Buscando Macondo

With the ground still rolling beneath me I set off into Cartagena to find a map and a SIM card. A lovely guy I get talking to in a shop called José walks me halfway across town to a map shop. Then a guy called Johnny also walks me across town and through a labyrinth of little market alleys to find a tiny booth containing a man submerged in cable soup with several computers in various stages of dissection as croutons. My phone is added to the broth and minutes later is granted Colombian citizenship.

Next morning we meet Captain John at the Yacht Club - a hilariously failed structure of raw concrete pillars spilling iron spaghetti and trailing plastic tarps. The unloading of the bikes is even more tenuous than the loading was with an absolutely tiny launch, its spluttering outboard in pieces.

It's a long day of waiting in customs and insurance offices and chasing all over town for a place to clean the salt off the bikes but at least Rob is good company - we have music, motorbikes and tenuous theories in common. There is also a programme on the TV in the aduana waiting area showing graphics of food passing through the large intestine. That helps too.

Cartagena is a place to regroup and I stay here ten days. Easily the longest I have been in one place thus far. I spend time in the mechanics district near the fort changing oil, having my worn front tyre reversed to get more milage out of it, cleaning my air filter and repairing the bolts I broke doing the above... There's a lot of asking in one workshop and being sent to another. The most helpful place is pleasingly named 'Juan Car'.

There is a film festival and I see Steve McQueen's new film 'Shame'. One evening there is a power cut and the dark street is full of partiers and police who get annoyed when the whole crowd starts mimmicking their sirens. Meanwhile I sit with a Mexican who rolls a 'mexican cigarette' and we spend 3 hours watching a coke bottle melting.

I form pleasant habits of where I eat and make local acquaintances, such as Andrea, a Costeño girl who teaches me Spanish. I hang out with Natasha who is officially the least boring person I have met thus far. From Oklahoma but with parents from Sri Lanka and Venezuela she has interesting perspectives. I would like her to come to Venezuela with me where she has family but it doesn't seem likely as her parents forbid it due to the heinous incidence of kidnapping and murder. It's fast becoming a more tantalising prospect than Colombia... Then again I do have my camera stolen here. A lovely old guy chats with me as I walk down the street. I'm pleased with my Spanish and it's one of those really memorable little interactions. Later I become pretty sure he was acting as decoy for his friend to lift my camera from my bag. Disappointing.

The Mercardo Bazurto is my first experience of how real Colombians live and I wander its mazelike tunnels and sit people-watching at a foodstall. They watch back, wondering how this gringo got so lost..

One street I wander in the old town has a sign above a shop saying Marqueteria. I look it up in my dictionary and in English it means 'Marquetry'. Seeing as I then need to look this up, my curiosty is piqued and I steal up the backstairs of the shop to find a beautiful loftspace with a picture-framer working there. An artist called Rafael Ortiz shares the space and he gives me a private tour of his work which is very engaging. Projects comparing grass growing through the concrete with the coffee-sellers who wander with their thermoses of rocket fuel. One has victims of child prostitution making dolls of themselves. Another takes an image of a tourist and turns it into a great icon. I drink the evenings away with a flurry of Argentinians and finally move on up the coast to Santa Marta.

A few miles short, the long land bridge across the mouth of the lagoon terminates into Cienaga, a village whose only purpose is shrimps. Curious pink ponds arranged with matching dried-up salt ponds accompany the shacks. I never do find out what they're for.

Up in the cooler mountains of the Sierra Nevada I pitch my tent at Minca with Chris, a German, on his finca that resounds to earsplitting Cicadas the size of hamsters that blunder into your face and your rum in their giddy one day of life.

I walk the mountain paths and bathe in the cascades.

I take a long hot ride to Aracataca, birthplace of Gabriel García Márquez, who is the main reason I am in Colombia in the first place. The town is the inspiration for his fictional town of Macondo. Waiting for an infinitely long freight train to pass on the line that bissects it, I am surrounded by about forty locals on their bikes. They smile and coo at my bike and crack obscure jokes about gringos on motorbikes. I grin back and tell them my story. I sit by the street with Luis and his 82 year-old mother. They feed me panela (sugarcane juice) and tell me where to find Gabo's house. I wander its rooms and taste the echoes of Cien Años de Soledad.

I find Natasha again in Taganga - a pretty little bay but the scent of backpacker is strong. I lash her thankfully small bag onto the bike and we literally dodge police trucks as we head into Santa Marta with her bare-headed. A helmet successfully purchased, we head up the coast to Buritaca. She loves the independence of riding and wants to buy her own bike and it is good to be reminded of the specialness of what I am doing here and see the adventure through her fresher eyes. We are now fully off the Lonely Planet grid and it feels great to be in this other-worldly little town with its dilapidated hotel and its balcony half-collapsed into the river mouth.

In Palomino we talk to a South African pair who have been cycling the world for five years. After breakfast arepas we do the ultimate backpacker activity - lugging inner tubes up through the jungle sweatily and then drifting down the river on them. It's so much fun and the beautiful scenery glides by dreamily..

As we approach Riohacha, the landscape morphs from tropical to savannah and on into cactus-strewn desert. A passerby helps me shoehorn the bike into a tiny space between two metal grilles at the front of the hotel. I buy dollars for Venezuela's black market and we drink Mandarin juice and test drive laughably broken motorbikes.

I manage to find WiFi in an upmarket hotel and load up my iPhone maps with the tiny desert trails of La Guajira. Natasha heads south I push on north into the desert. Uribia is kind of like the bright lights for all the tiny villages out in the sandy wastes. Throngs at the roadside with plastic bottles filled with cheap Venezuelan petrol. Bar after bar filled with rickety pool tables and drunks playing dominos. A woman sits opposite in a restaurant and points at my food. She doesn't leave until I have finished eating. She doesn't bother the other diners. The only gringo in town is a big disappointment for her.

 I leave the dusty main road and get directions from a Wayuu lady in a beautiful little hut made of cactus and goat dung. She calls me 'mi amor' as she shoos piglets and wide-eyed children.

I follow skittish sandy paths that split and remake and weave their way to the water.

The blue of the sea is overpowering after the rusty orange of the sand as I make Cabo de la Vela.

 The sky becomes overcast but instead of making things dull as it would in London, the light takes on a preternatural watery aspect. I clamber up a hill and find a statue of Fátima left by pearl divers in the twenties.

A girl called Sophia from Berlin wants me to take her to Punta Gallinas but I say I don't want to be responsible for her broken leg. It's hard enough to keep upright solo in the syrupy sand. I pour a bucket of water over myself at dawn and set out. There is a jeep heading most of my way leaving and I take providence's hint and follow it. If I hadn't I don't know where I would be now as the twists and turns of the tracks are entirely inscrutable. The scenery is breathtaking. Like a more verdant outback with its' reddish sand sometimes festooned with gnarly cacti, sometimes moonscape barren.

I part ways with the jeep. Tony, the Wayuu driver, just points to a vague track and tells me to take a left at the mountains..

A dusty hour later I find myself at Tony's sister Luz Mila's farm and I take a Chinchorro - a Wayuu hammock that has woven wings to keep you warm.

End of the Road.

I wander and say hello to the goats and the 'langostas' - huge psychedlic grasshoppers that fly.

Back at Luz Mila's they ask me if I am missing anything. They have found one of my panniers down the track a ways. They are half-disappointed to find it is mine. A mysterious silver box abandonned in the Colombian desert... Who knows what treasures it could have contained. I can't believe I didn't notice it falling off. Still less that I didn't miss it when I unpacked! And how lucky it didn't happen further back in the desert. I guess it just goes to show how rough a ride it was.

I ride out to the northernmost tip of the continent.

Sophia, the girl from Berlin, shows up - she took a boat. We head off to Taroa to the giant sand dunes there. She rolls all the way down into the waiting ocean. "I haven't done that since I was 7!" she pants.

I walk to Punta Aguja. I pass what must be the most remote Jehovah's Witness church on the planet, its walls of cactus.

Castaway cemeteries.

I read Times Arrow in the nook of a rock. A beautiful book in a beautiful place. In the evening, with three German girls, I get through a whole litre of Chinchirri, the local firewater. We argue about constellations and Mandarina (Catalina) goes water-skiing in the dark.

So now I am royally hungover for probably the most challenging ride of the trip so far. A long way back to civilisation and this time no convenient jeep to follow. I load up with gas, water, nuts and arepas. The first couple of hours are not encouraging - my paths keep petering out to nothing.  I ask directions at a hut I pass only to find myself passing the same hut about 20 minutes later. This time the lady sighs and points to the other of the two tracks that lead away. All this time I am battling the sand that sucks my front wheel from under me at the slightest provocation. Only one real fall but plenty of bruises and scratches, not least from the cacti that overhang the tracks. I worry about punctures - plenty of thorns and the rocks that poke through the sand are especially sharp.

Somehow it all works out and I find myself on more solid tracks. There is a rope across the road. It's the Candy Bandits. Luckily I have been forewarned and am armed with toffees.

A police truck all bristling with rifles asks directions of me. If you see a truck full of Colombian police wandering Plumstead in the next few weeks you will know why. Sitting eating my arepas, a man appears from nowhere and stares at my food. I offer him a piece and he takes the whole lot. I have to persuade him to let me have a bit back. This kind of thing has happened to me several times here. Sharing food and water is a given here.

Much dustier I make Maicao and while I eat, an ancient Pontiac lurches to the curb, the driver well-oiled. He slumps out of the door and proceeds to siphon the gas out into a container. So that's how they smuggle the gas from Venezuela..

I haggle with the moneychangers at the border. Best they will do is 7 Bolivares Fuertes to a Dollar. I know I should be able to get 8 on the black market so I only get $20 worth. The customs is one of the easiest so far. So advanced, they even have their own photocopier.

Venezuela traffic is fun. If you like homicidal chaos. Full of throaty rustbucket gas-guzzlers from the 1970s. Cambodian road rules ie Might is Right and Fight or Flight. Four guys in a chicken shack are super-excited to chat with me. It's all high-fives when I say I will stop and eat here again on my way back through. A huge oil pipeline follows the road, kids walk along it on their way to school. Herons perch on it as we cross the wetlands leading to Maracaibo, a roasting town if there ever was one. I suck down a coco frio and wander Las Pulgas market and Paseo de las Ciencas where there knocked down most of the old colonnial buildings to put in a pointless "green belt". I like the odd blue gothic Iglesia de Santa Bárbara - one of the survivors.

I head out across the huge bridge that crosses the neck of Lake Maracaibo and it's easy to understand that this is the largest lake in the continent. I stop to eat at San Miguel for cheesey arepas. The proprietor sits in front of a shelf full of fertiliser in reused plastic bottles and yells into his phone. I've never heard anyone achieve such sheer volume with a mobile device. He comes over and parts my hair with questions. He wants to know if my kindle is a telephone. Clearly such a large phone would be great for shouting into.

I fill up. It costs less than 8p. Milk here is 25 times the price of petrol.

Up in the hills the scenery is stunning, all heathery moors and it gets colder and wetter. Out of the frying pan and into the fridge. Having started the day at around 34 degrees, it steadily drops all the way to 3. I start to watch out for ice. Finally, after shivering my way over a pass at 4000 metres and with the light gone I stumble into a posada and its dank little rooms. All my clothes, a sleeping bag and 4 thick blankets and I am still cold.

The ride down to Mérida is blissfull. Not only does the morning mist clothe everything in magic but it gets warmer every mile.

One thing that is unique to Venezuela is that other motorcyclists like to have a chat regardless of how fast you may happen to be going at the time. They pull alongside, oblivious of that truck about to flatten them, and risk all to find out how many CCs my bike is. It's early morning, the roads are slick with dew and on one side the road crumbles into a 500 metre drop but this guy is toasted and wants me to pull over and have a drink with him. I politely decline. Venezuela is going to be fun.