The featured image today is taken from my hotel room balcony in Cali, Columbia. I can offer limited pictures due to no WiFi or Internet for the past 2 days. I am not using my phone to tether the single bar. Hope to add photo’s soon.
So today started off with jubilance, excitement and more. After riding my new 2018 BMW for more than 1.500 miles, I finally learned how to lower it by 2 inches — which in my world means that I can put my feet down flat on the ground. I can’t tell you how much safer that makes life for me. Apparently, when I picked up my motorcycle in Charlotte, North Carolina, it was preset at the highest possible setting for height. I never knew why my old bike was so much shorter. Oliver looked over my bike with me last night and he noticed the setting, but was not sure what it meant. I googled it at 4am because it seemed logical that the setting which said MAX meant something, but not sure what? Google had no videos or threads. In the morning, we asked Will if he knew anything and although Will is very tall, he played with his setting too — and with that, my life on this adventure changed on the road. I now have flat feet holding this 700 pound beast and no more tippy toes at stops, balancing at uneven grades or rocky settings. Great Game Changer.
With that great news our journey today took us from Manizales to Cali — both in Columbia which is about a 300 km ride. Oliver is now our riding guide and Marc is now driving the van. They will switch up riding every 3 days. Oliver chose a route which took us through a back road which was more interesting and ran parallel to the main thoroughfare. It turned out to be a good call since it was a decent enough road and had limited traffic with lots of scenery, towns, villages all around us.
Of course after our departure we had our first bit of drizzle and dense fog. Not my favorite riding, but on a bike, you take what you get. After an hour or so the rain got harder and we all pulled over to a side outdoor food stand. I got a coffee with leche [milk] which will be the last time I do that. The leche at the end of the coffee was so severely curdled, I had to spit it out in clumps. From here on in, I will be drinking coffee black unless I want to wear a dipper while riding. Seems that everyone brought rain-gear and not me. I do have a GoreTex suit, but that is limited in its protection vs a full on rain suit. We continued and after about 2 hours the rain stopped on the other side of a hill or mountain we passed.
One of our goals today was to visit a coffee plantation and just pop in. Unfortunately with the fog and rain we passed all of that
good stuff and the terrain got flatter and I personally was not delighted about that. I really wanted to get into the coffee surroundings more. With that said, Oliver did pop into a private dirt road where they grew Sugar Cane and Guanabana. What is a guanabana? Its a odd looking oval and large fruit which outside is a tough skin and inside has a custard with seeds and tastes like a cross between a banana and a strawberry with a hint of sour — Real good. We got to the main area where the workers were farming and they were absolutely stunned that 8 massive motorcycles drove into the farms dirt road and just parked and started touching their fruit. In the end, that is the fun of this stuff, the workers were very friendly and gave us a ripe fruit and cut it for us — while they stared at us with an uneasy smile, still stunned. That was a great moment.
On we continued and were making good time. At lunch we again got off the beat and ended up in this very small village with looked like maybe a few hundred people lived. I would say its typical, but the infrastructure was much nicer than most towns which are basically shanty-town villages. Anyway, we all parked in the town center and the entire village came out to greet us with curiosity and excitement. They walked over, took mopeds, a few motorcycles and the theme was that we had dropped in from outer space. We all ate at a chicken place which actually was pretty good. I had the only quarter roasted chicken and the rest got Columbian version of KFC.
The days ride was escorted by never ending farms, but not as we know them — more like fields and rainforest with coffee, fruit, corn, cane and everything edible and tropical you can imagine. From my eye it seems like Columbia should be super wealthy with its never ending lush rain forests with green fields and mountains, but I guess the money stays with the distribution in another country and the local farmer gets squat. I was also thinking how easy it is to have a field anywhere which grows drugs. It would be so easy if nobody ratted you out because the Country so far is one big green and lush farm. Unless the police traced the contraband, it is virtually impossible to pick that out of the countryside — either in the mountains or just about anywhere — it has to all blend in. These workers work for shit and just need a few bucks to get some clothes.
After lunch we were on schedule to get to Cali by 4pm or less. The traffic was great and the ride even better., My confidence has increased and as number 1 for Oliver, I never held up the group and we moved at a good clip. Of course we hit rain again but this time we rode through it and it stopped just before reaching Cali.
Cali is what I think of as a typical large industrial and commercial city in South America; grey, brown and old with limited infrastructure. Cali is very industrial with heavy equipment probably supporting the rural farms for hundreds of miles surrounding it. I will add that at some point entering the city, we did pass a strip of buildings that were modern-ish looking factories and storage that have to be owned by the large multi-nationals for export. That was the first time on the entire trek from Cartagena that I have seen anything that vaguely resembles modern.