After the usual border nonsense (public holiday, officials 2 hours late to work, haggling with moneychangers) I fly down the now quite modern-looking Colombian roads to Valledupar. The petrol stations, with their smuggled Venezuelan gas are more rustic.
I get chatting to a motorcyclist at a traffic light and he rides with me several blocks to find me a hotel. What is the likelihood that a foreigner in England speaking bad English would receive this sort of hospitality?
My mission here is to get to Nabusimaque, an indigenous village up in the mountains mentioned to me by Sofia from Berlin. A nice woman at a travel agency called Carmen Maria de Castro gives me some directions and then I set about finding a map. The nearest thing to a map shop I can find is an art shop and there a lovely woman called Paula goes out of her way to help me, calling a shop on the other side of town and such. Her husband, Marcelo shows up and is equally helpful. He speaks great English but, for a surreal twist, with a heavy Alabama accent. I guess he lived there for 12 years. I end up spending the evening at their Mexican restaurant.
The road to Nabusimaque is yet another level for dirt roads. Super steep and made of greasy mud and boulders. A guy on a little 125 called Albert sort of takes me under his wing. He patiently waits, listening to Vallenatu wafting from a pair of speakers glued to his handlebars, while I stumble over the worst bits. One slip and the bike would need a crane to pull it out of the 6ft groves the rain has cut into the road. Right at the end I have to cross a tricky river with big slippery stones and a fast current to get to house that will take guests.
I have to find a dwarf called Alberto in his picture-perfect little house to buy a permit to walk around here. He is the most friendly person in the village. Most people here are unsmiling and chilly. I wander up to Nabusimaque proper. It's a walled town with a moat and a big sign saying no non-indigenous people may enter or take photos. The Arhuaco have the atmosphere of the Aamish or the Hasidic Jews - sort of cultish. They wear all white with a sort of fez for a hat. One guy called Waycu is chewing a big wad of coca and laughs when I say my umbrella with a flower on it is not very manly. The whole village tramps off to the fields with shovels and hoes. The valley is a water colour, soaking in a pure light. Maria Quinta, my host, makes me a hot panela and I try to keep warm as I fall asleep listening to the frogs. In the morning I have to face the road back and this time alone. It's the first journey I feel genuinely scared of . I fall 4 times but thankfully nothing more than scrapes and bruises. On the way one Arhuaco guy asks me for money spinning me a long yarn about his mother dying. Then he wants to use my phone but there's no network. Then he asks me whats in my luggage and when I say a medical kit he wants painkillers. Cheeky fucker. It's been a real pattern on my travels here that indigenous people expect handouts in a demanding sort of way despite their not really appearing all that needy to my eyes.
After the trials of the road back down from the mountain I lurch into a race to get to Santa Ana for the last ferry across the Rio Magdalena to Mompox. First off my clutch is slipping so I spanner it back into place and then as I near the river 2 hours later on a rough road I hit a sea of mud and my front wheel locks up. More spannering and I whip off the front mudguard which gets me going again. A guy at the river has taken three canoes, nailed a few planks to them and called it a ferry. I pay 10,000 pesos and as soon as I have ridden on, about 30 more people get on, obviously glad of a free ride now that uncle gringo is paying.. Bit of a party mood as we drift across and I laugh and joke with them.
I am in a great mood anyway, after the adventures of the last few days. A few more miles of Cambodian-style villages and I arrive in postcard town Mompox with its population gently swaying in rocking chairs. I am escorted to my hostel by a random stranger once again and get in the shower with my mudguard and luggage.
Mompox's botanical garden is interesting, a personal lifelong project of a little old guy. He reels off the name of every shrub and its medical application. Pretty much everything in his garden cures cancer.
I keep heading south and cross the pretty wetlands around the Magdalena.
A little to the south of Bucaramanga I have to cross a river in full flood. I have the choice of a very spindly looking rope bridge with implausible little ramps to allow a motorbike on...
In the end I take my boots off and roll up my trousers and push the bike across. I am glad I didn´t try to ride as the sideways force of the water is considerable. The final stretch is a wrong turn along a gorgeous canyon the river made. Hurrah for wrong turns. High up in the mountains a lonely policeman stops me and asks why you never see British bikes, only German ones. This leads him on to the subject of World War 2 and he asks me earnestly if there are any Jews in Germany now. Erm, not as many as there used to be I suppose, I say. This leads us on the the subject of the Khmer Rouge and then Rwanda. Ah yes, Africa, he says, a lot of blacks there. I am at a loss for a rejoinder there and ride off, puzzling about this odd encounter at the top of a Colombian mountain.
I'm sitting in a restaurant in San Gil, enjoying the first genuine vegetarian meal of the trip, all seitan and brown rice and deliciously smoky vegetables when the rain comes down with a jaw-dropping intensity that knocks out the electricity and make it impossible to even shout to the person next to me such is the percussion on the tin roof. The near-vertical street outside becomes a foot-deep rafting torrent of level 4 rapids.
San Gil is great for food. In the market there are row after row of fruit stalls selling the most delicious fruit salads for breakfast. So many kinds of fruit that I have never seen before here.. I push the boat out and get the bike washed. The inch thick layer of mud all over it makes the muchahos laugh. I take a ride to a waterfall and it's indicative of my mood that I can't even be bothered to ride all the way up to it. On the way I have to pull over as I get a high oil pressure warning on the bike. After 5 mins cooling down it goes away... Hmmm... It happens again on my way to Medellín. I pull over and try to figure it out. There is a trace of dampness around the oil filter so I think maybe I need to tighten it. A bent bolt prevents me doing it myself so I find a local taller meccanico. Lovely guys in the workshop and my Spanish flows for a change. I zoom off in bright sunshine feeling good about that and my deductive mechanical skills. This lasts for about 2 twisty hours and then the oil light blinks on again... The way to Medellín includes a challenging dirt road and I reckon that Bogotá will be a better bet with its BMW dealerships so I change course, stopping every few miles to let the engine cool down. Luckily the temperature goes down with every metre I ascend... Then something occurs to me - I haven't heard the cooling fan come on in a couple of days.. Hmm.. Maybe that cleaning dislodged something.. I limp into Chiquinquirá and find myself a room in The Most Girly Hotel In The World. My bathroom mirror is ringed with roses and my bed has so many cushions on it that there isn't even room on the floor for all of them. I wash the roadsmut off my face and go looking for food. Why is it that Colombian shops only sell either shoes, cakes or drugs? Next morning I get out my Haynes manual and fiddle with my fan. It is stuck but I free it a little by poking it with a biro and I splash a bit of oil on it. But it still seems blocked and so I ride for Bogotá. A few hours later I am riding into the thoroughly first world BMW service center feeling like the poor cousin next to a disneyland of gleaming 5 Series and chic secretaries adorning crisp glass-and-chrome offices. A mechanic has a look and would-you-fucking-believe-it the fan comes straight on. Guess I fixed it but the oil hadn't soaked in yet.. Oh well, seems I am good to go, even though I am now in the wrong city! Had not planned to come here for 2 weeks when my friend Verné will be back and when some overdue post should hopefully have arrived. I spend the weekend looking for the elusive waterproof jacket I have been searching for for a month (Hard to find my size here!) and drinking and salsaing til dawn with Verné's flatmate, Sebastion, who works for a landmine NGO, and his friends. I learn that Colombia has the second biggest landmine problem on the planet. Also that the word Aguadiente translates as 'searing hangover'. I witness the ciclovia - a main street shut off to allow Bogotinos to bring out their bicycles and there are public calisthenics. All part of the reinvention of this troubled city. I walk up to Manzeraté, a church on the range of hills that tower over eastern Bogotá, at this altitude a lung-bursting hour of steps that brings the crowds out of a Sunday. The church service is punctuated with eye-watering ecclesiastical karaoke delivered by a bloke with a cheesey electric keyboard to the side of the chancel.
Beautiful ride to Salento, into coffee country. The plants make the steep hills look like knobbly knitting and gleam in and out of the mists. I meet Joe, a biker from New Zealand who has worked his way up from Patagonia. We swap favourite rides and spend an afternoon riding backroads up over the mountains. I hike up through Valle de Cocora. Rainy season is here with a vengeance and, with the aid of thermal underwear and wellington boots, I squelch in and out of mud-holes up through the heavenly scenery and through the spindly Wax Palms that grow only here, the tallest palms in the world.
I head up to Medellín with Joe and we try to find our way up to Volcano Ruiz. It is on orange alert and we are beaten back by torrential rain, disobedient GPS and cryptic directions from roadworkers. We find a hostel in Manizales and try again the following day. Up into the clouds and then down a winding track to the faded grandeur of a hot spring spa hotel that clearly hasn't seen guests in many years.
The wall-eyed caretaker talks in riddles as he makes us hot panela to warm up. He is obsessed with the idea of Skype. My Spanish is definitely not sufficient to decode. We continue down the track in still more driving rain until it the track becomes a raging torrent and we are forced to turn back by a mudslide.
We take the back roads up to Salamina and on to Aguadas and La Pintada. Saturated with rain by now and evenings are spent balling up newspaper into my boots and scrubbing my hands to get the blue dye from my cheapo gloves out.
In Medellín, I stay at the palacial home of Mike from Motolombia, a Danish guy who runs a hostel and a motorbike rental place here. I climb Cerro Nutibara but better than the cloudy view of the city is the intricate model of it.
We go check out the motorbike expo that is on.
We get a big motorbike convoy together and go out riding the hills above the town. I wander the botanical gardens and the sculptures by the city's best-known son, Botero. There is a beautiful counterpoint in a street nearby, full of fat-bottomed street girls.
I take the metro up to its cable car bit.
On the way to Honda, I stop at Pablo Escobar's ranch. In the powdery days of the 80s he lived better than royalty here with his toys. Hippos, Pumas, Ostriches, Lions, Jaguars, Flamingos, Zebras, Hovercraft, Helipads, Jetplanes and a huge collection of Classic Cars. Now it's being turned into a theme park with speakers blasting dinosaur noises at the entrance gate and a gigantic waterpark. I wander the ruins of his house with displays detailing the havoc he wreaked on this country. His swimming pool with the marks of the diggers that dug it up looking for an arms and drug cache. I stand and try to imagine the parties and assassination plans cooked up here.
I sleep in La Dorada just short of Honda. These little towns have sort of hermetically sealed micro-climates with their buzzy activity so at odds with the tranquil country around. They always remind me of provincial Vietnam. I drink beer near a bingo and pool hall while the barmaid cashes up - counting the brightly coloured bottle tops. It's like a trippy game of backgammon.
Turns out those perilous twisty, wet, foggy mountain roads filled with homicidal drivers are as treacherous as they look. I am 40km short of Bogotá and round a bend to find myself head-to-head with a car on the wrong side of the road. He's not even overtaking anything. Which is just as well as it gives me somewhere to desperately swerve to. I save my leg from being crushed but the same cannot be said for the back of the bike scant inches away. A sickening crunch and yet somehow I stay upright. My second blessing is that the driver, Mauricio turns out to be one of the good guys. My heart is too busy doing Drum-and-Bass to remember I should call the police, although I do manage to take photos and just then comes a torrential downpour and I sit in Mauricio's car while I get him to write down his details. He assures me he will pay for everything. More than a little dazed, I strap the twisted remains of my pannier onto the bike in the pouring rain as he drives away. Not a high point of the trip.
So this visit to Colombia's capital is all about trying to muster enough Spanish to get the bike fixed and negotiate with Mauricio to pay for it. I walk around the city looking for a Latoneria - a bodywork shop to try to bring my aluminium pannier back from the dead. For the second time this trip the workshop ends up being called JuanCar :) The frame of the bike is bent as is the rack that holds the pannier. The shop is dubious that it can be fixed but the alternative is a 3 week wait for a new part from Germany. As luck would have it this is the foremost BMW workshop in Latin America - mechanics come from México to train here so I cross my fingers. My sound recorder has also dead from the impact. A lovely guy in a camera shop spends an hour opening it and trying to fix it but to no avail. He won't take anything for his trouble. Despite me beating myself up for naively trusting people, Mauricio turns up trumps and hands over cash. Even takes me out for lunch. Turns out to be a representative for an Aguadiente company with a string of models on his sales force. Wants me to come out dancing with them...
Bogotá is also about catching up with my friends Verné and Troy. I met Verné in Kratie, Cambodia where she was pitting her vet skills against the corruption of the Khmer government and the apathy of the world to save the Irrawaddy dolphin. I even helped her do a very smelly autopsy on one once. I haven't seen Verné in four years but is one of those people with whom the intervening years seem like nothing. She stills wanders the globe saving dolphins and generally being sickeningly cool.
Despite the stresses of the accident I luxuriate in this first-world oasis with its film-set malls and big city buzz and prepare myself to push south.
My mission here is to get to Nabusimaque, an indigenous village up in the mountains mentioned to me by Sofia from Berlin. A nice woman at a travel agency called Carmen Maria de Castro gives me some directions and then I set about finding a map. The nearest thing to a map shop I can find is an art shop and there a lovely woman called Paula goes out of her way to help me, calling a shop on the other side of town and such. Her husband, Marcelo shows up and is equally helpful. He speaks great English but, for a surreal twist, with a heavy Alabama accent. I guess he lived there for 12 years. I end up spending the evening at their Mexican restaurant.
The road to Nabusimaque is yet another level for dirt roads. Super steep and made of greasy mud and boulders. A guy on a little 125 called Albert sort of takes me under his wing. He patiently waits, listening to Vallenatu wafting from a pair of speakers glued to his handlebars, while I stumble over the worst bits. One slip and the bike would need a crane to pull it out of the 6ft groves the rain has cut into the road. Right at the end I have to cross a tricky river with big slippery stones and a fast current to get to house that will take guests.
After the trials of the road back down from the mountain I lurch into a race to get to Santa Ana for the last ferry across the Rio Magdalena to Mompox. First off my clutch is slipping so I spanner it back into place and then as I near the river 2 hours later on a rough road I hit a sea of mud and my front wheel locks up. More spannering and I whip off the front mudguard which gets me going again. A guy at the river has taken three canoes, nailed a few planks to them and called it a ferry. I pay 10,000 pesos and as soon as I have ridden on, about 30 more people get on, obviously glad of a free ride now that uncle gringo is paying.. Bit of a party mood as we drift across and I laugh and joke with them.
I'm sitting in a restaurant in San Gil, enjoying the first genuine vegetarian meal of the trip, all seitan and brown rice and deliciously smoky vegetables when the rain comes down with a jaw-dropping intensity that knocks out the electricity and make it impossible to even shout to the person next to me such is the percussion on the tin roof. The near-vertical street outside becomes a foot-deep rafting torrent of level 4 rapids.
San Gil is great for food. In the market there are row after row of fruit stalls selling the most delicious fruit salads for breakfast. So many kinds of fruit that I have never seen before here.. I push the boat out and get the bike washed. The inch thick layer of mud all over it makes the muchahos laugh. I take a ride to a waterfall and it's indicative of my mood that I can't even be bothered to ride all the way up to it. On the way I have to pull over as I get a high oil pressure warning on the bike. After 5 mins cooling down it goes away... Hmmm... It happens again on my way to Medellín. I pull over and try to figure it out. There is a trace of dampness around the oil filter so I think maybe I need to tighten it. A bent bolt prevents me doing it myself so I find a local taller meccanico. Lovely guys in the workshop and my Spanish flows for a change. I zoom off in bright sunshine feeling good about that and my deductive mechanical skills. This lasts for about 2 twisty hours and then the oil light blinks on again... The way to Medellín includes a challenging dirt road and I reckon that Bogotá will be a better bet with its BMW dealerships so I change course, stopping every few miles to let the engine cool down. Luckily the temperature goes down with every metre I ascend... Then something occurs to me - I haven't heard the cooling fan come on in a couple of days.. Hmm.. Maybe that cleaning dislodged something.. I limp into Chiquinquirá and find myself a room in The Most Girly Hotel In The World. My bathroom mirror is ringed with roses and my bed has so many cushions on it that there isn't even room on the floor for all of them. I wash the roadsmut off my face and go looking for food. Why is it that Colombian shops only sell either shoes, cakes or drugs? Next morning I get out my Haynes manual and fiddle with my fan. It is stuck but I free it a little by poking it with a biro and I splash a bit of oil on it. But it still seems blocked and so I ride for Bogotá. A few hours later I am riding into the thoroughly first world BMW service center feeling like the poor cousin next to a disneyland of gleaming 5 Series and chic secretaries adorning crisp glass-and-chrome offices. A mechanic has a look and would-you-fucking-believe-it the fan comes straight on. Guess I fixed it but the oil hadn't soaked in yet.. Oh well, seems I am good to go, even though I am now in the wrong city! Had not planned to come here for 2 weeks when my friend Verné will be back and when some overdue post should hopefully have arrived. I spend the weekend looking for the elusive waterproof jacket I have been searching for for a month (Hard to find my size here!) and drinking and salsaing til dawn with Verné's flatmate, Sebastion, who works for a landmine NGO, and his friends. I learn that Colombia has the second biggest landmine problem on the planet. Also that the word Aguadiente translates as 'searing hangover'. I witness the ciclovia - a main street shut off to allow Bogotinos to bring out their bicycles and there are public calisthenics. All part of the reinvention of this troubled city. I walk up to Manzeraté, a church on the range of hills that tower over eastern Bogotá, at this altitude a lung-bursting hour of steps that brings the crowds out of a Sunday. The church service is punctuated with eye-watering ecclesiastical karaoke delivered by a bloke with a cheesey electric keyboard to the side of the chancel.
I get to Guatapé after various drenchings and check into El Encuentro hostel. Full of Brits! A girl from Jersey and four from Devon. I finally hit the motherload. The region is a maze of tiny lakes and I lose no time in jumping in. To coin a phrase, the water is perfect. I wander the little town with its kitschy frescos and climb the Piedra El Peñol. Well, actually I only make it just past halfway up this weird Uluru out-take as my vertigo kicks in bigtime... Such a bizarre sensation. My mind wants to climb but my body digs in its heels...
Turns out those perilous twisty, wet, foggy mountain roads filled with homicidal drivers are as treacherous as they look. I am 40km short of Bogotá and round a bend to find myself head-to-head with a car on the wrong side of the road. He's not even overtaking anything. Which is just as well as it gives me somewhere to desperately swerve to. I save my leg from being crushed but the same cannot be said for the back of the bike scant inches away. A sickening crunch and yet somehow I stay upright. My second blessing is that the driver, Mauricio turns out to be one of the good guys. My heart is too busy doing Drum-and-Bass to remember I should call the police, although I do manage to take photos and just then comes a torrential downpour and I sit in Mauricio's car while I get him to write down his details. He assures me he will pay for everything. More than a little dazed, I strap the twisted remains of my pannier onto the bike in the pouring rain as he drives away. Not a high point of the trip.
Bogotá is also about catching up with my friends Verné and Troy. I met Verné in Kratie, Cambodia where she was pitting her vet skills against the corruption of the Khmer government and the apathy of the world to save the Irrawaddy dolphin. I even helped her do a very smelly autopsy on one once. I haven't seen Verné in four years but is one of those people with whom the intervening years seem like nothing. She stills wanders the globe saving dolphins and generally being sickeningly cool.
Despite the stresses of the accident I luxuriate in this first-world oasis with its film-set malls and big city buzz and prepare myself to push south.
