Santa Marta to Cartagena - Colombia

(This is the last post from Colombia where we went at the end of the trip for something different than Patagonia. We did more continuous touring in Chile and Argentina. So if you are interested in that go back to those posts. I am not going to go to the trouble of making a separate blog for Colombia. If you want to go to the start of the posts for Colombia click here.)

From Riohacha Colombia we decided to ride back over a section of the road we had already ridden, back in the direction of Cartagena.  We stopped in the east end of Tayrona National Park to spend a couple of days there because we skipped over that on the way to Riohacha. More than one nature loving tourist had said that Tayrona was their favorite part of Columbia. You have to walk into the beaches on the east end a bit but, there are full services at the beach like restaurants and cabins. The beaches are some of the most beautiful I have ever seen with white sand and big round piles of white granite boulders here and there. Picture a tropical Joshua Tree on the Caribbean. We were there in low season and there were about a dozen people on each beach,  so it was not too crowded but it would probably be a zoo on holidays and high season. The big thing about the park is they are making an effort to keep it clean which was much appreciated. We stayed in a private campground called Castilletes on the way into the park where we felt they would do a better job of watching our stuff. It had about a kilometer long beautiful beach we had largely to ourselves. As a bonus it was also clean. Whenever we see a campground that has the word eco in it they tend to be cleaner so eco here must mean clean? We had the owner hack open a perfectly ripe guilt free LOCAL coconut for breakfast to go with the perfectly ripe guilt free LOCAL pineapple. I think if there is a risk that your food of choice could fall out of a tree and hit you in the head at any moment it qualifies as local.

The five k road into Canavaral beach was actually a highlight for us as there was little traffic and it was a total tropical jungle complete with Howler monkeys we stopped to watch and listen to.

The climb around Tayrona Park to Santa Marta from east to west was excellent, not too steep and it leveled off here and there. We had the good fortune of some rain to cool us off.  It takes a bit of a mental shift to get used to thinking of rain as a good thing when in southern Patagonia hypothermia was a serious concern.  In the tropics we have learned to just ride in clothes and sandals that dry off relatively fast. If it is real hot when it stops raining you don’t necessarily want to dry off right away as you get evaporative cooling. Plus when it is raining the sun is not out and mid-day riding on the Coast here in full on sun is too hot. It tends to cloud up in the afternoon like elsewhere in Columbia we have been.

The riding in and around Santa Marta is sunnier and hotter because it is in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the east. We rode until Cienaga a short way southeast of Santa Marta.  At that point we took a bus to Barranquilla as we were told the wind across the causeway would be dangerous due to crosswinds. On this particular day that would not have been an issue but we seriously thought we were going to have heat strokes if we kept riding. The first ten or fifteen kilometres out of Cienaga had some pretty shocking poverty.  Make shift houses were often half surrounded by water and the water was full of garbage.  After that stretch, the scenery is pretty pleasant with all these tidy little vegetable farms where they seem to be making a statement that they are not trashy like their neighbors to the east. The last half before Barranquilla you can see the ocean quite a bit and there is little development with not too much trash. A portion of that is a national park of some sort.

We were a little scared of Barranquilla being a large port town with little tourism. As usual we were worried about nothing.  We rode all the way through town and it wasn’t bad at all. The west end of town was fairly prosperous and had quite a few universities. 

The ride from Barranquilla to Cartagena was gently rolling and we had the good fortune of having it rain a fair amount even though this is not as jungle like as the area around Tayrona.  The pavement was excellent and there was a big shoulder. We were worried that the truck traffic we had seen from Bogota to Bucamaranga would be on this road to Cartagena but they weren't. We had been told there was good scenery along this stretch of the coast but there were only limited views of the ocean. Us being from Oregon, coastal scenery has to be pretty spectacular to get an honorable mention. The view was mostly light green rolling hills and pastures with just enough rainfall to grow small scattered trees. There were a couple of towns on the way and very few of the more typical road side vendors of fruit and drinks we have become accustomed to.

There were also very few places to stay and we ended up riding about a ninety some kilometers to the first hotel we could find. It was the only one left of a handful of failed hotels in a cluster. The hotel was actually nice but we were the only guests so that combined with the other abandoned new ones was a bit spooky.  We have noticed quite a few nicer abandoned homes and hotels around Columbia and would like to know what that is all about. As far as I know there was no big economic downturn unlike say in Argentina. All I can think of is maybe there were all these drug traffickers that needed something to do with their money like say movie stars in the US.  In this case the beach was nothing to write home about and it is only about fifteen minutes by car to Cartagena so it seems like an odd place to invest a lot in a hotel complex.

Speaking of drug dealers the highway had the usual random military check points maned by guys with machine guns. They randomly pull over cars to search or ask for ID. They never stop us, so we now have this total nonchalant attitude about encountering guys with machine guns on the side of the road. We have gone through at least twenty of those check points. The ironic thing about the Colombian soldiers is that they generally looked like fresh faced mamas boys and did not try too hard to look intimidating. Most of them were very young looking and no they weren't ten year olds. We did see a eight year old girl with a machete one day but that is a very common tool here. I guess there is no need to look too macho if you have a machine gun at your side. Laurie was in agreement with this and said that they were quick to wave and smile. When she talked to them they were pleasant and did not try to maintain that robotic commando facade like US soldiers and policemen seem to be trained to do.  I noticed that near the Venezuelan border the soldiers seems to not let their hands off the trigger and they smiled less.  Colombians are openly not too fond of Venezuela.

On a final bus ride back to Bogota (I know it is a bike tour but we only had so much time) they showed three incredibly violent movies in a row. They were all American of course and unlike the baby faced friendly Colombian soldiers we got to look at, we got to see real deal tough guys like Sylvester Stalone with lots of black stuff on their faces. I am sitting there as the only American besides Laurie on the bus and am supposed to be so afraid of Colombia and Colombians but in the course of one evening watched what had to be at least a couple hundred people die violently or be maimed. Hats off to the creative geniuses of Hollywood and all the money and energy they put into making movies. Too bad we lack funds for our schools, infrastructure and a million other things.

Cartagena is a modern high rise city with the big draw being the well preserved and restored old colonial part of town. Again we went from seeing no gringos to lots of them. Here though there are also quite a few high dollar tourists. There are lots of high end hotels, jewelery and clothing stores to accommodate them. The old walled city now is kind of an artificial tourist enclave where they go to great lengths to keep it clean and safe for the tourists.  The walled off old city has limited entry points through the walls which help the police keep the vagrants out. Visiting only here would be about like saying you had been to America if you flew into see French Quarter in New Orleans then left.  Cartagena feels a bit like the French Quarter in New Orleans only with less emphasis on debauchery and far less live music. There is more emphasis on the architecture, history and shopping. It is also quite a bit more expensive than the rest of Columbia. In Bogota I bought a plain cotton t shirt so as to dress down and not look to conspicuous as a gringo but here I feel the need to dress up to make the grade as a well healed tourist.  Only one more day here though so I am not going to go out and buy a collared shirt to keep up with the Jones-es. This time of year the Colombian tourists outnumber the international tourists about 20 to 1 especially in the high rise area of Boca Grande just south of El Centro. Outside the tourist areas there is plenty of poverty but lets not go there.

We spent the morning doing a self-guided audio tour of the military fort that over looks the town. The fort was the biggest colonial fort the Spanish ever built. There were lots of cool guy things like secret tunnels and chutes where they poured hot oil on the enemy. Cartagena has been attacked many times so there is no shortage of war history. Always heartwarming to learn about some more battles in mankind's seemingly infinite log of fighting wars. Good thing we are so evolved now we won't have anymore.

The next day we went to the inquisition museum in a building that they had life size instruments of torture used to get people to confess to this and that. It was in a building where they did the torturing.  See the slide show for some pictures of those effective looking inventions. From the looks of things I am glad i was not around then. I am sure i would have made the witch short list. Lets hope Fox news types never have total control or i am sure they would use similar things to get "liberals" to confess to all sorts of demonic transgressions.

Some final thoughts on touring in Colombia -  Although there are a lot of compelling reasons to bike tour in Colombia like the geography and the culture, touring is problematical.  There are not a lot of options to link up rural roads through the mountainous terrain and the main paved roads often have mucho truck traffic.  Few of those trucks are in the running for any clean burning fuel efficiency awards.  The country really needs to get on top of the trash situation in many areas whether that is preventative media campaign or clean up with abundant cheap labor.

If you had some sort of sag wagon to do rural roads on mountain bikes here and there that might be a good way to go BUT some of the rural areas are supposed to be not too safe if they grow or process coca there.  Where exactly they grow that is not publicly available information and Colombia is a very fertile country.  Let me know if you find a map. We heard that in one town in Colombia where they get asked if it is safe they jokingly respond that it is “too safe”.

Colombia being near the equator where the sun sets and rises about the same time all year long you can pick your climate based on elevation.  Bogota was at about 8,500 feet and was cool enough in the evening to warrant a light jacket or sweater.  The Caribbean coast was swelteringly hot. One of the best micro climates we were in was near the top of Chickamocha Canyon. It was warm enough to grow bananas but not so hot as to be uncomfortable.  The bottom of the canyon was very hot much like the bottom of the Grand Canyon. So for bike touring purposes you have some options with the climate control settings.

It is a little strange to be back to Bend Oregon where everyone is so serious about fitness or their uber athlete status. Yesterday I was in a bike shop where a fifty something cyclist wanted the owner to help him sell a couple of his five thousand dollar road bikes because a bike fit guy at another shop had convinced him they were not exactly the right geometry for him. It is quite a contrast after coming from Bogota and participating in the Cyclovia Sundays where there are all these old guys on really old road bikes with tattered, faded, mismatched bike jerseys but, most are not the least bit concerned if their gear is better or worse than yours. They are serious about it but in a different way like it is their national duty or something. You never know when some other country is going to challenge everyone in your country to a cycle race!

Here are a few pictures of this section

Santa Marta to Riohacha signing back in

After spending a couple days in the touristic beach town of Taranga just north of Santa Marta we decided to ride our bikes back through Santa Marta on to Riohacha about two hundred kilometres northwest up the coast.

Taranga had at least as many local and Columbian tourists as it did any foreigners. The gringos were mostly European but not much more than a couple dozen.  Taranga is a well known dive center but we are not divers so did not pony up for that. The local beach was pretty poor and there was not any snorkelling in the bay to speak of. Good snorkelling would have taken an all-day boat ride with the divers. Taranga like many Columbian towns had no shortage of extremely loud stereo systems blasting from restaurants and stores. Some of the little road side markets can barely afford plastic tables but they have these huge sound systems.

In order to start riding up the coast we had to ride through the north end of Santa Marta which has to be the trashiest town we have ever seen. The locals said it would be dodgy on a bike.  We got up early and made it through ok but I did not stop to pull out the camera to take a picture of all the garbage.  It was like a living breathing garbage dump.

The upside was that shortly out of town to the north the desert changes to lush vegetation and the locals are much cleaner. To be fair though, just like the green side of Oregon, the vegetation can hide a lot of trash.The traffic turned out to be pretty minimal and there was a big shoulder on the side of road.  The touring for the next two hundred kilometres turned out to be really good.

The climate varies a lot in the area because there is a huge mountain nearby that is tall enough to have snow on the top. It is one of the tallest mountains so close the ocean in the world. There are all kinds of microclimates as you go higher up the mountain.

We camped twice on the beach in hammocks on the way to Riohacha, once in a place called Los Angles and another in Palomino.  Palomino was just a place on a map where the road left the coast and we were tired but turned out to be a gringo destination. The one cheap campground was full of long term resident hippies including one plain looking woman from Sweden that had been there a month.  That one cost only about three USD a night but did not look very secure if you had any possessions.  We stayed in a little more upscale one down the beach a bit where all our hammock mates were guess what nationality? If you guessed German you were right! Three of them were playing what sounded like Latin American music with bongo drums and guitar. They were good at it too and probably learned from a meticulously thorough German book on how to play Latin American bongos in thirty days. “Wie um die lateinischen amerikanischen Bongos in dreißig Tagen zu spielen”

In the book exchange area of the beach place we stayed I spotted a deck of cards with some rather risqué drawings of sexual positions.  Each card was a different position and each had six categories listed below with numeric rankings – in German. The rankings were probably pleasure for her and him then technical difficulty and how strenuous.  The Germans are so efficient and prepared, maybe they really are a master race after all.

It is so weird to be traveling on a bike where we are the only gringos around and then seemingly for no apparent reason there are gringos around at some town. The poverty in these coastal towns is at a level we have only experienced in National Geographic magazines. Not everyone is really poor but it takes getting used to and we are not real camouflaged in those areas. No matter how “one” you try to feel with the local culture mentally you aren’t one and never will be one coming from middle class America.  We still have not seen any bike tourists in Columbia and the last three days have been very good touring.

The main road has very few side roads and the people who live back in the country either walk or ride a horse.  Very few can afford a car or even a motorbike which are popular so there are quite a few local buses on the road. Still even then the traffic was light enough to listen to birds and insects. At the campground in Palomino there was an English girl working who had a good quality kayak that she let me take out in the surf a bit. She had been with some other expert kayakers trying to do first descents in Columbia. I have seen a number of rivers with granite boulders that looked promising.  The problem is there are not a lot of roads along the rivers or anywhere else for that matter. Plus they grow coca in the local mountains here in spite of the drug war so hiring some dudes with donkeys to go upriver might not be such a good idea.

We have heard a number of times that Columbians are trading coca or its derivatives with the Venezuelans for gas. {The closer you get to Venezuela, the more people sell gasoline out of one liter plastic bottles outside their homes.} That way the coke goes into a country that is an enemy of the US and we are not able to operate out of unless we take it upon ourselves to bomb them with drone planes as is our prerogative. We sure are good at having wars and enemies.

After a ninety kilometer ride to Riohacha we are making arrangements for a guided transport for the coastal desert town of Cabo de La Vela. It abruptly turned back to desert about twenty kilometres from Riohacha. Riohacha is actually a decent medium sized town. The water front beach is clean and lined with quiet native women selling very colourful baskets under palm trees. Plus there are not hordes of dudes hawking this and that in your face.  There are very few tourists here. We saw and spoke to one Swiss family who like us were booking a trip out to the end of the peninsula.  It takes a four wheel drive.  They are very horn happy in Riohacha however and honk for no apparent reason or maybe there are a million reasons to honk a horn and I have just not deciphered the collective Morris code. They need a horn honkers anonymous group here.

Cabo de Vela would not be recommended as a bike tour even though a good portion of it is paved.  Water could be had here and there from vendors but the ride would be very hot and boring not to mention ugly with all the trash. The indigenous Wayuu people like many other indigenous folks do not have any values about littering. The Wayuu capital of Uribia you drive through is very trashy.

It is ironic that the Wayuu are famous and prodigious weaver of shoulder bags but where they live is so trashed up with plastic bags. Part of the reason may be that very few stores give you receipts and the bags show that you paid for the item. Merchants generally insist you have every little thing in a bag.

The Wayuu people other than that are incredibly calm though even in town when they are selling their handbags.  The women are especially quiet which is a very nice contrast to the rather loud Colombian culture in general. If you are a big city person suffering from anxiety attacks and your doctor says it is seriously affecting your health you should come hang out with the Wayuu people on the La Guajira penninsula.

Where the road that parallels the train turns to gravel past Uribia it would be pretty rough for touring. The dirt roads into the coast from that road would be doable but it would be possible to get lost in the desert.

The beaches up in Cabo de Vela were very beautiful as mentioned in the guide books but they had trash as well so they were not the pristine end of the earth experience I would have hoped for. All that sounds kind of negative but thought I would put it out there for anyone considering touring this part of Columbia. There are quite a few places where there are military guys with machine guns standing on the side of the roads. I am not sure exactly what their function was but security did not seem to be an issue.

 pictures from the coast

Pictures from the La Guajira penninsula

Santa Marta sign off.....

I think this might be the end of a “bike tour blog” as it just doesn’t look like we are going to do all that much touring in Columbia between now and when we fly home. We had heard from a couple of touring cyclists that had come down to Patagonia all the way from North America who said that Columbia was their favourite place to tour. They probably came down to Cartagena by boat and rode through the valley where Medellin is.  They talked about how warm and helpful  the people were.

We are encountering that too. People who’s vibe is so friendly it melts you like the initial rush of alcohol. More than once we have had young guys come up to us while on bikes to ask about our trip or offer to help us out however they could and they are really full of admiration for what we are doing. 

That said when you look at a map there are not a lot of alternate routes to the main ones through the country and there are a lot of diesel trucks on the road.  They are courteous but the pollution is pretty bad. Here on the coast near Santa Marta it is a desert and other than the tourist areas on the beaches they do little trash pick-up. If you have ever been to places like Baja you know that trash sticks well to desert plants and is a real eye sore. Plus although most Colombians are very nice, we really stand out with the red and yellow panniers and feel like we must look so affluent.  Being  supper easy targets is hard to get out of your mind. We have yet to see any foreign bike tourists. Maybe if we had real rag tag warn out equipment it would help but also unless you are in touristy areas being a gringo you really stand out as well. People call out gringo in a nice way from the side of the roads all the time.

We will probably do some more riding but will probably minimize that and include a fair amount of swimming and hiking. We may even hire some guides to go to the remote northeast coast. In any event I do not want to have to try and  prop up the semblance of a bike blog. I may post some more pictures.

The people of the Caribbean coast near Santa Marta are really diverse. It is hard to guess what sort of ethnic heritage the people you see are. There are all different faces and body types with lots of mixed blood blacks. The more black people are some of the warmest even though they are often just scraping by.

We are goiong to focus on safely enjoying the rest of our trip....

San Gil to Bucaramanga - Colombia

The side trip cycling to Barichara out of San Gil was one of the better cycle tourist days we have had in South America. On the climb up out of the valley from San Gil we met a local cyclist Jorge Santos age 68 who did the ride regularly. The climb I would guess was something like two thousand feet in about twelve kilometres. Jorge was still going strong at the top pushing higher gears of a race bike than we had available on our touring bikes. We asked him if he did anything special for his health and he said he ate lots of fruits and vegetables plus some fish like us.  He also avoided “comida rapida” or fast foods and carne or beef. When asked if he had any cycling buddies his age he said no they all just sit around. None of his children or grandchildren cycled because they “lacked discipline”.

The rest of the twenty one kilometer ride to Barichara was downhill about a thousand feet but both climbs were nice because they leveled off here and there to give you a break.  The lush green mountain scenery helped with the “discipline” but generally we are in good enough shape not to suffer too much on the climbs especially without our usual loads .

Barichara was a very peaceful small town at the top of steep valley. The whole town appeared to be made of two foot thick whitewashed adobe. The streets were made from large hand carved sandstone “cobbles” typically about two by three feet. There were a couple of dozen tourists around from the buses that run from San Gil but the town did not have a real touristy feel. There are quite a few stone carvers in the area and we could see them sculpting things on the ride in. See the photos on that when I get them posted hopefully.
Back in San Gil we went to the huge indoor fruit and vegetable market the size of a football field that somehow we missed seeing the day before. It sure is nice not to have any guilt about eating tropical fruit because it is not local. Good  thing planes we were on to South America run on bio diesel created from the French fry grease at the airports.

The next day we headed off on our first real day of touring in Columbia in off and on rain. The rain wasn’t too bad because it is warm enough not to have that cool you off too much.  There was quite a bit of truck traffic as anticipated but they were very courteous giving us lots of room.  Some even stopped if it looked like there was not enough room with the oncoming traffic.  Or, in fact it looked as though they would nearly force oncoming cars off of the road to give us room.  Also with the steep curvy roads traffic moved slowly and often came in surges behind slow moving trucks. Once outside of San Gil we could tell that the locals were not used to seeing gringos on bikes.  People were staring and the reactions were mixed. You could tell the women did not know what to make of Laurie being an older woman out there on a loaded bike. It is uncommon to see women doing sports. Maybe if they had had title nine and were allowed athletics in school?

We had a great complete meal at an open air truck stop for about three fifty each. As is the case in most smaller restaurants, there is no menu, except for a choice of meat, and had what they were serving. There were actually camping signs on the road but we pressed on to the Chicamocha Canyon to a cabin with a view of the two or three thousand foot deep canyon for about thirty five dollars. 

In this steep canyon you can see farms on either side that are so remote that the people seldom come in to town like only once a month to sell bananas or coffee.  The owner of the little hotel says they come in on Sundays for church. We will have to make a note of that when in small towns on Sundays that a lot of the people there may be farmers in remote areas.

The descent into the Chicamocha canyon was hands down the longest descent on a bike I have ever done.  Although I don’t have a gps unit the depth of the canyon is supposed to be as much as 2000 meters and the descent was 30 kilometers long. Luckily the climb out the north end was much more gradual and followed a pretty white water river.

We were told by the owner of the hotel in Chicamocha to get a bus through the area of Bosconia on the way to the coast as they hold up cars there at night. We are in Bucaramanga a city of about a million and are thinking about taking a Bus to the coast because of the above mentioned town and that there is just too much truck traffic on the only road from here to there. When we got to shower we could not believe the grime that was coming off. Our glasses were covered with a film that would not wash off without soap. It was probably from diesel exhaust. That cant be good for your lungs.

Today I just checked the news and there were bombings at the US embassy in Bogota and at a supermarket and a bus station in Cartagena related to a visit by president Obama here for a drug trafficing summit. Cartagena is a much visited must see tourist town so that is just great news. When in Barichara we met a French guy who owned a resort camping place on the beach near Santa Marta. Maybe we will just go there and hang out for a couple of weeks and then fly home.

We pulled off the road in Florida Blanca on the outskirts of Bucaramanga close to dark thirty to find a hotel.  The guide book mentioned some places in downtown Bucaramanga but when we asked a friendly local policeman how to get there he said why go all the way downtown when there were good hotels near a plaza close by. We found one and went to find something to eat from the vendors at the plaza. There is zero tourism here and we were the only gringos around but felt totally safe. The people were very warm and friendly. Yesterday at a truck stop where we were having fresh fruit juice the girl at the counter would not stop beaming at us with an infectious smile offering free refills. She had lots of questions about where we were from etc.

In the local Colombian paper today there was a headline story about Obama's visit, the bombings and in the view of the paper the failed US effort to battle the cartels and drug production here. The story said that basically the way to stop it is to go after the demand side in the US not the production side in Columbia and listed the number of drug addicts in the US.  Last week in Bogota a homeless trash can recycler found bags of US dollars. He contacted the police because in Columbia having large amounts of US cash is as bad as having large amounts of drugs.  A drug runner must have felt he was being pursued by the authorities and dumped the cash.  Hopefully they gave the homeless guy a tip for his trash can jackpot.  After traveling around a bit here you can quickly see how controlling production and distribution of something like cocaine in a country like this would be an extremely difficult thing to do. Why does the US feel compelled to stick their fingers in other countries business all over the world and not just mind their own business?

A friend of mine emailed about the secret service scandal involving prostitutes here and said at least they were creating jobs as an alternate source of employment to cocaine trafficking.

Pictures of this segment

San Gil Colombia

It took about an hour on a bus out of Bogota to look like anything that I would enjoy bike touring. Even after that no matter what the scenery was the road did not have much shoulder and there were a lot of trucks. The road was very curvy and had some unbelievably long steep descents. We will see how tolerable that main road is out of San Gil with the traffic. We have no goals for this part of the trip so if the traffic is too bad we will punt to the coast on a bus to try that out. There are no back roads until you get to the coast. It turns out that getting the bikes on a bus was no different than anywhere in Chile or Argentina and cost only the typical extra ten dollars paid to the driver and no box or bag was necessary.

San Gil is the biggest adrenaline sports town In Columbia according to the guide books and all the tourist information you see.  Now that we are here it is interesting to note the differences between this and other outdoor sports capitals. There are dozens of store fronts booking activities like white-water rafting,  bungee jumping, parasailing, rappelling off waterfalls, and some sort of deal where, while spelunking,  you slide down a muddy chute into a pool of mud. White-water appears to be what got it all started and you can raft down the local run that ends in town for $15. You can parasail off a big hill into a canyon for $60 and that includes insurance!  I always joke about taking up something like sky diving up with a vengeance when I get old so now here is my chance.

For all the hype there are really very few tourists or at least obvious light skinned ones. Apparently there are a lot of tourists from Bogota that come down here but if so the influence is nothing like you see in the big tourist destinations in Patagonia like El Chalten or Bariloche.  In those towns the businesses are obviously tourist oriented like gourmet restaurants, hotels, gift shops, sporting goods clothes and so on.  Here at least so far, mostly what you see are just the places booking the activities which seem more honest, that it is all about the activities and not shopping.  Towns like El Calafate in Argentina are the total opposite.  Maybe they just haven’t figured that out yet or just do not have the volume of international tourists that can afford all the things that first world outdoor sport tourists require to be happy.

More conspicuous than tourists in San Gil is the guy with the robes and the beard. His face is everywhere and there are a fair amount of nuns walking around. Motorcycles are also very popular here and they are reasonably quiet ones with modest horsepower not loud Harley type ones thankfully.  Consistent with that the guys here do not seem to need to be too macho. There are no stop lights in town and some of the main intersections seem to be controlled in large part by horn honk toots as in hey it’s my turn now.  Marille from Switzerland said that in her home town (maybe the whole country?) that horn honking is illegal except in emergencies. How civilized is that? Also Visa is not excepted anywhere in town except for one main grocery store. So much for the security of using plastic everywhere and not carrying realatively large amounts of cash

Speaking of the needs of first world tourists we are staying in a modern nicely decorated hotel with a private bath for about $25 USD. The owner speaks English that he said he learned on the job and from watching his favorite show on TV – Friends.  He also really likes the new show “Big Bang”.  When we told him about the solemn warnings we were getting about bike touring in Columbia from the State Department in Bogota he laughed hard. He said the route and areas we were taking were totally safe and he could show us on the map the departments that were unsafe, unlike anyone could or would do at the US Embassy.  Departments are regional governments like states or counties by the way. He said that the areas that were unsafe would be ones that you would have to fly into in the jungle and pointed to the Departments of Abauca, Casarne and maybe Putamayo which is consistent with other warnings we have heard about areas bordering Venezuela and Ecuador.  There is one other warning that we have heard that seems to have been derived from the above advice which is not to travel in rural areas.  That is totally unintuitive advice that I really question because in our experience the more rural it is the safer it is and not vice versa.  That advice probably morphed from the remote drug trade area reality by international big city tourists.  We were getting some warnings like that from North Americans about travel in Chile and Argentina which is totally absurd. Why is it that city people are afraid of going out in the country – Wild West shows on TV?

I have read repeatedly about American foreign policy mistakes around the world that often resulted in wars where we out of touch with the realities of the culture and the reality on the ground think Vietnam, Iraq and dozens if not hundreds of other examples. We need to get out more around the world and let go of all our preconceived ideas of how things are. Maybe it is all about fear of the unknown or distorted media representations.

It appears so far that people here in Columbia are not really into camping whether or not that includes bathrooms, hot showers or electricity. Maybe that is for practical reasons do to the humidity and precipitation. We will see. It is much warmer here in San Gil than Bogota as Eric the guy from Denmark told us it would be. It is almost to the temperature that people in Central Oregon would start to complain about that is anything over seventy five or eighty degrees.

We are headed off today for a side trip to the neighbouring town of Barichara which is supposed to have some of the best preserved colonial architecture in Columbia.  The guide book says it is an upscale tourist destination and they shot movies there for the architecture.  There is a bus every half an hour but we are going to ride our bikes.

I have read repeatedly about American foreign policy mistakes around the world that often resulted in wars where we out of touch with the realities of the culture and the reality on the ground think Vietnam, Iraq and dozens if not hundreds of other examples. This seems like just another example of that. We need to get out more around the world and let go of all our preconceived ideas of how things are. Maybe it is all about fear of the unknown

Bogota Part 2 and the US Embassy

One of the reasons we waited until the Monday after Easter was to check with the US embassy to see what information they might have.  I had a feeling that it would be waste of time and it was. They would only let one of us in past the perimeter gate after showing them our passports. The bikes absolutely had to wait outside.  A couple of cars needed access and they were checked over toughly by guards looking for explosives. They would not let Laurie inside the building and insisted she use the phone outside.  After getting a huge cyclical run around involving an operator and an automated phone system she finally convinced the operator to let her talk to a real person inside. The guy she talked to said normally he only assisted US government personal.  Helping US citizens with travel safety advice is apparently not in the mission statement for US embassies.  The US has a huge anti-drug operation here so that is probably a big part of what they do.  The guy said there was armed conflict going on in the north but could not be more specific than that. He also said he had never heard of anyone bike touring in Columbia.  That we took as a good thing because we had and if he hadn’t then presumably there haven’t been any bad incidents. We had heard that the only real places to avoid were the low elevation towns on the Venezuela border which is well east of the road to the coast. 

While Laurie was talking repeatedly picking the same options on the phone system, inside two Columbian motorcycle police zoomed up and blocked the road. They were followed by three very shinny Chevy Suburban’s with heavy tinted windows and special interior flashing police type lights. The gate opened for them so that they did not even have to slow down and then they kept driving into another gated interior area with a gate that quickly closed after they went in. There was a regular parking lot outside but whoever was in the car must have been a high very high value target or informant.  Ironically the choreographed high security entry looked like how you would see big drug deals being made or how mafia kingpins would meet on TV.  Maybe the US embassy is making drug deals?  Those big suvs one after another with heavily tinted windows were about as conspicuous as you could get down here.

I have read repeatedly about American foreign policy mistakes around the world that often resulted in wars where we out of touch with the realities of the culture and the reality on the ground think Vietnam, Iraq and dozens if not hundreds of other examples. This seems like just another example of that. We need to get out more around the world and let go of all our preconceived ideas of how things are. Maybe it is all about fear of the unknown. See the next post for more on the security situation.

Bogota Columbia 1

Part of the reason for deciding to spend our last month cycle touring in Columbia was we wanted something different from Patagonia and fall was well on its way down there.  Columbia is different alright, at least Bogota.  The big thing we noticed right away is the variety and abundance of tropical fruit, a fair amount of which we have never seen or heard of. Laurie is very willing to dive right in and try the new fruits out. So far we have liked what we tried. In the old historic district of La Candeleria, which is a common place for tourists to go, there are vendors in carts selling all kinds of exotic fruits and fruit juice that is cheap.   Yesterday I had a big cupful of mango slices and a slice of raw coconut plus some sugar coated cooked coconut sliced like French fries all for only a couple of dollars. The pineapple and mango is to die for.  Laurie noticed that there are quite a few natural and vegetarian restaurants as well for those that can afford it.  The guide books say there are quite a few health conscious people in Bogota.

We were also pleasantly surprised to find out that Bogota has more kilometers of bike paths and bike lanes than any town in South America due in large part to an eccentric mayor who was a bike enthusiast. There are some three hundred kilometers of bikeways. They also shut down a bunch of streets all over town on Sundays and holidays for bikes.

But before you get to thinking this is some sort of tropical version of San Francisco we are seeing huge numbers of homeless people and many of them look about as pathetic as you possibly could. In the Candelaria district you get approached by beggars and people hawking stuff all the time but you get used to it.  On the first day we saw two homeless people taking a crap on the street. One was a thirty something woman right on the sidewalk on a narrow street frequented by tourists. The street vendors line the sidewalks of most of the major streets and are selling everything under the sun, or clouds in the case of Bogota. There are tourists here but nothing like the number in the popular destinations of Patagonia. Given the well-known violent history of the nation and with the population of Bogota at around nine million, the percentage of tourists is very tiny. It also appears that the common thing to do is fly to Bogota take in the attractions there and then fly to the Caribbean coast. So like in Patagonia we will be out on the road in places where tourists don’t always frequent.

We happened to arrive during Easter week and Catholicism is a very big part of the culture. In a fairly upscale apartment area we road through they were re-enacting Christ on the cross with an actual guy on a cross. In the La Candelaria district on Good Friday they had a big procession with a big life size Christ layed out in a casket being carried down the street followed by a military looking band playing depressingly sombre music. Laurie is Catholic and knew all the names for the rituals they were performing, such as the 12 stations of the cross and the burning of frankincense and myrrh.  Many blocks were closed down for this and they were packed with people. There are also lots of ornate churches here from Spanish colonial times. Columbia was a prize for the Spanish with all the gold and other resources here and you can see they invested heavily.  All the homeless people around the grand old churches and government buildings are quite a contrast.

Although Columbia is supposed to be changing rapidly and becoming safer, there are areas that nearly everyone agrees that you should not visit to sight see like the jungles to the south where they grow coca. We are going to gather as much info as we can in the next few days about where it might be possible to ride safely.  It appears that from Bogota to the Caribbean coast it is very beautiful and there are a lot of historic colonial towns. The US embassy is open again on Monday and they are supposed to be helpful.  I don’t have my hopes up too high on that as the US embassy in Santiago would not return any emails.  They will not be our only source of info however and we are asking around for what we hope will be first-hand information.

On a day when things were open Easter week, we managed to find some good road maps that we were told did not exist. Even the guide books say there are no good road maps. The best one is called Mapas de Ruta by IGAC  with fold out pages for the main segments.  It is perfect for what we need and a big confidence booster.  We found it at the Panamerica Liberia (book store and office supplies) in the La Candelaria district.
The next thing we did was go down to the area where all the bike shops are on Calle 13. The idea was to see if anyone knew about touring conditions in the country.  We had the good fortune to run into Javier Guerrero the owner (?) of CicloSports who spoke good English and was very friendly. He said that there was a Danish guy coming in at a specific time that afternoon to pick up a bike he was buying from them.  Eric, the guy from Denmark had toured in the country the previous year. We came back to talk to him and he had lots of good encouraging information. Eric who appeared to be about 65 was opting to take a bus to the north to San Gil from Bogota to skip the rain in the high mountains. It is about three hundred kilometers to San Gill with most of it above eight thousand feet.  We are debating whether to do the same. He says the buses are different here than in Chile and Argentina and you need to have your bike in a bag or case. We will check that out but we are leaning toward riding as we are seeing a pattern where it rains every day but usually in the mid afternoon for whatever reason.  So if we get an early start it might be tolerable.

CicloSports also had a nearly identical replacement 36 spoke 26” wheel that we needed because Laurie’s was badly damaged when she was hit by a car. Those wheels are special order items in the US.  Javier knew we were touring and had his mechanic build the wheel that afternoon while we walked around a big market area nearby.  The price for the wheel and the labor to build it using the other parts from the old wheel was about 100 USD which was not a bad deal.  We were totally stoked about the good fortune happening at CicloSports. We also picked up some nice Columbia souvenir jerseys at other stores on the block.

Speaking of jerseys as today is Easter Sunday and the only real big objective we have left is to visit the US embassy on Monday. We decided to do a big ride using the cyclovia roads and bike paths. There were a lot of people out for an Easter Sunday. It was kind of funny to see and pass all these old guys with sponsored jerseys often on not exactly race caliber bikes. We did get passed by some fit looking young racers on a hilly section being escorted by a guy on a motorcycle even.  

Bogota runs into some steep mountains to the east and it was interesting to see all the remaining third world looking shacks being replaced by modern high rise apartments.  From up high Bogota spreads out as far as you can see and looks like some rapidly spreading organism gobbling up the hilly country side. If we elect to ride  out of town we will be riding through the north end which is well-to-do end, so that is encouraging.

Pictures from Bogota which may not have accurate gps locations as i am still getting to know the camera.

I forgot to blog about LAN airlines and bikes.....

From Satiago to Bogota we flew on LAN air lines. Other than the fact that LAN charges two different prices one for locals and one for foreigners we were very impressed with LAN.  The baggage allowances listed on their web page are a bit convoluted and we had heard about how they possibly combine weights for an oversize item. There are also some rules about your baggage allowances if your flight originated on another airline. After reading over the rules a number of times to try to make sense of them we decided to just show up and see what they charged. In order to not look too overwhelming we tried to put everything but the bikes in a grain sack under fifty pounds and carry on a couple of panniers each. The ticket agent did not make any fuss about it and the bikes went free.  Boarding the plane went smoothly as well. They actually load the plane from the back to the front with rows at the gate where you line up according to a range of numbers. It went very smoothly. There were none of the dozens of special privilege categories that that US airlines call out to board first.

Once on the plane they had about a couple of dozen free movies and other options to choose from like games. We were served a nice free meal with wine including refills on the wine. The flight attendants were about as professional as you could get as well. All in all it put all of the US airlines that I have ridden on to shame.  Rumor has it that the US airlines will be charging to use the lavatories soon. "The lavatory is now available for gold elite members." In coach you will have to bring your own bag to pee in.

Santiago Revisited

Probably at this point I have far exceeded the word limit for a travel blog and no one really cares anymore but I have experienced a few things in Santiago the second time around that might be of interest to some people.

We decided to take the deluxe red eye bus from Panguipulli to Santiago.  Why the red eye bus?  Well we had a traveller tell us that this was the way to go so you could just sleep through the long boring drive down the Pan-American Highway in the central valley. Normally that would not be such a great idea for us as we do not sleep real well sitting up. The tour busses here do come with different types of seats. They have some called semi cama that go back almost as far as a recliner for reasonable prices which we had taken from southern Patagonia for a stretch. Those are reasonably priced and sleep can be had. But if you are willing to pony up they have busses with full cama seats that basically layout flat like a bed. For the two of us with bikes on this 12 hour trip it cost us roughly $150 US. That was a pretty painless bus trip on a deluxe Mercedes bus. If you think all the buses in Latin America are school buses loaded with people carrying chickens well you are mistaken.

We booked a room at the Casa Condell recommended by one of the tour books as one for elder trekkers because it was quiet and it was. The other ones were all full because there were a number of things going on like the huge Santiago marathon, the Lollapalooza  and Arctic Monkeys concert, a juggling festival and a few other things. If you want the non quiet hostels you have to act fast. The location of the hostel was better than the posh digs of the Intercontinental Hotel where we stayed for cheap on the way in on frequent sleeper points.  The Intercontinental it turns out was in the Sanhattan district (like Manhattan, get it?) No wonder there were all those guys in suits. It is actually listed on the map as Sanhattan.

Well the marathon was a trip. It came right by our hostel where there was an AC DC cover band and they were good. There were all types in the marathon from the super fit (including Kenyans) to well …..one girl who was more than a tad overweight with nothing more than about a four inch pleated skirt and nothing underneath keeping cool.  Laurie said she would never again be self-conscious about how her body looked in a swimsuit. Suffice it to say that Santiago is not exactly representative of Chile as a whole.

Also across the street on the boulevard park this weekend there was an environmental fair with about a hundred vendors in tents.  They were pushing the same impractical Utopian left wing fascist agenda with products like energy saving appliances, solar panels, art from recycled materials, organic produce and eco diapers.  When will those people learn to get with the real world?

Today I went down to see an area we were told had a lot of bike shops that somehow no one told us about before.  I just winged it on my bike and ended up going down some interesting streets. One street had nothing but hardware stores for about three or four long blocks. Nothing but hardware except for some establishments that it didn’t take long to figure out were servicing a different kind of men’s hardware. What synergy, eh? Imagine the male focus group that came up with the idea for that. I am guessing they offered refreshments.  In a different part of town very near the big Catholic cathedral in the plaza there were rows of baby clothes stores flanked on both ends  by guess what kind of establishments?  The same focus group must have thought that one up too but hopefully well after the refreshments were passed out. I think they forgot to include young mothers in the focus group.  Oh and one of the establishments with the dark tinted windows also had confessions listed on the window.  Those marketing guys were on a roll.  Back to the bike shop quest….The hardware stores then started morphing into new and used auto parts stores of every imaginable type. There were stores specializing in used bumpers for certain makes for example. That went on for about a mile. This was followed by a couple of blocks of tire places where they changed the tires right out in the street and there were guys standing out in the street to direct you in and do your tires. It looked like a third world speedway pit stop.

The blocks of auto parts stores finally intersected San Diego street where the bike shops were supposed to be.  There were a few bike shops all right, like about thirty or forty within a few blocks. They were all sorts of combinations of inventory from mostly bikes to mostly parts and some were just wholesale with big boxes of cables, spokes and so on.  Whatever type they were they were wall to wall jam packed with inventory. They had some high end bikes in some of the shops but were not quite like the immaculate ones out at the east end Mall Sport that had the ten thousand dollar carbon fiber road bikes on display. Those shops would be more familiar to people in Bend. The bike shops started morphing into computer and electronics shops. Big city bike geeks from cities like Seattle could instantly relate to that. The only thing missing for them maybe would be coffee shops.

On the way back I managed to end up on some street that had a bike lane that was separated from the cars with not just a paint stripe but concrete parking lot dividers in rows.  That seemed to be totally effective at keeping the agro big city drivers out of the bike lane. Although I would not call Santiago a bike town, there are quite a lot of cyclists of all types.  Some are insanely brave going at top speed against the traffic on busy arterial streets filled with horn honking drivers.  Besides honking drivers even Santiago is quiet compared to Argentina. We saw what looked like a long line for vehicle inspections one day.  They must inspect for mufflers too.  They need that in Oregon as it is getting to be a problem there where nearly every motorcycle feels the need to have its muffler removed.

For the first time in months we are hearing sirens. That said generally we are feeling very safe everywhere we have been here in Santiago even at night but I am sure out in the slums to the west that might not be the case. Although we are warming up to it a bit it is still a huge city with bad smog.  Speaking of smog and big cities what is the draw about going out and breathing as hard as you can for two or three hours in a big city marathon? We never really gave it much thought before. All the thousands of runners are a trip but still……the other day at some jam packed restaurant I said I wanted sit where I could people watch. Laurie said that is not hard as you can people watch any way you look just about everywhere you go here.  You can’t help watching all the women in tight pants and showing lots of cleavage. They want you to ……..it feels like a high school experiment were you put the fruit flies in a warm jar with a banana and watch them multiply exponentially…..until

Here are few pictures with the new Panasonic camera we are still trying to learn. Some may not have GPS in the correct location.