Long way home (Motorcycle Diaries, Pt V)

Heading towards El Carmen.

Like a Walmart shopper, I got an early start on Black Friday. I've found there comes a point during most adventures when I need a break from my own thoughts so I popped headphones in and cruised through the countryside. With the throttle on the little 125 wide open, I danced along to ZZ Ward, Kanye, and some reggaeton while ignoring the uneasy looks from other drivers. Apparently dancing and driving isn't a thing in Colombia.

I cruised all the way back to the Ruta del Sol and started retracing my way south towards Bucaramunga. I wasn't quite ready for my adventure to end though and Marlon's map denoted a big triangle off to the east going through El Carmen, Ocana, and Cucuta so I decided to head that way.

Exiting the Ruta del Sol, it would be an understatement to say I was startled to find the road I needed was dirt. I still wasn't used to the idea that I could go from one of the largest highways in Colombia to a dirt road instantly, so I spent several minutes sitting on the side of the road trying to figure out if I was in the right place. It was only when I saw a tanker truck barreling along, kicking up a huge cloud of dust, that I decided this was indeed a "main road."

The road twisted through the mountains, following babbling creeks and climbing to scenic outlooks over and over again. When I finally made it to a small town I stopped for the night. The one hotel in town didn't have a single-occupancy room for me so the proprietor told her 4-year-old son to walk me down the street to a family that had a cheap room. Basically what they had was a bed in their storage room which they rented for 3 bucks a night. It was awesome to stay in a rural family's home and though the accommodations were extremely basic nothing was lacking.

It took about two hours, but once one of the kids started talking to me everyone had hundreds of questions. All in Spanish. One of the men, William, drew me three maps in a row - every time I would get up from the table the map he had drawn would disappear and he would insist on redrawing a new one for me. He warned me to stay on main roads because I was deep in FARC territory and venturing down a side road would almost certainly land me on the front page of newspapers. Although I had seen an "anti-explosives" insignia on a soldier walking down the road earlier that day, this was the first time I realized I would be riding through a conflict zone and had mixed feelings.

On one hand I felt confident I'd be fine. FARC was making headlines for surrendering and de-escalating conflict, and I figured the last thing their PR campaign needed was a foreign kidnap victim. I was riding a local motorcycle, and with a full-face helmet, long sleeve shirt, and jeans it was difficult to tell me apart from a Colombian. But - this local man was very adamant that it was very dangerous. I decided I wasn't willing to turn around.

Overlooking El Carmen.

In the morning I rode on to the beautiful colonial town of El Carmen and found further evidence of the conflict. The buildings leading into town forced a pinch-point in the road and that was exactly where the police decided to position their station. It didn't look like a peaceful police station though, there were bunkers and sand bags stacked out front in case of an attack. On the street corner an officer was lounging in a plastic lawn chair, surveying the area while casually chatting on a phone held with his left hand. In his right hand, draped over a sand-filled 55-gallon barrel was a large pistol, and slung across his lap was a menacing automatic rifle. It was the most casual display of massive firepower I'd seen.

The rest of El Carmen was beautiful but I left to continue towards Ocana. I was nervous the whole way and tried to avoid talking to people since that would give away my Gringo status, but the remote dirt road riding and spectacular views made it worth it. At Ocana I relaxed because William had told me that was the end of the dangerous area. He also told me to check out Los Estoraques and although my Spanish wasn't good enough to understand what Los Estoraques was, when I saw a sign for them I peeled off the road.

Los Estoraques. They're cool and all, except I live near Moab, Windows, and Zion.

Leaving Los Estoraques I started climbing a mountain pass on to Cucuta but was turned back by a rain storm. By the time I got close to the top I was wearing shorts, jeans, a tee-shirt, a tank top, a long sleeve shirt, a wool sweater, and a rain jacket, and I was soaked and freezing. I crested the mountain pass, grimacing as the road transitioned from pavement to potholed mud. A local shop owner told me the rain went on for hours, and though I know rural Colombians would rather make something up than admit not knowing the answer, at this point I was just looking for a reason to turn around and that's exactly what I did.

Bad weather lost its novelty real quick.

That night I stayed just outside Ocana in one of the nicest hotels I've ever been in. It cost 13 dollars a night. The town was having a celebration of some sort so I sat in the town square and watched kids have flour fights, teenagers race motos in the streets, and a local band rock out while writing in my travel journal. It was a fitting way to spend the last night of my trip.

In the morning I made the epic run from Ocana to Bucaramunga to San Gil. It was 310 kilometers on extremely twisty road on a 125cc motorcycle. I got stopped by a cop once, I saw a flipped cargo truck, I descended into a 2000m deep canyon and climbed back out, and then, finally, I arrived back at the Colombian Bike Junkies HQ in San Gil. The moto made it. I made it. The adventure was incredible.

Overlooking the Chicamocha Canyon, nearly home!

Finial route map

Out of the desert (Motorcycle Diaries, Pt IV)

The adventures in and around Riohacha continued the next morning when my trusty moto, reliable until this point, decided it didn't want to start. I pushed it down the road, sprinting at full speed, and eventually got it bump-started causing blue smoke to billow out the back. I ran it for a while, then stopped and started it a few times over to make sure the water in the watered-down gasoline had mixed back in correctly.

I rode the straight and flat highway east towards Maicao, then turned north towards Uribia and the intersection aptly named Cuatro Vias. There was a railroad that paralleled the highway perfectly, several crashed cars in the ditch presumably from people falling asleep at the wheel, and a lot of cactus. The road was so hot and so boring it wasn't fun anymore and I questioned why I was continuing several times.

I was trying to get to the coastal desert oasis of Cabo de la Vela but had heard that the way there involved a long desert road. I started to take that more seriously as I was passed by expedition-worthy 4x4 trucks with lifted suspension, extra gas cans, full size spare wheels, winches, and jacks. My fantasy of skipping across the desert on an underpowered motorcycle was evaporating as quickly as my water reserves.

At Cuatro Vias I was tired and bored, and the rude attitude of the man in the shack that passed as a convenience store further soured my mood. I was feeling less and less motivated to continue to Cabo and when I realized I was standing on the last meters of paved road I decided against riding it. I probably could have made it but it just wasn't enjoyable anymore so I turned around.

The rural desert had one more trick up it's sleeve though - there's no gas stations. When I asked for directions to a gas station I was pointed to the front of the convenience store shack where a man had soda and liquor bottles filled with fuel. Each one was prefilled, and when I asked for a certain amount the bottle containing it (a liter, a gallon, etc) was upended into my gas tank. I had seen stands on the side of the road where people had a yellowish liquid in bottles but I had assumed it was some sort of local drink, not a makeshift gas station. Turns out gasoline is so cheap in Venezuela there's a huge amount of black market fuel that pours across the border into Colombia. There's so much that conventional gas stations don't exist along the eastern border of Colombia.

Cuatro Vias' gas station

Once I had turned around from Cuatro Vias and decided I wasn't going to Cabo my mood started to brighten. I still wanted to ride some dirt so I swung over to the rail road tracks but was turned back to the highway by a security guard resembling an under-funded Terminator impersonator. I took some pictures of the cactus fences I saw, watched some cows eat watermelon, and smiled as the foliage turned green, the temperature dropped, and curves started to grace my path.

Cows eat watermelon. Who knew?

Ok, ok, I won't try to jump the fence.

Continuing south I lost my gas cap once but went back and found it, and ran out of gas again but quickly found a man on the side of the road selling some. I checked in to one of the worst hotels of the trip, and after dinner turned on the TV finding out it was Thanksgiving because the American football game was playing live.

Thanksgiving sunset outside of La Paz, Colombia.

Riohacha (Motorcycle Diaries, Pt III)

While Marlon's hand-sketched map may have lacked details and scale, it was my main navigational guide and all my problems started when I lost it. I set out from Costeño Beach hostel headed northwest towards Riohacha. The highway hugged the coast line and every hill crested led to a beautiful beachfront view. It was gorgeous and I eventually had to force myself to stop taking pictures for fear I wouldn't actually complete any mileage.

I shouldn't have worried so much. About an hour after leaving the hostel the road turned flat, straight, and hot. Dense jungle foliage which offered shade gave way to grazing pastures of grasses. The road wasn't paved as well, and it stopped following the coast. Eventually I got tired of this and took a random left towards a beach town called Camarones (meaning shrimp in Spanish).

The road was paved, but probably not in the past 20 years. It was elevated and on either side was a weird ecosystem that alternated between swamp and grassland. Strange buildings dotted the landscape so I pulled off the road to have a look. It felt like a desolate place but as I was searching for clues as to what the buildings were a boy carrying a ladder walked by. He told me they were ovens for firing bricks. It's funny – if asked I would have had no idea what the word for oven was but as soon as he said it I understood. I wonder how much we don't know that we know.

I thought I'd stop in town for some lunch but as I rode through I got the feeling I was the only foreigner most of them had ever seen. I was still sick and not ready to sign up for a two hour meet-the-weird-guy town hall so I decided to head back to the highway.

Grazing lands outside of Riohacha.

Brick ovens belching smoke.

I cruised to Riohacha without further incident, got some lunch, and took a dirt road out of town that led straight into an impassible river. The locals told me the road went back to the highway but that clearly wasn't the case. I retraced my route, stopping to watch some people kite surfing as the sun started to set over the ocean.

I didn't want to stay in the city so I rode out of town and saw a sign for The Beaches of Mayapo. I remembered seeing a small road on a map that wound along the beach ending up in Quatro Vias and I was much more interested in taking that road than two long, straight highways. So I headed towards Mayapo.

The road surface was some of the best I had encountered in Colombia so I figured it was a main road and would lead to a decent sized town, which was good because I knew I had to get gas sometime soon. The road was so much fun – long sweeping corners with nothing to obstruct the view so I could fully commit to the apex and push my little 125 as fast as it would go. I was having a blast until the road suddenly, without warning, turned to a network of spidering dirt trails. I felt like I was in a cartoon as I sat there, blinking, thinking “huh.”

Ya can't get there from here.

This was completely outside my frame of reference. How does a main road disintegrate to unmarked dirt trails within a meter? There was no town, no turn around point, no road signs. I shrugged and went back the way I came.

I still didn't want to sleep in the city so when I passed a sign for a refugio (a small guest house) I headed that way. The beach was about a half a kilometer away through the grasslands, and there were about 10 house-looking structures in a row. I assumed one of them was the refugio but as I got closer I realized there were no lights in any building. I walked around and determined that there was absolutely no one around. It looked like a tourist town with restaurants and small shacks, but it clearly wasn't in-season and no one was there. It was a bit eerie as the sun had set and I was quickly running out of the last glow of light.

No matter, I unpacked my hammock and strung it up between two support beams of a thatched roof. It was idyllic – motorcycle, hammock, and backpack all sitting under a thatched roof a few meters from the lapping waves. But it was also spooky. And windy. When I got in the hammock it started slapping me in the face at a rate of about 3 times per second.

I had second, and then third and fourth thoughts. 'Why am I doing this?' I wondered, 'I'm nervous, I'm in the middle of no where in a foreign country, I'm getting battered by wind, and there are normal hotel rooms – not sketchy ones - just a half hour away for only 10 dollars.'

'Forget this nonsense.'

I packed up in about 3 minutes (Hennesey Hammock's snake skins are awesome) and took off back towards Riohacha. It was a euphoric feeling until the bike sputtered and died. I realized I had ran myself straight out of gas. Exasperation set in.

I had passed a house with a light on a few minutes before – the biggest indication of civilization I had seen in a while so I started pushing the bike back. I didn't remember it, but it turns out I had also passed a school where two security guards were chatting at the gate. I told them I needed gas and they answered in the most accent-riddled Spanish I have ever heard. I had no idea what they were saying. I couldn't even understand when they said the word for “10.” Luckily they understood me fine and eventually we worked out that one of them would walk about 2km with me to a cluster of homes where some guy had some gas.

I grabbed my removable day pack which contained all my valuables and we started walking down sand footpaths into the dark. I could see no lights on the horizon, and it was too dark to see any building outlines. I was sure I was going to get gas or get robbed, but I had no idea which one was more likely.

After several random turns we arrived at a trailer where an old woman was lounging in a hammock. My guide asked her for gas but she was out. I started to panic but no one else seemed concerned. We walked a few minutes down the road to another trailer where a disheveled man said he had gas and showed us to a locked shed out back. He opened it, and as his flashlight darted around I saw 10 or 15 five-gallon containers all presumably filled with gasoline. He sold us a few gallons and we walked back to the school, lugging the gas long.

With new gas the bike fired right up and after thanking the guards profusely I headed towards Riohacha for the fifth time that day. Yes, the fifth backtrack in a day.

I was exhausted, sick, anxious, and even a bit scared as I followed the deserted road back towards the city but I couldn't help be in awe of the stars overhead. I stopped, turned off the bike, and starred at them for a few minutes. I felt like I was on a big journey but I was only venturing around one part of one country, a rather small country at that, on one planet. I felt far away from home, but my DT125 topped out around 70kmh and I had only been riding for a few days. The star light had been traveling at the speed of light for 100's or 1000's of years to get to the same spot. Granted – they didn't have to deal with running out of gas (since they are gas. Boom! science joke), getting directions, mechanical failures, or FARC kidnappings, but it still made me feel infinitesimally small and my problems even smaller.

I stopped at the first hotel I found on the outskirts of Riohacha, and with thoughts of all the problems that day juxtaposing the immensity of the universe I climbed into bed. Digging through my pack before falling asleep I found what I should have started the day with – Marlon's map.