With the help of a Panama-style wake up call\u00a0 (they come and knock on your door), we get a very early start, and after some great coffee, cab it to the airport.\u00a0 The usual Panama city traffic slows us down a bit, and we wind up getting on the plane just before take-off.\u00a0 Airport security managed to find some tools in my carry-on to confiscate, of course.<\/p>\n
Nice plane;\u00a0 leather seats, extra leg room; even served food on a one hour flight!\u00a0 Arrived on time, and our baggage was there when we got through immigration!\u00a0 Airport staff was friendly and helpful.<\/p>\n
Found Girag office and started the paperwork chase.\u00a0 Really not bad, just had to find and walk to one customs office, and the customs officials we had to deal with were super nice and very helpful.\u00a0 We were all done with transit documents in one hour.<\/p>\n
Back at Girag terminal, we were all loaded up and ready to ride out when I noticed than the windscreen on my bike had been broken on the right hand side.\u00a0 Something large and heavy had smashed into the from cowl on the right side. I of course complained, and that started a process that delayed us another two hours.\u00a0 After having a bunch of people look at the damage, I was finally offered $100 USD to settle my claim for damage. which I accept, since there wasn’t anything I could do about it anyway.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Finally, we left the airport, at around 2:30 PM.\u00a0 We followed the main road into Bogota, and immediately we were confronted by some of the craziest and most reckless driving we had seen.\u00a0 These guys were nuts.\u00a0 They would simple run you off the road.\u00a0 It was a very intense ride into town, and we got lost when we tried to get off the main road onto the street we hoped would have a hotel we could afford.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The next two hours were another nightmare.\u00a0 It tarted to rain just as we exited the highway, and that became a downpour of biblical proportions;\u00a0 the streets flooded, and became curb-deep lakes.\u00a0 The surface streets were a maze of one-way and crazy-angle tangle that got us hopelessly confused.\u00a0 then, we managed to get separated when I made a sudden left turn and Levi could not follow.\u00a0 In the downpour we tried to find each other, but even with our radios we spent an hour wandering the flooded streets looking for each other.\u00a0 The street numbering system in Bogota is no system at all, and just too confusing for us simple gringos to follow.<\/p>\n
At last, I found the spot that Levi was holed up at, and we waited out the rainstorm like two drowned kittens together.\u00a0 Soaked to the skin and cold.\u00a0 When the rain subsided, and the lakes receded, we worked our way north through the city until we found a wierd hotel with enclosed parking.\u00a0 Over-priced, but we could not be fussy at this point.<\/p>\n
We dried off, and warmed up, and then got overcharged for a very mediocre dinner.\u00a0 Went out to a couple of local bars for a beer, and got nothing but poor service and very weird looks.\u00a0 We went to a pool hall, and played some pool,\u00a0 smoked a couple of small cuban cigars we got in Panama, and I went back to the hotel and went to bed!\u00a0 Levi went off into the nearby University area to see what the nightlife was like.<\/p>\n
Our first day in Columbia was a very mixed bag.\u00a0 The experience at the airport was very positive.\u00a0 People were friendly and helpful.\u00a0 But Bogota is no place I ever want to drive a motorcycle in again, and\u00a0the people, at least in the are where we wound up,\u00a0 were not so friendly at all.\u00a0 One interesting thing we noticed, was that about half of the vehicles on the street were motorcycles!\u00a0 It was amazing how many there were.\u00a0 Mostly small (125-250 cc), but everywhere.\u00a0 They swarmed the streets in droves.\u00a0 It is wild to see so many bikes at the lights and corners.\u00a0 It looks like some sort of motorcycle rally in progress at every traffic stop!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With the help of a Panama-style wake up call\u00a0 (they come and knock on your door), we get a very early start, and after some great coffee, cab it to the airport.\u00a0 The usual Panama city traffic slows us down a bit, and we wind up getting on the plane just before take-off.\u00a0 Airport security […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[19,6],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1565"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1657,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565\/revisions\/1657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}