Sloth on a Stick

Finally had done with Cartegena and headed South into the heartland of Colombia. The first thing I noticed on this leg of the journey was that WD-40 when sprayed all over your bike to protect it from salt water and then used again to clean the bike up after the crossing, gets into your brake pads and you have very little in the way of stopping power after that! I knew this would happen so I wasn't surprised but it meant that I had to ride very carefully for the first little while. It took about an hour and a half before the brakes were back to normal :)

The next thing I noticed is that gas costs a lot here in Colombia! Its about $4 per gallon and that's more than anywhere South of the USA. I also found that using the lower octane rather than the premium is a bit hard on my bike. It runs OK (due to the electronic ignition and fuel injection) but is inclined to pre-ignite and makes unhappy sounds under heavy load at low revs - so I guess I´ll stick to the good stuff.

I was not sure what to expect from the traffic or from the local police road blocks (normal when entering a new country) but was pleasantly surprised on both fronts. There was more than the expected amount of city traffic but this was because the city was quite a bit larger than I initially figured. Once out of that though, the drivers here are very well behaved. Likewise, the police road blocks were no problem. There were quite a few of them but we only got stopped and asked for papers once. They were quite insistent that my insurance papers were no good here in Colombia and that I needed local auto insurance. To this, I just trotted out the old "nice, happy, friendly, but very stupid Gringo" persona. It was effective and eventually they gave up trying to explain and just let me go on down the road - "somebody elses problem"!

About half way through the days ride, we came across another little patch of roadside vendors much like the one in Nicaragua. The difference here was that the local commodity of interest was not "parrot on a stick" but rather "sloth on a stick". This was even sadder than the birds being for sale and I again had issues about stopping and taking pictures while I thought about the moral implications. Again I did not stop this time but decided I would stop next time. Later on there was another little area of parrot salesmen so I took some pictures of these this time.

After a good amount of riding (500km) we had had enough and randomly selected a hotel in a mid-sized town. It was quite a nice hotel and the room was very nice compared to where I had been staying in Cartegena. I was tired and figured I would sleep very well. Unfortunately the room was right on the main street and there were big trucks stopping and starting and roaring through town all night and I ended up getting almost no sleep at all - bummer. Forgot that lesson for a while there so the universe gave me a reminder I guess :)

- average day and a bad night.

The rest is Gravy

Yesterday I went SCUBA diving down here on the NW coast of Columbia.
When I started this trip I had very limited but quit clear objectives as far as doing things went:
1) Make it to Panama
2) Do some rock climbing in Indian Creek, Utah
3) Do some SCUBA diving somewhere in Central America.

So, yesterdays efforts meant that I have now officially cleared that slate and everything else is "gravy" :)

As for the diving, it was not "spectacular" but it was good and I feel satisfied.
I did two dives with one of the local outfits and it cost me about $100. The first dive was the best because we went to two sunken wrecks and did a swim-through of a completely black and quite confined tunnel through one of the wrecks. This was quite scary and required some mental discipline to commit to it. There was also quite a lot of coral that I recognized from my home marine aquarium and the fish were also very colourful and recognizable. The visibility was so-so but it was good enough.
After that dive we hung out on a local beach with brilliant white sand and blue green Caribbean waters and had a nice lunch of fish and fruits prepared by the locals (included in the dive package).
The next dive was late to start and was shorter than desired since the dive leader was low on air. This had happened (more or less as expected) because one of the rented tanks and one of the regulators had problems (pretty normal for developing world dive equipment). I even mentioned that it would be nice if we had a spare reg' and tank for the dive when we were at the dock before leaving. I'm not surprised that the suggestion was ignored though since spare stuff just costs more money and they really do run on a shoestring down here. That said, I felt that the dive leader ran a very safe and well planned dive so no complaints there. The dive leaders limited air supply was compounded by the fact that everyone in the dive group was relatively experienced and calm when diving. That means that we did not puff rapidly through our air supply and so were quite efficient and the dive leader didn't get to end the dive early and thus conserve his own air for the next dive. So the end result was that the second dive was somewhat disappointing since it was short on time and had no exciting wrecks to play around - but it was still a nice dive anyway.

After we finished the dive we headed back to town in the launch. It took about 45 minutes for the trip out in the morning but it took about 70min for the way back. This was because the wind here in the afternoons is very strong and this causes waves and so I again found myself pounding through waves in a boat on the Caribbean. It was no real problem though since I had recent experience with much larger waves. We did get thoroughly soaked by the spray but the water is very warm (no need for a wet suit when diving) and I was wearing swimming gear anyway. Sorry there are no pictures of the actual diving but I don´t have the cash for a big dive camera and they didn´t rent any either. Oh well - memories are good enough :)

Storming the Castle

Just for something to do, Teryk and I decided to go see one of the local tourist attractions - The big old Fort that stands outside the old town. So we strolled over there mid morning and found that it didn´t really look interesting enough for us to pay the entry fee (even though it cost only a few dollars). So then we decided to stroll around the outside of the fort and see what we could see without being in amongst the throng of tourists.

We wandered around and speculated on why this feature was here and that feature was there etc. When we got to the far side of the structure there was absolutely no one around and there was an easy path up onto some of the lower walls of the fort. So, we wandered up and looked around and decided that the walls didn't seem that impregnable. The walls are steeply sloped but quite textured and we figured there was a line of weakness that could quite easily be climbed. So we figured we´d give it a go and see if we were right - We were right!
We clambered up the wall and then wandered casually past a couple of the local security people (with quaking hearts) and in to the throng of tourists. It was not our original plan to avoid paying the entry fee but it turned out to add an extra dimension to our tour of the fort. Then we strolled around inside with the rest of the tourists for a while to see what there was to see.
It wasn't that interesting inside but they did have a very nice, very large Colombian flag that was fun to take pictures of and they also had an old canon half buried, muzzle down in the dirt. - I liked this idea and I think it is an appropriate treatment for all canons! :)


On another note, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to all my readers for the terrible quality of my spelling in all my blog posts. Ive always been bad at spelling and am these days unashamed about it. However, it has come to my attention that there are a couple of regular readers for whom English is not a first language and my spelling as well as my writing style must make it difficult to read at times. - hello to Marie´s mum :)
Sorry about that, I´ll try to do more corrections, but I´m a bit stuck in my ways these days :)

Cartegena

Landfall in Columbia was at Cartegena which is a colonial city on the North Coast.
Apparently the place was regularly attacked by pirates when it was used by the Spanish as the main port for shipping the treasures of the new world back to Spain. Francis Drake was one of the pirates that totally sacked the place back in the 16th century. The Spanish then spent two centuries building massive fortifications around the town and port. These walls and forts are still here (They are indeed massive!) and the old section of the town within the walls has been very well preserved. The town has become a major tourist destination in Columbia and with good reason; The architecture and atmosphere are wonderful. The old buildings with stone entryways and hidden courtyards with fountains and swimming pools are magnificent. The flower covered balconies throughout the old town make me seriously think about what it would be like to live here for a while.
The town is hot during the day but in the evening the place really comes alive with al-fresco dining everywhere (it is a bit full of tourists though). In short, I would have to say that it blows away my previous "best city experiences" on the trip (Oaxaca and San Christobal de Las Casas in Mexico).

After we arrived from the boat, we spent a day recovering from the days of sea-sickness induced starvation (ie just drinking and eating and making little moans of satisfaction).
Then the next day was spent getting the bikes off the boat and running again. This proved more difficult than hoped and Marie spent the morning taking her bike apart and putting it back together. Eventually her bike started up fine after we had towed it up and down the street for about a kilometer (I guess it still had its own version of sea-sickness to get over). The big seas and strong winds meant that the salt-water dousing were constant for the bikes and it was really hard on them

- Note to Motorbike Riders - Don´t take your bike to sea if you care about it!!

The amount of corrosion on all exposed metal surfaces and especially on any exposed electrical wiring and contacts was terrible. We had prep´ed the bikes as best we could and had sprayed all the sensitive bits with WD-40 but it seemed to make no difference at all. So each of us spent more or less a full day in Cartegena working over our bikes very thoroughly and trying to get rid of as much of the corrosion as possible.
So, now we have been in town for almost a week and the bikes are about ready to move. Ive got a few more touristy things to see here and then I´ll likely head East along the North coast. Then from looking at my map and some reading it looks like more or less a straight run South into Ecuador over about a week or so. I´m yet to ride around in the country and they say you need to be much more careful than in Central America, but we´ll just see how it goes.

Das Boot

Stahl Ratte - The name is German for "Steel Rat" and she was about a 40m long steel hulled (riveted) schooner (two masts with the rear mast being the larger one) built in Norway around the turn of the previous century. She usually travels using both engine and sail and has a top speed of only 8 knots (16Kmh) The engine was a big 50 year old diesel that ran at about 300rpm. This is so slow that you can clearly hear each piston fire (about ten per second).
The crew were a bunch of about seven Germans all of whom seemed very nice. The ship is run as a society and some of the crew are permanent (the captain has been there for 25 years) and others are just there on holiday like the 17 travelers they were ferrying to Columbia (to earn some money to help maintain the ship).

The Crossing
After we had lashed the bikes to the gunnels and made fast the luggage, we hove anchor and set course for the nearby San Blass islands – Yarr!
The islands are a bunch of idyllic little Caribbean islands covered in palm trees and surrounded by coral. There are tiny ones with a single palm tree up to larger ones with small villages and an airstrip. We anchored near a larger one for the night and settled in aboard. The next morning we did the customs requirements for leaving Panama and then headed further away to another island. There was quite a strong wind but the waves were smallish since we were inside a reef (apparently the second largest in the world after Australia’s barrier reef). We stayed there for about two days and enjoyed diving off the ship into the warm water and snorkeling around the nearest small island (about 20 palm trees).
Then it was time to head for Columbia. The captain gave us a mild warning that the waves outside the reef would be larger and that because the wind was strong and from dead ahead that it could be a slow passage.
Alas his words were something of an understatement. We spent the next three days in a living hell of constant motion sickness, bad water and near starvation. Two thirds of the people on board were constantly sea-sick (myself included) and while semi-functional were not able to keep any food down at all. I threw up at least six times and blew blood vessels in my eyes with the effort! I’ve spent months on ships traveling to and from the Antarctic in big seas but this was way worse (mostly because the ship is much smaller and gets tossed about much more). It was quite entertaining at night laying in a deck chair on the upper deck looking up and watching the masts “stir the starts” in between bouts of hanging my head over the railing and "feeding the fish"!
After six days the waters became calm again and we had arrived at the North coast of Columbia. We were pulling into the port town of Cartegena; one of South Americas most attractive and touristy cities.

Four Bikes in a Dugout Canoe

Where were we?…
Ah yes on a river bank in the jungle.
There were in fact several other people there to meet us. They were specifically there to help us get the bikes over the next obstacle.
Waiting in the river was a large dugout canoe (probably the largest one I have seen) but there was no ramp that I could see. We had to get all four bikes into this canoe in order to get taken down stream and out into the bay where the larger boat was waiting for us. The technique employed here was simple brute force. That is to say we simply rode the bikes one at a time into the river alongside the canoe and then everyone took hold and heaved the bike up about 1.2m and into the air, over the side and down into the canoe. The only reason that this worked was because we had about ten people there to help with the “laying on of hands”.
So now that we had the bikes all loaded into one canoe and the gear and luggage all loaded into another one, we pushed off and headed down the jungle shrouded stream.
This was getting very “Indiana Jones” and then more so as the river sped up and we had some small rapids and tight bends to negotiate while ducking under draping vines and keeping an eye out for anacondas :) The skipper on the little outboard and his mate with the long pole were quite competent though and we successfully made it through the jungle river past a small village of thatched huts in a jungle clearing and out into the bay.

The bay was however not as smooth as I would have liked and there was quite a bit of chop out there. If this canoe went over, it was going to be quite expensive. Again, the crew knew what they were doing and we didnt capsize or sink and fairly quickly came alongside the big boat out in the bay. Getting the bikes up the 3m onto the deck of the ship was comparatively easy though as they just used two block-and-tackles suspended from the rigging and hauled them up one at a time :)

Full-Contact Off-Roading!

After the new years party, we had a day to get money, guide books, maps, and prep the bikes for Columbia. This was enough time but only just, and I was still feeling quite flustered and uncertain about the whole “going to Columbia” thing.
But, the sun went down as usual and it came up the next morning and we were off again.

Today we had to ride to where the boat was waiting for us. This meant riding from the Pacific side of Panama over to the Atlantic side, then along a highway for a bit and then down a 40Km dirt road. We were quite worried about this dirt road since we did not know how good or bad it would be and we couldn't’t seem to get any details. Eventually we were assured by the organizers (at the Hostel) that the track was in good condition and should be no problem. We were also told that the other travelers on the boat trip would be going in by 4WDs at the same time so we could follow them and they could assist us if needed.
So, at 6am we were outside the hostel with bikes and 4WDs and everyone ready.

The 4WDs started up and drove off before we even had our helmets on and that was pretty much the last we saw of them!
There were four of us on bikes and two had GPS so we were able to find our own way to the start of the dirt road (with a few questions asked of bystanders as usual). It only took about two hours to get here so things were going fine.
The dirt road however looked like it could get difficult as it had a high clay content and there were rain clouds in the area...

Soon enough we found that things were not quite as easy as we had hoped they would be!
The clay sections were quite wet in places and this gets really treacherous on a bike (and our bikes were all fully loaded and gassed up – max weight). Within the first 5km, we had all fallen off at least once and the trail was getting worse. The slippery clay just fills in all the lugs on our off-road tyres and we were left with nice smooth wheels to try to stick to the steep slimy trail.
It turned into the quintessential jungle trail riding that you see in your imagination.
My bike was the biggest and heaviest and least off-road-able and I dumped it in the mud at least a dozen times. Most of these were at less than walking pace and on steep down hills. The only way to try to get down these was to get yourself into one of the car wheel ruts, switch off the engine, and then use the clutch as a rear brake and the regular front brake. This way you can paddle with both feet and control each wheel individually. It didn’t really make much difference though since on anything but flat ground, the brakes just instantly lock up the wheels and then you try to ride the sliding bike down the bob-sled track using your feet to try to keep it upright. Usually sooner rather than later your foot slips and over you go! Then it would take two or three helpers to get the bike upright before you start the process all over again. It wasn’t long before we were all completely covered in mud and sweating buckets. That said, we were however all keeping very good spirits and laughing very hard each time someone took a spill. I particularly enjoyed the scene when I looked up to see Teryk’s head go bouncing down the trail – after a second look, it turned out that it was just his helmet.
So, some six hours later we arrived at a river bank in the middle of the jungle. All the bikes and bags and clothing was plastered in red clay mud. All the bikes had assorted “service issues” but we were alive and well and glad to be through it. My bike had the usual destroyed indicators and was belching huge plumes of oily smoke – For a while there I thought I had really damaged the engine and even seized it up at one point...

How to maximize the “Oh-No” feeling.
In retrospect though it turns out that my bike just does not like to be upside down!
When it is, oil leaks from the engine into the air filter box (not a good design in my opinion). Then when the bike is put right side up (with the assistance of others), the oil in the air box gets drawn down through the carb and into the cylinders. This just means the bike blows smoke for a while. But, if the bike is upside down for a few minutes, quite a lot of oil leaks out. And then after righting and restarting it, if you stop the engine before that oil has all gone into the running engine, it continues to drain into the carb and down into one or other cylinder through an open valve. Then if you try to start it up, you get whats called hydraulic lock on that piston and it won’t even crank over.
This feels really bad since you think you have seized your engine and you are in the middle of a jungle track covered in mud with just about no options of getting the bike in or out for repairs. This feeling of “oh shit” can be further heightened by the gentle rain and the sounds of Howler monkeys enjoying your predicament very vocally from the nearby trees!
I have found that this particular situation is best alleviated by using the “engine brake” technique to roll your dead bike down the next treacherously slimy hill to a flat spot. You then find when you get there that the steady slow pressure of using the engine to brake the rear wheel has slowly pushed the excess oil out of the locked cylinder and into the exhaust. Only then are you fully able to accept and enjoy the gales of laughter coming from your friends. This is because you are at last able to start your engine but your bike is now doing a great impression of something between a space shuttle launch and a London Fog!
Ahh the lessons of life :)))