Day 1 - Bergen-Amsterdam-Paris

Our journey has begun.

We flew from Bergen to Amsterdam Sunday afternoon in a beautiful sunset, and on to Paris Sunday evening. All our luggage was checked through to Bogotá from Bergen, so we didn't have to think about it in the airport in Paris!

On top of our own 40 kg of luggage, we added a shipsack full of children's clothes for an orphanage in Colombia. Because of weight restrictions on domestic flights and because we will switch airlines in Bogotá, we probably won't be able to take that with us to Cali, but there are orphanages that will be happy to receive such gifts in Bogotá, too!

Paris CDG (Charles de Gaulle) is a huge, but very modern airport. Terminal 2, which opened in 2007, is nice and clean, with 7 long, tube-like terminal buildings and several wireless Internet providers. The walkways between the buildings are also big glass tubes — it felt a little like being on an alien space station at times!

The free shuttle buses to nearby hotels go every fifteen minutes. Just make sure you get on the right one — due to franchising, many of the hotels have confusinigly similar names! A nice lady at the information desk pointed this out to us, which made us check with the driver even though the name of our hotel was written on the shuttle bus. This saved us a lot of time and hassle, because the driver patiently explained to us that we needed the *red and white* Ibis shuttle, not the *pink and white* Ibis shuttle, which went to a different Ibis Hotel altogether!

We were very happy that we had a stop-over in Paris with a bed and a shower, so that we would only have one flight the next day -- that's enough for one day, especially when that flight is supposed to take over 11 hours!