White Line Fever in Colombia

Colombia has had a hard time shaking its reputation as the cocaine capital of the world. Because of that reputation and the dangers implied with it (especially to Americans) Colombia was not a very tourist-ed country until recently. It is now rapidly becoming a very tourist-ed and safe country in spite of what the United States state department would have you believe (as is true of most countries and what the state department would have you believe). 

Colombia was really pretty, the roads had wide shoulders and were clean, and there were nice people but I found myself frustrated at the language difficulties as noted in the last blog post. Fortunately some of the people in certain regions of Colombia seemed to be easier to understand. Either way, Colombia was not as fun for me this trip compared to my trip in 2007 for some reason. I enjoyed the hills, scenery and the climate but I felt as if I was just putting my head down and riding with little enjoyment. I felt like I had "white line fever" and was just following that white line on the side of the road between the shoulder and the driving lane. It didn't help that I had a deadline date for when I had to be in Cartagena to catch the sailboat to take me from Colombia to Panama. Whenever I have had a deadline date I tended to ride harder and longer to achieve it and always arrived at my destination well in advance.

While I was in Chile another cyclist had commented to me that I would not be able to wild camp much starting from Bolivia all the way through most of Mexico and he was right. It was too dangerous or too populated (see population density map below) to hide out effectively.

Ever since reaching Ecuador and Colombia I had been just riding from town to town and had not been able to wild camp so I really missed it. I always had the option of asking someone if I could camp on their property but camping just to camp wasn't that fun, there was no adventure in it. I began to feel like I just wanted to be alone at the end of the day and not be on display for the whole family (or town) to watch me set up my tent and answer the same questions, and have the same small talk as the day before so I opted for getting a room in a hotel/hospedaje every night instead.  
While in Colombia I contemplated ending my trip once I reached Panama. I remembered what Paul the first cyclist I met on the road at the beginning of my trip said to me while we sat chatting for a couple of hours. Paul was at the last few days of his 928 day ride (http://www.panamericantour.net/) from Alaska to Argentina and recited to me what a woman he met along the way had told him. She had said that if he was ever considering ending his trip before he reached Ushuaia he should stop and take at least a week break before making any rash decisions. I pondered that advice and decided that I would probably feel differently about ending the trip once I rested up in Panama. I had a friend coming to visit me there and it would be a perfect break. So I rode on with white line fever.

I stayed in Itagui near Medellin and then took the train into Medellin to sightsee.  They have a great public transportation system there.

Part of their public transportation includes aerial gondolas like this and some of the extensions of the gondola system are included in the purchase of the ticket for the train. The hotel desk worker told me how to get the farthest on the same ticket so I covered a lot of the city this way.

High above Medellin at the top of one of the gondola lines it terminates at the start of another gondola system which takes riders over a park area set aside for hiking, biking, and many other outdoor sports. This view is from over that area of land.

The gondola system carried me over some obviously poor neighborhoods.

Downtown where there are many sculptures by the famous Colombian artist Fernando Botero displayed.  There are a couple of statues sitting at the side of this church.

Torrential tropical rain often poured out of the sky all of a sudden. I was pretty lucky not to have gotten caught in any major rains while I was riding but I was always watching the sky for telltale signs.

A view from one of the elevated train stations. It reminded me a little of Bangkok which also has a good elevated train system. 

I don't remember any advertisements like this in Bangkok though... :)

Stopped to fix another flat on the road out of Medellin.

It is pretty common to see people pull right into the river to wash their vehicles in the river.

I saw lots of folks walking around with these palm leaves. I finally figured out that it was Palm Sunday.

After a long climb up the hill shown in this photo I stopped to watch the paragliders for awhile. I didn't take a flight as it was expensive and I had already tried paragliding in a tandem set up in Alaska years ago.

This is a common hot water set up.  The water flows through this head that makes it hot through electricity. The plug isn't usually placed in such a risky place but often there are wires running from the wall to the shower head.
Is a hot shower in these chilly mountains worth the risk of electrocution? Yup!

Another very typical "shower head."

Great improvisations abound in Colombia!

Matt Burney a fellow American cyclist I met on the road on this bike trip taught me how to adjust the spokes to true my wheels.  I became pretty good at it with the tools I had and the tricks Matt taught me but I didn't have the perfect truing stand and wasn't totally confident every time so I had stopped here at a bike shop to have the mechanic check my work and fine tune it. It is such a pain to dismantle my cargo every time I need to work on Tankita so I got pretty good at being able to remove the wheels without unpacking her.

Matt taught me how to use a zip tie affixed to the bike frame to accomplish what this mechanic is doing with this wheel stand.

Fresh milk delivery.

So many people in Colombia and later in Central America ride as a passenger on the bar of a bike. This bike owner got creative about his passenger placement.

I followed the Cauca River for many kilometers in two different valleys in Colombia. These two valleys were the only flat parts of Colombia until I arrived at the coast.

The meeting of the waters from a side stream to the Cauca River.

Willy Wonka's chocolate waterfall?

Along this river valley I saw a lot of these iguanas and they sure made a lot of noise when they scurried away scared from my approach.  They sounded like a much larger animal until I figured it out.

Only the second time I saw water buffalo in the Americas. I rode one once in China! I think they are so cute!

Gigantic cat fish for sale on the road along the river.

Mangos were growing everywhere in such massive quantities on some huge trees. They weren't quite ripe enough until I got a little further north towards the equator.

Luis caught up with me on the road after I saw him fixing a flat and I asked him if he needed anything. He also rode with me for a little while before turning off to his town. He told me about a hotel up ahead that had a swimming pool and wasn't too expensive. It was a great tip as I would not have thought it affordable and would have just passed it on the highway but I stopped to inquire instead and stayed two nights.

This is the hotel room of the place Luis (above) told me about. There was a pool on the grounds too. At $11 per night it was a bit more expensive than I had been spending but it was so worth it! The climate had gotten so hot in this part of Colombia, I really enjoyed the pool.

Pete and Rose owned the hotel with the pool. Pete is from the USA and Rose is Colombian. We shared some animal time together. 

This is a little portable service center in a semi truck! 

I am happy not to have to pedal with a load like this.

Flat swampy area near the coast.

Johnny and Carmenza are Colombian cyclists who passed me going the opposite direction about 10 days prior to meeting them this second time. I specifically remembered them because Carmenza was the only female cyclist I had seen in Colombia and it has a big recreational cycling community! They remembered me because I was the only traveling solo female they had ever seen! They gave me a thumb's up last time as we passed each other but this time they had stopped to talk to me. They were on a 10 day trip all over the top end of Colombia. What is shown in this picture are the only "luggage" they had! 

I came across this tanker accident on my last day of cycling in South America. I was meant to get to Cartagena on the coast later in the day and I started to think I would not get there when I saw this tanker. It must have been a pretty recent accident and no cars were allowed to go through because of the risk of having a started engine drive through the spill. I didn't ask questions but just ran past the truck hoping no one would light a match while I was going through the puddle of fuel! The guys seen near the back of the truck are trying to score some free fuel while it was just pouring out of this tanker. It was a free for all and no one was doing any spill response (yet). 

Some police used bikes for transportation in Cartagena. The following several photos are of Cartagena. It was a very pretty city in the historic city center.

Yummy pizza made in a restaurant owned by two Italian brothers. I was so tired of the same type of food every day so when I got to Cartagena I was so happy to eat pizza and pasta!

Marek and Aldona (the two cyclists I was with when we all were robbed in Peru) were in Cartagena when I was there and I didn't know it until I saw them in the pizza place. It was a great reuniting and purely by chance as we hadn't been in touch lately to know the other's location.

I left Tankita in Cartagena and took a side trip north to Taganga and Tayrona National Park. This is Taganga's beach front.

I met some fun people on the beach at sunset. We all hiked together into Tayrona park in the following days. 
Left to right Hollie (British), Hollywould-me :), Luisa (Brazilian), Dan (British), and Marco (Swiss). It turned out that Dan was booked for the same sailboat as the one I was booked on for the crossing from Colombia to Panama! 

"Caution-Armed guards and vicious dogs" guarded this property on the beach front.

When I left the room to watch the sunset I had hidden my computer under the mattress of the hostal bed. When I returned I had forgotten it was there and promptly went to sleep. The next morning I pulled out my computer and saw the results of my sleeping on it. The screen was cracked inside and had this large black spot and line running through it. I was able to continue to use it but knew it would probably just get worse.  I ordered a new screen on Amazon for $54 and had a friend who visited me in Panama bring it to me. I found a YouTube video on exactly how to replace the screen and I replaced it myself! I was so excited to have salvaged my computer!

Speaking of computers, one of the struggles of using a computer kiosk while traveling in foreign countries is the different keyboards. In Latin America the keyboards feature the upside down question mark ( ¿ )and the squiggly (~tilde) that is needed over some 'n's (ñ). These special characters displace some of "English" characters on the Spanish keyboard. For instance, on most keyboards in Latin America the "@" (ampersand) is shown on the same key as the number two just like in the USA but there is also another character on that key as well. So the stroke to make the ampersand is not Shift + 2 but rather Control + Alt + 2. But on some Latin American keyboards that doesn't work and the magic combination is Alt + 6 + 4 (and not the 6 or 4 at the top of the keyboard, this combo only works while using the numbers on the number pad)! Then there is the AltGr key which is the right side Alt on our keyboards. That key does something else entirely in combination with other keys. The differences in keystrokes doesn't necessarily have to do with the country or region that I was in either. Sometimes one kiosk's keyboard will be different from the one next door! I have been in places where the only way I can get into my email or enter one of my passwords that has special characters in it is to copy and paste the characters from somewhere else on some website I pull up because I cannot figure out which combination of keystrokes will give me the characters I need! I can type around and test them but while entering a password the characters usually don't show as you are typing them, they are turned into dots or asterisks so as not to be viewed by others. It makes it pretty hard to figure out when you can't see what you type so I would sometimes enter the characters first in the login space and then paste them in the password space. It seemed like a lot of work just to login to email! I was so thankful when I would find a place with wifi where I could use my own computer.
Here is a diagram of a Spanish keyboard. Notice that typing without looking at the keyboard could be problematic since some keys are in totally different spots than on an English keyboard. To name a few differences; the semi quote and quote keys, the brackets, the asterisk, and the dashes. Also the shift key on the left side is a half key instead of a full key and there is another key added between that shift key and the "Z" key. That darn shift key always escaped me since it was smaller!

Tayrona National Park on the northern Caribbean coast of Colombia. This park was beautiful and has been maintained very well.

The park had a camping area where some tents could be rented, a hammock area, and even some hotels. I brought my own tent and camped.

This structure housed hammocks (shown below) that guests could rent to spend the night.

Hollie looked into a hammock for the night but found out that with the wind blowing on that rock outcropping that it got pretty cold in the hammocks overnight.

The grasshoppers were huge and usually were found in the bathrooms after dark.  Some people wouldn't use the bathroom with one of these in there so the park rangers were on hand to shoo them out.

There is a small indigenous group of people who live near the park. I only got this photo of these two in typical clothing as they were walking away.

Lucy and I hiked around some of the deserted beaches and rocks (below).

The trail I took into the park was fairly flat and the trail out of the park went over a small mountain through the jungle. These nasty trees were much like the ones found in jungles throughout South America. Falling into one by accident really hurts!

I had hiked in with the group I had met in Taganga but they left a day before me so I hiked out alone but my trusty camera self timer never fails me!

Ten minutes of following this butterflies' movement and this is the best photo I could get.

Back in Cartagena with a waffle cone with 4 scoops of ice cream, a cookie, and some drizzled sauces, it doesn't get much better than this!

Starting to get Tankita broken down to put in the cubby in the back of the sailboat I would cross on to Panama.

The sailboat "Sacanagem" which is apparently Brazilian for some kind of sexual thing that no one could explain!

Only part of the beer purchased by us 10 passengers for the five day crossing. It was sure to be a party cruise!

The marina in Cartagena.

Leaving the harbor in Cartagena and saying goodbye to South America!!

The last day of riding the South American leg of my bike trip in Cartagena was on April 4th-what would have been my mom's 70th birthday. I thought she would have liked that.

This is the map of my route up to the top of Colombia corresponding with the last photo for this posting in the harbor of Cartagena. As usual the orange lines indicate where I rode and the black lines indicate where I used other means of transport

This blog brings you up to date on my travels until April 16th, 2013. I am only four months behind as of today August 24th! I'm getting there!

Statistics for South America

As of April 16th, 2013 upon leaving the continent.

Time since I left home for this trip: 16 months

Miles ridden: 7,148 miles (11,504 kilometers) 
Total feet/meters of vertical ascent (per my GPS): 331,426 feet (62.77miles)/101,019 meters

Total days on bicycle  trip: 420 (only bike trip time-does not include the break taken in USA)

Days on the bike: 226

Days ridden solo: 218

Days off the bike: 194 (almost equal to days on the bike!)

Average distance ridden per day on riding days:  32 miles/51 kilometers

Average number of hours spent on the road when riding: 6 (? I am not sure about this as I have not finished formatting my GPS data) including stops for lunch, photos etc.

Nights spent sleeping in tent: 137

Number of showers: 128

Number of beers:  I lost track!

Number of jars of peanut butter consumed: 17

Number of flats:  29

Miscellaneous other information ordered highest to lowest:

Distance pedaled/time spent in country Ascent Highest point reached Miles Kms Days Feet Meters Feet Meters Chile 1,964 3,167 153 Chile 107,056 32,639 Peru 14,852 4,528 Bolivia 1,365 2,201 89 Bolivia 53,736 16,383 Bolivia 13,799 4,207 Peru 1,235 1,992 55 Colombia 50,879 15,512 Chile 12,402 3,781 Colombia 1,003 1,617 50 Argentina 39,599 12,073 Ecuador 10,890 3,320 Argentina 821 1,324 47 Peru 42,073 12,827 Colombia 10,158 3,097 Ecuador 746 1,203 30 Ecuador 35,047 10,685 Argentina 3,854 1,175

All other blog posts that had units of measure conversions from Metric to English were rounded estimates. These figures are using the exact conversion formulas. 

Photos and blog posts to come:

A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama!

Costa Rica-a.k.a. Gringolandia.

Nicaragua

Honduras

El Salvador

Guatemala and Statistics from Central America

Mexico