Long Ride South

Before checking out of out hotel, we made more photocopies of our passports and other important documents, to try to speed up future border crossings.  We walked to the nearby market, and bought a white pineapple, which was on our list of Ecuadorian cuisine to try.  Getting out of Quito proved to be a chore;  it was a long ride, and we got confused a couple of times, and frustrated by closed or blocked streets, and exasperated by terrible traffic and horrible black diesel exhaust, but eventually we made it out the south end of this huge city, and on the Pan American Sur.

It was very slow going, on twisty mountanous  roads, although the roads so far in Ecuador have been some of the best we have encountered.  We did not get as far as we had hoped, and stopped fairly early in Riobamba, because after that town there appeared to be a long stretch of just mountain, with not much chance of finding a place to stay.

We tried to find a restaurant that served cuy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_pigs#As_food), another local dish that Levi wanted to experience, but our search for that proved to be a waste of time.  We asked a cab driver to take us to a place that served this regional dish, but all we accomplished was spending 30 minutes or so touring the neighborhoods of Riobamba, ans spending $3.00.  We settled on eating at a restaurant that advertised Texas steak, and had a very good meal after all.  Returning to our hotel, we enjoyed our white pineapple for desert!

Had no luck getting internet access, and had heavy rain all night.  It has rained on us every day that we have been in Ecuador so far.

After a fairly quiet night (a rare thing anywhere along the Pan Am), we had breakfast in the hotel restaurant, and then got a cab to the TelefériQo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telef%C3%A9riQo), a  gondola cable-lift that runs from the western part of the city up to the top of one of the volcanoes than surround the city.  It is a fabulous ride, and affords great views of the city on the way up.  When we reached the top, it was still fairly clear, and we could marvel at the view;  but before long the clouds descended and we were enveloped in fog.  The top of the lift is over 13,000 ft. in elevation.  We walked around the top, met and talked with all kinds of tourists from everywhere you could imagine, and had some terrible instant coffee.  A very cool experience.

After getting back down, we rode the trolley into the old city center, and did some inernet and some window shopping.  Saw some more amazing buildings, plazas and churches.  Levi bought a hat that he had been wanting.

We returned to the Santa Clara market near our hotel for a hornados lunch, since it was just too good not to do again.  Then we spent a couple of hours relaxing in the hotel spa;  delightful.

A nice break from the routine, and we were ready to get back on the road tomorrow.

Armenia by day: Nothing says welcome like a naked woman being tortured

When I got up our morning in Armenia, my Dad had already been out and about, and had a few things to show me. First, he lead me the block from our hotel to the roundabout where the highway met our road, where the town proudly displayed the above art picturing a mostly naked woman, face obliterated in black, being seemingly tortured by grappling hooks. Lovely! Next he showed me a gas station just up the road with a huge area we could potentially use to replace the brake pads (which we had spares of) on my bike.

We ate breakfast, pleased to have real hot sauce (read: out of Panama, where every restaurant in the country had the same terriblevinegary excuse for hot sauce), and went to do the brakes. When we attempted to move our bikes, the guy who’d helped us park it (where the Hotel had told us to) insisted we needed to pay him to get it out. Unwilling to argue, we forked over $2 (Note to Joe: it was 4,000 pesos, 2 USD) and grumbled as he laughed with his friend as we drove to the gas station. We decided to fill our tanks at the gas station to make the prospect of working on our bikes in their parking lot less awkward, and having filled up in the town before, took less than a gallon each. We parked and started taking our luggage apart, getting out tools, and getting down to business. The attendant came over to look at what we were doing (mostly interested in what we had in the bikes I suspect), but assured us we were fine. Finished the brake job up and adjusted our headlights so hopefully next time around my Dad’s won’t horribly blind me on dangerous mountain roads.

Armenia is located at the northern end of a giant flat valley, and going was notably easier as we headed south. We still had much of the grandeur of the mountains, being surrounded on both sides by them, but none of the hassle. Since a long straight road would have been far too easy for us, Colombia had thought to add roundabouts about every mile, many poorly labeled. I stopped counting at 20 for the day, and suspect the actual number to top 30 by the time we stopped for the night in Popayán. Though we managed to navigate the roundabouts despite their frequency and confusion, when we tried to follow a road that bypassed one of the larger Colombian cities, Calí, we ended up miserably lost in the town of Palmira, and ended up taking a road that went right back to the highway that went to Calí. Then just to rub our noses in it, the highway we’d tried so hard to avoid had a bypass that kept us completely out of the city. Go figure.

We ended up at a relatively fancy hotel that had an internet connection and craptastic computer my Dad tried and mostly failed to get anything done on. We tried hard to find a decent place to have dinner, but unable to find a part of the town with decent restaurants that were actually open (damn Sundays in religious countries!), we settled on a pizza place not far from our Hotel. More people who saw us came off the street and asked us for money including a goofy kid who spoke a little bit of English. To cap things off, the waiter, who’d done a good job up to then, tried to overcharge us for our pizza: we’d ordered the special (18,000 pesos), and I’d watched him write down the order and the correct price on the bill. When he brought us the bill, the 18,000 had been crossed out and replaced with 22,000. I pointed this out and he changed it… gringo tax avoided, this time. I ended the night having a nice conversation with the receptionist at the hotel about Colombia, culture, and language.

We got our “free” hotel breakfast in the morning and tried to get out of town. As is our tradition, this was made very difficult by some random event out of our hands. Today’s act of human: some crazy parade/political protest where all the participants wore matching white shirts and the police shut down our direction of the panamerican. The police had been nice enough to put up one detour sign with an arrow, but after that, it was up to you to figure out where the closure ended, and how to get there. To make matters more interesting, the detour threw us right into an extremely crowded downtown area with tons of traffic and road work. To give you an idea, I was cut off at a concrete road work barrier while driving on dirt by a mule-drawn cart. Eventually, we managed to snake our way through town and end up back on the way out of town.

We finally reached the end of the massive valley we’d driven in the entire day before, and our exit was marked by a descent into a massive gorge carved by a river which showed us just how high up the valley had been. It was another stunning day of scenery, winding through mountains, following deep green canyons covered in spanish moss, and peering into gorges unlike any I’d ever seen. The road was also interesting, by which I mean full of washouts. While high in the mountains, we came across a long line of cars. Being in Colombia, we moved to the middle and skipped to the front of the line of 75 or so vehicles, which weren’t moving at all. At the front we found out why:

Oops!

A tanker truck obviously full of some sort of flammable liquid had fallen into the ditch at a particularly nasty gravel washout, and no less than three wreckers were trying, rather unsuccessfully to pull it out.  We waited at the side of the road for about 45 minutes while we watched them pull the truck back and forth, at one point wrangling hundreds of people watching up to the scene of the accident like they were going to have them help, then the cops ordering them to disperse again, and at one point actually putting one of the wreckers in the ditch with the tanker, where it appeared to be stuck as well. Meanwhile, we met a bunch of extremely friendly Colombians and talked to them about our trip. We also met the woman who’s car was at the very front of the line, who’d been waiting there for 3 hours! Seemingly disheartened by sticking one of their wreckers into the ditch, they finally decided to let traffic by, and we began a mad dash to the front which was completely devoid of traffic thanks to a day’s worth of being blocked.

Already giving up on making it particularly far that day, we decided to stop and have lunch. We picked a small restaurant in a small town, and a nice old woman waited on us. Like pretty much every restaurant in Colombia, this one lacked a menu, but when the woman rattled off what she had, we stopped her at fish and ordered a couple cokes to go with them. While waiting, she brought us some strange and sweet fruit tea (seemingly not understanding our request for Coke, which we’d seen in her cooler), then delicious vegetable soup, then rice, salad, and plantains, and finally 2 of the most beautiful whole deep fried fish I’ve ever seen. Completely golden brown, the skin was crunchy and wonderful, the inside hot and moist, and both massive; I couldn’t even manage to finish mine. The whole meal came to about $8.

More crazy mountains and we made it to the town of Pasto for the night. We ran all over the city looking for a decent hotel with parking and internet, and ended up settling on the first we’d tried, right on the Panamerican, which lacked internet, but the guy at the desk actually opened up a door in their parking lot to a room being used for storage and let us park our bikes inside for the night. After we settled in, we left to explore the city. We found a bar directly next door to our hotel, and we decided to start off with a beer. Well, we went in and ordered a couple beers, and it was pretty obvious we’d found a little more than a bar. Two women at a table next to the door insisted we sit with them, and looking around the place, there were only a handful of women, all clearly of “ill repute,” further evidenced by a little room in the back that could really only be good for one thing. Glad they couldn’t understand us, we laughed about it uncomfortably to each other and drank our beers quickly, but not before one of the girls at our table tried to get us to buy them a drink.

We wandered through the city, stopping at a pharmacy for some pain meds for my Dad and finding the woman there had seen us driving around on our motorcycles earlier. We found the city’s center, and thoroughly enjoyed walking past the numerous decorated plazas and old government buildings. We stopped and had some cheap street food (the guy next to us even offered us his fries!), and saw numerous street walkers and another bar full of hookers, this one at least slightly less hideous than the last, but still not enough to get us to go in.

In the morning, we headed to the Ecuadorian border. We got horribly lost in the border town, and while confusedly deciding where to try next, a car stopped and the woman driving asked us what we were looking for. When I told her, she said to wait, and she flagged down a passing scooter and told the kid driving it to lead us to the border, which he did. Before we knew it, we were in Ecuador, only to find out from another adventure rider (one of four we met at the border!) that we had to go back and go through the completely unlabled exit process of Colombia before we could enter Ecuador.

Perhaps it was just the way we traveled and the places we decided to go, but Colombia was never close to the scariest place we’ve been on this trip. Beginning in Bogotá, we met more than our fair share of suspicion, but it seemed like the farther south we traveled, the friendlier people became. Gas hovered right around $3 a gallon throughout Colombia, and clearly the country’s answer to this was motorcycles. They were everywhere! Every other vehicle on the road was a motorcycle, and considering all the buses, trucks, taxis, and cars clogging the roadways, that’s no small feat. In the cities, intersections with stoplights would end up filled with bikes waiting for the green. People who obviously didn’t own cars used bikes to transport the kinds of things one from the US isn’t used to seeing on a bike: 27″ TVs, their entire family, propane canisters, 6 foot long metal rods, etc. Also, though Colombia has numerous toll roads, every one of them has a tiny bypass lane reserved for motorcyclists, which saved us untold amounts in tolls. Finally, as in Central America, we passed dozens and dozens of police and military checkpoints, and were never stopped once, instead watching numerous vehicles both in front of and behind us get stopped instead. Ahhh, welcome to South America indeed!

Not far from where the sprawling city of Bogotá tapered off, we reached the end of the valley it sits in, and were again deep in the mountains. Our bikes ran rough at the high altitude, especially given the often extremely steep grades. It was my first time in the Andes, and to put it mildly, they’re unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Words, like the pictures we seldom get an opportunity to take, fall horribly short of describing the grandeur and beauty of some of the scenery we pass, and the Colombian Andes were absolutely no exception. The mountains, and the views of them afforded us by the insane roads we were on, are absolutely awe inspiring, and by that I mean I was literally in awe of them.

Just one of many giant, cloud-covered Colombian mountains

We underwent massive changes in altitude from mile to mile, constantly climbing up and crawling down through extremely steep and tightly winding roads. At one point, when we stopped to take a break, snap a couple photos, and chuck some boulders down the mountain like little kids, our thermometer read 110 degrees F. About 15 minutes and a lot of climbing later, the thermometer read 55. How do you dress for that?

After a full day of just spectacular scenery, we’d decided to push for our original destination, Armenia, despite knowing we’d be coming in after nightfall. High up in the mountains, we once again entered dense fog, and finally, substantive rain. About half an hour before the sun winked out, while coming up to a downhill turn, I hit my brakes to avoid running into the back of a truck my dad had recently passed only to find myself hardly slowing. I hauled on the front brake and slammed my foot down on the rear, and managed to slow, but it was something was definitely up. Coming cautiously to the next corner, I tested my brakes, and found the rear to be completely useless: there was no resistance in the peddle, and nothing happened no matter how hard I pushed.

Unsure as to what exactly was going on, I worried that if there was a break in the brake line, I may eventually run completely run out of brake fluid, and end up with no brakes at all. Given we were on a massive descent at the time, that would be… bad. I wanted to get my Dad’s attention as quickly as possible, in hopes of having his help diagnosing the problem. Unfortunately, at the same time, he was in a hurry trying to get us to Armenia before it got dangerously dark, and so he was flying around slow moving trucks and cars, something I couldn’t really do with no rear brakes! I carefully picked my way through traffic behind him, flashing my brights, waving my hands, and honking my horn at him, to no avail. Eventually, I got behind a slow truck and stayed there, knowing if I didn’t show up in his rearview for awhile, he’d stop. I came up on him on the side of the road waiting, and I waved my hands for him to stay put. I explained what was going on, and we took a look at the bike. It had plenty of brake fluid and no apparant leaks. Instead, the rear brake pads were completely gone, or at least as far as was necessary for them to fail.

From there, I took the lead,  and began our slow perilous journey down the final stretch of mountains. Night fell, and the roads were slick, steep, and curvy… exactly the kinds of roads that really really suck when you only have a front break on a heavy motorcycle. I had to keep the bike in 1st or 2nd gear, and cross my fingers that nothing jumped in front of me. I finally figured out why I’d had so much trouble seeing in the cloud forest when I was also in the lead at night in the fog, as it happened again this night: my Dad’s headlight had been bent upwards after his collision with the cow, and now shined directly into my rearview mirrors, obliterating my night vision. With no way to tell him, and my strongest desire being to get to a hotel and off the bike, I gave up on trying to tell him, and we eventually found our way to a truck stop right off the highway in Armenia. Our hotel was less than $9, and furnished accordingly.

We relaxed with a mediocre dinner, once again served without us getting much of a say in what we got, but getting a “free” taste of pretty good soup. We were obviously overcharged for the meal itself, so I guess that balanced things out. When we went out again in search of a bar or something, a guy started following us around speaking some highly accented Spanish I could hardly understand, and didn’t have any desire to try to follow. When we gave up on finding anything interesting and went to a restaurant across the street with outdoor seating so we could smoke a couple cigars, he tried to sit down with us, and only when the owner of the restaurant came over and made threatening gestures at him did he leave us alone. While sitting there drinking a couple beers, two more people came up to us and begged, including a guy who looked about 21 dressed in fancy jeans and a nice shirt. As we were leaving, the original guy came back to bother us again and even went so far as to try to follow us into our hotel; I had to stand in front of the door and tell him to leave!

While Levi slept in, I went out to try to catch up on phone calls and blogging, but all of the internet cafes where closed!  After our complimentary hotel breakfast, we headed south on Ecuador’s excellent roads, and enjoyed more fantastic mountain vistas.  Every turn presented very picturesque towns, lakes, and volcanoes.   Altitude so high that the bikes ran very sluggish. We briefly got confused when Quito was shown on a highway sign twice, in two different directions, but we quickly got passed that.  Somehow we missed the monument/marker for the actual equator, so we do not have that photo.  After one last long climb through some weird desert-like mountains, we entered Quito from the north.

Quito is a huge, long and skinny city, located between volcanoes on the east and west.  Levi navigated us to the central district, where we found a good hotel for $26.  We took a trolley to centro ($.25) and checked out the amazing older city, amazing old churches and the ‘basilica’, centuries old government and commercial buildings, and very cool squares and public spaces. Then we went to a local market for a fabulous lunch of hornados for $2.50 – maybe the best meal I have had so far on the trip!

Driving and road etiquette here is better than anywhere we have been in central or south America so far.  Drivers are patient, and are less quick to use there horns.  The annoying wolf-whistling and honking by taxis is much less prevalent here, and just in general, the streets are quieterand safer that what we have become used to.  Hurray for Ecuador!  But the soot and exhaust from the trucks and buses is no better, or worse.  Ecuador has the cheapest gas we have seen so far – $1.50 a gallon for regular.  Buses and trolleys are very convenient and cheap, and taxis are not expensive, either.  Internet cafes abound, but connections are slow, and machines prinitive. 

We took advantage of a sauna/spa in the basement of our hotel, and that was a very pleasant and relaxing experience.  All in all a very nice afternoon in a very nice, world-class city.

Levi slept in, and I read until he got up.  Our hotel included breakfast, and then we had an easy out-of-town.  Road started with a climb into fantastic mountains, but a very tough road like so much of Colombian mountain road.   Just amazing, dramatic scenery.  I have to say, that I am very, very glad that it worked out that we did not skip Colombia.  Some of our experiences was not the most positive, but the scenery was unparalleled, and I would not have wanted to missed it.  What a beautiful country, and although they definitely need to work on their tourist industry to make it acceptable to the average US citizen, it was not an entirely negative experience. 

We stopped for some excellent coffee just short of the border, and then entered the border area.  A wait in line was all that was needed to exit Colombia, and then The Ecuador entry process was time-consuming, but only due to long lines.  There was no hassle, no stress, no fees;  every one was helpful, friendly, and pleasant.  It still took over two hours.  While we were there, we met three Colombians who were heading to Patagonia on their Harleys.  It was fun to chat with them.  We hope to meet up with them again, somewhere along the way.

As we headed south into Ecuador, we soon discovered that the mountains here were even more spectacular and impressive than in Colombia!  Words fail to describe the grandeurand beauty of the scenery.  Soon we were high in the mountains, but now on wonderful, wide, well maintained and well engineered roads.  We got cold, and soon had our coat liners and electric shirts on… temps were in the 50’s and it was raining.

Again, we got confused and briefly off the road in Tucan, but quickly recovered the Panamericano Sur.  We stopped for lunch of  ‘fritata’ at a small roadside comidor, and had a friendly local offer to share his beer with us, and welcomed us to Ecuador.  We finished the stretch into the town of Ibarra before dark.  Friendly, curious, helpful people seemed to be the norm.  We found a decent hotel, and walked to the town center, which was very nice and easy to explore.

When doing the little bit of planning that went into this trip, we settled on the disappointing conclusion that we should avoid Colombia. A land of mixed reviews, nearly everyone who’d been there had nothing but positive things to say about the place, while just about everyone else had bought into the reputation of the place, and urged us to avoid it. Even the proponents of going there had to admit that our reservations weren’t unfounded, and that we’d have to be careful. In my mind, there was enough going on on this trip that I was willing to give up on a country that was potentially highly dangerous if avoiding it wasn’t horribly inconvenient – it’s not like we had a lack of risk to keep things interesting!

So in Panama, we’d ask the logistics companies for quotes on shipping to Ecuador or Peru, figuring we’d have plenty to keep ourselves busy while our bikes arrived… but freight shipping is tricky business, and for small quantities – say, two motorcycles – expensive. Even the process of getting prices, timetables, and answers to our questions was long and arduous. The company we eventually settled on, Girag, was an air freight company, and every part of the way they did business was fast and easy. They’d take our bikes on a(ny) Tuesday or Thursday morning, put them on a plane, and have them for us the very next day. For this convenience, we’d have to pay handsomly, but amazingly, it ended up being just about on par with sea freight, and much much quicker and less frightening.

The catch was that all Girag’s flights to South America went through Bogotá. To fly the bikes farther would be more expensive, and would delay their pickup until the weekend. To further complicate matters, personal flights from Panama to Ecuador or Peru were ludicrously expensive. When we finally looked into flights to Bogotá, which were $200 less than those to Ecuador or Peru, the decision was made for us: we’d fly our bikes to Colombia on Thursday and meet them the next morning at the same airport.

We flew Copa Airlines, and the flight was only an hour and a half on a small, extremely comfortable plane… and they found time to serve us food (cheese sandwich and fruit cup)! You certainly don’t see that on flights in the US anymore. The airport was spotless and signs were in Spanish and English. Customs took less than 10 minutes and they barely asked any quesitons. Outside the terminal, I asked a guard where the Cargo Terminal was, to pick up our bikes, and found it to be within walking distance. In no time, we’d found Girag’s office, they’d given us the paperwork for our bikes, and they sent us a five minute walk away to the customs office to get the proper paperwork for our bikes.

As far as this part of the process is concerned, I can’t possibly explain how glad we were to not be in Central America anymore. The customs building was clean and well lit. The woman who helped us, incredibly friendly. She smiled, joked, and made our photocopies for us! Yeah, that’s right, we didn’t have to slog over a bridge covered in mud, or into the nearest town in search of a photocopier we had to pay to use… this girl did it for us and didn’t charge us a penny! Even better, when it came time for her to fill in a huge form, she handed my Dad’s to another agent and they worked in parallel! We hadn’t found a single Central American country that had figured that trick out.

Paperwork in hand (no charge!), we went back to Girag and in no time were looking at our bikes sitting in their warehouse. It was raining a bit outside, and they let us re-pack (we were setup to live out of our backpacks as necessary) our bikes in their warehouse. That’s when my Dad noticed that his bike had been damaged in transit, and part of his windscreen was broken. We pointed it out to the Girag people watching us (as usual, our bikes were quite the conversation piece), and they told us the guy who could help us with a claim was out to lunch, so we decided to do the same, at the restaurant in the parking lot of the Cargo Terminal.

What followed was a curious episode that occured several times, but has luckily been limited to Colombia. The restaurant was Cafeteria style, where you picked up a tray, walked a line, and picked up your food… at least if you’re not obviously an American. When we tried to get our food like everyone else, the guy at the cash register insisted we sit down, and that they’d bring us our food, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Though everyone sitting down has a practically identical meal, we get served something completely different, with 3 times the meat, no beans, and when we ask for a coke, which is located in a fridge off to the side, the “waitress” (who normally cleared tables) went to the fridge, took out a coke, brought it to the back, then brought out a glass with the coke in it. We also paid what had to be double the price as anyone else in the place, and left frustrated for being treated differently, even if their intentions were good. Oh well, the food was fantastic anyways.

When we went back to Girag, the guy was back from lunch, and took a look at the bike. There was no arguing, he only asked us how much the wind screen cost (too damn much) and made us a pretty reasonable offer. A half hour later, my Dad had signed a waver saying everything was honkey dorey, gotten some cash, and we were on our way out of the warehouse (which involved driving the overloaded bikes down a dangerously thin wooden plank laid over the stairs leading down from the warehouse *shudder*).

In the time since we’d left the passenger terminal to when we finally got on the road, the once tranquil highway leading from the airport had become an 8 lane circus. Traffic backed up bumper to bumper, hundreds of motorcycles weaved between traffic, and cars, trucks, and buses – the latter two spewing abhorrent amounts of black sulferous cancerous smoke all across the highway – showed no concern at pulling into our lane, leaving us hardly inches to maneuver on the pothole-stricken lanes, and on numerous occasions nearly running us from the roads. Throughout our trip, we’d born witness to all manner of aggressive, impatient,  insane, and disrespectful driving, but Bogotá set a new record; drivers had absolutely no respect for motorcyclists.

We followed the airport highway into the downtown area, and the city – and the crazy traffic – seemed to stretch on forever. We ended up overshooting the turnoff for the north/south freeway we wanted to take, turned around as it started to downpour, took an exit, and ended up losing each other when my Dad made an illegal U-turn on a massive street with 2 lanes of traffic in each direction, seperated by another 2 in each direction in the middle reserved for bus rapid transit. So there I was going the wrong direction on an 8-lane behemoth of a road, cars jockeying for position and honking their horns, giant puddles and rivers forming across the road, and each block I traveled down looking for a turnaround put another block between me and where I presumed my Dad had stopped. I tried a few sidestreets in an attempt to get back on the main road going the opposite direction, only to meet more major roads with no turnarounds, numerous one-way streets, and dead ends. It took me 20 minutes to get back to where we’d lost each other, and by then, I was totally soaked and frustrated. I found a place where a ton of motorcycles were parked with their riders huddling under a skyscraper to keep out of the rain, and talked to my Dad on the radio. A good 20 minutes later, he’d found me, and we were able to get back on our way.

Doing our best to avoid crazy drivers in crazier traffic on the soaked and lumpy streets, we eventually ended up on a street through a university district, and happened upon a hotel – called ABC and ran by an incredibly weezily Colombian – which we took immediately. We decided to try for dinner at the restaurant in the hotel, and again got the run around. They had no menu, and when I asked how much the chicken was, the woman ran off to bring us two orders of chicken, which neither of us had actually ordered. The chicken was alright, and since the woman at the restaurant had disappeared, we went to the front desk to settle up, and were pleasantly surprised that the food wasn’t highly overpriced… but later when we tried to leave the hotel, the weezly owner flagged us around and insisted he hadn’t known that we’d ordered the “special” (mind you, we hadn’t actually ordered anything!) and insisted we pay more. Blah.

Ruins across the street from our hotel in Bogotá

From our ride to our hotel, we knew we were surrounded by bars and discoteques packed with college kids from a nearby university. There was even a bar directly outside of our hotel enterance, and given everyone in Bogotá seemed to smoke, and smoking was banned from public establishments, the stairs of our hotel were crammed with students in their club finest smoking American cigarettes and trying to look as aloof as possible. So we decided to try the bar right next door, which proved more difficult than we thought.

Before the bouncers would let us in, they patted us down, and asked for our Cellulars. Assuming we were talking about phones, something we don’t have, I tried to explain that to them, but they insisted. After a couple minutes of confusion, I finally figured out they were asking for our ID, which they inexplicably call a “celular,” and we managed to get in. It was blaringly loud, and just about everyone was drinking a local beer called Aguila, so when a guy walking around serving drinks to tables asked what we wanted, I asked for two of them. Loosely translated from memory and Spanish:

“We’re out of Aguila”

I stared blankly back at him for a minute as I surveyed the crammed bar, tables covered in empty Aguila bottles, people standing around drinking fresh ones, condensation still beading on the bottles, before responding “Umm, ok. What beer do you have?”

“Budweiser.”

“Really?? Budweiser? We hate Budweiser, what else do you have.”

“Just Budweiser”

By that point, I started to get the picture. The unflinching stares and weird looks weren’t enough, they even refused to serve us the local brew, so we cleared out and tried a different bar down the street.

Now pros at being ID-ed and searched, we got in and were again assaulted by music, and found the bar completely crowded. There were tons of tables, all of which were crammed with young people, and a small open area that served as a walkway for servers to the bar when unpopular music played, and an instant dance floor when something popular came on. We managed to squeeze into uncomfortable seats up at the bar and actually get served a beer, from Colombia no less! From our vantage at the bar, we could properly assess the number of strange looks we got, with some of the males really scoweling at us. At least some of the women looked and smiled.

We didn’t stick around too long, and after bar number two, my Dad decided to call it quits. Being around 10pm, I wasn’t giving up so easily. I hit the streets by myself and spent a good hour walking around the neighborhood, getting a feel for the place. Being a Friday night, the place was absolutely packed with people, eating bad street food, smoking Marlboro’s like it was going out of style, and lining up to enter packed bars and clubs. Every one seemed filled to capacity, and I was mostly ignored on the streets. Being a huge attention whore and all though, I decided to pick a bar and see if I could change that.

Mostly, I didn’t, but I had a pretty decent time nonetheless. I ended up at a club that served their beer in giant plastic mugs and played the strangest collection of mostly American music I’d heard in awhile. I still can’t remember the last time I’d heard Love Shack before that night, and certainly not the last time I’d seen people so excited to dance to it! Anyhow, the place was two levels, the second level being mostly a balcony overlooking the main dance floor below. I found a nice spot along the balcony and wallflowered with my megabeer, content to be mostly ignored, as it beat the weird looks we’d gotten earlier. One girl seemingly tried to flirt with me, but I’m definitely no Don Juan in Spanish, which is alright.

The next day we set out to escape Bogotá. I’d gotten directions from Google on how to get back onto the main highway South, and luckily, it wasn’t pouring rain. On the first block away from our hotel, a man in typical homeless garb was walking along by the corner, swung around and spotted us, and proceeded to freak out! He stood bolt upright, stared directly at me, reached into a plastic bag he was carrying, and pulled out an empty plastic 2-liter bottle. He proceeded to spike it like a football, then produced another and did the same thing. He was shouting unintelligably and looking very… excited. As we proceeded around the corner, he actually started walking towards me, into the street, but didn’t make any directly violent moves, at least not before we’d gotten away. After that, even the simple route I had planned was still hard as hell to realize, and we ended up making several ridiculous turns, the most representative being when a seemingly major road ended right before an intersection with a huge curb mere feet from the road it would have met. We managed to use a driveway to get onto the sidewalk and get through anyways, and eventually found our way onto the motorcyclist’s deathtrap that passes for a freeway.

Bogotá seemed to go on forever. The scenery was at least partly worth the effort, with the city nestled between enormous lush mountains, and full of everything from modern steel and glass skyskrapers to barrios that extend for miles. Besides dodging the usual suspects, the “freeway” threw ox-drawn carts, tons of pedestrians, garbage, potholes, and inexplicable lane closures at us at random intervals, all through the clouds and clouds of black toxic diesel exhaust. When we finally made it out of the city, we stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts, sighed a deep breath and embraced the feeling of luck we had for making out of there alive.

It should have been easy to get out of Popayan, since our hotel was right on Panamericano Sur, but just south of the hotel, the road was closed for some sort of demonstration, and we had to divert into the maze of town streets, until we found our way back near the center of town, where it was a madhouse of traffic, market stalls, and donkey carts.  Then straight back into nasty Colombian mountain road – narrow and poorly designed with very tight curves and limited sight lines.   Lots of bad road hazards like washouts and potholes.  Very little traffic, thank goodness, but still very slow going.

At one point, we pull up behind a line of stalled trucks and cars.  When we go around to the from of the line, as all motorcycles are expected to do, we find that all traffic in both directions has been stopped for 2-1/2 hours because a full tanker truck had slid off the road, into the mountainside, and a very poor washout patch.  The police had three wrecker trucks hooked to this tanker, trying to right it back onto it’s wheels, but they were getting nowhere fast.  A huge crowd had gathered to watch, and even help, but as we watched for about 45 minutes, no progress was being made that we could see.  We did get to spend the time talking with many of the other stranded motorists, and that was very pleasant.  they gave us a very different impression of what Colombians are like from what we had experienced elsewhere so far.

The men working on the mess finally managed to get the biggest of the three wreckers also stuck in the ditch behind the overturned tanker, and soon after that they decided to let the backed up traffic through, one direction at a time.  We took off with a huge batch of motos at the front of the line headed south, and continued through more narrow curvy road.

When we reached a town, we stopped for lunch at a little roadside luncheria, and had an absolutely fantastic fried fish meal cooked by a little old lady.  The scenery of the Colombian mountains is beyond descriptions.  There are no words that will do it justice.

Then more wild curves and mountain road – for hours!  More cloud-forest heights.  Impossible to make any time.  We climb above 12,000 ft. again, get very wet and cold, arrive just before dark in Pasto.  Here our experience is completely different fron the other Colombian towns.  Everyone we talk to is nice, friendly, helpful.  We find a decent, cheap hotel (sans toilet seat), and excellent coffee.  The entire vibe is different here;  we feel welcome and comfortable.  We explore the town, and except for finding a few too many ‘putas’,  we have a very pleasant experience.  People are curious and friendly, and it is fun to meet them and talk.  Without doubt Pasto was my best Colombian experience.

I got up early, and went across the street for coffee.  Coffee came pre-sweetened, as it does here sometimes.  Where we had stopped was just outside the city proper, in a truck-stop like area that had all truck service and trucker related businesses, restaurants and hotels.  The area had a very unsavory air to it, and everyone seemed to have a rather bad attitude towards gringos. There were a collection of strange persons hanging around, and several ‘characters’ approached asking for money.  One strange little man in particular had followed us around the night before, and would not take no for an answer.  He saw me come out in the morning and latched onto me again.  He pestered me endlessly until the restaurant owner finally chased him off for me so I could eat in peace.

After coffee I wandered around a bit to see if I could locate a place for us to get out the tools and work on Levi’s brakes.  I walked passed an entrance sculpture that we had missed coming in in the dark, and was amazed at what the town had chosen to display at the entrance to their town:  a painting of a nude woman being ripped apart with hooks.  (see Levi’s post for the image)

When Levi was up, we had breakfast and moved the bikes to a nearby gas station that had a large area for us to work in.  As we were leaving the mud-hole we had been told was hotel parking, a guy came and demanded $4.00 for parking fee.  We knew it was bull, but we didn’t have much choice but to pay him.  He laughed at us as he walked away.  No one seemed to mind that we set up to work at the gas station, and we completed the brake job in short order.  I also made some adjustments to the broken windscreen, that helped stabilize it and keep it from flopping around too much.

Finally, we loaded out of the hotel, and headed down Panamerican Sur towards Cali.  Good road, then even better road;  passed lots of military checkpoints, and cars were stopped in front or behind us, but they never even looked funny at us.  Lots of toll booths, but always with a bypass ‘lane’ (barely wide enough for our monster machines) for motos.  We passed an area with very fancy estates, many with wall, gates and private armed guards.  No doubt the country homes of Cali wealthy.

We lost our way for a while in Palmira, when we tried to bypass Cali and head straight south.  For much of the day we road on excellent highway through a very wide valley that was at high altitude. At one point we were over 12,000 ft. in altitude. My bike rolled over 10,000 miles since leaving Michigan.

 Popayan is a large city, but wierd and strange in what it has and doesn’t have.  We explored the town a bit on foot, but everywhere we went we were either overcharged, rudely ignored, or asked for money outright.  Very uncomfortable.  We ate pizza and beer for dinner, then stayed in the hotel.

A day of close calls…

We were awakened by a call from the front desk, asking us to move our bikes so another guest could get their car out of the garage.    By the time I got down to the garage in the hotel basement, the car in question had already maneuvered itself out.  We found a tiny hole-in-the-wall place to try breakfast, and it was very strange indeed.  Food here is cheap, but we have not had anything very good yet.

As we started to leave town, we passed a corner where a homeless-looking madman started throwing empty bottles onto the ground, and them made a charge into the street, as if to grab Levi off his bike.  He was screaming some unintelligible stuff, and acting very crazy.  We just managed to escape his clutches.  Had a very hard time finding the autopista sur;  the street layout in Bogota is simple incomprehensible.  We wandered up and down one-way and dead-end streets, often taking sidewalk shortcuts,  jumping curbs,  and going the wrong way on one-way streets out of frustration and desperation.  Finally we go onto the main road, and fought the crazy traffic for miles south until we left the city congestion behind.  Very poor signage, thoughtless and reckless drivers, road construction, massive traffic, horse-drawn carts on the highways, bad roads, lots of close calls;  we had it all.

At one point when the traffic slowed to a crawl, two young men ran over behind a truck next to us, jumped up onto the rear of it, and managed to wiggle their way under the tarp covering and into the truck cargo area.  They were clearly thieves looking to steal what they could from the truck’s cargo.

Stopped at at gas station when we were not sure we were on the correct road, and I discovered that one of my footpeg mounts was loose.  More bolt tightening!  Finally out into the country, we are surrounded by some beautiful scenery – Columbia is a country of mountains, and they are spectacular.  Words just fail to do justice to the magnificence to the scenery.

I have a very close call when some young motorcyclist comes shooting out of a gas station from the right, behind Levi and in front of me.  We were traveling at 60 mph. He entered the road without even looking to see if anything was coming.    I managed to swerve and miss a direct broadside collision, but only by inches!

One nice thing that Columbia does for its motorcyclists, is excuse them from all road tolls.  There are many toll stops, but every one has a special bypass lane for ‘motos’, and they get a free pass!  We enjoyed that.  Columbia has many military checkpoints and traffic stops, as well.  They selectively pull over vehicles and check them, sometimes searching them.  We were not stopped once.

Much of the day was spent negotiating terrible mountain roads.  Narrow and steep, often with little or no shoulder.  At one point, Levi was within inches of being knocked over when a truck came WAY over the center-line (there was no centerline, really) on a curve and narrowly missed his rear pannier with his front bumper.  We expected to reach Armenia, a fair sized town, well  before dark,  but about 20 miles short of the town, when were in really bad mountains, Levi discovered that his rear brakes had failed completely!  So we had to do the last stretch going really slow, and then it started to rain, and then it got dark, and then we found ourselves, again, in fog and cloud forest, where visibility dropped to almost zero.  We crawled our way down the last of the mountains, and stopped at the first hotel sign we saw,  grateful to have survived this day.  We parked our bikes for the night in a mud-hole behind the hotel, chained them together, and hoped for the best.  We went across the street for a quick dinner, and got overcharged for mediocre food, and hassled by strangers, some well dressed,  asking us for money.