A day of close calls…<\/p>\n
We were awakened by a call from the front desk, asking us to move our bikes so another guest could get their car out of the garage.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 By the time I got down to the garage in the hotel basement, the car in question had already maneuvered itself out.\u00a0 We found a tiny hole-in-the-wall place to try breakfast, and it was very strange indeed.\u00a0 Food here is cheap, but we have not had anything very good yet.<\/p>\n
As we started to leave town, we passed a corner where a homeless-looking madman started throwing empty bottles onto the ground, and them made a charge into the street, as if to grab Levi off his bike.\u00a0 He was screaming some unintelligible stuff, and acting very crazy.\u00a0 We just managed to escape his clutches.\u00a0 Had a very hard time finding the autopista sur;\u00a0 the street layout in Bogota is simple incomprehensible.\u00a0 We wandered up and down one-way and dead-end streets, often taking sidewalk shortcuts, \u00a0jumping curbs, \u00a0and going the wrong way on one-way streets out of frustration and desperation.\u00a0 Finally we go onto the main road, and fought the crazy traffic for miles south until we left the city congestion behind.\u00a0 Very poor signage, thoughtless and reckless drivers, road construction, massive traffic, horse-drawn carts on the highways, bad roads, lots of close calls;\u00a0 we had it all.<\/p>\n
At one point when the traffic slowed to a crawl, two young men ran over behind a truck next to us, jumped up onto the rear of it, and managed to wiggle their way under the tarp covering and into the truck cargo area.\u00a0 They were clearly thieves looking to steal what they could from the truck’s cargo.<\/p>\n
Stopped at at gas station when we were not sure we were on the correct road, and I discovered that one of my footpeg mounts was loose.\u00a0 More bolt tightening!\u00a0 Finally out into the country, we are surrounded by some beautiful scenery – Columbia is a country of mountains, and they are spectacular.\u00a0 Words just fail to do justice to the magnificence to the scenery.<\/p>\n
I have a very close call when some young motorcyclist comes shooting out of a gas station from the right, behind Levi and in front of me.\u00a0 We were traveling at 60 mph. He entered the road without even looking to see if anything was coming.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I managed to swerve and miss a direct broadside collision, but only by inches!<\/p>\n
One nice thing that Columbia does for its motorcyclists, is excuse them from all road tolls.\u00a0 There are many toll stops, but every one has a special bypass lane for ‘motos’, and they get a free pass!\u00a0 We enjoyed that.\u00a0 Columbia has many military checkpoints and traffic stops, as well.\u00a0 They selectively pull over vehicles and check them, sometimes searching them.\u00a0 We were not stopped once.<\/p>\n
Much of the day was spent negotiating terrible mountain roads.\u00a0 Narrow and steep, often with little or no shoulder.\u00a0 At one point, Levi was within inches of being knocked over when a truck came WAY over the center-line (there was no centerline<\/span>, really) on a curve and narrowly missed his rear pannier with his front bumper.\u00a0 We expected to reach Armenia, a fair sized town, well\u00a0 before dark,\u00a0 but about 20 miles short of the town, when were in really bad mountains, Levi discovered that his rear brakes had failed completely!\u00a0 So we had to do the last stretch going really slow, and then it started to rain, and then it got dark, and then we found ourselves, again, in fog and cloud forest, where visibility dropped to\u00a0almost zero.\u00a0 We crawled our way down the last of the mountains, and stopped at the first hotel sign we saw,\u00a0 grateful to have survived this day.\u00a0 We parked our bikes for the night in a mud-hole behind the hotel, chained them together, and hoped for the best.\u00a0 We went across the street for a quick dinner, and got overcharged for\u00a0mediocre food, and hassled by strangers, some well dressed, \u00a0asking us for money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A day of close calls… We were awakened by a call from the front desk, asking us to move our bikes so another guest could get their car out of the garage.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 By the time I got down to the garage in the hotel basement, the car in question had already maneuvered itself out.\u00a0 We […]<\/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\/1658"}],"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=1658"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1698,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658\/revisions\/1698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}