I hit the road on a holiday weekend and was pleasantly surprised to find one of the main roads leading south out of Medellín was closed for foot traffic and bikers. I was able to make it out of the city stress free. Then I hit the hill leaving Medellín.
I am slowly but steadily making my way up the hill with my bike loaded with my usual crap. Weekend warrior bikers are curious and continually asking me questions while passing. I´m struggling to breathe and they NEVER understand what I say the first time I say it due to my accent so I have to say it again, exactly how I said it the first time, and then they get it. Sometimes I am so frustrated I am yelling at them in this very clear monotone voice so they will clearly get what I am saying without me having to repeat. So far I have not ignored anyone and I try to be as respectful as possible to these inquisitive folk.
One of them clung on like a leech and would not let go. He also happened to be one of the top competitive bikers in Colombia. The guy has these frightening watermelon thighs and a very light 11 pound bike that he had to mention and rub in my face. This guy can bike circles around me and I start to get somewhat frustrated huffing and puffing my way up the hill while he is playful pedaling and smiling and thoroughly enjoying the interview he´s giving me. My patience was being tried and I secretly wished death on him or a flat or anything that would get this guy to let me suffer in peace.
My answer was of course answered but only in the form to teach me a lesson. On a slight decline my tire popped and I crashed into a giant puddle of mud and nearly missed a barb wire fence. They guy pedaled ahead, then circled around and joined me. Great. Now I get to have him watch me massacre my tire cause I´m not proficient fixing flats in anywhere under an hour. The guy, being as nice as I was afraid he was, hoped off the bike and helped me out. He taught me tricks that proved to be helpful when fixing flats on my own.
We got the bike moving again and now I was indebted to him, but all the same I was tired and wanted a break. I found a place to eat, and he joined me. I was able to buy him something for his help, to earn back those karma points I had lost while wishing him death when I had sweat burning in my eyes.
He continued to lead me all the way up to the summit. 26km in all the guy rode with me, which as about 2.5 hours at my slow uphill pace. We shook hands and parted ways; yet again learning a lesson on humanity and humility.
Caption: ¨Oh, those lovely hills. Bring them on.¨
The backside of the mountain was another downhill grin-fest. There is nothing like pumping techno music while you take your life in your own hands blazing by semi´s only relying on rubber tires with patches on them and $5 worth of break pads. You feel like a bird on Ecstasy. Nothing can get you down. You can taunt dogs that can´t catch you. It´s wonderful until that next hill. And there is always the next hill and it always arrives too soon. Then time slows down again and you have to pay back the downhill debt you just enjoyed.
I ended up going 75km that day until I found a water amusement park with camping. Ok, sounds great. For $7 you can have access to pools, water slides, camp grounds and about 200 Colombian families on a holiday weekend. The Colombian families were nothing but nice. Taking me in and offering me food. Asking me the usual questions in disbelief, ¨You are traveling solo?¨ and the like.
Caption: ¨One of the Colombian families that could not believe I am riding solo in Colombia. And I could not believe how bad that stuff they were spreading on their bodies smelled.¨
I enjoyed watching the families bonding and playing together in the water park. It even gave me pangs of wanting to start my own family. Interacting with Colombians and seeing how important their families are and the look of concern on their faces that I was alone so far away from my friends and family has made me think more than once.
I basked in the sun and water. I was stared and pointed at but still enjoyed myself even when the youngsters would stop walking and watch with big curious eyes the wet long-haired gringo walk by. It´s a non-stop show wherever I go.
At night the festivities continued with traditionally dressed dancers enjoying themselves while the families watched. I was out of my mind overly excited about all of this. Am I that entertainment starved? After the dancing and a solo guitarist performance that no one wanted to see end, there were games to win prizes, like a free breakfast. Five eager ladies volunteered and came up to play a game not yet revealed. It turns out it´s a singing game where you have to keep singing the right words of the song when the music cuts out. Not only could these unrehearsed ladies do it, they did it with style and grace and well. One of them was even dancing and swinging her hips to the beat while belting out the lyrics to a well known Colombian song I have never heard in my life. It got me wondering if the same would happen where I´m from at home. If so, not like this. There was something wholesome and warm that emanated from them. A giddy grin could not be wiped off my face while sitting Indian style before the show.
Caption: ¨ Who would have thunk it here in a pueblo in the middle of Colombia?¨
Caption: ¨Camping in a water amusement park. Amusing, eh?¨
Caption: ¨Night festivities. Warm blooded creatures.¨
I got up in the dark the following morning to pack up my tent. My only company was a flock of vultures picking through the BBQ remains of the campers from the night before. Those vultures follow me wherever I go while I bike. I curse and yell at them flying overhead when I´m in pain and tired that I´m NOT dead yet.
I biked a very long 97km uphill that day. Joyous scenery that makes your eyes hurt. I ran out of will power to make it the last very steep 9km to the town Chinchiná. I got a call on my cell from my brother at 3pm while eating lunch. As I had been eating a really dirty-shady vagabond was laying about 10 feet from me on the concrete with an empty 2 liter bottle of coke under his head as a pillow and staring at me the entire time with this gaze that was somewhere between puppy dog ´I would like food´ eyes and ´I know you have money and I want to rob you cause I´m strung out on drugs´ eyes. So Randy calls me and the vagabond takes the opportunity to come up and ask me for my knife sitting on my table. ¨Ok,¨ and I reflexively stand up from my chair. He squatts 3 feet from my table and starts to cut the empty bottle in half. I told Randy, my brother, to call me back in 5 because I had to pay the bill and go across the street cause I didn´t want this guy to hear me speaking English. I hang up and the guy is asking me, with knife in hand, if he can finish my coke. ¨Yep, it´s for you, ¨ was all I could say. I never imagined providing the weapon for my attacker.
I went across the street to the gas station and got a room. A very shitty place and it looked like a prison with chicken wire and barb wire surrounding the concrete box structure. Whatever. I was tired, beat and would rather talk on the phone with my brother than bike a 10th hour that day.
That next morning, again leaving at 6am, I made it up 25km of straight up hills while listening to Emilina Torrini. Struggling up these hills becomes painless and tears well up in my eyes as I pass excruciatingly beautiful scenery lit by the rising morning sun. It´s then I decide I want to have sex with Emilina Torrini´s voice.
Caption: ¨She made me cry.¨
I made it to the top of the hill three hours later (yep, about 8km per hour) to Santa Rosa. Here I found a truck and a company to take me another 18 km up a steep dirt road with thermals at the top. $20 for the ride, camp site, access to the thermals and breakfast. I brought food to make a camping soup lunch with lots of bread and fruits.
Caption: ¨Jurrasic Camping.¨
The Termales de San Vicente can only be compared to Jurassic Park. Steep jungle cliffs enclose a pristine wilderness with cascading waterfalls and bubbling hot pools. I marinated my aching knees and sore watermelons in hot waters and a strong sulfur smelling Turkish Bath that made you hallucinate after 15 minutes. I think they call it a Turkish bath because you are bathing in your own sweat. You can see each pore crying on your skin making a perfect bead.
Caption: ¨Abs of Steel in just 8 hours a day.¨
At the end of the day I decided I had to get a massage. It was cheap and I was once again alone. I did have company with two families interviewing me separately for a few hours each while in the thermal pools together. They were curious and sweet and since I was not exerting myself up a hill biking I found it enjoyable instead of wanting to curse them with incurable diseases.
Caption: ¨Damn you, GOD!¨
Camping was cold, but cozy inside my down sleeping bag while I fell asleep to the music of rain dancing on my tent. I woke up to find a few of the seams in my tent are not as waterproof as I would have hoped. Drips were inside the tent and now it leaves me with in a quagmire of what to do with my tent. A new one? Carry more weight with another tarp for the top? Ah, shittles. I´ll worry about it later. It´s winter here and it rains everyday at least two hours a day. There is NO weather forecasting here cause it´s pointless. Look outside. It will change in 45 minutes.
Caption: ¨My breakfast morning view. Total bullshit.¨
The next morning I had a slow start. I couldn´t muster up an appetite to eat all of my free breakfast which I know I need to eat for the day´s bike ride. After breakfast I took another dip in the hot pools to warm up the legs after the cool night. Then I headed down the 18km of downhill after having to walk my bike up 2km of straight uphill gravel. I could not bike up that to save my life. Walking was difficult.
Caption: ¨Dirt road.¨
While on the downhill what do I see creeping slowly but surely around the corner? A most ridiculous sight- a bike loaded with giant colorful bags. Now I know how absurd I look to the locals! Turns out it´s an American lady from Colorado biking from Quito through Colombia with no destination in mind. I think she was just as happy to see me as I was to see her and we covered ourselves greedily in verbal vomit for an hour. We were dizzy and drunk off the encounter, not remembering anything we were saying or what was being said.
It can´t be underestimated the moral boost it gives you to run into a fellow bike traveler that has also lost their mind. And I mean lost their mind traveling solo (here she is a lady, no less) on a bike through South America and deprived of talking to fellow travelers. We talked for an hour and I went on my way. More adventure and rolling hills lay ahead for me this day. A flat was fixed, a long hill was climbed and then a speedy downhill to a camping spot just outside Salento in Zona Cafetera, an authentic colonial pueblo with a heavenly coffee aroma.
Caption: ¨Solo American woman biker that made me feel sane, and Colombian military all in one shot. Just your typical 9am photo.¨
I wanted to see this camp site, but I really wanted to make it to Salento, only 4km up the road. I called on the owner of the place and this frail energetic fellow of 40 something years greets me and takes me inside. Right away he invites me into his house, and I am full of biker sweat stink, and offers me his couch and asks if I want a joint. I said, ¨Well, I´m not sure I want to stay but I want to take a look.¨
¨No worries, man, relax. You can smoke, no obligations,¨ was his genuine reply.
We shared a joint and after my ride it expectantly floored me. He puts on his TV, pops in a DVD and turns the volume to FULL, as all Colombians do, and starts air guitaring this Jethro Tull song.
¨So you play the guitar?¨ I ask him with puffy eyes and a smile.
¨No, flute,¨ and right then a flute solo that can only be rivaled by the scene in Anchorman was on the screen and my new hippy stoner friend was air fluting right along. He took a moment to put down the imaginary air flute and picked up a jar of Milo (like Quick chocolate milk powder mix) and took a giant spoonful and hands it to me. We then passed the joint and Milo mix until we were finished and content. He then drops in my lap a book about tree houses. I thumbed through this book mesmerized. Each tree house was more amazing than the last. He is fascinated by tree houses and I am fascinated by him.
Now I was in the proper state of mind to take the tour of his grounds, and definitely in no state to make it up the 4km road because I was stumbling walking. He takes me on a magical tour of his grounds. Each room is more amazing than the next with themes. One themed tent has animal skins, bones, and teeth from all over the world. Everything has been carefully crafted. It is a work of love and not of garish money. A handmade bamboo coffee table has an elephant foot sitting on top of it; there is a mural on the wall made of bird feathers and lion teeth.
{http://www.geocities.com/campingmonteroca/ This is the site. Take a look at the themed rooms.}
The next separate room a few minutes walk from the first one is called ¨Hippy Hilton¨ and is decked out in rare 70´s albums and art: Beatles memorabilia, waterbed, and murals all done tastefully, with little money and lots of love.
Each room was more amazing than the next. Another US Army tent with decorations from all over South America. Another tent filled with stars that glow in the night so it seems you are sleeping in the Milky Way.
We go to his tree house in construction (remember the book) and there is a ladder leading up to a platform where he has a table of 4 kilos of weed drying that he picked that morning. He hands me a fistful and tells me it´s organic and free of chemicals. Awesome, thanks.
Then he takes me to his labor of love, his own mini museum of artifacts he collected from around South American on his travels. A molar from a mammoth, jaw bone of the oldest indigenous tribe of Colombia, spine of a whale, incandescent meteorites, and the list goes on and on. My head was dizzy was amazement. Then he takes me to his snake collection. Here we play and hold snakes he says are safe, but I start to lose faith in that fact when he pulls one of this favorite and ´sweetest´ snakes out of it´s cage. He holds it by the tail and gingerly passes the tail from one hand to the next while keeping his legs as far back as possible. The snakes head is right at knee level and is striking for his legs and crotch, finally catching his pant legs with a bite and not letting go. It´s then he starts walking to me asking if I want to hold the snake and the snake turns its attention to me and starts striking at me in my biker shorts.
¨NO, get that thing away from me. It´s trying to bite my shit!¨ and the guy just laughs it off and puts it back in the cage. All this in Spanish, too, by the way.
We go back to his house, eat some fruit loops and then he says I can choose any camp site in the place. I start walking with him but I already know this place is amazing but not a place to stay with NO visitors. I tell him that I´m going to head up the hill before it gets dark cause the place in Salento will have people that I would like to talk to since it´s been 4 days of Spanish for me. He says no problem and that he will give me a ride up there! Wow. What a man.
We drive up with the bike in the back of the car with the trunk partly open. When we arrive to town we are nearly green from the carbon monoxide filling the car. He takes me on a tour of town and introduces me to his friends. They a military guy comes up and shakes his hand to say hi and asks him for weed. He hands him a fistful of weed and they part ways with smiles. I´m stoned and he just sold weed to the military. I love this country.
I got to the guesthouse and was back in the cozy traveler cocoon. I got to share a dorm room with the most annoying Israeli girl I have ever met. She is surly. She is the type of person that even when she is right she is wrong because both her and her tone sucks. She was telling off these Aussie travelers because they didn´t want to eat a cheap menu meal. God have mercy on the soul of the man that spends his life with that lady. She will make his life a living hell.
Salento is wonderful with charming colorful buildings with colonial architecture. The coffee is strong, good, and inspires giant shits. The locals play a little practical joke on the tourits by locking all the bathrooms in the cafés and you have to pay 400 pesos (about 25 cents) to use them. It must be due to the havoc created by the strong coffee in the bathrooms. Too much info, I know, but this is just life here on the road.
