Project VELAIA

The happenings I’m writing about right now lie a long time back, about 20 days. And they mostly lie a lot lower than I’m sitting now: My father and I have just left Cuenca in Ecuador and are camping on 3400m at the moment. The temperatures have dropped a lot since the sun’s gone and I’ve pulled the sleeping bag up to just under my arms, so only my fingers are freezing. But now about what happened bag then:

We had good, sunny weather when leaving Bogota. First cycling west towards the airport on the bike path in the middle of the 8 laned Calle 26, then following the Bogota map with included bike paths we turned south arriving at the eastern end of the airport. Just before reaching Calle 17 we turned right, west, and cycled on a main road towards Funza, avoiding all the poorer and therefore more dangerous suburbs and all the traffic in Bogota’s south and on the main southern exit of Bogota.´

A nice little pass leading up to 2800 or 2900 m lead towards a massive drop down from Bogota’s high plateau first to 1300 m and later even further down to Girardot on less than 500 m altitude! Man, what a downhill. We flew down the serpentines, overtaking big and heavy trucks time after time, breaking down through dark grey clouds and finally arriving in a muggy climate in the city of Girardot.

The personnel in a hotel in the Girardot center told us the water would be warm, “caliente” anyway, even though they didn’t have a special heater. And they were not too wrong! Even throughout the night the weather was unpleasantly warm and humid and only because of my fathers skills as electronics teacher did we get the A/C which was installed but not working (and which we didn’t have to pay for) going. And as a result the night was by far not that bad as I had anticipated and as the following nights in the Rio Magdalena valley should get.

After an early internet session we started out into the stickyness of the early noon. The roads were crowded and filled with motorbikes, cars and trucks without catalytic converters and for the next few kilometers over the river and a bit further the roads were absolutely packed. A few school boys threw a water filled bag after my father but as I’d been cycling on the front I only realized that my father was missing after a minute or two. I thought something bad had happened but a few seconds later I could see him on the road again cycling towards me.

We continued into the early afternoon, refilling our water reserves whenever possible or refreshing ourselves with freshly prepared orange (naranja) juice, cooled down with a few ice cubes. The water went straight from the mouth to the surface of our skins to cool down the heavy working bodies.

Suddenly I made out a strange sound and asked my father whether his tire punctured. But a moment later I realized that it was my rear tire that was rapidly loosing air. I immediately reduced my speed and started pushing the bike to the shadow of a nearby tree. I thought I’d fix the puncture there and we could continue in 5 minutes. But the job was a lot harder than that, even though I didn’t actually even fix the puncture: Swarms of mosquitos appeared right away and Elmar took out the Autan spray and applied it in massive showers all over our bodies. After 2 or 3 minutes the mosquitos were gone but a farmer with a small pocket radio had appeared and started watching us change the tube … we still had a spare tube left and decided to fix the puncture in a more pleasant place without all the “mossies” sucking our blood. It later turned out that the puncture again was caused by the bad rim tape the people mechanics from Kiwi Bikes in Rotorua, New Zealand, had used: The whole tube had small, 5 mm to 1 cm long slits on the inner rim side which sometimes just broke and let all the air through within a few seconds. That had happened in the USA once or twice and even in Venezuela, but back then I just didn’t realize that it had been the crappy rim tape.

In the evening we arrived in a small town and I bought a tool to tension spokes as I had lost the one of my multi tool somewhere. But instead of ending our cycling day with the sun we continued on: This was the first long test for the quad Seoul LED light my father had built with assistance from his students. And the result was stunning: about half the cars, trucks and busses on the other lane gave us light signals indicating we should turn down our bright headlights! The street in front of us got perfectly visible and more often than not the opposite traffic turned down their lights, too.

The temperatures got more and more acceptable and we didn’t think about stopping our night ride – three times we stopped at small shops or 24/7 truck stops, where at one occasion we even got a jugo natural (de mora), a freshly prepared fruit juice, just the right nutrition bomb to keep us going.

At 12 o’clock – midnight – both of us hit the wall. Luckily after a few more kilometers there was another shop open till late. Even though that tienda sold only crappy stuff we found some carbohydrates containing sweets and yoghurt to get us rolling again, at least to a place where we could camp. So after about another hour of cycling along what seemed like a prison between two parallel lines of barb wire, we finally found a entrance to an empty looking grazing field and pitched our tent about 200m away from the main road. The mosquitos were still active past 1 am so we jumped inside and killed a whole bunch of them, pressing the small beasts against the yellow wall of the inner tent.

But sleep we couldn’t: The temperature was still in the high 20s or even at 30°C, more like a sauna than a pleasant climate to sleep in.

Following the main road through the Rio Magdalena valley we arrived in Neiva the next morning after passing a few oil fields. Now the people began to stare at our eyes because of the not-black color – something rarely seen in this part of Colombia.

School children wanted to get photographed together with us and the people in general got a lot more open and shouted “hello” and “gringo” when we passed.

We stopped at almost every shop beside the road because of the short and sticky night and the terrible headwinds we encountered.

At one occasion I asked Elmar to go slow so I could take a picture of him with a nice little lake in the background. And I had just the right timing: Having the camera in my hand and the circular polarizer mounted to the front of the lens, two dogs started chasing my father on the recumbent. Just after he got rid of them a car driver stopped in between the two of us, so my father signaled him to drive away. So you see that sometimes it’s quite an act to get the right shot

In the evening we left the main route and took a right turn towards the mountains.

We had heard stories that further south the street would go through lonely FARC (terrorist, rebel) country and therefore decided to go a more northern route westwards towards Popayan, coming through the town of Inza and climbing over a 3400 m pass.

Just before Inza we had to flee the road from a wild bull blocking our way to the town of Inza.

The rainy weather these days converted the road into a sea of mud and we were not the only ones who had problems with these conditions:

At a tricky narrow passage we had to help out a tiny mini truck driver getting his truck out of the muddy mess.

Weakened from all the bad weather and harsh conditions I got a cold and we decided to take a few days of in Popayan, also using the time to upload pictures and follow the Colombian athletes at the Beijing 2008 Olympic games.