I’m still a day behind in my blogging, but I’m hoping to catch up today in between Medellin exploring.  I’d be further along if I hadn’t hit a car yesterday.  What’s that?  Huh?  Oh yea, that’s just sucking you right in isn’t it?  More on that later…

Yesterday turned out to be our longest day yet with about 300 km, which at 185 miles was a fairly long day.  I’ve decided that each km here is about 1 1/2 miles at home, so considering that math we road about 450 miles yesterday.

The day started as usual when leaving a big city – it’s all about escape, and the congested city streets seem to go on forever.  It was really hot and even more humid.  Getting gas was a test of patience.  The streets on the outskirts of town were in fairly bad shape, and there was construction that was just hard to figure out.  At one point the worker waved us through, and I’m pretty sure we ended up on the wrong side of the road as Gio was forced to jump over a dirt and rock berm, and I slithered around some cones through a pile of dirt.  But we ended up back on a road, so I guess all was fine.

We passed through several towns and villages along the way.  Super interesting because one of them was oddly vacant of cars, but the streets were lined with hundreds of scooters.  The motorcycles here are as omnipresent as bikes in Amsterdam.  Still surprised electric scooters haven’t hit big yet.

Also, we got pulled over, but that’s all part of the routine here – just a standard random traffic stop.  They were super friendly and even joked with Gio about being Ossama.  They did take a bit longer with his docs though…  We also saw some military guys walking the side of the street with machine guns.  It’s a little off-putting to see at first, but you have to hand it to Columbia in general – they took their country back, and this show of order is much appreciated once you get used to machine guns carried casually about.  Besides, I’ve seen massive bearded Belgian Special Forces in Brussels airport carrying around more menacing weapons with a higher probability of use.  Colombia is making their country safer, and I don’t mind the inconvenience of the occasional traffic stop.

The riding was great yet again, and some of the valley we road through was really beautiful.  As usual, you see the most amazing small things.  The kid below was on a dirt bike going at least 30 mph behinds this truck hauling beef.  Now keep this in mind:  the kid’s face is about 18″ behind a bouncing pile of cow shit. I gave these trucks some room when we were behind them.  Those cows don’t give a fuck.  Gio told me that at one point I started to go left around a beef truck and then swerved right to try and pass along the curb, and right at that moment a strong stream of piss came shooting out the left side of the truck!  For once I chose wisely and avoided a golden shower.  We saw this kid’s technique in the city too, only those guys were doing it on the freeway through tolls!  Unfortunately, I could not get the camera out during that ride.

The other interesting thing that I took away from this was that on the road, I would say that two items are BY FAR the most transported by trucks here – gas (or some “peligroso” – dangerous – fuel) and beef.  On this route, I would say that at least a quarter and maybe a third of the trucks were transporting beef.  I think when the future looks back and concludes what things really ruined it for humanity, it will be population growth, corn subsidies, and beef production, possibly not in that order.  And of course Trump.

One brave kid.

Beautiful valley we rode through.

More of our riding scenery.

After all of this smooth riding through the mountains and valley and beautiful twisting roads, it was time for us to enter Medellin.  Like entering Bogota, this is not for the faint of heart.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ll describe this from our perspective, but we are not saying we’re the world’s greatest adventurers – we can’t be because about a million people in this city alone do what we did today every day.  As Gio said, “We call this adventure.  They call this life.”  It’s true.  But, for anyone from the States (or maybe a big chunk of the world) I’ll share this mayhem as best I can.

This was very much like riding into Bogota, but the roads are wider and there are more lanes and everyone is moving faster – like highway speeds.  And we have to do this for about 10 km weaving in and out of traffic.  At one point we split lanes for about half a mile inches from cars on either side of us.  Apparently Gio now knows what it’s like to need to slide the side bags underneath a semi because he has a bus next to him.

The whole experience is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, but it all makes sense after you do it for a while.  In fact, some of it is rather brilliant.  At traffic jams and traffic lights, all the motos come to the front – WAY safer for everyone.  The bikes get to the front, and they are immediately gone and out of the way of cars as soon as traffic starts moving.  The alternative is bikes dealing with stop and go traffic in the heat on oily slick roads mixed in with cars driven by people on cell phones and then working to pass them over the next several kilometers.  But if we tried this at home, cars would pull over to make sure that motos didn’t get in front of them with some macho “you ain’t getting in front of me” bullshit.

But not here, like I’ve said before, there’s cooperation here, and everyone is working on getting to where they’re going.  Gio described it like riding in a criterium race – everyone is competing but working together too.  Everyone works to keep the speed similar and lets riders in, and the most dangerous rider is the one who goes too slow or doesn’t know how to ride in the group.

I’d also compare it to a fast flowing river – if you thrash about and fight it and try to slow down, you’ll bang your head and knees and elbows on all the rocks and drown.  If you simply go with it and find the rhythm in the flow, you’ll smooth over the rocks and rapids and find yourself emerging into a gentle riffle floating effortlessly along with the way nature intended.

But this all works because the drivers here are AWARE of their surroundings man.  They drive with a tenth of the distance between cars than we’re used to.  And the amazing thing is that to get your license here, all you have to do is pay – there’s no class or anything.  It just works.

Pulling into Medellin was mind blowing.  I’ve pulled into big cities before – on cars and motorcycles – but nothing is like pulling into Medellin because you can see so much of it.  The comunas (known as favelas in Brazil) are made up of hundreds of barios and  just keep going up the hills and then there will be 20 or 30 or more high rises all clustered together.  And this after emerging from the jungle just a few kilometers ago.  It takes your breath away.  Like nothing I’ve ever seen before.  Medellin is “only” about 4 million people but you can see so much of it because of the mountains surrounding.  Breathtaking.  Unfortunately, you can only catch glimpses of what’s around you because it takes ALL your facilities to find your way safely through the mayhem.

Does not do it justice, but if you zoom in you can see some of the city.

Somehow we managed to navigate our way through this traffic and find our hotel.  And then I hit a car.  Yea, we were about to make our last turn, and my phone made a sound that it was dying, and I noticed that my charger cord was dangling down around my front tire (that could be slightly dangerous), so I grabbed it up and laid it on my lap, so maybe I was a bit distracted, but I think it was more that I was just tired and let my guard down now that we were there.  We made the turn to pull into the garage and I clipped the right front bumper of a car with my left bag.  The damn bags stick out so far the way they’re mounted!  It’s so dumb to mount them like that here.  Duh.  Anyway, I enter the garage after hitting the car (and thankfully staying up) and dude I hit comes running down the ramp saying “You hit my car You hit car !!  Blah blah blah.  More Spanish words.”  Meanwhile, I’m negotiating a very steep incline into the garage, and frankly my hands are fucking full.  So I’m all like “Yo se bro.  Tranquillo. I know bro.  Chill out.” He kinda just goes blank, drops his arms and stands there and stares at me not knowing how to reply while I take care of not dropping the bike and getting through the parking check.  We calmly park our bikes, settle our gear and walk up to assess the damage.

Long story short, we get the rental place on the phone while the other party finds a guy to translate (and this guy who’s name I don’t even know was a MASSIVE help, and I really didn’t think him enough – he was amazing) and we start to negotiate.  Our rental company said we had two options – get the traffic police and have both cars impounded until a legal decision could be made (NOT an option), or iron out a deal.  I offered a number, and he countered with a number 10 times higher to which we responded with absolute outrage.  We played hardball and ended up closer to his number but striking what I thought was a good deal – it would have cost 3-5 times more in the US, and we needed this wrapped up.  And hell, it was like 70-90% my fault.  I mean, he was illegally parked, but I clipped him.  In the end, we made friends, and he even took his picture with us.  All-in-all a good experience and not too expensive.

Proof of payment.

All smiles after the deal is done.

And WOW.  Medellin.  This is a great city.  Or at least the area we’re in is great.  The city overall is obviously very poor as 70% of he population lives in what we know from Brazil as favelas but what are known here as comunas (much more on this tomorrow), but the area we are in is jammed with restaurants and clubs and coffee shops and taco stands and tonight crafts being sold with dancing going on and street shows and on and on and on.  It’s alive, and it feels great.  Our dinner was once again amazing.  Grilled cheese wrapped in pork served with honey and tomatoes followed by a mixed meat dish and of course washed down with the omnipresent limonada de coco – coconut lemonade.  Yum.

Tomorrow we shall see more of Medellin outside of our tourist area.

Good ride today.  Here’s where we’re I’m at and where we’re at:

I was a little dirty after today’s ride…