travellingbennetts

The end always starts with a beginning, which was in Santiago. Then the end of the beginning, that probably happened on arrival into Buenos Aires. Then the beginning of the end, which occurred once we’d escaped the confines of buses and were back on the bikes in Lima. Just out of sight over the hill past the Colombia border facility was the end, we just had to get there. Easier said than done.

Immigration took about 1 minute, assisted by the border people who were training some off-siders and were apparently trying to show them that smiling and nodding at people who have toddler level Spanish is better than expecting a miracle through shouting. Through that, we wandered up the hill to an office building for the bikes to get through customs at around 5:30pm, expecting a quick result. And then the wheels came completely off, caught fire, and crashed into an avgas storage facility next to a baby unicorn orphanage. Colombia had just implemented a new web-based customs system to make things easy, and we all know how that turns out. The bandwidth at the border was 1 pigeon/minute, so logging in to the web and opening the system only took 10 minutes. Then our Spanish “skills” came back to haunt us, no English version of the forms available. And then it started to rain, so we jammed into the customs office with the customs officers, most of whom were totally disinterested in us except when we blocked their access to the fridge. Then we needed to provide all our information, in PDF format. Including our passport, our passport Colombia stamp, rego, and a photograph of our VIN number on the motorcycle. Not sure if you’ve ever decided to selfie the VIN but it’s not easy to get, and to apply the camel back-breaking straw to the mess, standard smart phones can’t convert .jpg photo files to .pdf. By this time it was heading onto 8:30pm and no-one had yet gone through the process and got out – the usual resigned humour had evaporated with the hope.

Fears of living the rest of one’s now considerably shorter life at the border were misplaced, JC managed to get most processed and I managed to .pdf everything with Roisin’s help, and suddenly had approval, although some imperfections would later come back to haunt me. Some more waiting for everyone else, and we were heading in dribs and drabs into the border town of Ipiales to the hotel. On arrival after only getting slightly lost, a small familiar crowd was gathering out the front of the decidedly dodgy looking premises – Scott and Gina announcing that we didn’t have a booking. Luckily there was a shop next door that sold spirits, beer, and chips, with that well-known combo always successful in improving any situation while we waited for someone with Spanish skills to appear. JC arrived, spoke to the front desk, and we re-mounted to head off to wherever it was we were heading off to. As it turned out, into the middle of the city, to a very nice hotel. Humours came flooding back over the angry levee like, well, floodwater. Around the corner to a pizza dinner, and the big day was done.

Day 91 (wondering while writing this if anyone noticed the previous day had been Day 92 in Ecuadorable, luckily no-one is that switched on unless they have some sort of psycho-obsessive Norman Bates condition that could easily explode into violence) was to Popayan. The roads in Colombia are famously twisty, and today was a joy until we hit the trucks. The stopped line of vehicles just went on forever, and occasionally one would decide they could easily make three lanes out of the standard two to speed things up when the line started moving. This would create some manoeuvring, at times needing trucks to back up or move sideways via pointing and waving to allow us through. And then suddenly we were through a checkpoint, and on our own. Alarm bells started going off, hopefully it was simply a landslide with only a 1.5 m wide track of unblemished tarmac around a huge boulder, yes surely that was why trucks and cars had been stopped by authorities. Then we came upon another checkpoint, whose attendant had enough English and hand signal skill to say “slow, it is slippery”. Mate, we’ve ridden from half-way down to the bottom, and now nearly all the way to the top of South America without once dropping the bike. Toby Price hasn’t managed that. We’ll be fine.

Bikes into off-road mode, we started down. As the road started to steepen, the slippery started. Clay had been selected as the roadworks topcoat, fine if in the Atacama, but less fine if in the tropics with rain almost every day. Coming around a truck while barely in control, confidence wasn’t improved seeing all four of our predecessor’s bikes lying down, and a turn to the side where grip is always better meant the back started to slide out. In a slow-motion sliding clay ballet, a scallet if you will, I got to a point where lying the bike down was the only physical possibility. Damn it, officially the first ever drop in South America, North America, or Africa. Plenty in Australia but that doesn’t count. Cindy had stopped and decided that walking her bike down was the go, we’ve had a wealth of experience in this situation, but I claim that I was ambushed. Someone nice helped me right my bike, then to the edge, then a slow slip-step trying to stay upright while allowing the bike to slide down under its own steam. Cindy got down with a bit of help from the local Colombian guerillas, who control the area we were sliding through. Eventually we got to a flatter and drier bit, so could start crafting our personal story of how magnificently we’d handled the crisis, with the dropping of the bike simply to give the school children something to hide behind during the fire-fight between local FARC guerillas and the Colombian army.

Heading into Popayan got a little messy, I got into a wrong lane so missed a turn and caused a long delay for the others, which they took advantage of to hone and practice their heroic slippery hill stories. Into the hotel, which was happily an estancia on a coffee estate, and the top accommodation ranking for the trip was threatened. Magnificent rooms, freely flowing drinks service which started to reveal some cracks in the slippery hill stories, and a great dinner was much appreciated. A downer was that the support vehicle had been trapped with the trucks so J2, Gabi and Roisin and more importantly my pyjamas were not going to get in until at least midnight. Life can be tough.

Continuing north-ish on Day 92 we did the now usual Colombian twisting road extravaganza, dodging trucks and traffic as per custom. The navigation was back on Garmin, so therefore completely random with some people suggested to take ridiculous dirt roads while others stayed on the main road. A new lunch tradition had now started – roadside service stations complete with truckies yet somehow lacking fuel – and these enabled the Holy Grail of South American travel to be captured, the Quick Lunch. Australians are used to being able to pull into a servo at 12 noon ± 60 minutes, and while paying for fuel select a fizzy drink and “food” from the awesome display of pies, pasties, sausage rolls, dimmies, chico rolls, things that resemble fish, plain or cheese filled sausages, and chips. Fuel + lunch + bike maintenance = 15 minutes. In South America a road lunch can take 3 hours, with full menu service and wines and utterly random appearance of dishes, usually salads which come out 2½ hours after ordering while the freshly caught and slow-roasted spatchcock came out 3 minutes after the order was placed. But JC had found a loophole – the very limited menu. Chicken, or fish? The restaurant can then just bring the same plates out – problem solved. Into Salento, we’d been warned the hotel was on a street like a precipice so need to be careful parking, but it turned out to be nearly the Salar de Uyuni flat. A very nice little town, plenty of colour and a short walk to the Plaza to try to find Colombian pesos (COPs), which we needed more of once we’d been ambushed by team members on a spree at a local watering hole. Off to dinner, and we prepped for another big city entry day on Day 93.

Into Bogota; destination the Bioxury Hotel. That makes it sound direct and easy; it wasn’t. The roads were the usual truck dodging exercise, made better once into the road works which allows the motored cyclists to proceed to the front of the queue. The wait time can be a bit random though, with others encouraged to get off their bike and start doing something that will hopefully get things happening. Starting with taking the gloves off, then the helmet, then the backpack. If these don’t work like they did brilliantly at the Peru border crossing unfortunately with half of Chile getting in front of me, then lighting up a ciggie, or taking the boots off to change socks might be a winner. Next level is bike maintenance, getting the bike up on the centre stand and getting the tyre pump out with all 10 m of cable unrolled is a surefire way for the lollypop man to unexpectedly give the go signal. Finally, if still no action, putting the keys into a pocket never before used for the keys which will be forgotten in a panic and wandering off into the scrub to use the virtual facilities (i.e. a shrub) is a last resort.

And then after finally getting going we were into the tunnels. The Tunel de La Linea is 8.5 km long and there are lots more tunnels, dual lane and simply epic riding as long as one remembers to raise the tinted visor to see. Then into the bedlam that is Bogota, in particular the main road coming in from the west that even defeated scooters in trying to filter up between the barely moving cars and vans and trucks. Arriving in the usual sweaty mess, it was once more waiting a bit for our room to become available, then up to relax in the bioxury and prepare for the evening’s norm of finding somewhere for a drink before a group dinner with the usual hilarity.

The usual city tour had changed for Day 94, we were going to the Museo del Oro, literally the Museum of Gold but with a very attractive history section which rightfully said that metallurgy is one of mankind’s greatest achievements, although the vibe in the room was that metallurgy is the greatest achievement. Someone started on about getting rid of smallpox, but they were quickly shut down by the hostile crowd and moved on by security. With self-congratulation peaking amongst some of the group, we moved through the excellent museum and then took a wander about the Bogota centre, which naturally has a similar design to every other city on the continent with its central Plaza. Then back in a cab to the hotel, then off to the big shopping centre down the road to find lunch.

A craft brewery dinner with the returned drama of trying to order via an app requiring Wi-Fi with a complicated password (i.e. in Spanish), and Bogota was finished. Except for a stop off at an Irish Pub on the way back to the Bioxury under the assumption that David and Roisin would be in there for purely cultural reasons.

Heading north on Day 95, it was a pretty short one to Villa de Leyva, a geologically important tourist town. The main excitement of the day was caused by the lack of confidence the Villa de Leyva council Roads and Plazas Division has in bitumen or concrete. Baby head rocks is their preferred surfacing medium, for every public space. Our hostess said as we were heading out to dinner that Villa de Leyva was very safe. We said we were on motorcycles, so then she said perhaps not.

A very pleasant hors du camion (off the truck) lunch, and then a wander through town. A feature of the town is the palaeontology, with fossils coming out the wazoo. Even the rocks in the garden bed outside the room were chock full of ammonites, nature’s answer to the primary school ashtray.

Rain that evening and night had the panic attacks in full rage by dawn of Day 96; the graphic thoughts of riding out over smooth, wet and therefore slippery baby head rocks was a torture for the overly imaginative cyclist. As always, the things you think are going to be a life-threatening drama are a non-event, the rain had stopped and the babies were mainly dry. Even when not they were fine and no possible justification for lost sleep. Heading west on the still ridiculously winding roads, the plan for the short day was somewhere else we’d never heard of; Doradal.

Artistic disaster occurred early on. The iPhone had been used extensively for navigation over a couple of weeks, mainly because it showed the stops on the daily route which was important if one wanted a coffee or lunch which one did/does. One was not aware that iPhones are vibration sensitive, and eventually the auto focus stability mechanism fails if mounted on motorcycle handlebars. The result was weirdly wavey and out-of-focus photos, ironically a bit Salvador Dali melting landscape artistic.

Across the large Magdelena River in oven conditions and a bit of resulting tension on the intercom, we found the turn-off to the Hotel Madeira Boutique which was built in the African style, the entire construction budget had been spent on the hotel and grounds which left nothing at all for the access track. More large rocks but this time on a narrow steep ascent, fortunately no dramas for anyone. A nice lunch out of the truck again, and the afternoon was mainly spent having a few quiet drinks and splashing about in the infinity pool.

Peter’s failed Suzuki V-Strom which had been on the truck since Ecuador went off for electrical repairs, and some effort was made to straighten out David’s dented R1250GSA front rim using a 4 by 2 and a small sledgehammer just to while away the glorious time. Up on Day 97, success had been achieved with Peter’s bike even though they’d taken until 3am to completely re-wire it, and he was back in the game for the unsurprisingly highly twisting road to the famous Medellin, pronounced Meddlin’ except by Colombians and just about everyone else.

The trip into the planned Medellin was a bit confusing, the road we were on would bring us through the city from the north, so JC decided to make a change to come in from the east. Some U-turns and random deviations later, we made it to the hotel. Cindy claimed that her rear brake wasn’t working, so I decided to take the Tigressa for a lap of the hotel car park. Down the hill towards the street, and then a half decision to take the footpath half changed to the main street, and the footpeg hit the edge of the garden. Bike fell over and left me sitting on the lawn with my boot trapped under the bike and refusing to come out. Shouting at team members didn’t work, they were oblivious. Passers-by saw my predicament and rushed to help, then started conversations when I told them we had ridden much of South America although right now it didn’t look like I had the skills to ride around the block. Eventually someone decided to help lift the bike off, they were just heading out on a big tour south to Santiago themselves so felt that they had to do something. Mind you, Scott had a more exciting day as he and Gina had headed off earlier than the group, and he’d decided to take a highly technical dirt track to get into Medellin. Gina smacking him on the back of the helmet only made it more technical.

The Medellin experience was basically all about getting the bikes out of the country. The web-based system hadn’t specified the bikes departure date; we’d assumed it was our departure date rather than the bikes so 5^th June was the popular choice. Turned out that the bikes weren’t leaving until 20^th June earliest, so would be living under expired permits. Hence we headed to the Bureau of Customs down in Dodgetown Medellin, and parked at a public parking facility. The security point passed in the Bureau, we went to the appropriate office to be told there was no appropriate office to meet our needs. Never mind, back to the hotel and Garmin destroyed our competition; Cindy, David and I arriving way before everyone else. Then the longest lunch in tour history, the Caesar Salad took longer to arrive than it took Caesar to decide to cross the Rubicon. Never mind, a few drinks and a trip to the supermarket and Medellin was done, no time for the Escobar tour unfortunately.

Day 98 started the descent. Through winding roads shrouded in warm fog with the usual traffic dodging, and then gone were the cooler climes of the mountains, down on the river and coastal plains it is just relentless sweating, with high-speed air flow the only counter measure. Luckily we were getting onto the straighter roads by Colombian standards, sometimes 200m between corners and then even further.

Lunch in an open air venue at Taraza, these sorts of restaurants are common in Colombia and attract the truckies and other travellers. Simple food and big serves, typical of the truckie lifestyle. Unlike Australia though, there is always a fridge full of beers, we just could not be trusted. The destination for the day was Monteria, which was a relatively easy day’s ride from the end. Lots of phone calling and texting was the order of the day, everyone’s bike customs issues had been resolved except mine, and the automated system wasn’t working. Finally we got a message and a call from the Director of Customs himself, full of apologies regarding inconvenience while enunciating his intent to destroy JC’s hopes of keeping my bike, so my problems were solved. Planning also started on this day – we’d need to have the fuel content in the tanks down to a couple of litres, so calculations were done using average sea-level and average speed and average weight consumption, instantly ruined by passing a ridiculously long sugar cane road train at 180 kmh.

The parking was interesting in Monteria, the hotel was part of a shopping centre so we parked in the centre’s car park and wandered through the shops to check-in. Up to the pool bar, a small non-truck stop meal, and the second last day was done.

Day 99. Cartagena. End of the end, almost. Not an easy day, the temperature and humidity climbed relentlessly, some people had filled their CamelBak, but others didn’t like to break the lines of their riding suit for the photos the crowds would be taking on arrival.

Like all South American cities, Cartagena is huge so clogged suburbia went on for about 10km – our hotel was near the coast so tough to access. Dehydration became a real risk, but with some CamelBak ride sharing we made it across a huge water crossing in the middle of an intersection and into the San Lazaro Art Hotel. Conveniently located right next to the imposing Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas, and with air conditioning that worked well, the remaining riding was merely to the port and as we were on the water surely that couldn’t be too far away from the hotel. As always too early to check in, we whiled away the time having a leisurely lunch.

The activities at the close of a big tour are; doing the laundry, unpacking and re-packing, checking paperwork, trying to get one’s iPhone fixed, doing touristy stuff, having huge celebratory drinks and dinners, buying souvenirs which should have happened all through the trip and now results in everyone at home only getting a gift from Cartagena, thoroughly washing the bikes, getting the export paperwork notarised and then taking them to the port. Phew, lots on in a couple of days.

Day 101 rocked around, and it was time to take the sparkling bikes to the port. Unfortunately Peter’s V-Strom refused to start and kept blowing fuses again, a lesson for the kids there about high pressure washing of motorcycles. So it was up on the truck for its final South American journey. Even more unfortunately it was a freakin’ moist oven outside with a very long trip to the port in 38°C temperature and 3000% humidity, sans CamelBak because we had no idea it was going to take us 45 minutes. Into the port on the cusp of total dehydrated sunstroke, we hung around after finding water and quietly sweated until the port crew were ready to process us. Signing all the documents, a detailed inspection was carried out on the luggage and things going with the bikes, and then the battery on each was disconnected while standing inside a moist furnace that was the shipping warehouse. Losing a battery connection bolt and being unable to get the battery cover onto Cindy’s bike to get the seat back on may have caused someone to have a temper tantrum with associated sweat spray over a big radius, but no-one could remember who.

Picking the bikes up in Santiago in February was the beginning. Leaving the bikes at the port in Cartagena was the end, realised as soon as we got back to the hotel. Suddenly nothing is left but saying “see you later” to the group and getting on the plane, for us to Panama, Cuba, Texas USA, and then home.

A dedication and huge thanks to the people and now friends who turned it from a ride into an adventure and provided a lot of hilarious moments: Leader JC and Juan2 in the support truck, Paul and Allana on their blue BMW R1200GS, Scott and Gina on their BMW R1250GSA with illegally sized panniers, Rex and Sally on their Triumph Tiger 800XC, David on his BMW R1250GSA and Roisin who refused to go anywhere near it, Peter on what was once a Suzuki V-Strom 650, Mick on his bumblebee BMW R1250GS, and Gabi – the first person ever to sacrifice their buttocks with an entire Compass tour in the support truck.

So big highlights from 101 days? The personal list with a riding focus, of course there were heaps of non-riding moments:

• Patagonia. Torres del Paine (except for horse riding – why do we always fall for that?) and the El Calafate glacier.
• Gravel (Duncan only for this one) – especially from the Angostura estancia. Great fun day with Rex, Scott and Gina, besides Cindy’s bike drama which as usual provides a big story everyone wants to hear about.
• Reaching Ushuaia.
• The ride up to the top out of Purmamarca (Permanent Marker) in northern Argentina. One of the best rides, ever.
• Death Road ride day on DR650’s with Scott.
• Ride from La Paz Bolivia down into Arica Chile day. Awesome scenery, a fantastic day.
• Roads in Colombia. The one out of Bogota to Medellin was dual lanes and relentlessly twisty. Like a personal racetrack, just awesome riding.
• Crossing the equator.

End of the USA