The story still starts in Venezuela: We wake up in the morning and go for a walk through San Antonio to get some breakfast. Then we head towards the border and in fact we could have easily passed without paying anything or any formalities it seemed, but I had read in the Lonely Planet guide book and I’ve heard from other travelers that it’s always best to say good bye to the officials and get a stamp into your passport - for Venezuela we had to pay 46 Bolivares departure tax each and then we got the stamp.
Together with cars, trucks, people walking, on their bikes and in wheel chairs we crossed the bridge to Colombia - on the bridge people pulled up goods from the Venezuelan site to smuggle them into Colombia it seemed. There was a lot going on and the heat of the early noon only added to the pretty stressful situation. Behind the bridge on the Columbian site we could have passed into the country again without being stopped but first we turned right to get a print with arrival date and 60 day visa into our passports - a pretty uncomplicated and fast process compared to the time expensive rituals in Central Asia or when you’re coming into the country on an international flight with a lot of security checks and so on.
The traffic was horrendous and we tried to leave the major road as soon as possible. Too soon, as it later turned out: From Villa de Rosario, a smaller town near Cucuta, we had to cycle back to the autopista after we’ve had lunch there, entertained a school class for 15 minutes and bought a new, working SONY mobile with SIM card for about 30 Euros. Then, two kilometers further we took a right turn, crossed under the autopista and were on our way to Pamplona now, starting to cycle a green valley upwards into the evening sunset.
We moved up the mountain slowly and passed a lot of restaurants … we got hungry - the only problem: all of them were closed! As the night put its dark veil over the countryside we still cycled as we couldn’t find a proper camp spot due to the mountainous terrain and all the trees and bush. And as we just passed a small kiosk, a tienda, beside the road, rain set in. Under the protecting roof of that little shop we had a fruit juice and beer (serveza) and asked the friendly senora, Rosa, whether there was a posada somewhere around. Lucky us: The posada was just 100m away and the woman called them to verify that they had a free room for the two of us. What a first day in the new country!
Together with Rosa we successfully tested our new mobile phone and the new Colombian phone number. The result was that Rosa now had our number in the memory of her mobile phone and started to call us on a daily basis; a totally unexpected but often pretty entertaining and funny call came in either on the road or in the tent or posada in the evening. I then took the phone, answered “Ah, Rosa, mui bien! Un momento … mi padre … ” and handed the phone over to Elmar so he could test the new Spanish words of the day with Rosa.
On the way up to Pamplona we were happy to find a lot fresh fruits in small shops just beside the road. These ranged from naranjas (oranges), different kinds of bananas (platanos, normal bananas and miniature ones), orange fruits that contained small, sweet and acid kernels with a transparent slippery flesh layer around and looked like frog or fish eggs to pineapples and melons. And all totally fresh, right from the trees!
We got company from a road cyclist for the last 2 to 3 hours up the mountain to Pamplona. Even though he would have gone 3 times the speed of the heavy and exhausted touring cyclists he slowed down and asked a lot of questions. He told me about his participation in races all through Latin America, in a 2 weeks lasting Vuelta de Venezuela or de Colombia and answered our questions when we spotted a new fruit or plant beside the road. This way we also found out that a drivers license costs far less than 100 Euro in Colombia and that you learn driving on the road, not at a driving school or even from a teacher!
My since China already a dozen times fixed trousers started to fall apart unrepairably and I from now on always had to wear underpants below the outdoor trousers. There was already an entry on the Bogota TODO list named “new trousers” as Bogota was my last hope to get something acceptable.
In Pamplona we took a room close to the Central Place. But there was no electric light inside, in fact there was no light at all in the city except in one bank. The locals told us at 6pm the electricity would return so we spent some more time on the plaza mayor, watched the locals enjoy the stone age like time without power from the plug.
The shower was an electrical one, so the water went through a shower head where it got almost boiled. But the power of that electronic shower head is far from enough and as a result we had to shower under a very tiny stream of water, barely enough to wash the soap off again.
In the evening we went out looking for a vegetarian meal but got rejected by several restaurants until we decided to enter a restaurant even though they’d told us they wouldn’t serve vegetarian meals … and we got our ensalada (salad), papas frances (chips) and juice - quite tricky to survive as vegetarian on the Latin American continent so far!
We continued on towards Malaga. That meant a short climb of 300 altimeters followed by a long descend into a valley and immediately up again. Men were killing the trees beside the road with chainsaws and processed them immediately at the spot. We observed that phenomenon all over the mountains: Humans take away the natural landslide protection and the last anchors that hold the precious and in these latitudes often very thin mother top soil in place, a very unsustainable exploitation of the resources mother nature has given to us!
The smaller, secondary or tertiary roads are often continuous building sites: some parts are braking because of a landslide below the road, others are damaged by heavy rocks or landslides coming down from above or are washed away in a flash flood. That’s why we often get to see a lot of workers in their orange clothes along the road, similar to the Chinese workers along the desert roads who incessantly have to free the road surfaces from sand.
On the football and basketball field of a tiny little school we pitched the green tent just before dusk and I asked a farmer from a close house for some petrol to power our stove and cook the standard meal: noodles with tomato sauce and a few vegetables.
A group of 4 young school children arrived at school even before the teachers the following morning. But they didn’t talk a lot, just answering the our questions for their names and age with the minimum but constantly staring at us and especially at the recumbent bicycle and Elmar when he rode away a few minutes later.
The next 3 kilometers were a wet brown mess! We cycled slowly to keep the mud ending up on our bikes and gear as low as possible - that’s not a foul excuse for the low speed, believe me! Then the road got asphalt for maybe two kilometers, the last time till the end of the day: Because now we climbed further up towards the 4000 m pass, following a rough and often stony dirt road. We passed a wonderful, nature made arena surrounded by hundreds of meters high walls from stone.
We came into a mining area just 100 altimeters from the peak of the road and took some pictures of immense rotten concrete structures. Now the clouds almost hit our heads as they crawled over the mountain range and I had to shoot the panoramas very fast as the gray giants were flying past us at an immense speed!
A long downhill, interrupted only by a short 30 minute emergency rain break, brought us down to a small mountain village, Cerrito; maybe 20km from Malaga. We immediately got the attraction of the whole village and the people even followed me into the shops to see what I’m buying and to hammer me with questions. And what did I buy you might ask … just the usual: fresh vegetables, pasta and salsa (de tomate = ketchup) for dinner. A few kilometers after town we had dinner just behind a barb wire fence on a few square meters of even ground with short grass.
Cycling towards Malaga the coming day I saw two people sitting beside the road destroying hand sized rocks and making them to small stones the size of a tiny chicken egg. They sat there day after day hammering on the rocks and the mountains of small rocks beside them showed at least a week worth of work! Both the man and the woman still had both eyes even though they didn’t cover their ojos (eyes), amazing!
Passing Malaga airport (with cyclists and cows on the runway!) we arrived in this small town with a magnificent scenery, bought some bread and sweets from a bakery (panaderia) and hung out for a while on the main square.
Daniel, sounds like you’re having a blast. It sounds like you’re already good at Spanish. Have fun!
– Iain