Americas 2023

Spent a day in Bogota, doing not much anything. Visited one famous old restaurant for tasty local food and walked around the city a bit. It was a public holiday today, so most shops were closed..

Have to admit Bogota is not really one of my favourite cities. Even if I'm used to Latin American cities Bogota feels way more unsafe than most of them, especially at night. Well, the next cities should be better, Cartagena and Medellin.

Hello, Latinoamerica. :)

Now sleep...

Urgh.. Four hour night flight in economy class ain't fun. Especially if arriving at 05:20AM and having the next flight in the afternoon. Well, some sleep on the aircraft and some more on a terminal bench and we even survived out to see the city a bit and have a pizza. There's a big football game in the city tonight, so the entire city was full of football fans and most restaurants were really crowded.

Too bad there was no enough time to visit the CNN headquarters, the huge Georgia aquarium or Coca Cola museum.

We stayed overnight in Monterrey so we were still six hours out from Los Angeles. So, there was not that much time to do any special excursions today. Instead we choose to continue our "American simulation", listening to country radio and driving our pickup truck to an outdoor shooting range.

Being foreigners was not a problem at all and it was relatively easy to understand how the process works on a shooting range here, so we spent some time there making holes in cardboards.

Afterwards we drove the rest of the way to Los Angeles, got lost on horrendously steep and small streets of Hollywood Hills with our large truck and visited a viewpoint above the Universal Studios and other movie companies. Now at LA airport, waiting for our flights to Atlanta and Bogota.

This will be one long night... The flight to Atlanta departs at 22:45 and I don't think we will get a lot of sleep on the four hour flight. Then a ten hour layover in Atlanta will follow, and finally the 4-5h flight to Bogota. Why we got this idea... :)

After some hours of driving we found the coastal city of Monterrey, sea lions and a scenic "17 mile drive" road. :)

The first actually interesting destination of the trip was Yosemite national park. We started our drive at 6AM from Los Angeles, arriving to the park in the early afternoon.

The day was spent driving and walking around the Yosemite valley, although I must say that the park was quite a bit of disappointment to me at that point. Everything is very developed and built up, even to the highest peaks there is a proper asphalt road for cars and all the hiking paths are concrete.

Only just before the sunset we found a way more interesting part of the park, the Taft Point viewpoint which had no structures and asphalt roads and fences. 4km roundtrip forest walk brought us to great views over the valley and the sunset. Definitely worth it. :)

Darkness came and we drove to a nearby town of Mariposa. Or well, nearby, 100 miles and two hours of small and windy mountain roads. I think I have never been so tired driving as I was yesterday evening, mostly due to the jetlag.. Well, managed the last miles without sleeping while driving.

Now it's breakfast in Mariposa and to the coastline.

Evening arrival after a sleepless (strange, the Finnair new business class is very comfortable) flight and a check-in to a cheap Hollywood hotel. We did a quick walk to the Hollywood boulevard, planning a very early departure on the next morning.

We started this trip with a round trip to Budapest due to Finnair pricing mistake for business class flights, and the trip will also end with a similar roundtrip. The first episode of Budapest was just remote working and a quick visit to the famous ruin bars, so not much to tell about that.