Day 51 - We Love Columbia

MB Post:
We will be leaving Colombia soon after spending 16 days exploring the western half of the country. (It’s taken me most of those days to finally remember to spell Colombia with an “o” rather than a “u”!! ) Colombia is great! I know that we’ve been telling you how friendly people are in most of the countries we’ve been through, but Colombians are over the top. We pulled into a gas station at the end of a long, tiring day of riding curvy switchback mountain roads, passing innumerable belching trucks and being worried about finding a secure decent hotel in the upcoming border town with Venezuela. The gas station attendants and some type of security guard dude with a gun on his hip, pumped our gas and told us the amount due. In our tired mental haze, we accidentally gave them multiple times the amount due in Colombian pesos. Keep in mind that the Colombian peso is 3000 to the US dollar. The conversions get challenging at the best of times. The gas station guys freaked, got all excited, surrounded us and started talking really fast Spanish all at the same time. It took us a little while to figure out what was going on, but eventually we translated that they were very concerned about our ability to survive in this border town. “Take care….take great care. Don’t show your money in public like that! Don’t give out so much money at once! ” They took the appropriate amount due and gave us wads of bills back. Then they gave us a hotel recommendation that turned out to be an awesome place to stay.

At times though, the friendliness and curiosity is overwhelming. We can hardly every load/unload, park or gas up our bikes without an audience. People don’t try to mask their curiosity and admiration for such big bikes. They come up within three feet, take a stance, cross their arms and unabashedly watch our every move. There is actually a lot of work every day in loading and unloading our bikes and getting everything ready to ride. The staring and questions can be a little distracting when our foggy, old brains are trying to remember all our steps. Invariably, we start riding and we have to stop within the first five minutes because we’ve forgotten to strap something down or put in ear plugs or put on sunglasses or push start on our gps or open a vent in our jacket or put my gopro into my helmet holder or put on gloves or strap our helmets or put on sunscreen and on and on and on.

Our impressions of Columbia?...... beautiful highly dissected mountains full of small plots of agriculture on incredibly steep hillsides, really twisty winding roads, buildings of red brick and red tiled roofs climbing up the hillsides in

Medellin, towns of varying brightly colored houses, silver urns full of hot strong coffee with an additional hot water spout in case you don’t want your coffee so strong, plazas full of gaudy big Christmas decorations and lights, green and verdant flora, small motos zipping everywhere around us on the roads, delicious roasted chickens for $4, quality hotel rooms for $20-40, hills and more hills, free toll booths for motos as long as you can ride through the death defying narrow cement moto lane that is just barely wider than our sidecases, beautiful colorful artistic graffiti in Bogota, fortress walls in Cartagena, the occasional smell of toast while riding (coffee beans), soup with swollen chicken feet (Bruce ate his but I couldn’t), cold coke in a glass bottle, street lights that turn yellow before going from red to green (ready, set ,GO!!!), the Colombian music band called Piso 21, plazas and churches….. just to name a few things.

We had our first real adventure ride of our trip here in Columbia. It was a 45 mile gravel road that wound up and down several mountain passes. It was a single lane road (used for two-way traffic) that was a line of continuous blind corner switchbacks and lots of steep drop-offs. The road is nicknamed the “trampoline of death” by Columbians and is considered one of the worst roads on this continent. What really made it challenging were the maniac fast truck drivers who refused to ever hit their brakes. We made it but I can’t tell you how relieved I was when I saw pavement in sight!!

We do laundry every night in our hotel room. (Haven’t camped yet. Just seems like to much work on top of riding most of the day). We each have two days of riding clothes so we have to wash every night in the sink and hang our clothes around the room to dry. I have been wearing my moto pants and jacket every day (except three that I can remember) for over 45 days now. I am in love with my moto pants. We have a connection. They do me right!

We had our first “policia” interaction of the entire trip so far…. Passing illegally…..despite the fact that everyone does it constantly! The key is don’t do it in sight of the policia. The cops were quite serious when they first stopped us….. telling us it was going to be a $250 ticket per person. But we were prepared. We had read a lot online about how to handle these situations…..be polite and stall. So, we stood on the side of the road for half an hour talking with them. By the end of the half hour, we were showing them pictures of our grandkids and they were laughing at Bruce’s attempts to speak Spanish. For example, Bruce attempted to say, “I listen to Spanish lessons in my helmet” but instead he said, “I listen to Spanish lessons in my cheese”. Then when he did the Catholic gesture of his fist on his heart saying “mea culpa, mea culpa, domini mea culpa” to express his penance over passing illegally, the cops just cracked up. At that point we knew we were

free-birds. In gratitude for letting us go, we gave them two Utah key ring trinkets and palmed them $20 and rode off.

Drove by one of Pablo Escobar’s estates where he hung his first drug running plane over the entrance gate. He had hippos among other animals on this estate. When the government confiscated his property, the hippos went feral and eventually became the largest herd of hippos outside of Africa. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to ride through the estate to see the hippos.

Tomorrow we cross into Ecuador. A new country to explore!