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@moog
A month since I last posted and it feels like Boyaca was a lifetime ago. We returned back to Bogotá and after a few days relaxing and eating good pizza we said goodbye to our pal Chris and rolled out of the city. Over the next few days we descended from 3000m to 300m and once again felt the heat and humidity we thought we’d left behind on Central America. Some boring highway riding and difficulty to find camp spots meant this wasn’t the greatest time but the gravel roads around the Tatacoa desert lifted our mood and after a week of sweating we climbed back up to 2000m.
On and off rain punctured our final weeks in Colombia and our last big challenge was to climb up and over the Trampolín De la Muerte (aka Devil’s Springboard) 2800m of climbing in 70km on a narrow windy unpaved road prone to landslides. Our experience wasn’t that devilish and we were pleasantly surprised by the low-ish traffic, decent gravel and relatively gradual grades. We made it over the first of the peaks on the first day with only one landslide holding us up, an abandoned building gave us shelter for the night and even had running water and (sort of) flushing toilets! The following morning we woke up to steady rain and a thick blanket of fog. We rode 10km without the weather changing and made the call to hitch a ride in a passing truck rather than punish ourselves doing a 900m climb with no views to show for it. We got really lucky and the first truck we saw stopped and we hopped in the back for a boneshaking 35km of pothole filled roads.
Some fairly cruisey roads led us to the the border with only a mild bout of sickness delaying plans, not the worst though as we were staying a hostel with a tv and amazingly one of the 6 available channels showed the Tour live every morning.
We crossed in to Ecuador with no drama and checked in to country number 10 of the trip. We’ve been largely following the Trans Ecuador Mountain Bike Route (minus a few shortcuts to try and catch up with friends further up the road). The roads are some of the best we’ve ridden and are now regularly up at 3000-4000m and won’t be dropping below 2000m until we’re in Peru. Embarrassingly we hadn’t really researched Ecuador much before arriving and had very little in terms of expectations but so far it’s been incredible, the indigenous Andean culture is very apparent here and it feels significantly less colonial than Colombia.
There are some tough days coming up (25-35km in 4 hours of riding) but plenty of stunning scenery and hopefully some nice remote camp spots. In 9 or 10 days we’ll be in Cuenca to enjoy a week off the bikes and hopefully some good food.