life @ 13

y blah blah blah....

shit (pictures updated)

the curse of the blog. if it's not updated regularly, not only do people stop reading (ok by me) but if lots of stuff happens then you have to make a very confusing and slightly epic post. so this is what we're going to get. deep breaths.

Cali

we all really, really liked Cali. Medellin was like a bone-crackling puppy, growing and developing at a seemingly stupendous rate, not entirely full of culure but flush with interesting people and felt like a "real" city. Cali was the opposite, fairly quiet, seemingly stuck in the past, and seemingly devoid of city people. but it had a great vibe, great music, great clubs, very friendly locals, and a coolness matched by few other places.
we made the mistake of not making reservations at a hostel, so when we got there every hostel and hotel was booked (except in the very undesirable center of the city). we ended up talking our way into one of the newer ones...which has the potential to be a great place, but the owner was more than a little batshit crazy and there were more than a few tense moments.
anyway, we passed the new year there, had a couple of really great days with lots of alcohol and dancing and meeting people from all over (including some ecuadorians we plan on staying with in a day or two). fabian and i met quite possibly the craziest man in Cali and left some good english and german quotes for him to dwell on. if you scan through the pictures, you'll see that we even made it into the local newspaper. etc etc.
so fabian continued on his quixotic way back to medellin and up to venezuela. julian and i left early in the morning, hoping to make the 130k to popayan. leaving the city was pretty easy, fast and flat for the first 50k, but soon after the road turned up, and the new year's residue began to make itself known. unbeknownced to us, this was the beginning of the endless (ENDLESS) ups and downs..up 100m, down 100m, up 150m, down 120m, up 75m, down 50m, etc, etc etc. mentally unfun. took a long nap in the middle of the day, so by the time we got to piendamo about 105k from cali it was already getting dark, we had climbed 1500m and were ready to stop. stayed in a gas station with a very friendly and businesslike owner.

piendamo - mojarres

one of the things that most anyone who has spent an entire day riding a bicycle notices is that when you have a good, long day it feels like you get to experience a miniature version of your life within about 12 hours. extreme highs, extreme lows, love, sadness, infinite happiness, unforseen problems, new friends, new enemies, etc, etc. this was one of those days. 161k with 8:15 on the bicycle and over 2000m of climbing. left really early in the morning knowing we were in for a long day...we were feeling whipped just a few k into the day by the ENDLESS ups and downs...after 20k these calmed down and we had some really, really great cycling descending to and around popayan. good roads, nice grades, a seemingly infinite number of cyclists. leaving popayan, already a couple hours into the day, the sign said we had 121k to go. more of the ENDLESS ups and downs for 40k, then down to about 1300 (from 2000?), and a climb back to 1800. i stopped at the top to wait for julian but he must of passed while i wasn't looking...after 20 mins waiting i couldn't decide if i had really sprinted up the climb or if he was ahead of me. after 3 people concurred that there was in fact a tall cyclist with a black shirt in front of me (one lady said one hour in front...) i realized i was goign to have to push pretty hard the next hour or two to catch up (still not entirely sure if he was in front or behind). a big descent down to 900m, then a hot, shitty climb up to 1300 to get out of the valley.
eventually caught up with julian along the way, there were another 25k or so of ENDLESS ups and downs. stopped in el bordo about 45k short of mojarres where we ran into a group of 10 cyclists (and these people were REAL cyclists) from bogota cycling to quito. took some pics, exchanged the typical chit-chat, then decided to ride together to Mojarres...our final destination but they planned on going furthur. was lots of fun pedalling with them...got to lead the group for 8 very fast km. then our weight and long day caught up with us and they were all pretty far ahead of us...however they stopped near a scenic river and i played some violin for them and took some more pictures. they pressed on...we searched for water and juice (funny story, somewhere in the picture captions). but as it turns out, they decided to stop in mojarres too. all had dinner together, stayed in the same hotel with a well-negotiated price, and drank a few of the best beers of the trip. a very memorable day

mojarres was at 600m, so we knew the next day would be hot. ok, fine, we leave early, we know there is a climb around 35k so as long as we get above 1200m or so by 9am we should be fine. and we were doing well, until we realized that we had very little cash...and it was sunday morning in the desert and there were no stores and nothing was open and we had little food and water. after 8k on no breakfast we stopped at a tiny pueblo with no stores, but somebody let us in their house for water, which we filtered to drink and cooked up some pasta for breakfast. really, the biggest problem was not that we were still hungry afterward but that we were losing time, it was already 90 degrees at 8:30 and it was going to get worse.
more ENDLESS ups and downs for 35k, stopped in a town that finally had food, spent some of our rations on lunch (but filtered water from the tap), and began one of the shittiest climbs yet...starting at 500m and well over 95 degrees with a 7% grade, it was a very slow and water-intensive first hour or two. bought some more pasta to cook along the way (cheap empanadas for lunch), climbed to about 1600m and descended down to about 800. ever since we left cali, the people have changed almost completely...almost everyone we see on the road is of indiginous descent. lots of them sitting on the road asking for money (people throw coins from cars sometimes). they were very bitter and verbally agressive with us...really the first time I had experieced this sentiment in colombia.
anway, climbed back to 1200m, knew there were no cities around which was OK because we didn't have anything close to the money for a hotel. camped just off the main road, overcame stove problems to finally make some dinner, crammed into julian's tent when it started to rain, woke up to nice mountains and questioning sanity...the campsite was less than 2 feet from a pretty sheer drop.
next day to Pasto was a climb all day from 1200 to 2700. met a local cyclist on the road who was really friendly and talkative...invited us to his sister's house near the highway for juice and coffee. me the whole family, hung out for a while, and of course, played some violin in exchange for hospitality. the rest of the day was uneventful, except for the fact that we were completely wrecked from the past few days and the end of the climb was not technically difficult but a little bit of a mental challenge. rain near the top, temp dropped to about 50 degrees. descended about 300m into pasto leaving victory cries in our wake. greeted by some friendly but aggressive festival-goers who promptly sprayed us with "snow in a bottle", threw powder in our face, and painted us black. pretty endearing, really.
the rest of our stay in pasto went pretty much like that. we were there for the last couple days of the festival de blancos y negros, quite possibly the greatest party on the planet at the time. lots of drinking, dancing, random spraying and face painting and powder throwing. stayed in a nice but expensive hotel ($12 each per night). helped a randon guy on the street who was fairly brutally assualted by a taxi driver. ate something i shouldn't have.
leaving pasto, i knew it would be an interesting day. i was feeling 80% at best. two flat tires on the way out of the city for me. my legs felt good but my body not so on the climb from 2400 to 3050 out of the city. very cold on the descent...julian got pretty far ahead because i kept stopping. by the time i got to the bottom of the descent at 1700m i realized that my chances of making it up to ipiales at 2900 were nil, as i couldn't eat anything and could barely hold down water at the moment. took a nap on a restaurant table over a little bottle of water. woke up a couple hours later feeling a little better, worked up the motivation to unpack the bike, stop a bus, and ride about 40 mins up to ipiales, shouting at julian when the bus passed him.

so ipiales is where we are, a pretty cold city at 2900m, but it's a good size, nice and cheap...the perfect place to take a few days off to get better, reflect on colombia (a fairly big task) and plan for ecuador. in the hostel in cali we met a really friendly and fun dutch couple, Loes and Joop, who we also saw in pasto and ipiales, who just left for quito this morning. lots of good times with them. don't have my camera with me right now, but went to one of the most spectacular churches just a few k away from here...pics coming...eventually (maybe not till quito).

we're going to leave sunday morning with the hopes of an easy border crossing (heard some horror stories of 12+ hour waits), going to stay with the ecuadorians we met in cali for a night or two, and should be in quito by the end of the week.

one last thing. (i'm getting a little tired typing this much....unless you're desperately bored at work i'm sure you're getting a little tired reading too. check the pictures, they're more interesting anyway.) i'm going to leave most of the numbers out of the blog and use this instead, mostly for me (i can't imagine why anyone would be that interested) but also for you number freaks out there. reading over other biker's travelogues i'm realizing it's easy to slip into a fairly uninteresting narrative of distances, terrain, and cities. not entirely sure how i'm going to counteract the tendency, but at least know that i'm thinking about it.