was good. It was but nothing to write home about out.