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.