You are reading a single comment by @moog and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@moog
The flight from San Jose to Bogotá was super easy and we had a week booked in the city to get the bikes serviced and try and replace a few bits of worn out gear. So far we have 0 regrets about missing the extra riding that would have been involved in going to Panama City / arriving in Colombia on the north coast. The mountains are where we want to ride so I’m not missing the 2000km of hot highway at all.
I’m not going to go in to details (I’ve already lost enough sleep over it and finally managed to move on and not think about it anymore) but the work done on the bikes at the shop was awful, real amateur hour stuff. The worst of it was finding they had used super glue to try and secure the piston in my front brake and almost every part of the service had been done incorrectly or badly. I redid most of the work myself and luckily nothing unsolvable but it wasn’t the relaxed week I’d hoped for.
After that debacle we got on a 9 hour bus north to San Gil to start the Oh Boyaca! bikepacking.com route. We linked up with a friend who we first met in Baja California and who is coming to the end of his 1 year tour starting in Anchorage. A familiar face and dose of British humor was just what we needed as we got back in to tour life after a few weeks off.
The last 3 weeks of riding have been incredible, crazy climbing - 16,000m in 550km with a max elevation of 4100m - but the gradients have all been steady and the roads have been AAA grade gravé. Daily 600-800m climbs (often 2 or 3) with giant 20km descents has meant daily distances haven’t been so big but we also made a conscious effort to take it slow and enjoy ourselves.
It’s currently rainy season here and although it’s not daily we’ve had our fair share of wet days and nights. It’s also meant a few interesting incidents on the road with river crossings, roads covered in bog from mud slides and blocked roads from landslides. We got round it all but it was pretty testing at times. Wet nights also meant we discovered that our tent seams were leaking, not ideal but after the first wet night we managed to find shelter in barns and various roofed structures as well as a few stays in hostels and lodges.
Overall we’re loving Colombia so far, the cycling culture is apparent almost everywhere we go, food and lodgings are cheap and the roads so far have been consistently great. We head south tomorrow and should be at the border with Ecuador in 3-4 weeks. We’re planning on taking a fairly direct route with a few quicker highway sections before we head up the Trampolín del Diablo.