Caption:¨Salento: Coffee plants, platano trees, all in a bamboo frame.¨
The best part of Salento was it gave me a chance to settle in and bond a bit with the fellow backpackers. Going, yet again, over days of spectacular scenery and entertaining encounters and having no one with which to share experiences is getting old. Then, because I am starved for conversation and in a weak attempt to make me feel like others can halfway understand where I have been and what I have seen, I annoyingly tell them biking story after story after story, until I want to put my own hands around my throat to shut me the hell up. Luckily for me some of them are genuinely interested.
Caption: ¨One of the victims of my endless story telling.¨
I am quite capricious. One moment I think biking solo is the only way to meet the locals and have an opportunity to really have amazing experiences and put your self out there, the next moment I want someone to relate this entire experience with and to. It was after Salento I started to really wonder if the biking solo was really worth it. Yes, it has been amazing, but I feel as if I have done my fair share of solo traveling. I have spent more than the average person ¨getting to know myself¨ away from family and friends, and I have looked in each corner, under the mattress, under the dresser and rug of my brain, so to speak, and I am now quite confident there are not going to be many new realizations having more alone time. It will only give me the opportunity to get more comfortable with being alone and become dour.
I remember when I first started traveling and I met people that had been traveling away from family and friends for a long period of time. I distinctly remember the cut off was at 6 years when people started to get a little strange. They were now on their own trip, and not on a trip related to anyone else. I think that our experiences define us. If you are a doctor or a lawyer or a construction worker, you are trained and work in this field for years and eventually there are similar personality traits within these careers. All of these jobs are knitted within the fabric of normal society and they are then bound by similar experiences and responsibilities. A person that has been traveling or living abroad will have a completely different experience and as the years go by they will find it harder to relate to the people they left. Naturally your view of the world changes, and now, after having been ¨on the road¨ for a while I have started to see the gradual changes in myself that I saw so glaringly in others when I first started to travel. On one hand it is nice because I am different, but on the other I feel that I am starting to reach a point where I cannot imagine dating someone that has not extensively traveled or lived in another country or is an exotic foreigner. This cuts down the dating pool of my own Tierra Madre by about 90% of the female population, if not more. So I have opened horizons on one front and, for better or for worse, closed them on another.
Caption: ¨A child walking his little dog through the playground.¨
I am going to give my fickle mind a bit more time to decide. I will bike my ass to
Caption: ¨Another roadside attraction. I had to take a pic of this artistic Oreo combo.¨
I had this whole plan to get to the border before my Colombian VISA runs out in 4 days, and I would have made it since I am in Popayán, only 4 days ride from the border, but I came down with my first cold. It has been a cornucopia of sore throat, fever, body muscle aches, throbbing eyeball headache, and a draining lack of energy. While in that half delirious state of fever sleep your mind goes through all the alluring options of what it is you could possibly have. I ruled out malaria of the testicles and brain infection, instead thinking it is a cold or flu at worse, although my lungs hurt.
Luckily I decided not to try and ¨sweat it out¨ by biking onward from Popayán when I first started to feel a little off. I would have been stuck in a no mans land between here and the border which is known to be still be in guerrilla hands. Instead I am in a safe cozy traveler hostel with two of the nicest hostel owners, The Scots Tony and Kim, to help me with my VISA extension and a daily dose of sympathy. I will stay here a few extra nights, perhaps take a class of Spanish and watch lots and lots of movies.
Caption:¨This guy looks how I feel at the moment. ¨
If I am honest with myself I think I know why I got sick. My bike rides since Salento have been nothing short of super human for me. I am now able to go distances in times I never thought possible when I started my journey in the northern part of
Caption: ¨Not one of my wild steeds, but this guy was following me.¨
Caption: ¨I spend lots of quality time with the owners/chefs of the restaurantes along the way. All sweethearts that make great soup.¨
