Day 66 12/31/2021
Odometer 31,050 – 31,280 —– 230 Miles (8580 Miles Total)
Bogota, Colombia – San Gil, Colombia
When I went to bed last night I knew I was going to have a miserable night. Some guy next to my bunk was snoring like it was his day job. I really wanted to open his curtain and punch him in the face. I didn’t sleep all night. There were mosquitos in the room buzzing in my ear all night biting me everywhere, it was hot, and then this asshat with his snoring. I couldn’t wait for the sun to come up so I could get my day started.
I got up at about 6:45, cleaned up and made a ton of noise leaving my room and packing up since the bag Nick brought was the loudest bag ever made in the history of bag making! I hope I woke up the snoring asshat. I called an uber and got to the airport cargo section. I met up with a lovely girl named Nubia who was an absolute sweetheart about the whole process and was so helpful. I mean she also did all the work which was lovely. The whole process took about an hour and a half and we had to walk about 10 minutes over to customs to get that paperwork sorted. I was so happy once I saw my bike. Oh how I missed it so much. I spent about 2o minutes rearranging everything in my bags and putting things in a bag I would drop back off at Daniella’s place that Nick can bring back to NY for me since I have things here I haven’t been using and I want to free up some more space. After I was done they pulled up with a Forklift with a ramp on it and told me to get on the ramp with my bike. I was like seriously?
I rode my bike on this ramp, the forklift picked me and the bike up and drove to the edge of the loading dock and the guy wasn’t great with the brakes so I almost fell off the bike a few times and would have gotten crushed between the cage and my bike. He got me on the ground and I got my bike off. I shot over to Daniellas, dropped off the bag and decided to go to a bike shop to see if I could spend any money there. Touratech is a little big company that has shops around the world. I loved their shop in Czech Republic. They had tons of stuff there. I took a 20 minute detour to their shop here and it was trash. They had nothing there. So off I went to San Gil. Daniella and Nick told me to go there since it’s the adventure sports capital of Colombia. I had a 6.5 hour ride there. I stopped for breakfast at this restaurant by a lake. I ordered eggs and bread for breakfast. They literally brought me out 2 fried eggs with bread and nothing else. I hope they make a better breakfast than this in Colombia.
It was on this ride that I realized how much the riding sucked since I left Puerto Escondido a month ago. I got used to long boring roads with no mountains. I could not believe I just got used to that. I was wondering what was missing in the riding. It was all so boring. I looked up at one point on this ride and I saw a huge mountain range surrounded by clouds. It put such a big smile on my face. I drove through a huge gorge at one point with a waterfall which I stopped to take pictures of. A few days ago I was looking over my bike and I realized my rear tire had a big flat spot in the middle from just riding straight for the last 3000 miles probably. I’m happy to be riding some mountain roads with lots of turns again and possibly making that rear tire back to a rounded shape again. I had a guy on a street bike start riding with me for about 90 minutes. I was ripping through turns riding like a maniac passing everyone. I was having an absolute blast. The temps went from 60-70 degrees in Bogota to 85 once I was off the mountains a bit. I was wearing all my gear so I was comfortable riding like a maniac. The guy was having a blast too I could tell. We parted ways at one point, or at least I’m hoping because he disappeared where there wasn’t a town. I hope he didn’t crash. I cut my 6.5 hour ride down to 4:45 which I was so happy about!
I pulled into town and parked right in front of my hostel. The man who owned it is Australian. I got my bed, unpacked and went out for an early dinner. The hostel was having a small feast tonight which they emailed me about on the ride today. That put a smile on my face. I went out and got a burrito with a brownie. I’m so happy the food is good here and cheap if I didn’t mention it already. I got back to my bike and stripped down the plastics again so I could flush the coolant system. I added a lot of water in it when I was in Guatemala and I’m pretty sure I’ll be hitting freezing temps at times in the next month or two so I’d rather be safe than sorry and add some coolant now to get some of that water out that I added. I hung out around the hostel after that to work on the blog and catch up on phone calls. Dinner came out and I hung out with everyone while they spoke Spanish trying to understand what they were saying. One of them asked me a question and suddenly I made a few friends since they spoke English. We spoke for about 2.5 hours. This was the fourth or fifth time on this trip where someone told me how they view Americans which I sort of agree with them.
They see us as having such good easy lives in America that we create problems to have to worry about. I mean it’s sort of a good thing and bad thing in a way. I won’t get into that here but it’s always interesting to hear what people say about Americans. After our long chat I decided to go to bed. I scratched my eye this morning unpacking the bike at customs and my right eye has been bothering me a lot. It’s been burning a lot tonight and I need to go to bed. It’s only 11:30pm and I’m the only one in bed.
Waterfall on the route to San Gil
