Southern Exposure

Monday, January 19

We slept well and woke up early. We ate a Mexico style convenient store breakfast of coffee, some yogurt, and a granola bar. Since it was still raining, we weren’t very enthusiastic about touring the Cafe Zone, as beautiful as it was. We were aiming for a long day of riding with hopes of reaching Pasto. We wanted to spent the night in a big city so we could watch Obama’s inauguration on an international (English speaking) news channel.

We rode back across the valley towards the main highway. Low clouds or steam was rising out of the forests, giving the morning a primeval feel. We kept stopping to take pictures because the valley was so sublime. It’s not hard to see why the Cafe Zone is considered so special and under different circumstances I would like to spend more time touring the region.

After numerous photo ops, we were back on the road south to Armenia. We managed to resist the smells of roasting coffee and get through the town without stopping. The highway gently descended out of the green hills into more conventional farm country. The traffic was light and the road wasn’t particularly twisty, so we made great progress for 100 miles.

We had had such a light breakfast, we were planning on an early lunch. Around 11 we started keeping our eye out for a nice place to stop, but when you’re hungry you tend to find yourself in open countryside. We passed a few papaya plantations which looked tempting. We pulled off to enter a small town, but after riding through the main plaza, the town seemed particularly uninviting, so we passed and moved on. Near noon we came to Santander de Quilichao, where we pulled in. We asked for the menu at the restaurant we had chosen, and were told there was no menu. It was chicken or chicken. We’d chosen a rotisserie chicken restaurant, which was fairly obvious if you looked over at the huge spinning roaster busily cooking up 50 chickens at a time. You only picked if you wanted 1/4, 1/2, or a whole chicken. We each chose a quarter, which came with fries, rice, and a salad. It was particularly delicious. Specialization has its dividends.

We continued our way south and the road began to climb again. We passed Popayán at 6,000 ft and as was now typical with the scenery at this altitude in Colombia, it was beautiful. I’m repeating myself describing how lush and verdant the hills and mountains of Colombia are – the pictures will have to tell the story.

After enjoying the scenery along this high plateau, we began to descend again. The road was very narrow and twisty. It was a nice change from the less curvy stretch prior, but we had to be cautious. The road was still wet from rains, and it was clear the rainy season had taken its toll on the road. We passed numerous slide zones where the road was closed to one lane. In other places the road had sunk 6 inches with a token patch of asphalt to ramp up and ramp down. You’d be cruising along and then the road would temporarily drop 6 – 12 inches for 50 ft before you hit the ramp back up.

Once we had descended into the valley, the road improved. We had passed many military checkpoints, but our luck finally ran out and we were stopped and my bike was searched. Fortunately it was only a pannier search, no tedious unloading of the duffle bag. You can tell it’s a half hearted search when they don’t open the duffle bag. I gave my standard spiel to the officer, and he checked our papers. I asked him about the road damage, and he said the hills are always sliding, so they do what they can but it will never be perfect. He asked us for our insurance, but we didn’t have any for Colombia. No one had said it was mandatory. I told him that and he seemed satisfied, said things were “muy amable” and let us go on our way.

We couldn’t have been going for more than a half an hour before we were stopped again. As we came into view, a group of very young male soldiers formed a line across the road to stop us. The only reason they stopped us was that they were bored, and we are an exotic stop. I chatted with them for a bit as they surrounded the bike, which freed Inna up to take some pictures. After about 10 minutes of chatter, we were cleared to go and were off. They said we had a long way to go to Pasto.

Once we crossed a big river, we began to climb again. The mountains across the river were quite spectacular. Like one of the chains of mountains we encountered in Mexico, the clouds were spilling across the peaks like a fog. The mountains looked to be losing their battle to hold back the clouds.

The twists and turns of the climb out of the valley were more open and sweeping than the descent, so it was less work and more fun. We reached what I’d call the plateau of highland Colombia. It’s between 5 and 6,000 ft high, and green, green grass without too many tall plants or trees.

The mountains here are just incredible. The road clings to the side of the mountain, which form a smooth plane with a distinctly vertical camber. If the base level is 5,000 ft, the valleys between the mountains seem to descend all the way to sea level, where a rapid, chocolate river continues to cut the valley. We’ve never seen anything like this before and it was enchanting. Above the road the peaks tower over you, and the road just goes up and up as it winds around the peaks.

In the back of my mind as we ascended was that somewhere up here, ahead of us, was the large city of Pasto. It was hard to reconcile with the green peaks surrounding us that on some higher yet plateau thousands and thousands of people had built a modern city. As we neared Pasto, the light was fading, and as such things go, we had reached the level of the clouds. It was dark and we were riding in a damp, thick cloud. We were only 10 km from the city, so we made the easy choice to just latch onto a slow going car and follow its taillights into town.

The highest point of the ride was 9,300 ft, and we descended down to 8,400 feet in downtown Pasto. We stopped at the first nice hotel we came to, and since it clearly had secure parking, I asked the concierge if their TV lineup had an english speaking news channel. We had ridden this hard to be sure we had a nice place to watch the inauguration the next morning. He wasn’t sure, so he took me up to what would be our room, and we channel surfed. I was really hoping for BBC World News, and resigned to CNN International. To my immense irritation, the only option was Fox News. Weak! It would do and it had its own irony. We settled in quickly, exhausted from a 370 mile ride through the mountains. It was one of the best days of riding of the entire journey.