The End of Colombia for Swen & Kat

to see our last pictures of Colombia click here

Hello! We last left you in Medellín where we were having a great time exploring the city with some friends. After a few days there however we had to say goodbye and hit the road again. It had been a great 10 day break in Bogotá and Medellín but it was time to move on. In this part of road towards Ecuador not sooo much happened besides cycling, so the following will give you all a bit more of an idea of the “routine” of our bike travels....

We started off on a slightly overcast morning, going up over the hills to exit the city heading south. The traffic was not light, but not too bad either, the hills not horrible; we felt good. Until the rain started. We were only about 2 hours into the ride when it started to sprinkle, then came down heavier, started pouring, and finally we made it to a roadside restaurant where we stayed to dry off with a lunch of hot soup, the usual rice, beans and egg plate, and hot chocolate. The (what we assumed to be) beautiful scenery was obstructed by heavy cloud cover and fog. The rain stopped for enough time for us to get back on the bikes and continue but we only got about another half hour before it began to rain again. We were totally soaked but made it up to the peak of 2380m (~7000ft.) and raced, trying not to slip and fall the last half hour down to the village of La Pintada at an altitude of 570m (~1700ft). We quickly found a hotel to stay in and dry out for the night.

The next day we had mainly flat riding until early afternoon where we started a climb again, and again got rained upon. We hitchhiked the last 10km steep climb to the town of Rio Sucio where were informed by a group of Colombian cyclists that the next town was a steep 25km uphill ride. Kat was more than convinced by this information to stay for the night so we found a cheap but nice hotel and again had a warm shower and dried our things.

We had planned on hitchhiking the next steep uphill the coming day, but ended up starting it and found it not to be too steep (we got a little help in a steep part by hanging on to the back of a semi-truck and getting pulled for a few kilometers), and it wasn't 25km either. We were thankful we stuck it out and rode it ourselves as the views on the peak and down again onto the north of the Valle del Cauca were spectacular. At some points during these few days there was so much fog and cloud cover that visibility was about 10m (30 ft) and we had to slow down on the descents because of this. Also, because of the rain and fog we couldn't take the camera out much at all, so there aren't many pictures of these few days.

Entering the Valle del Cauca region of Colombia gave our legs some well deserved rest as we raced along the flat valley, one day achieving our personal best record for distance in a day: 136kms (85 miles)!! Yes, we now consider flat valleys or plains rest days! We camped in a nice finca (cow farm), got some fresh (still warm and hand-milked) milk for our cereal breakfast and enjoyed nice conversation with the groundskeepers. We also stayed in nice hotels in some quaint villages, enjoying our newly discovered Colombian specialty of large fruit salads with mounds of ice cream and syrup on top. Over the next few days in the valley we had 3 straight days of over 100kms (60 miles) and enjoyed the scenery of mountains in the distance, cane fields around us.

Unfortunately this valley couldn't last forever and as we neared the city of Popayan we headed into more mountains – our big distances became just a memory and our legs and butts were more sore than before! We stayed an extra day in Popayan because Kat was strangely sick – we had read this was supposed to be the most beautiful colonial town in Colombia but we weren't impressed and disappointed to have to stay an extra day in someplace that wasn't so nice. The traffic was especially horrible in these narrow streets.

Fortunately the next day Kat was better and we left happily towards the town of El Bordo. It was a tough day of constant up and down, our legs were tired by the time we got to the descent in the afternoon. Another night in a cheap hotel: we had nice showers, cleaned our clothes and had a nice stroll of the one-street town to find something for dinner.

We continued on the next morning happily in a flatter section of highway, through some beautiful scenery but at our late breakfast-early lunch we decided to hitchhike the next 120kms to the city of Pasto. And although beautiful we were glad with our decision as the climb was long and the day was hot, there weren't any villages for a long time and no place to rest or refill water bottles. We got a ride in an empty but for one pig semi-truck after about an hour and a half wait. Our incredibly friendly truck-driving host chatted with us about other cyclists he has picked up along this road, life in Colombia, soccer, traveling, and even his career in the drug and cocaine cartel world in the end 80s and beginning 90s, when Pablo Escobar virtually “ran” the city of Medellin and crime and violence was part of everybody's life there. Besides all the interesting chats, our driver stopped several times for us to take pictures of the fantastic views into deep canyons and over far away mountain ranges.

We left Pasto a bit late, but had a nice day riding some tough climbs – we even met some other cyclists – a couple from Costa Rica also heading to Argentina. We rode together till the next restaurant for lunch, but in the afternoon lost each other in the mountains. They were a bit slower than us as they were still in the beginning of their journey (only 6 weeks in) and also carried a lot more baggage than we do. We were wondering if we would make it all the way to the border town of Ipiales in one day, and we might have if we had taken a shorter lunch, but we made it to the small village of San Juan, about 15 km from Ipiales by nearly 5pm. It was good we didn't push ourselves too much: we had climbed a lot through some fantastic views of canyons and rock cliffs, rivers and mountains but were tired, and in San Juan stayed at the hotel where apparently all cyclists going through stay at. The proprietress had a big notebook filled with names and dates of cyclists from all over the world who had stayed there.

The next morning, excited for the border and a new adventure in Ecuador, we left early. Along the way we met 2 other cyclists coming north, a famous (in the bike-traveler world) couple from Germany who live in southern Colombia and offer up their house to cyclists going through. We chatted about the routes for a while and shared some stories and left even more excited for our future destinations than before. We climbed the last few kilometers to Ipiales, loaded up on good Colombian bread, and had the easiest, nicest, fastest and cheapest (free!) border crossing ever. At the border we met some more travelers, some going north, some going south and all shared smiles, stories, encouragement, and excitement for our respective travel plans.

We were looking forward to new sights and experiences in Ecuador but were sad to leave Colombia and all the great things we had come across during the past 7 weeks: the fantastic, outgoing and friendly people, great food, new exotic fruits, amazing landscapes, diverse geography, interesting cities, very cheap and nice accommodation, a new appreciation for mountains... Little did we know that Ecuador could bring us all this and more! Until next time when we write about our journey from the border to Quito!

Besos, Kat & Swen

Colombia - Medellín

more photos of Medellín are here

We left our lovely Bogotá hosts at around 7:30 am for a quick ride to the bus terminal to meet Nati, Ben, and Nati's father. We quickly got our tickets and surprisingly were not charged for the bikes! As we boarded we discovered that the bus was full of young school children from Medellín who had traveled to Bogotá for a choir contest. They won, and so were cheerful and friendly, singing much of the way to Medellín.

The ride was absolutely gorgeous – crossing from the westernmost chain of the Andes over the cordillera central to the easternmost part of the chain, we had to go down and through the Rio Magdalena Valley and up again, crossing several climate zones on the way as in Bogotá it had been only around 15 degrees Celsius while down in the valley at our lunch stop we felt again the sticky moist heat we remember well from the coast. Have we mentioned yet that Colombia is spectacularly beautiful? Luckily it was a clear day and we had fantastic views of the countryside and also of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano far off in the distance: seeing it's snow-covered peak at a height of 5325 m (~16,000 ft) was the first time since we started our trip that we have seen snow! The road was very windy, sharp curves, steep ascents and descents, there was a lot of truck and car traffic and very little shoulder on the road, so we were glad to be in the bus and not on the bikes for this stretch of highway. However, as we have said and observed many times before, it seems that in order to be a bus driver in Latin America one must drive like a maniac, so the ride wasn't as relaxing as we had hoped. Even though the nearly 400km (~640 miles) journey took us about 10 hours, we would have taken probably twice as long had we driven ourselves. We arrived in the Medellín terminal around 7pm, Nati's brother came in his big van to pick us up, and we piled in all the bags and bikes to drive to our new home for the next few days.

Known as “the land of eternal springtime,” Medellín (alt.1480m/~4400ft) has a very temperate climate – much warmer than Bogotá but less hot than Cartagena – the perfect temperature, and even though there was plenty of rain it didn't stop Ben and Nati from showing us the city over the next few days. The first day we walked to the metro station a few blocks away and instead of taking the metro right away to the city center, we decided to take the cable car – part of the public metro system! – that leads up to the neighborhoods in the hills. It offered great city views to orient ourselves and at the top we got off and walked down to the next station, to head into the city. We visited a nice sculpture park, had a great vegetarian lunch at the Hare Krishna restaurant, and walked through an outdoor fruit market where Nati introduced us to some interesting unknown local fruits. At the “barefoot park” public guides instructed us on how to relax by soaking our feet in the pools, walking blindfolded through a maze and enjoying the bamboo garden. That night we met some friends from our Panama-Colombia boat journey at a local bar to watch the Colombia-Peru football match, which was quite exciting – at least the other spectators were very excited to see Colombia win while we were more busy drinking beer and catching up!

We spent the next morning in the beautiful Medellín Botanical Gardens, and then in the afternoon went across the street to the science “Interactive Museum” where we let our inner children loose (especially Swen) and played for hours with all the games and exhibits: from the outdoor playground with a giant centrifugal-force spinner thing to the physics floor with many displays and games having to do with motion, gravity, optics, and sound waves, to the digital technology floor with many interactive games and activities such as a thermal imaging room, robots and a real size model apartment where appliances and electronics were controlled from either a computer screen inside or the telephone booth outside. We spent so long inside, we were exhausted and starving when we left!

Our third day we spent traveling by bus to the nearby mountain village of Santa Elena, about 1000m above the city with great views into the valley on the bus ride, for it's 10th annual Street Arts festival. A quaint little town, but the festival was more than disappointing – maybe the rain postponed the music and dances that had been posted. Nonetheless we enjoyed a nice lunch and great walk into the hills to see the views and beautiful houses, some of which had large flower gardens, the flowers of which were cut and taken in huge bunches to be sold in the flower market of downtown Medellín. We returned home and prepared a Thai curry dinner for our fabulous hosts to thank them for having us, showing us this great city and for including us in their lives for a few days, and with hopes that someday, somewhere we will see Ben and Nati again – Europe? Australia? Colombia? Time will tell...

The rain poured all night long and we prepared our bags in order to head off in the morning. It had been 10 long and exciting days discovering Bogotá and Medellín, connecting and re-connecting with old and new friends, and experiencing some of the most beautiful and interesting days we have had since our trip began. It is time to get back on the bikes; we ride south, in search of new wonders and discoveries of this country and its people.

Bogota

To see more photos of Bogota click here

Colombia's tourism slogan, "El unico riesgo es que te quieras quedar," = "the only risk is that you want to stay" is pretty appropriate: this country has brought nothing but good to us and our trip. Since arriving a little over a month ago, we have met incredibly friendly, generous and interesting people, have had great food and tried many new exotic fruits, have enjoyed the beautiful countryside and landscapes from coastal lowlands to mountains, and have not felt unsafe or insecure. And we are only half way through!

We arrived in Bogota on the 3rd with our cyclist friend Wayne after an unexpectedly easy ride in from the city of Facatativa, taking only 2 hours when we believed we would need 4 - our guide books were wrong in the altitude changes and instead of a hard climb we had perfectly flat roads that helped us fly the 50km into town. Bogotá lies in a huge basin right in the middle of the Cordillera Central of the Andes mountain range and extends today with its ~8 million inhabitants into the surrounding mountain slopes. We had great luck arriving on probably the only flat road that enters the city, and also were fortunate to find a wonderful couchsurfing family to host us. Staying with Ivan and his family made our days there a lot more interesting, informative, fun and social, and gave us the opportunity to learn a lot more about Colombian culture and traditions. Four generations living under one roof can be the norm here and of course the small house had room to squeeze us and our bikes in between Ivan and his sister, her 4 incredibly lovely and talented young kids, their mom and dad, grandma, and two large but friendly dogs!

We spent one last afternoon with Wayne, our cycling friend, before we parted ways; spent some time in the house with Maria Angela (Ivan's sister), her children and other relatives sharing stories and experiences; we were on Skype for a while with family, and were able to rest and relax, organize and enjoy ourselves and our new friends.

Bogotá has a partly preserved colonial old town, which is a pretty place to walk around; the rest of the city is fairly modern with a MetroBus system, great bike lanes, skyscrapers (offering great views from their top), modern museums, traffic jams, pollution, rubbish (but recycling as well!), public parks, nice plazas and a botanical garden. They even close many main streets to car traffic on Sundays and Thursdays leaving the many, many bikers free from the worries of getting hit by a mad bus driver. All this we explored in our 5 days there, strolling a lot through the streets and avenues, tasting the state of Santander's specialty of fried ants (only Swen), drinking great cane-sugar sweetened coffees from street vendors, visiting the world biggest exhibition of gold and indigenous jewelry-smithing art in the huge Museo de Oro, walking through room after room of paintings, sculptures and drawings from Colombia's most famous artist Fernando Botero , as well as other famous European artists such as Picasso, Matisse, etc. in the Donacion Botero Museum. You would easily recognize Botero's art – everything he paints/sculpts is exaggeratedly fat, from the human figures to animals and vegetables!

We also had the unique and unforgettable opportunity to participate in a traditional healing ceremony as Maria Angela invited us to join her and 2 of her children on a trip to a special place about 2 hours north of Bogota called El Sol Naciente (The Rising/Birthing Sun). Many Colombians participate in this ritual several times a year and we had prepared for several days by avoiding certain foods and spices, etc. The Colombians call this ceremony a healing ceremony, it is a cure, a remedy and treatment for various problems. There we were given special buckets filled with herbs soaking in hot water to bathe with, were given relaxing massages in order to be better prepared for and opened to the healing herbs, spoke with a medical doctor about any problems, illnesses or pains (spiritual, physical or mental) and our intentions and expectations of this healing ritual. We were given a long introduction to the practice and use of the herb, it's effects and side-effects, how the ceremony would progress and what we should do, where we should be - they lent us hammocks for the night which we hung in the hut or could choose to sit or lay around the central fire.

Then the ceremony began, and along with around 75 other participants, we lined up to meet the Taita (Shaman). He asked a few questions to us, where we were from, what we do, etc. then said a prayer over the goblets of Jagé (Ayahuasca) juice, and handed them to us to drink. It was bitter and strong tasting, many of the participants suffered bad ly all night long from the side-effects (vomiting and diarrhea), but we just experienced some nausea and stomach cramps. There were other parts to the ceremony afterwards, lots of drumming and guitar and flute music around the fire, we were “cleansed” (aka whipped) with stinging nettle plants, got alcohol spit on us, the bad energy was fanned out and away from us. We had all night in the hammocks to reflect on why we were there, what our future would hold, our connections and relations with others and by daybreak we were awed with the incredible views around us and beauty of the place, of life, of each other. We took the bus back to Bogota at around 8 am along with s everal others, tired but happy, positive for the future, and spiritually refreshed. We felt indeed mentally cleaned, and a night of laying in a hammock and just thinking about life, the future, our wishes and fears, had done its part in the process – how rarely do we take such a time off to really think without distraction about us and our lives!?!

Back in Bogotá we met Swen's old friend Ben from Australia with his wife Nati, native from Colombia, who had just arrived from OZ to visit Nati's family. A great reunion, after about 7 years of friendship kept via email and the occasional postcard. We spent a beautiful day together strolling around and going via cable car to the top of the mountain overlooking Bogotá for great views, and catching up on all the stories of our lives of the last years.

Then it was time to say goodbye to the lovely family of Ivan and Maria Angela and jump into a bus with Ben and Nati towards Medellin, the country's second biggest town and home of Nati's family, where we would spend a few more days together....

From Cartagena to Bogota

. . . more photos of the first Andean hills are here

Hello again, this time from the capital of Colombia, Bogota! It has been two weeks to get here from Cartagena, and it has been a very diverse two weeks regarding the countryside we cycled through, from the coast to the first high passes and mountain sights of the Andes.

The first couple of days leaving Cartagena we cycled towards the colonial town of Mompos on the Rio Magdalena, in the middle of the flood plains of lowland Colombia. Gentle rolling hills, everything very very lush and green, lots of cows on the healthy looking rancho fields, some first heavy rains that encouraged us to enjoy more hotel stays and do less camping. Mompos was at the times of Spanish rule a major shipping port on the river to get all the gold and other valuables out of the country down to the sea harbors of Cartagena and Santa Marta. Today it's a sleepy little town with nice plazas and colonial mansions. Here Simon Bolivar first declared independence of Greater Colombia (the colony of Greater Colombia then included Venezuela, Panama and Ecuador) from Spanish rule in 1810, even if this first independence didn't last very long, and the fight for it continued till 1819.

Past Mompos nearly 200km of dirt mud roads waited for us, through huge wetlands and floodplains full of waterbirds. But we were lucky enough to avoid the mud by hitching a ride on a cow truck; the bikes were strapped onto the back of the truck and we hoped the cows wouldn't shit on our nice leather saddles... The driver was very sweet, if difficult to understand (in general Colombian accents give us a hard time), we talked about how he once went to a Guns N'Roses concert, music, parachuting; he ended up inviting us to dinner before dropping us at one of the nicest - and cheapest - hotels we have ever stayed in on our trip: a roadside trucker hotel.

...

Now we were finally on the road into the first hills of the Andes, towards the capital of Bogota. The first climbs gave us both a hard time as we hadn't had hills since Nicaragua about 2 months ago, so our legs were sore and we fell into bed early at night. Camping in the first mountain village was very nice, with village kids surrounding our camp curiously the whole evening, and even returning very early to watch us pack up.

On the way to San Gil, the "adventure tourism capital of Colombia", we had to pass the Canon de Chicamocha, where all of a sudden the lush vegetation gave way to cactus, red rocks and thorn bushes. The 1500m drop down into the valley was interrupted by a swim in one of the tributaries of the Chicamocha river, while the climb out of it was interrupted by nightfall and we had to set up camp in an abandoned, half-constructed house on the side of the road. The next morning we did the last 10km of the climb before breakfast, and then enjoyed the descent into San Gil, arriving by early afternoon.

We only planned to stay in San Gil for one day of rest but it turned into 4: the owner of the small hostel we stayed at asked us to run the place for 2 days as she wanted to get away and visit a friend in another town. We enjoyed staying in the beautiful old colonial house nearly all to ourselves, we had only one guest the first night and another two guests the next day. Free internet, laundry, hammocks and a nice private room with adobe walls (a mud-wood construction technique common in south-west US and from Central to South America) and large wood beamed roof kept us comfortable. We did manage to have some fun, too, and took an afternoon river rafting trip down the Rio Fonce through some class 3 rapids. Unfortunately we couldn't take the camera!

We were eager to say goodbye to San Gil and get back in the saddles and left a few hours after the proprietress of the hostel returned and we managed to pack up. The second day out of town we caught up with an Australian cyclist on one of the many uphills. It turned out he had heard about us from the cyclists we met in Cartagena, so he wasn't surprised to run into eachother. We continued together for the rest of the day, having a long lunch chatting about our cycle stories, and in the end spent the next 4 days cycling in a team of 3.

The mountains were getting ever higher, the landscape ever prettier on these days towards Bogota, often looking like the high grasslands of the alms in the Alps. Swen felt often that it is a bit like home here...! We did a little off-road loop to a lake at 3200m altitude, where we camped and for the first time in many months we had to get our warm clothes out of the bottoms of the bags.

The next day a drizzly rain greeted us when getting out of the tent which together with the cold at this altitude made it a very disagreeable morning. So we cycled off without breakfast, stopping an hour later and 500m lower in Zipaquira at a bakery for coffee and sweet breads, warming up in the sun that finally came out. Here an old huge salt mine had been turned into a tourist center: they have opened up a lot of the shafts and built shrines and churches into it. A bit weird all this religious fanaticism down there below earth, but still impressive the colorful lightning and huge caverns far under ground.

We left onto another dirt road over some high mountain passes into green valleys dotted with little farms and small villages. Beautiful, if hard cycling. Unfortunately, the little town we had picked to spend the night ended up not having any lodging; we weren't even allowed to camp behind the church and the school they told us to try was too far away on another hightway in the wrong direction. The next town 10km further, and the next 14km further didn't have any accomodation either... The sun was setting by now and the final (we hoped) next 14km to the city of Facatativa we had to ride in the dark - a very unpleasant experience with all the traffic, all our gear, and our exhaustion from this very very long day. Fortunately we found a place to stay there.

In Facatativa we visited an archeological park the next morning, where some pre-colombian cave paintings were partly overpainted with portraits of Colombian ex-presidents. Not so impressive but it was a nice park to stroll around for a bit. The final 40km into Bogota made a quick if polluted and traffic-busy ride, bringing us right into the city center where we said goodbye to our happy travel companion from Australia, having a last coffee and some street food on a plaza together.

Bogota - the capital and it's 8 million people - will be discovered in the coming days....