The roads in Colombia are a motorcyclists heaven, with every type you could possibly imagine from fast sweeping mountain roads, to tight serpentine unpaved roads picking their way through drop dead gorgeous scenery.
Yesterday I decided to find a fun road, so picked the faintest line on the map to a city 140 miles away to the West, with a hostel and went for it.
Within a few miles I was having problems keeping to the route as my paper map is too vague, and my gps seemed to be having accuracy issues - often placing me a mile or so from the road I was even on. This turned out to be a theme for the day, with many u - turns and even 1 double-u - turn after the gps suddenly changed its mind. And those double u - turns are embarrassing, when you were gawped at the first time you rode by!
After about 50 miles of mostly paved roads I got to the very small town of La Plata in South Colombia, and from there things got super fun, and super hairy, as the paved road ran out.
For the next 100 miles (!) the road alternated between the worst rock strewn road I'd ridden on outside of Baja, or to what I imagine the Ho Chi Min trail looked like after it had been carpet bombed (pot holes galore, going on forever, and spaced so that if you were lucky you could at least miss 2/3 of them if you kept to 15 - 20 mph.) Oh, and it was raining on and off all day too. Oh, and 1 river crossing cos the bridge was being rebuilt - luckily it was only 18 inches deep or so, and only about 100 feet wide ....
Even on a light bike like mine it was exquisite torture, like being inside a paint shaking machine, but with the most amazing views imaginable. Today I went from lush impossibly green fields, to cloud capped jungle mountains with 50 - 300 foot waterfalls and raging rivers in the valley far far below, to spooky cloud forests, green with moss and enveloped in drifting white.
All this at the agonizingly slow pace of 15 mph, upto 25 mph rarely. The drop offs were daunting multi hundred feet straight plunges into the valley below, and in many places the road had even collapsed upto a few feet in - so that pot hole rapidly approaching on the right verge where I am riding turns out to be a sink hole! Terrified. Understatement.
Just that 100 mile section took over 5 long, non-stop hours, and when it finally spat me out onto yet another section of the best paved mountain roads you have ever seen, I still had a few hours before I got to that night's hostel. A 9 hour day, with only a banana and 1/2 Gatorade for breakfast .... and I still rolled upto the hostel just before dusk.
Oh, and these amazing dirt roads - on nearly every section, no matter how beaten up or remote, I saw school children in uniform walking home from school, couples on motorcycles and even the occasional bus and truck.
A very humbling, earthing experience. To understand that our own adventures can be taking place in the normal everyday world of others.
