Project VELAIA

Watch my Colombia Slideshow with all pics till Popayan on flickr

Because we had a few more things to do this morning, including the final lines of an article for the website, the sorting and downloading of the pictures to the iBook (over USB 1.1!) and because we hadn’t seen anything of the city center yet, including some of the most beautifully decorated churches of Colombia, we decided to use the room all the time till 2 pm.
Additionally there was the breakfast buffet and we used all the endurance from cycling to gulp down almost everything they had on the buffet and to keep the 4 people in the kitchen employed (there were only 2 other guests in the restaurant that morning).
An interesting feature of the elevator in the Hunza Hotel was, that one could push a small button and it was locked! So for about 20 minutes one of the two elevators was ours as there were not a lot of guests and the staff didn’t get the old needle printer going to print us our receipt - Elmar fixed the printer within 2 or 3 minutes! We put all our Ortlieb bags inside so there was just enough space for two more people, our private elevator - almost like in the Borat movie when Borat enters the elevator and tells the hotel employee that he won’t take a smaller room

If time can pass slowly, then the rest of the day on the bike it definitely did so! Dark clouds, a lot of up and down with nothing special, just the usual green and brown fields, and the heavy traffic made time pass at snail speed today. Two or three times we had to flee from rain and we didn’t really get into cycling today. After every stop the legs were heavy again and just as we got going the next “rain interruption” came over us.
On top of that we got a brown-slippery two kilometers stretch at the end of today’s ride. I escaped from that with brown dots all over my face and clothes and the usually green panniers also got a brown touch in this 3 minute downhill beside the roadwork.
Lucky us that we got accepted in a small posada that evening - but on the other hand the bed turned out to be way too soft and when we got up early the next morning I felt even worse than the evening before! That’s the time when you need a one or two hours lasting massage, like my colleagues at the Tour de France get it every evening - I guess I should slightly adjust my profession And yet another day along the packed 55 road towards Bogota. Not a pleasure to ride here at all and the high peaks of the Andes I had imagined, the snow covered ones and the dry brown altiplanos (high plateaus), the large almost empty areas, where are they? Instead we get a lot of green, wet and populated places with traffic and bad weather … after yet another day of that mess I was really happy when we turned left in Sesquile to take a less frequented alternative route into Bogota.

This road first brought us through a tiny village where we could stock up for dinner and then lead to a lake, the Guatavita Laguna. This man made lake is about 10 km long and we found a nice spot after about 2 km, just 15 m beside the road behind trees and bushes and right above the lake.

Now Elmar went for a photo shooting session down to beach - and got some quite interesting results with real educative value (see above) - while I pitched the tent and prepared everything for dinner, a three course meal starting with a nice champignon creme soup followed by a pasta course with tomato sauce and a dessert of bollitas, strongly spiced and golf ball sized round globes.

Then came the final day to Bogota and as usual the last stage looks a lot easier than it actually turns out to be. I knew that cities are a serious stress factor if you’re on a heavy loaded bike, especially if there’s a lot of traffic and if you have to take a lot of care for your luggage. With light bikes you can move a lot easier through traffic and the crowds on the bike lane, you can cycle up and down the pedestrian bridges and don’t have to lift the bike up and down the sidewalks. But to make things worse we only arrived in the city at 3 pm. First we had to cycle along the lake, cross a small mountain range into another valley and finally climb up another 300 or 400 height meters to reach the north eastern outskirts of Bogota.

A normal sight in Bogota, and in fact also in minor towns or villages in Colombia, are camouflaged soldiers walking through the streets or protecting special places. They often carry a machine gun in their hands. And I guess they’re not there for no reason!

Luckily we didn’t have to cycle to the southern part of town, the part where the poor often live in slums. Instead we cycled to the home of CouchSurfer Mauricio close to the shopping center Grand Estacion and the central university. On the way we got to see a lot of scary things, the scariest being a rasta cyclist with long hair doing a wheely non-stop besides us on the narrow cycling path, then standing up on the handlebars of his bicycle, surfing the bike through the crowded streets of Bogota! Totally crazy but extremely entertaining for us

After crossing a railway line we had circumnavigated the place from three sides before we finally found the right address and Stefan, also CouchSurfer and good friend of Mauricio, received us at the entrance and greeted us with a “Na, wie geht’s?”. He told us that he’s come from Vienna for half a year to Bogota to improve his Spanish and study and teach German at the nearby university.

Together with Mauricio and Stefan we had a really pleasant time in Bogota. Stefan often prepared delicious meals in the evenings and without him only half the entries on our TODO list would have been finished at the end of our stay in the capital. He knew how to get around town and his Spanish skills helped a lot!

We didn’t only go for a visit to the old city center, to the place where Bogota was founded, but also went outdoor clothes shopping to the northern parts of town and partying till midnight in the city center.

And Mauricio didn’t only prepare magical fruit juices (jugos naturales) but also gave some lessons in Salsa dancing!

On sundays more than 100 km of Bogota’s roads are closed for motorized traffic and pedestrians, skaters and cyclists take over the street. There are small shops where you can buy food and drinks, there are big public dancing lessons on public places and ramps for stunt skaters are put into place to make it attractive for young and old to go out. Together with my father I set out to enjoy big part of my birthday on the road with thousands of other cyclists - it couldn’t have been any better, just the right timing! A wonderful big birthday party for a cycling nut like me

Related posts

• Day 453-458 (2008-07-20 to 25): First kilometers in Colombia, Cucuta to Malaga (1)
• Cycling alongside Lago Titicaca (4)
• Tag 402 bis 428 (30.05 - 25.06.2008): Von Cedar City nach San Diego … lange her (5)
• Tag 396 bis 401 (24. - 29.05.2008): Von West nach Ost durch Nevada, Carson City bis Baker und bis nach Cedar City in Utah (3)
• Tag 391 bis 395 (19. - 23.05.2008): Fahrt durch Californien, West nach Ost, starting in San Francisco (1)