Friday, March 12th – Everyone was up early in our happy little roadside hotel, ready to get back on the road. The day looked clear and promising, and after a quick cuppa joe, no brekkie on offer, we got on the bikes and headed out into the bright morning. We soared over some really wonderful roads through the mountains, pausing a few times to take pics at the more striking overlooks. Our riding agreement is if someone drops behind, then the presumption is they stopped for a whizzle or a pic, and the other two will slow down or pull over and chill for 5 minutes before turning round and going back to see if there’s an actual problem. This worked really well, as 99/100 times the person stopped for a pic (we were sweating too much in the 108 degree heat to need to hit the bushes very often). We dropped into a town called Pasto to grab some brekkers and hit the ATM. Pasto was very refreshing, reminding me of a classy English market town, with a nice central square and busy well-dressed people bustling around. As usual an admiring crowd gathered around the bikes asking questions, and we were as charmed by the people as the town. We lingered over a second cup of coffee as I got my boots polished by an enterprising boy – just doing my part for the local economy. We ran through a pretty painless border crossing into Equador - only 3 hours - and rode into the nothern town of Ibarra, sourcing an hotel for the night from our indispensible Lonely Planet guidebook. Ibarra also seemed like a busy, fun town, with people chatting away to us as soon as we stopped - and, being Friday, we decided to cut loose a little after the last few quiet evenings and get a drink or two…
Colombian mountain road
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Thurs, March 11th – We woke up in our luxury sheds to an overcast morning, so we struggled into our wet weather gear after a welcome cup of coffee in the motel owner’s kitchen. We got rolling around 7:30am with the day’s goal of reaching the border to Equador, and headed south towards a town called San Augustin for our planned breakfast stop.The side road we were on ran through some rugged hilly country with few fences or fields – and we all were thinking how beautiful it was, and how nice to be off the main highway. Right after breakfast the road turned to dirt, and in the next few hours we climbed over several mountain passes at 10-11,000 feet, skating around in the mud, and having a great time of it. We came down into the town of Popayan and back onto panamerican tarmac. We immediately took another side road south, and as the sun started to go down we were again all struck by the raw beauty of the Colombian back country. As it got dark we were still miles from any real town, and after the previous night’s near-miss, we decided to stop at the first hotel we ran into – which despite being in the mddle of nowhere was pretty clean for $7 each, and served up an acceptable two course meal for $3.50. Larry and I were, by now, well used to eating fried chicken and french fries for lunch and dinner, and Moe endured yet another vegetarian serving of rice, beans and plantains.
Southern Colombia – 10,000ft up and 60 miles of dirt road
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Wed, March 10th – Amazingly Moe´s new radiator caps delivery showed up at 10am while we were out eating breakfast – we´re learning not to underestimate Colombia. We took a cool-off dip in the pool after Moe had fixed up his bike and we loaded up all our gear. It´s definitely warm here at our current latitude of about 4 degrees above the equator… and because March is halfway between winter and summer the sun is actually just about directly over the equator. We got rolling, and somehow wound up on a back road paralleling the PanAmerican highway. Some gravel and potholes interspersed with tarmac kept us amused, but the countryside was absolutely beautiful, very lush – like England on a hot summmer´s day. The expensive villas on the hillsides told us that plenty of folk in Bogota were making good money and buying up country property. We got back on the PanAmerican for a while, and then took a parallel off-shoot heading south that looked interesting. We were really happy to be off the main road, as the terrain turned more mountainous and exciting by the mile. Looking at a map of South America you realise that the Amazon tributaries drain from the mountains we were in, about 100 miles from the Pacific coast – and it´s truly bizarre to cross over rivers, look down and see the water flowing away from the nearby coastline. There were very few towns at this point in time, and we still hadn´t found anywhere to stop by the time it got dark. Riding at night on these roads is not a great idea – remember the dead horse on the road in Costa Rica – and this time we almost hit a man walking on the road just as a semi-truck went past in the opposite direction – not good. We pulled over at a little traveller’s motel – very basic, no hot water or air-con, very hot and humid with lots of mozzies. We got a ride from the motel’s owner and his small son into the local town of Garzon and had a decent fried fish dinner washed down with a glass or two of the local pilsner. I slathered myself in repellent and spent a fitful night in my hut hiding under the topsheet.
The “think tank” in Melgar
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Tuesday, March 9th - After a well-below-average breakfast at one of the “Comida Rapida” restaurants in the Centro, we had to take a look at Moe’s bike which had burped out some coolant when we arrived in Melgar last evening. In the traffic-jam leaving Bogota, the bikes had gotten super-hot and we were worried we had heat-damaged something. Moe stripped the bike down to check on the location of the leak, which just seemed to come from the coolant header tank overflow. We jumped into the pool to do some critical thinking, and decided to check on the waterpump, the thermostat and the radiator cap as the most likely suspects. If it wasn’t any of those three, then a cylinder head gasket was leaking, which would be a severe, possible fatal, blow to the trip. After a few hours of wrench-spinning and test rides, we concluded it was the radiator cap gone bad – thank goodness – we called Juan, and he put two new ones into overnight delivery to our hotel for us. We spent the rest of the day eating, drinking and lounging, thinking our 5pm rule had worked well for us – we could have broken down in the middle of nowhere …which is where we would be the next day, Day 27.
Monday, March 8th – Monday morning we packed up from our nicer Bogota Hotel – although we had problems with no hot water and had to swap rooms Sunday evening. OK, so always check for plastic sheets and hot water. We rode through Bogota to the KTM Colombia showroom at the north end of town, and the jefe Juan – super-nice, interesting guy who speaks perfect English – loaded us up with two rear tires, oil & filters, and then led us a few klicks to their service shop. His guys wasted no time in getting stuck into oil and filter changes on the two KTM´s, and I changed the Duck´s oil and filter – which I´d brought along. We had a quick bite o´ lunch and headed out to continue our journey southwards just as it started raining. We spent the next two hours in traffic hell trying to get out of Bogota – the local drivers are incredibly pushy and impatient – and I´m being nice. We were about 80 miles south of town by 5pm, and our rule since the hell-hole in Tecpan, Mexico, was to start looking for an acceptable hotel about an hour before dark… if you wait ´til dark you´re too tired and desperate to pick and choose a decent spot. We found a quiet hotel with a nice pool, and wasted no time in stripping off and jumping in – 108 degree weather does that, doesn´t it? Melgar is a pleasant place although we could only find one decent restaurant which served up some good fresh Mexican food.
Moe´s Katoomer receiving some new oil and filter
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Sunday, March 7th – We woke up depressed in our cheap hotel after a lousy night´s sleep – we´d forgotten to check the beds on check-in and missed the plastic undersheets that make sleeping impossible. We went out for a nice breakfast in La Candelaria and formulated our immediate plan – the KTM´s needed rear tires and all the bikes needed an oil change, so we decided to spend the day looking around Bogota, and go to the KTM dealer in the morning and buy tires and oil. First-off we walked around looking at hotels and switched to a nicer place without plastic sheets. We then had a fantastic vegetarian lunch – best lunch of the trip by far – and walked down a main street downtown closed to traffic for Sunday strolling and street vendors, and went to the Museo Nacional. The Museo is housed in the old prison and contains artifacts from several thousand years B.C. to the Spanish Conquest to the War of Independence and Simon Bolivar – lots of interesting stuff - and luckily the signs were all in Spanish or we´d have learned a lot more… To finish the afternoon off we took the funicular up the steep cliffs behind the old city to a church perched on the top overlooking the whole city for awesome views. Bogota is huge of course, and in fact Colombia is the third most populous country in South America. The final tourist spot we went to after dinner was the main square of the old city, which has a torrid history including public executions, and where Bolivar arrived in triumph after winning the decisive battle of Boyaca and securing Colombia´s independence from Spain.
Moe and Larry in La Candelaria
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Saturday, March 6th – We caught our 6:30am cab out to Panama City’s International airport, and our ensuing hour-long flight to Bogota was happily entirely uneventful. Colombian immigration was also a non-issue – why the road border crossings have to be so primitive is beyond me – got some Colombian pesos out of an ATM, and caught a cab ride out to the Cargo area. The bikes got unloaded from the plane as we watched, and we got our paperwork together for a nice visit to the customs people for a temporary vehicle import permit, which only took 2-1/2 hours. The lady was surrounded with computers yet she had to hand-write the forms with 3 carbon copies …go figure. We got the bikes out of the cargo area – the people at GIRAG had done a pretty solid job of strapping the bikes down – and we shook hands all round and took pictures.
Jeremiah, Larry, Moe and Curly with the GIRAG crew at the Bogota airport cargo area
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Thur/Fri, March 4th/5th – Thanks to a couple of computer terminals and wifi in the hotel’s roof terrace restaurant and bar, we spent the whole day Thursday scouring the internet for routes around the Darien Gap into Colombia.
The Panama Cityscape from the Bahia Suites roof terrace
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