Day 17: North to Bogota

Today we rose in the middle of the night for our northward journey to Bogota. Our time here, though short, has been very rich and important for us on many levels—in feeling the condition of humanity, seeing the Great Waves of change unfold in a vulnerable place, and considering the future of the New Message here and across all our travels thus far.

In the darkness of the lobby, at around 2:30am, we took this photo of four weary travellers. Now it is time for the last stage of our journey, to Bogota, Colombia and then home to Boulder.

The city of La Paz was sound asleep as our driver wheeled through the empty streets, taking up two lanes and running red light after red light. Ever higher we climbed out of the deep cut valley, past the layered neighborhoods of simple clay and brick homes, past windows dark and a few lit. We climbed up onto the high Andean plains, and, after much Socialist-state beurocracy, were sitting at our gate with with a hundred tired Bolivians and a few American and European backpackers and mountaineers.

As our plane climbed into the sky, we looked down to as if on a lake of many thousands of lights—the city brightly lit in the deep black of the Andean night.

After connecting to our flight in Lima (which we very nearly missed, if we had arrived only 3 minutes later) we boarded our flight to Bogota. Below are some of the images I was able to capture from the plane in sequence from the dry mountains of Peru, to the infinite expanse of the Amazon and its many rivers, to the forest-clad cliffs and farmed land of Colombia.