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
