Riohacha → Albania → San Juan → Valledupar → Codazzi
Tonight i finally broke and went to a fancy restaurant in Colombia. Well, at least on the marginally fancier end of this rural town of 40,000 people. I spent $10 on a ceviche that probably would've been $5 in Panama, but i desperately needed something fresh after eating a lot of heavy $3 lunches the past few days. The food here is on average slightly better than it was in Panama, but that's not saying an awful lot. I will do a food picture post soon to give you the lay of the land.
But let's rewind back to Riohacha, capital of La Guajira for a while. After my desert break, i headed back on my bike and started pedaling south. My hope is/was to join up with the Río Magdalena somewhere north of the tourist town of Santa Cruz de Mompox, then follow it south. The first step was to get into the wide valley that yawns between the Sierra Nevada and the Sierra de Perijá along the Venezuelan border. Rather than struggling with my bike across even the piddling eastern corner of the Sierra Nevada, i took a zig-zag route across the plains that would pop me out at the bottom end of the railroad that stretches from the Cerrejón mine, through Uribia, to Puerto Bolívar.
I thought going south would mean i was done with the desert, but that turned out not to be the case. It's not a full-out desert, but the earth is very dry and there's not much growing out there besides yellow grass and some very thorny scrub. Little to no shade. Along the way i passed a few Wayuu communities, and stopped in at one for a malta. The guy said he had malta but would i like to try chicha instead? Well, yes please!
Turns out the local drink in that area is chicha - not "chicha" like it's used in Panama (where the word means pretty much any kind of juice) but chicha in the more traditional sense: a corn drink. I think it is mashed, sweetened and slightly fermented corn mixed with water. It tastes a bit like Mexican horchata, or (closer) sikhye, which is a sweet, watery rice drink that you can occasionally find in Korean restaurants. I'm surprised that it hasn't taken off in the corn states of the US, because it's cool and refreshing and sweet and has a few little kernels in the bottom so it's a like a meal at the same time as a drink.
I arrived in Albania in the evening, a town where Google told me there were a couple of hotels. After checking in, i took a walk to the town square, which was bustling as some kind of bingo game was going on, and people were setting up their night market snack stalls, which tend to be parked out the front of bars from sunset to late. This - again - is really the Latin America that i imagined in my head when i first came to Panama (and didn't experience it). Big church with a big square in front of it where all the people gather to socialize and eat street food and have fun. Colombia has it. The squares here aren't quite as happening as the squares in China where entire armies of 大媽 (grannies) flock to dance the evenings away, but they're definitely hubs of activity, especially in the small towns.
But Albania isn't just the town square, it's also very close to the Cerrejón mine, which is a massive coal mine, and perhaps a reason why people in town didn't seem too surprised to see a foreigner roll up and sit down alone with a beer. A few pretty girls came up to chat to me and asked if i was working at the mine. I talked a bit about my bike tour then headed back to the hotel before i turned into a pumpkin.
Yeah, i'm rarely out more than an hour or so past sunset (6pm) here. Not that i can't hear the party, though. At my hostel in Riohacha one night a bar upstairs was blasting music from 7pm right through to 7am the next morning. Subsequent days didn't go all night long, but if deafening accordion music keeps you awake, don't bother with a cheap hotel in La Guajira. Noise complaints are clearly not a thing anywhere in the province.
Nevertheless, my spot in Albania proved to be the quietest yet, so i slept well and headed out the next day, deeper into the valley. I had to cross one decent-sized hill to get into the valley proper, and it's there that i started getting flashbacks to California, specifically a part of Inyo County called Owens Valley. It's dry. There is some cattle. Not much, but some. Also cactus. And mountains on both sides. Occasionally there are tall enough trees on the edge of the road to get some shade. Not often.
Unlike Cali, in La Guajira every now and then there is a village next to a bone-dry riverbed and locals selling fruits and cold drinks.
There was a little patch of water before arriving at San Juan del Cesar, and i thought i had made it out of the arid zone. It's amazing how suddenly the landscape changes when you get close to a creek that actually has some water in it. The trees get bigger, the grass gets greener, you can hear insects and birds overhead, and see lizards in the undergrowth. It's incredible, because when you get just a few hundred meters past the river, it's dead silent and dry as a bone once more.
San Juan was a lot shabbier of a town than Albania. I wandered up and down the main street for quite a while trying to find a 6L bag of water. This is the standard method i have for replenishing my bottles every evening - 4.5L for the bottles, 1.5L for breakfast/coffee and evening sips. Unfortunately those bags - which cost around 50 cents - aren't always easy to source, so your next best option is a plastic bag filled with dozens of 300mL mini-bags of water, which is around $1.50. But it's also more water than i can easily consume in a day, so impractical for traveling. On the other hand, a single 1L bottle of water is $1, so that's just a waste of money and plastic if i want to refill everything. Oy, the joys of traveling somewhere that doesn't have potable water coming out of the taps, and doesn't provide an electric jug in hotel rooms so you can "purify" it yourself, as is the standard situation in China.
Anyway, water tangent. The funny thing about San Juan is i asked in one store after the next after the next, and eventually i found my 6L. But it was all like that. I looked for a cell phone recharge card too and went from one place to the next to the next. There are dozens of stores that appear to sell identical goods, but in fact they are all slightly different. One thing that caught my eye was the numerous street vendors selling phone cards to make cheap calls to Venezuela. At least in this part of Colombia, along the border, you can never forget that something like 1.5 million of the 5+ million displaced Venezuelans now live as refugees in this country.
At one of the stores someone hanging out at the counter struck up a conversation with me, and i had one of the funniest exchanges i had since leaving China. When i explained that i was traveling by bike, and that i was traveling alone, the woman got more and more shocked. Eventually she exclaimed "but how do you eat?!" I'm always bowled over by this question, and it's the first time it's happened to me outside of China (where it happened extremely often). I presume it's rooted in this concept that white people are utterly incapable of eating anything beyond a burger and fries, and when confronted with any kind of food that isn't that, they'd rather just starve to death. Admittedly, this is true of an embarrasingly large number of expats and tourists, but it's still a wack prejudice. I told her i just eat regular almuerzos (lunches) same as her. She's like "so, you like Colombian food!?" - amazed. I told her yes, even though privately i think Colombian food is pretty average. The amusing thing is i think it's average because it is almost as bland as the shitty midwestern food that she apparently thought i preferred, not because it's inedibly spicy or exotic.
Well, San Juan was fun. My next stop was Valledupar - the home of the famous accordion music known as vallenato. To be honest, i think Colombia's vallenato music is less fun to listen to than Panama's típico music. Vallenato uses rhythms that sound more "white" to my ears (they use an aggressive 2/4 beat that sounds like a three-legged horse), and it doesn't feature the mournful yodeling of típico. That said, it is still miles better than fucking rock music. Trust me. I just listened to this shit 12 hours straight while i was trying to sleep. When people are blasting accordion music, it doesn't feel as disturbing because the notes are all really clean and don't sustain for a very long time. It's just melody, like rain drops on a tin roof. When you put it side-by-side with a rock song, dear Lord Almighty, those long endlessly sustained chords make me want to shoot myself in the head. So fucking grating. I think spending the past 4 months consuming almost exclusively accordion music has made me hate guitar music even more than i already did. Ugh. Fuck guitars.
Tangent!
I was expecting the ride to Valledupar to finally take me out of the arid landscape into something a bit more conducive to growing crops, but aside from the odd cotton field, that didn't happen. Again.
What did make me realize that i wasn't in La Guajira any more was the gated communities and the private schools. Clearly Cesar has more wealth than La Guajira. The private schools are of the same type that i saw in China - they always have an English name and a billboard showing some Harry Potter-looking white children standing in front of a fucking castle or something. It's this absurd idea that British private schools are the epitome of a good education, when really they're just places for upper class tosspots to start their old boys network.
Eventually i crested a hill and went deeper into the pocket where Valledupar is nestled.
It's a big city, with highrise buildings and everything. It took me a while to find a hotel where i felt comfortable parking my bike out front because (much like Santa Marta) a lot of hotel lobbies were through a tiny door and up a flight of stairs. Also there are more "luxury" hotels (by which i mean hotels that charge over $20 per night). Eventually i found a spot, checked in, and had a little wander. The town was bustling, although the meticulously polished town square was deserted. I enjoyed some evening fruits, then headed back to bed.
I had originally planned to spend a couple nights in Valledupar while i tried to figure out exactly where i was going to go next, but the hotel had conveniently offered to wash my clothes overnight, so that took away my other excuse for staying in town a little longer. I think i am getting back into the rhythm of bike touring again, and staying two nights in one place just feels wrong.
My challenge for plotting the route past Valledupar is that ideally i wanted to go west along the main highway to Bosconia, then across some smaller (gravel) roads to pop out at Mompox. But Bosconia was 90km away with no hotels in between, and i wasn't able to find enough hotels or hostels along the gravel road route to be sure i'd have somewhere to stay.
The 90km thing is something i could easily have managed on my bike in Canada and the US, and perhaps i could manage it here too, but for the weather. Friends, it has been 38C/100F the past few days. It is brutally hot, and there is almost no shade on the road. After a couple of hours, my water bottles have water hot enough to cook instant noodles. I am getting exhausted very quickly, and i don't think realistically my body can hold out for more than about 5 hours. Since i'm averaging 15km/h or maybe a bit less on this bike, it's not realistic to shoot for 90km.
The remote roads thing is something i am a bit less certain about. There are enough small villages along the way that i could restock with water at least. But if there are no formal hotels or hostels, that means asking someone if i can camp in a nearby yard or field, which i did a few times in Canada, but i'm a bit more scared to do it in Colombia. Of course hardcore cycle tourists just pitch their tent wherever the fuck they want and deal with whatever curious locals or police when they inevitably get busted. But i don't wanna do that, i feel like it's rude to camp illegally, not to mention slightly risky if there are some bad dudes in the area. So i'd prefer to stick to routes where there is at least a hotel or two, especially given the hotels i pick are very affordable anyway. And yet... that messes up my plans a little bit, and might leave me cycling along the highway the whole way. Which... i suppose isn't really as bad as it sounds, because the highway in this part of the country is just a normal sealed one-lane-each-way road. It's much more relaxing to cycle along than the multi-lane highways in Canada and the US.
So, yeah, i dunno. I've put off the problem today by heading south to a town called Agustín Codazzi. It's on a main highway, which i could continue following south tomorrow, or cut west along a much wonkier road to the middle of fucking nowhere where according to Google there is a hotel, which i suspect is one of those expensive rural getaway dude ranch type places, but at least it'd be something. I will try to ask some people in town tomorrow morning to see what they think. No doubt i'll get the usual "just follow the highway" answer, but you never know.
I mean, if i miss Mompox, oh well. I'll still eventually join back up with the Magdalena. I liked the romance of following the same river all the way up, but whatever. Best thing about not having any serious plans when you travel is if you change your mind, it's no big deal. Million interesting places to see in the world, so wherever i end up is fine. The best thing about bike touring is that i can just stop along the way whenever i see something i like, in places where the bus would never stop, and even private cars can't pull over. So i get to make my own tourist destinations, just randomly along the way.
But let's rewind back to Riohacha, capital of La Guajira for a while. After my desert break, i headed back on my bike and started pedaling south. My hope is/was to join up with the Río Magdalena somewhere north of the tourist town of Santa Cruz de Mompox, then follow it south. The first step was to get into the wide valley that yawns between the Sierra Nevada and the Sierra de Perijá along the Venezuelan border. Rather than struggling with my bike across even the piddling eastern corner of the Sierra Nevada, i took a zig-zag route across the plains that would pop me out at the bottom end of the railroad that stretches from the Cerrejón mine, through Uribia, to Puerto Bolívar.
I thought going south would mean i was done with the desert, but that turned out not to be the case. It's not a full-out desert, but the earth is very dry and there's not much growing out there besides yellow grass and some very thorny scrub. Little to no shade. Along the way i passed a few Wayuu communities, and stopped in at one for a malta. The guy said he had malta but would i like to try chicha instead? Well, yes please!
Turns out the local drink in that area is chicha - not "chicha" like it's used in Panama (where the word means pretty much any kind of juice) but chicha in the more traditional sense: a corn drink. I think it is mashed, sweetened and slightly fermented corn mixed with water. It tastes a bit like Mexican horchata, or (closer) sikhye, which is a sweet, watery rice drink that you can occasionally find in Korean restaurants. I'm surprised that it hasn't taken off in the corn states of the US, because it's cool and refreshing and sweet and has a few little kernels in the bottom so it's a like a meal at the same time as a drink.
I arrived in Albania in the evening, a town where Google told me there were a couple of hotels. After checking in, i took a walk to the town square, which was bustling as some kind of bingo game was going on, and people were setting up their night market snack stalls, which tend to be parked out the front of bars from sunset to late. This - again - is really the Latin America that i imagined in my head when i first came to Panama (and didn't experience it). Big church with a big square in front of it where all the people gather to socialize and eat street food and have fun. Colombia has it. The squares here aren't quite as happening as the squares in China where entire armies of 大媽 (grannies) flock to dance the evenings away, but they're definitely hubs of activity, especially in the small towns.
But Albania isn't just the town square, it's also very close to the Cerrejón mine, which is a massive coal mine, and perhaps a reason why people in town didn't seem too surprised to see a foreigner roll up and sit down alone with a beer. A few pretty girls came up to chat to me and asked if i was working at the mine. I talked a bit about my bike tour then headed back to the hotel before i turned into a pumpkin.
Yeah, i'm rarely out more than an hour or so past sunset (6pm) here. Not that i can't hear the party, though. At my hostel in Riohacha one night a bar upstairs was blasting music from 7pm right through to 7am the next morning. Subsequent days didn't go all night long, but if deafening accordion music keeps you awake, don't bother with a cheap hotel in La Guajira. Noise complaints are clearly not a thing anywhere in the province.
Nevertheless, my spot in Albania proved to be the quietest yet, so i slept well and headed out the next day, deeper into the valley. I had to cross one decent-sized hill to get into the valley proper, and it's there that i started getting flashbacks to California, specifically a part of Inyo County called Owens Valley. It's dry. There is some cattle. Not much, but some. Also cactus. And mountains on both sides. Occasionally there are tall enough trees on the edge of the road to get some shade. Not often.
Unlike Cali, in La Guajira every now and then there is a village next to a bone-dry riverbed and locals selling fruits and cold drinks.
There was a little patch of water before arriving at San Juan del Cesar, and i thought i had made it out of the arid zone. It's amazing how suddenly the landscape changes when you get close to a creek that actually has some water in it. The trees get bigger, the grass gets greener, you can hear insects and birds overhead, and see lizards in the undergrowth. It's incredible, because when you get just a few hundred meters past the river, it's dead silent and dry as a bone once more.
San Juan was a lot shabbier of a town than Albania. I wandered up and down the main street for quite a while trying to find a 6L bag of water. This is the standard method i have for replenishing my bottles every evening - 4.5L for the bottles, 1.5L for breakfast/coffee and evening sips. Unfortunately those bags - which cost around 50 cents - aren't always easy to source, so your next best option is a plastic bag filled with dozens of 300mL mini-bags of water, which is around $1.50. But it's also more water than i can easily consume in a day, so impractical for traveling. On the other hand, a single 1L bottle of water is $1, so that's just a waste of money and plastic if i want to refill everything. Oy, the joys of traveling somewhere that doesn't have potable water coming out of the taps, and doesn't provide an electric jug in hotel rooms so you can "purify" it yourself, as is the standard situation in China.
Anyway, water tangent. The funny thing about San Juan is i asked in one store after the next after the next, and eventually i found my 6L. But it was all like that. I looked for a cell phone recharge card too and went from one place to the next to the next. There are dozens of stores that appear to sell identical goods, but in fact they are all slightly different. One thing that caught my eye was the numerous street vendors selling phone cards to make cheap calls to Venezuela. At least in this part of Colombia, along the border, you can never forget that something like 1.5 million of the 5+ million displaced Venezuelans now live as refugees in this country.
At one of the stores someone hanging out at the counter struck up a conversation with me, and i had one of the funniest exchanges i had since leaving China. When i explained that i was traveling by bike, and that i was traveling alone, the woman got more and more shocked. Eventually she exclaimed "but how do you eat?!" I'm always bowled over by this question, and it's the first time it's happened to me outside of China (where it happened extremely often). I presume it's rooted in this concept that white people are utterly incapable of eating anything beyond a burger and fries, and when confronted with any kind of food that isn't that, they'd rather just starve to death. Admittedly, this is true of an embarrasingly large number of expats and tourists, but it's still a wack prejudice. I told her i just eat regular almuerzos (lunches) same as her. She's like "so, you like Colombian food!?" - amazed. I told her yes, even though privately i think Colombian food is pretty average. The amusing thing is i think it's average because it is almost as bland as the shitty midwestern food that she apparently thought i preferred, not because it's inedibly spicy or exotic.
Well, San Juan was fun. My next stop was Valledupar - the home of the famous accordion music known as vallenato. To be honest, i think Colombia's vallenato music is less fun to listen to than Panama's típico music. Vallenato uses rhythms that sound more "white" to my ears (they use an aggressive 2/4 beat that sounds like a three-legged horse), and it doesn't feature the mournful yodeling of típico. That said, it is still miles better than fucking rock music. Trust me. I just listened to this shit 12 hours straight while i was trying to sleep. When people are blasting accordion music, it doesn't feel as disturbing because the notes are all really clean and don't sustain for a very long time. It's just melody, like rain drops on a tin roof. When you put it side-by-side with a rock song, dear Lord Almighty, those long endlessly sustained chords make me want to shoot myself in the head. So fucking grating. I think spending the past 4 months consuming almost exclusively accordion music has made me hate guitar music even more than i already did. Ugh. Fuck guitars.
Tangent!
I was expecting the ride to Valledupar to finally take me out of the arid landscape into something a bit more conducive to growing crops, but aside from the odd cotton field, that didn't happen. Again.
What did make me realize that i wasn't in La Guajira any more was the gated communities and the private schools. Clearly Cesar has more wealth than La Guajira. The private schools are of the same type that i saw in China - they always have an English name and a billboard showing some Harry Potter-looking white children standing in front of a fucking castle or something. It's this absurd idea that British private schools are the epitome of a good education, when really they're just places for upper class tosspots to start their old boys network.
Eventually i crested a hill and went deeper into the pocket where Valledupar is nestled.
It's a big city, with highrise buildings and everything. It took me a while to find a hotel where i felt comfortable parking my bike out front because (much like Santa Marta) a lot of hotel lobbies were through a tiny door and up a flight of stairs. Also there are more "luxury" hotels (by which i mean hotels that charge over $20 per night). Eventually i found a spot, checked in, and had a little wander. The town was bustling, although the meticulously polished town square was deserted. I enjoyed some evening fruits, then headed back to bed.
I had originally planned to spend a couple nights in Valledupar while i tried to figure out exactly where i was going to go next, but the hotel had conveniently offered to wash my clothes overnight, so that took away my other excuse for staying in town a little longer. I think i am getting back into the rhythm of bike touring again, and staying two nights in one place just feels wrong.
My challenge for plotting the route past Valledupar is that ideally i wanted to go west along the main highway to Bosconia, then across some smaller (gravel) roads to pop out at Mompox. But Bosconia was 90km away with no hotels in between, and i wasn't able to find enough hotels or hostels along the gravel road route to be sure i'd have somewhere to stay.
The 90km thing is something i could easily have managed on my bike in Canada and the US, and perhaps i could manage it here too, but for the weather. Friends, it has been 38C/100F the past few days. It is brutally hot, and there is almost no shade on the road. After a couple of hours, my water bottles have water hot enough to cook instant noodles. I am getting exhausted very quickly, and i don't think realistically my body can hold out for more than about 5 hours. Since i'm averaging 15km/h or maybe a bit less on this bike, it's not realistic to shoot for 90km.
The remote roads thing is something i am a bit less certain about. There are enough small villages along the way that i could restock with water at least. But if there are no formal hotels or hostels, that means asking someone if i can camp in a nearby yard or field, which i did a few times in Canada, but i'm a bit more scared to do it in Colombia. Of course hardcore cycle tourists just pitch their tent wherever the fuck they want and deal with whatever curious locals or police when they inevitably get busted. But i don't wanna do that, i feel like it's rude to camp illegally, not to mention slightly risky if there are some bad dudes in the area. So i'd prefer to stick to routes where there is at least a hotel or two, especially given the hotels i pick are very affordable anyway. And yet... that messes up my plans a little bit, and might leave me cycling along the highway the whole way. Which... i suppose isn't really as bad as it sounds, because the highway in this part of the country is just a normal sealed one-lane-each-way road. It's much more relaxing to cycle along than the multi-lane highways in Canada and the US.
So, yeah, i dunno. I've put off the problem today by heading south to a town called Agustín Codazzi. It's on a main highway, which i could continue following south tomorrow, or cut west along a much wonkier road to the middle of fucking nowhere where according to Google there is a hotel, which i suspect is one of those expensive rural getaway dude ranch type places, but at least it'd be something. I will try to ask some people in town tomorrow morning to see what they think. No doubt i'll get the usual "just follow the highway" answer, but you never know.
I mean, if i miss Mompox, oh well. I'll still eventually join back up with the Magdalena. I liked the romance of following the same river all the way up, but whatever. Best thing about not having any serious plans when you travel is if you change your mind, it's no big deal. Million interesting places to see in the world, so wherever i end up is fine. The best thing about bike touring is that i can just stop along the way whenever i see something i like, in places where the bus would never stop, and even private cars can't pull over. So i get to make my own tourist destinations, just randomly along the way.