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table with two of his associates.  After dinner Clara went to bed while I sat with them on the terrace.  After a Daiquiri and some desultory conversation, I also retired, leaving a call for 4.30 AM.

Feb. 5. The Avianca bus was scheduled to call at the hotel at 5.10.  We were called on time, and managed to get our bags packed and taken to the lobby by six minutes past five, only to find that the bus had gone.  The plump Teuton at the desk seemed not at all disturbed and suggested we could get there by taxi.  A rather disagreeable man with a slight accent (but no Spanish at all) was in the same fix and very cross about it.  He had made the trip before, and said the bus was probably killing time outside Avianca's city office; we shared a taxi to the city office, and there was the bus, a big open affair with no inside aisle. It was dark, the street was dark and the passengers were sitting in glum silence.  We managed to find places and squeeze aboard. It was too dark to see anything of the city, but the sun came up before we reached the airport, so that we could see the road and have our first glimpse of the meek little Colombian burros, some carrying crates of bottles and some carrying humans, who looked incredibly long-legged as they towered over those small backs.  No food of any kind at the airport, and nothing within reach.  We were briefly weighed, with baggage, and then sat on the terrace waiting to be called to the plane.  P. J. Eder was also waiting; we talked with him now and then, and sat behind him on the plane.  It was a Douglass, with side entrance and all seats facing forward.  The other passengers seemed to be South Americans.  We went up less roughly than in the seaplane, and Clara found it less painful to the ears.  When the plane was up and on its way the steward brought around coffee and sandwiches, "jamón o queso ?".  We came down for twenty minutes at Barranca Bermeja; we could just make out the oil drums and see that it was a river port as we came down, but the airport was surrounded by fields and woods.  A few yards from the building I collected some scale insects on a gardenia.
There was much to see as we flew up the Magdalena valley --- mountains on both sides, the Eastern cordillera on the left and the Central on the right, with the river between looking very small indeed.  Now and then there was a small cluster of roofs, but long stretches without. Once we saw a little steamboat on the river, tiny enough to prove that the river was not the thin thread of water it appeared.  Once I saw a crocodile, sunning himself on a sand-bar.  After an hour or so the river began to get even smaller, as we gradually climbed, until we were fly-