Day 26 – Passport

Late start today – we try and get every last bit of sleep we can to deal with being woken up twice a night by a hungry girl.

After breakfast, Leanne had us put on some nice clothes and we took some family photos out on the balcony near our room.

We hung around the room not doing much until lunchtime.

After lunch, Magnolia picked us up and took us to the passport office, where we met with our lawyer who had our copies of the sentencia and the new birth certificate for Nicol.

Our lawyer submitted the forms, we paid the various fees and then waited for them to be ready for the photos. Unlike previously where we brought passport sized photos with us, they now have digital cameras ready to take photos themselves. These are just for emergency passports – if you want a full 10 year passport, you need to send everything to Bogota where they can create the new electronic passports used elsewhere in the world.

It took a couple of tries to get a suitable photo – there was no shortage of ladies behind the counter offering to help get Nicol to look at the camera! Fortunately she was not in a smile-at-everyone mood, so that wasn’t a problem (no smiling allowed in passport photos!), but she was very interested in everything going on around her, so it was difficult to get her to look directly at the camera. Finally they got the photo they wanted and we then sat down to wait.

It didn’t take too long for them to prepare the passport for us, so after checking all the details were correct, we said goodbye to our lawyer and headed off with Magnolia to find a shop that sells luggage.

Some of the things we have bought this trip are a little bulky and a bit fragile, so we didn’t think we could fit them into our existing bags. We decided to try and find a cheap hard-shell case which would carry everything – we are allowed 2x 23kg bags each for the three of us (Nicol doesn’t get a full baggage allowance) and we only have 4 bags in total at the moment.

We looked at a few bags before they finally pulled out a Fila hard-shell case (or a copy of one!), which would have been nice – except for the price (over $250), so we looked at other options and eventually settled on something for around $75. Not hard-shell, but still has good structure to it, unlike a lot of bags being sold these days, where they seem to focus on weight at the cost of structural integrity.

We went next door to try and find some bubble-wrap, but it seems they needed to drive to another store to find some – so after about 20 minutes of waiting, we gave up and left.

Back at the hotel, Magnolia made some calls for us about our planned side trips. Seems like every option we consider will be quite expensive (flight change penalties, excess baggage costs, etc) – it’s more a matter of convenience versus cost we need to decide on.