We have arrived in Venezuela!

Posted by Åsa on 12 August 2009

Hello everybody! First of all I want to say thank you to everyone following and commenting on my blog, it is really inspiring and encouraging to read your comments. It is you, the fantastic views and the cheerful Colombians blowing their horns and giving us thumbs up that keep me going in the long winding climbs in the Colombian Andes with my 35 kilos heavy loaded bicycle. (Up to now we have ascended in total 10 400m, that’s already more then climbing the Everest).

Unfortunately bike traveling in the Andes with long hard rides and unplanned overnight stays doesn’t make it easy to keep a very regularly updated blog. Many days we have arrived to the villages where we stay over night with the last light, we search for a hostel, shower, hurry to bee in the street finding some food before they close (extremely early habits in South America so far, at nine they are all in bed ;-)). After the meal I usually just feel like leaning back, putting my legs high, close my eyes and rest.

Often there is no internet or it closes early as well….

But the texts are growing and growing in my computer and every now and then I will be loading it all up.

Due to this, although we passed the border to Venezuela yesterday and we are right now in the precious colonial town San Pedro del Rio, you will still receive some information about Colombia.

We left Villa De Leyva in the early afternoon after visiting El Fosil, a wonderful petrified ”crocodile” from a time when what is now the Andes was the bottom of the sea. The chap, a Piosaurius by the way, is 7 meters long and some 100-150 million years old!

The day was sunny in the morning as it used to be those days we have been traveling in Colombia, but here in the desert of La Candelaria the sky was clearer and the sun lasted longer then in other regions where we have been.

The owner of the bike shop where we had asked for a mirror the other day was accompanying us the first climbing kilometers out of Villa De Leyva towards Arcabuco.  The climb was partly steep, but after the short ride yesterday just from Rachira to Villa De Leyva and the strong breakfast we had consisting of rice soup, two fried eggs, garbanzos, meat, more rice, potatoes and yucca, all flushed down with a cup of hot chocolate, I really felt reinforced  and strong in my legs again.

After we reached the mountain pass and reached to the valley in the other side the landscape drastically changed, from the desert like burned bushes, dry yellow grass, cactuses and treeless slopes we entered a world of lush green, sprawling water and dense forests. From Arcabuco we followed the river Sogamoso down towards Barbosa, we were partly deep down, partly high above a deep gorge. The steep walls almost 90 degrees and some 200m tall, high up there were some cows grassing in tiny pastures.

There are many trees in the area with big “beards”, a symbiotic plant covering all from the electric wires to mainly the trees. It has a very mystic and nice effect, makes you feel like biking in JRR Tolkiens Middle earth. This beard, barba in Spanish is called barba espanhol or barba del Viejo (Spanish beard or old mans beard) as the Indians that lived on the continent when the Spanish arrived in the late 15-century saw beard for the first time in the face of the Spanish conquistadors. For me the near by city of Barbosa will always be reminding me of these bearded trees although in fact the name has nothing to do with the bearded trees as Barbosa is just a very common Spanish surname and probably it is pure coincidence that there are extremely common with bearded trees around the city of Barbosa.

The weather was unstable, sunny with a thunderstorm far away, suddenly it started to rain for a minute or two. The light mesmerizing. Although it was getting dark we stopped to make some photos of Moniquira from above. While doing that suddenly a precious parrot showed up in the grass and headed straight towards us. He immediately became the main object for the photos. The feathers shining blue, yellow and green. We started to chat with it, but unfortunately he wasn’t in the mood to answer.

Between Arcabuco and Moniquira we hit again the main road, the traffic was more intense of course then in the small secondary roads and tracks that we have taken so far, but due to the poor map we have of Colombia and the many extra kilometers we have made so far, we decided to ignore the trucks in the road and make some fast and easy advancing without having to worry so much about the choice of route and the very confusing advice of the people. That the main road is bloody beautiful helps a lot too ;-)!!

Next stop was Oiba, the stay there became longer then expected due Javi’s diarrhea. I took the chance to buy the local news paper “El Tiempo” spending a whole morning in the terrace of a nice café trying to decipher the Spanish, chatting a bit with the people more or less voluntary while sipping on a great Colombian Café con Leche. The coffee here is terrific, like it ought to be as one of the worlds leading exporters of coffee.

One of the articles was about the region of Boyaca that we had just left behind. There was a puma that was bothering the people the last two weeks by taking nearly one hundred sheep and even a couple of cows. This new was not affecting us directly personally, as the hunting hours for a Puma is between one and four in the night/early morning, and up to now we were never even close to be up and about at that hour of the day! But for this particular puma it is sad as the people will hunt it down and kill it as soon as they get green light from the department of environment. Much more tragic though is the fact that this puma leaving her natural habitat (which here in the Andes is the cloud forest), is a symptom of the cloud forest is being taken down at an alarming speed in favors of pastures for the growing cattle industry.

Pescadero is a small village in the gorge of Chicamocha, it is located in a semi desert close to the equator at a height over the sea level of just 500 meters the climate was really hot.

In the small village there was only one hospedaje, a row of narrow little cementing bunkers with a roof of corrugated metal. The effect must have come very close to an oven.. We were fried and cooked and steamed all night long.

After the fright night waited a climb known to bikers all over the world as especially hard, the climb up to Aratoca, a very nice ride (about 28km following the river in the beginning). We made our best to escape the big city of Bucaramanga and started the climb to the Paramo till the kilometer 12 where we found another bunker, but this time at a height of 1600m the bunker experience was even quite nice ;-).

We have crossed the páramo of Berlin, about 40kms on a height of about 3400m. We arrived there after a climb of 50km (pura subida) from the city of Bucaramanga some 1000m over the sea level.

Up there just in the top we were very happy to meet nice people, a military checkpoint, a little restaurant and a hospedaje. We arrived a bit late and the last 10-20kms or so there was absolutely nothing, not even a cerveza-shop, so we were prepared to use our tent up there on the cold and windy paramo, eating very bad and filtering some water from a stream.

What a nice surprise it was then to find this little paradise in the middle of the fog. The soldiers that were guarding the place together with the big ugly amstaf-type dog named Luna were young and curious keen on making photos with us. Luna, herself was overwhelming in her expressions of love.

In the night it became truly chilly up there, the water was freezing cold, chilling the skin until it hurt. Finished as we were the thought of a shower didn’t even appear to our minds anyway... We were even too lazy and to chilled in the unheated room that we didn’t filter any water before we went to bed either. This was a grave mistake as we both woke up in the night completely dehydrated, which forced me to make the very few pleasant travel to the bathroom in the cold of the darkest hour of the night almost naked and with bare feet to spend some fifteen minutes swearing over the situation in company with our little savior in so many situations, the Katadyn pocket filter.

The filter is helping us to save the growing rubbish mountains from quite a lot of PET bottles and is also saving us quite a lot of money and worries about water. We are very grateful of Katadyn sponsoring us with filter and water purifying pills.

Soon we are leaving Colombia, tomorrow we will arrive in the border city of Cucuta. It is really sad to leave this beautiful country behind. It has been great in so many ways. The enthusiasm among the people for cyclism has been obvious, the cheerful positive attitude omnipresent. The diversity of landscapes we have crossed in very short time, changing dramatically just from one day to the other. The grandeur of the nature in the Colombian Andes taking our breath away (both literal and figurative spoken). The easiness to make bike traveling regarding finding food or somewhere to sleep has been truly impressive.

We couldn’t have enjoyed a better start of our long journey.

@dear Cyrille, Virginie and Inés, thanks a lot for the wishes of strong rear wind that has been our faithful companion (as common at this time of the year) as long as our going-south adventure has still been going north.

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