(33) Cartagena to Salento

Well, as I posted on Facebook the other day our plans have changed and we have decided to cut the trip short. It was a hard decision but I think in the end the right one. However, since my Facebook post things have changed yet again. I’ll go through all our final trip plans at the end of this post. Right now I’ll catch up on our goings on since Cartagena.

We spent a day just enjoying Cartagena. It’s a really nice city, but we had a deadline to meet for getting to Bogota and retrieving our bikes. Our original plan was to just take a bus from Cartagena to Bogota, but after finding out that it is a 19 hour ride we quickly changed our minds and decided to fly! 45 minutes after boarding the plane we touched down in Bogota. When we left Cartagena it was in the low 90s and very humid. Due to being at 6,800 feet in elevation Bogota was a very pleasant 70 when we landed. We chose a hotel right near the airport here since that is where the bikes would need to be picked up once we got them out of customs.

As it turned out our hotel was only about a quarter of a mile down the road from the customs office. We met a representative from Cargo Riders, our shipping company from Panama to Colombia, at a Dunkin Donuts (had to laugh that they had them here) in front of customs at 8:30am the next morning to start the odyssey of getting our bikes through customs and officially into Colombia. The day started with us just waiting in the customs office lobby for almost 3 hours. Things went mostly smooth once our turn finally came around. Unfortunately right at the end the customs guy started to interrogate Neil, in Spanish, as to why our vehicle titles didn’t contain the same information for the two bikes. I have an Arizona title and Neil has an Alaska title. One title refers to the bike as a Kawasaki KL and the other as a Kawasaki KLR650. He could not understand why two titles would refer to the same kind of bike differently. Neil was trying to explain that each state in the US does things their own way and the customs agent just couldn’t wrap his head around that. In the end he finally relented, signed off and sent us on our way to go collect the bikes though.

As it turns out the bikes came into Colombia via DHL, so they were our next stop. More waiting and paperwork ensued there. On the plus side, by 1:00pm we were standing outside the DLH loading bay and caught our first sight of the bikes in Colombia. We watched as the bikes were forklifted down to ground level from the loading bay and unwrapped. Finally at 1:30 pm we were able to jump on the bikes and set off to follow the shipping agent to his office to pay for the shipping. Of course nothing can go smoothly it seems. On the way out of the controlled access area the guard at the gate dropped the arm on the gate too early hand hit me in the head with it. Luckily I had the helmet on and the gate arm was only lightweight plastic so it didn’t hurt me or knock me off the bike, but it did leave a nice scuff mark in the middle of my visor. I was really bummed that I’d have to be looking through that damned scuff mark for the rest of the trip. However, later that night back in my hotel room I had an idea and tried to buff the scuff mark out with toothpaste. It worked like a charm! You can’t even see the scratch anymore. The rest of the process went off without a hitch. We went to the shipping office, paid our bill ($1,200 per bike plus $350 per bike for storage while we were on the boat) and rode back to our hotel.

Our original plan was to spend the afternoon we picked up the bikes to tour around in downtown Bogota. However, after the amount of time it took to retrieve them there was not enough time left to go downtown. So we decided to extend our stay by a day and go into town the next day. Our day downtown was nice. We found a great restaurant for lunch, Paxson did some shopping and I managed to find a motorcycle shop to buy some chain lube for the bikes. What with me not speaking Spanish and the woman behind the counter at the motorcycle shop not speaking English we needed Google Translate to come to the rescue. I was finally able to communicate what I needed and she was able to understand. Unfortunately, that store didn’t have any chain lube. I was trying to use Google Translate to ask which store did have it. She was finally able to communicate to me that she had already sent one of her co-workers over to the other store to get the chain lube and it would be brought to me in a few minutes. Sure enough about 5 minutes later another woman came back with a can of chain lube :) I was able to pay and be on my way. Mission accomplished!

The remainder of the afternoon was spent taking a tram up one of the mountains on the edge of the city to a church with a fantastic view of all of Bogota below. As luck would have it the afternoon thunder storm clouds rolled in just as we got on the tram up. So all of my pictures are through the clouds and it’s hard to get a feel for how big Bogota is. Still, it was a nice ride and view. I’m glad we did it. After all that walking for the day it was decided that a stop at an ice cream store was in order. So we walked back into the center of town and had a nice ice cream cone each before flagging a taxi down for the ride back to the hotel. By this time though, it was dark and we managed to catch Bogota rush hour. What took us about 20 minutes to get into the city took over an hour to get back to our hotel. We didn’t even actually get all the way to our hotel. There is a pedestrian overpass near hour hotel. Rather than have the taxi driver go all the way to the airport make a U turn and come back to our hotel we were able to get him to stop on the other side of the road and we took the overpass and walked the last bit to our hotel. Probably saved ourselves 15 minutes by doing that.

The next morning it was off toward our next destination of Guatape. That was too far for a single day’s ride though so we chose to have an intermediate night’s stop in the town of La Dorada. It was slow going getting out of metro Bogota, but after that we had a nice day of mountain riding to the town of Honda then some fast roads up the river valley to La Dorada. I say it was a nice day’s ride. Paxson my disagree. She is not so enamored with riding on the back of Neil’s bike on narrow, twisty mountain roads. Especially when going down hill. That was the bulk of this day. She was very happy to be done with the day. Unfortunately, mountain roads are about all we are doing for the remainder of our time in Colombia.

Our night in La Dorada was uneventful. In the morning I realized that I had not done an inspection of the bikes since the work was completed on them in Panama and the shipping. I went down early the next morning to give the bikes a once over. Mine looked fine, but when I started looking at Neil’s I saw that there was absolutely no coolant in the overflow tank. Neil said it didn’t run hot the day before, but there was no way we were going any farther without topping off the coolant. So Neil and I set off into town first thing to find motorcycle coolant. Thankfully, I think there are more motorcycles in La Dorada than people. There was a whole section of town devoted to motorcycle shops. Finding coolant turned out to be easy. What wasn’t easy was finding a funnel to help to get it in the reservoir without making a mess. After checking about 4 stores with no luck we gave up and just figured we would have to pour it in slowly.

Getting the coolant in the reservoir turned out to be much more of a process than either of us expected though. I had asked the folks in Panama who did the service on the bikes to flush and replace the coolant. I know they did something, because the cap on the reservoir was on so tight and the space so confined that neither Neil nor I could get enough grip on the cap to remove it. So nothing to be done about it but we had to start to remove the shroud around the tank so we could reach the cap better. Even after pulling the plastic shroud from in front of the reservoir we still couldn’t twist the cap off. Thankfully, I had one pair of pliers in our tool kit that opened far enough to be able to grab the cap and we were finally able to get it off, pour in the coolant and put everything back together without further issues. In the end all it cost us was about $4.00 for the coolant and an hour and a half of time before we were finally on our way to Guatpae.

Guatape is a town on a like in the mountains East of Medellin. It’s a massive man made lake in gorgeous countryside. The thing that brought us there was “The Rock” or more formally El Piñol Rock. There are several pictures of it in the gallery. It’s a big monolith with a set of stairs that go up the side to an observation deck at the top. Neil, Paxson and I took part of a day to go climb it and take pictures. The view from the top are amazing. The ride in was nice as well. This was where we spent Christmas and climbed the rock on Christmas day. Nothing in town appeared to be closed for Christmas. It just seemed to be a normal day as far as things being open.

On Boxing Day (the day after Christmas) we hit the road again heading for the town of La Pintada. This is another town that was just chosen as a place to stop on the way somewhere else. The section from Guatape to Medellin looked pretty straight forward on the GPS as I mapped it out. What the mapping software didn’t know is that the 8.2km (5+ mile) tunnel on this road is not open to motorcycles. As we rode up to the tunnel we were waved down by police and told we had to turn around. Neil and I checked Google Maps on our phones and chose a route that would merge back up with the planned route on the other side of Medellin.

The route we chose was easily the steepest descent on pavement we have made during the whole trip. It was also fairly heavily trafficed which required us to be using the brakes much more than we normally do. This turned out to be a major issue for me and a minor issue for Neil. About three quarters of the way down to Medellin my front brakes overheated and I totally lost the use of them. My only way of stopping was by engine braking (shifting to 1st gear and letting the engine compression slow me down) and the rear brake. After having lost the rear brake in another set of downhills in Mexico I knew that it would not last long if I kept going and then I would be in serious trouble. About this time Neil told me via the helmet intercom that he had lost his rear brake as well. Thankfully we were able to find a side street and get off the road before our brakes totally failed.

When brake fluid gets too hot it looses it’s hydraulic properties and no longer will force brakes to work. This is what happened to us. We were able to set on the side of the road for about a half an hour and let everything cool down and both our brakes returned to near normal. We decided to get down the last of the hill into Medellin and stop for lunch to let them fully cool. That plan worked with no further issues. By the time we came out from lunch we both had full normal braking ability. Other than a huge scare, especially for me since 80% of your braking ability on a motorcycle comes from the front brake, it turned out OK and neither of us have had issues since.

After Medellin the road was still very windy but comparatively flat so neither of us were worried about brakes overheating anymore. This stretch of road did have quite a few stretches of road construction going on though. Having fully adopted the motorcycling rules for Colombia, those rules being that there are no rules pertaining to motorcycles, we followed all the other bikes on the road and just bypassed any flagmen holding up car and truck traffic on the one lane sections. Of course the workings of a “flagman” here is not the same as in the states. In every case there was a stop/go sign stuck in the ground somewhere at the front of the line of cars for the construction zone. The flagman would be sitting under an awning some ways away. Periodically he would come out and turn the sing to the other side.

At the first one of these Neil and I waited in line. After watching half a dozen bikes just whiz by without slowing down we decided why not and headed off. When we met oncoming traffic we would just get over to the side and let them by and continue on through the rest of the construction zone. I would say we did that at least a half a dozen times on this leg. One of these sections was a bit worse than the rest though. A landslide had completely closed the highway a few days before near the town of Santa Barbara. We saw signs about the road being closed but went anyway because there was also a somewhat cryptic message (on a road sign) about a detour. So we figured we could just take the detour around.

When we got to the “detour” we found it to be a dirt path about 4 feet wide on the edge of a cliff with only a netting fence to keep you from going over the edge. But as noted before most rules don’t seem to apply to motorcycles here. and we could see both foot traffic and other motorcycles using the path around the construction. It was definitely closed to cars and trucks. So off we went bouncing along the path trying to dodge the oncoming motorcycles and not hit any of the pedestrians as well as not go over the cliff. In the end we both made it with no issues and Paxson got a quick video of part of it that I have uploaded to the video section of the website.

The only other thing of note on this day was running into our third Pringles stand. Three different times out in the middle of nowhere, meaning we were at least a few miles from the nearest town, we would start to see signs for Pringles potato chips along the road. Kind of like the old Burma Shave signs except just adverts with no story on them. After seeing 3 or 4 signs you would see a guy on the side of the road with stacks and stacks of Pringles selling them on the side of the road. None of these guys appeared to be selling anything else, just Pringles. We aren’t sure if there is a national obsession with Pringles here or what, but each time we had a good chuckle together over the helmet intercoms.

That brings us to were we are now in the town of Salento. Tonight will be our third night in town. It’s a really nice and bright little town in the middle of Colombia’s Coffee Triangle. That is the area around the cities of Manzanales, Pereria and Armenia. It is also the nearest town to Corcora Park which is home to the world’s tallest palm trees. Yesterday we spent the morning touring a coffee farm and the afternoon hiking in Corcora. We chose not to try and ride the motorcycles to either of these. Salento isn’t big enough to need taxies in town but so many people want to go to the coffee farms and Corcora that there is a whole fleet of converted Willy’s Jeeps that function as taxies back and forth to those two locations. For those who don’t know Willy’s Jeeps are modeled after the Jeeps used in World War II. They have been retrofitted with two rows of seats facing each other in the back and man do they pack the people in them! On the way back from the coffee farm our jeep had the driver and two passengers in the front, 9 people in the two seats facing each other and another 4 people standing on the rear bumper holding on to the roll cage. 16 people in all in a little jeep!

Neil and I both were on the bumper on the way out but I was inside on the way back from the coffee farm. All three of us were on the inside on our way to Corcora, but for the 15km ride back to town Neil and I with one other guy wound up on the bumper again. OK, if I’m honest Neil and I liked riding on the bumper! Well, at least until it started pouring down rain about half way back to town LOL. We tried to kind of sit on the tailgate and hide under the roll bar tarp but gave up after a while and just stood back up and got wet. Great fun. The park was very interesting as well. The info their said that the palm trees can reach a height of up to 60 meters (give or take 130 feet). It was a cloudy and foggy day which made for some interesting pictures of them in the gallery.

That brings us to the end of this next to last installment of the trip updates. We chose to stay here an extra day so we could figure out how we are going to get back home. Our original thought was that we would go to Quito, Ecuador and ship the bikes back home from there since Paxson already had a ticket home from Quito. Well, this morning I got the shipping quote from Quito and it came in at $5,500 per bike plus an unknown fee to crate the bikes. The estimate I got from the folks in Bogota to ship home was $3,500. I am waiting for final pricing from them but it’s going to be significantly less than from Quito. So rather than riding to Quito, dropping Paxson off and riding all the way back to Bogota we have come up with a new plan.

Since Paxson has a ticket that allows for changes, she is changing to a Bogota flight. We are going to start tomorrow on a two day ride back to Bogota to drop the bikes off at the shippers so they can start crating them. We will then fly out to the Colombian part of the Amazon basin and spend a few days at a lodge in the Amazon basin (lodge to be determined). We will then put Paxson on a plane while Neil and I stay in Bogota for the 6th and 7th to work through customs paperwork with the shipper. Neil and I are scheduled out now to leave Colombia early in the morning on January 8th. Neil is going all the way back to Alaska and I’m flying to Las Vegas and on to Bullhead City. The bikes will fly from Bogota to Miami and then be trucked to Las Vegas. I think I will rent a trailer and put the bikes on a trailer and drive into Las Vegas to pick them up and trailer them back to Bullhead City whenever they arrive.

So the trip is almost at an end. I’ll make one final post covering our ride back to Bogota and the time in the Amazon when I am home. It has been a fantastic experience and neither of is are too disappointed we didn’t manage to do the trip we had planned. We have had an unbelievable adventure and will just have to see if we can continue it again at a later date.