First 3 days pedalling

Posted by Javier on 7 August 2009

Our trip really started in Zipaquirá, few kilometers after saying bye to the deepeei crew. It felt nice to feel that from that point onwards we would experience again the nice feeling of not knowing where we were going to sleep, or what would be our precise route. That is the best feeling when you are bike touring: you have no ties other than possibly a flight ticket coming back home or a final destination.

In Zipaquirá we enjoyed the best of many fine examples of Spanish colonial style. In some streets or in front of the main church (photo 1) I felt transported to Andalucía or Extremadura, back in Spain. Even the people looked similar, with the same parsimonious sense of enjoying live. However the main attraction there is the Salt Cathedral, a huge labyrinth of chapels and via crucis that ends in an immense principal church (photo 2). The idea of using an old mine for a church is appealing, one can feel the grandiosity of a big space together with the quietness of a place several meters under the surface. The lack of light in a place where the ceiling is about 40 m tal called for a photo of about 40 seconds.

After the visit the rain, that accompanied us intermittently during the first 2 days. We went through long climbs and descends with quite a lot of traffic, so we decided to take secondary roads and even tracks. The rains continued, and even the heavy traffic, since we were crossing an area of coal mines. Although we enjoyed some good views and the company of nice people, the route crossed large plantations of unappealing eucalyptus and casuarinas, just interrupted by large or small coal mining enterprises under the persistent rain. After taking an extremely broken and small track, where we had to push the bikes in very steep grades of more than 20%, we managed to reach the Candelaria Desert (photo 7) and the old village and monastery of the same name (photo 8). There it started a completely different landscape, characterized by desert conditions, nice blue skies and much less traffic. That night we slept in the surprising and touristic Ráquira, a colorful village with a lot of charm (photos 9-11). Again a rehearsal of colonial architecture at its best, just improved (for now) by the famous Villa de Leyva. The road to Villa de Leyva permitted us to cross the first flats of the trip, in the middle of a cultivated desert guarded by mighty mountains everywhere (photos 12 &13).

The first we noticed in Villa de Leyva was the sense of being in the past, in the 16th century. The big cobblestones that pave everything always lead to the main square, an impressive construction of 120 x 120 m, surrounded by white colonial houses with wooden balconies and a nice baroque church. In the middle a tiny stoned fountain contrasts with the dimensions of the complex, which is one of the biggest squares in all Hispanic America. A 180º panorama of half the square barely shows its grandiosity (photo 14). We were walking the perpendicular streets for some hours, filming and photographing. We also managed to visit "El Fosil" a Piosarius of 7 m and around 150 million years old. A lot of other attractions surround Villa de Leyva, but while cycling with about 40-45 kg of luggage and quite a lot of expensive stuff it is better to recognize that for bike tourers conventional tourism is really difficult and tiring. We packed our things and started the long climb to the green Andes again. But that is another story.

15 comments. Tags: rain, mountains, javier. Location: Pamplona, Colombia