San Alberto → Sabana de Torres → Barrancabermeja → Puerto Araujo → Puerto Berrío
I've done it! I've made it to the "puerto belt"! That's the part of the Magdalena Medio between Medellín and Bogotá where all the towns are called Puerto Something. I noticed it when i was speaking to a Colombian tourist up in Cabo de la Vela who told me he came from a town called Puerto Boyacá, which is another port a little bit further south of here.
Let's rewind to San Alberto. Not just the scenery but the culture changed a bit on my way south from Aguachica. I was still in Cesar - clearly wealthier than La Guajira, but still a very campesino-feeling province. It felt like Aguachica was a turning point, where the roads started getting a bit more heavily-trafficked, and where there was a move from informal tiendas and market stalls to more structured and formalized commerce. I started noticing a lot more white Colombians. The food changed as well.
According to the theoretical regions of Colombia, Cesar (or at least the northern part) is still considered part of the Caribbean coast. That's kind of ridiculous when you are surrounded by hills and get food poisoning from the ceviche, but after i hit Aguachica i understood it. Around there is where things started feeling less culturally Caribbean and more culturally South American, in the sense of actually being whiter and more European. Now there is a standard lunch which is chicken breast with cheese melted all over the top. You can buy sandwiches with salami and hard cheese. People have pets, notably dogs - not sad and scrawny strays, but aggressive, barking guard dogs. All the properties are fenced. There are no people by the side of the road selling juice. There is less accordion music and more guitar music.
Or, at least, that's what it felt like till Barrancabermeja. After San Alberto i exited Cesar and entered Santander. The main difference, it felt to me, was that suddenly there were a lot more palm plantations, but perhaps that was just where the road happened to go. Sabana de Torres is a small town several miles off the highway, and the route i took left me zigging and zagging through steep hills covered in grid-planted palm trees. The town itself was pleasant but unremarkable. My next detour off the highway was to Barrancabermeja, a much bigger city on the shore of the Río Magdalena known as the oil capital of Colombia. But, also, it had a more Caribbean feeling than any of the towns i visited since Riohacha.
Which is to say, the accordion music came back, but not just the accordion music - soca and upbeat dance riddims too. The town was bustling, and - despite the very expensive hotels - it still felt charmingly chaotic, in the vein of downtown Barranquilla. I took a walk to the one section of the town that actually butts up against the river - a stinky fish market and dock. The river is something like 2km wide at this point and the water is brown and rushes past at an unnerving rate. It feels like just a bit of rain would put half the town underwater.
I had considered spending two nights at Barrancabermeja to celebrate having made my way back to the Magdalena, but my hotel was twice the price of the rural/highway hotels, and the motherfuckers called me up at 9pm to get my breakfast order. I ignored the phone twice, but it kept on ringing, so i answered in a pissy mood, then they asked me to choose a breakfast option for the next day and i told them to fuck off. (Well, less directly than that because i don't know how to say "fuck off" in Spanish.) The next morning i still got some dumbass menu with 27 options on it to pick my breakfast from. What the fuck, man? Just give me fruit, bread, coffee, the end. Or don't offer breakfast at all. I can't stand these ridiculous breakfast menus where everything has some kind of flowery name and the food has enough fat and stodge to totally ruin the rest of your day.
I have a theory that when restaurants start getting too middle class, they stop just telling you what the food is, and instead they start with the presentation of a dozen fancy-named dishes that all taste the same anyway. This was obvious in China, where if you go to a working class restaurant, the menu literally just describes the ingredients in the dish. Tofu with celery. Red cooked meat. Fish flavored eggplant. Dry fried potato slice. But then you go to a fancy restaurant and they start with all these bullshit dishes like The Emperor's Fucking Who Gives A Shit. Here in Colombia it's the same, where at the most basic restaurants they just reel off a list of which meats there are and how you want them cooked, but then you go somewhere a bit more classy and it's Del Fucking Barrio Who Gives A Shit. It's such a wank.
Anyway, being harrassed by hotel staff over the phone at night and being forced to pick from a million breakfast options when i was tired and just wanted some damn coffee really soured me on Barrancabermeja. I suspect the hotels and restaurants in town spend most of their time catering to cashed-up oil industry execs, so they're used to dealing with fussy assholes who consider themselves too good to just eat an arepa and drink a tinto for breakfast. Unfortunately when hotels and restaurants start groveling and treating me like some kind of royalty and not a normal person it just makes me feel disgusted and not want to stay. So i left.
Going back to the highway, i took a winding roundabout route through the hills. For much of the trip it looked like i was heading through the jungle, but every now and then you'd see hints of what was really hiding behind all the greenery - a massive extraction industry.
Somewhere along the way i passed a museum of petroleum, which had a whole bunch of different pumpjacks on display. It didn't appear to be open, which was surprising, because even though not very much is open on Sundays in Colombia, there were a lot of recreational cyclists on the road, enjoying a morning zig-zagging through the undergrowth and stopping into small restaurants along the way.
Santander is cattle country, when it's not oil country. I hate cattle country, because the only thing i can think about when i cycle past all these empty fields is what a waste of space it is. I'm not a farmer, so i suppose it's possible that the soil there isn't good to plant crops in, but when i pass fields full of nothing except a handful of cows, i think about all the calories that could have been growing there, in grains, or vegetables, or fruits. When i cycle past these palm oil plantations, or cattle pastures, it just seems so depressing. It's not really nature, but it doesn't really feel like food either, not in the same way that cycling past banana plantations or rice paddies does.
Anyway, cattle country it is, and that means that the restaurants on the side of the road don't sell fruit juice any more, they have open fires where they steam racks of beef ribs and other obscenely huge cuts of meat. I'm sure that's exciting to someone, but for me i can't think of anything more awful to eat when i'm on a bike tour than a gargantuan helping of meat. It doesn't have enough fast calories. It's too heavy. Fruits and vegetables and grains is what i crave. Meat and dairy just seems like a quick route to constipation or bloatedness.
But it's the regional thing. Currently i am in Puerto Berrío, having crossed the Magdalena, which leaves me in Antioquia, home of the famous bandeja paisa dish. Bandeja paisa is sort of like the standard lunch of Colombia if they replaced all the vegetables with meat and dairy. So you get carne molida (ground beef) and chicharrón (pork rinds) and chorizo (sausage) and a fried egg and a quarter of an avocado. There might be some rice and beans too, but it's basically just meat with meat and meat. Just thinking about it makes me queasy.
Last night i stayed in Puerto Araujo, which is a tiny village along the highway. It has a gas station and a handful of hotels, a handful of convenience stores, two or three bars and a small supermarket. The highway hotels of Colombia look a lot like motels in North America, but they have massive parking lots in the front because they primarily cater to long haul truckers. I usually avoid them because i prefer the smaller hotels inside the villages that have a central hallway with rooms off to either side - at night the hallway is filled with motorcycles and occasionally a bicycle or two. They're the same price as the highway hotels, and similarly cater to travelers who will only be staying overnight, but the two-wheel crowd is a bit different to the 18-wheel crowd. Either way, the rooms rarely ever have a window, and if they do it just faces into the hallway. No air conditioning. No hot water. Shower is just a pipe coming out of the ceiling. But they fill a gap that has been abandoned in North America - safe, clean overnight lodging for $10-15 a night. More comfortable than camping, more privacy than hostels, exactly the kind of thing a solo traveler needs.
My hotel here in Puerto Berrío is a bit fancier than that, but that's partly because the town is a bit more touristy than the highway villages. I'm not sure there are realistically many sights to see in town, but it is on the route to Medellín, and this corner of Antioquia has some fishing spots and waterfalls and apparently charming rustic villages dotted about the place. The hotel staff recommended i start cycling up the mountain to Medellín, but i feel like that would be short-changing my goal of following the Magdalena all the way south to the Tatacoa desert. Apparently going up to Medellín from here is less hellish than further south, where the Andes get stupidly steep. But i am awfully tempted to take a 55km gravel road that snakes through the hills on the west side of the Magdalena to a village called La Sierra which i think has a barge that transports vehicles back across the river to the 45 highway. Of course i could just cycle across the bridge and 15km back to the highway from here then follow it down to Puerto Boyacá, but it just seems more exciting to take a gravel road to a village and then a boat ride across this epic river at the heart of Colombia.
Just, cycling a gravel road here, it'd be a lonely ride, on a bike without any suspension and not many gears, in hot and humid weather... Is it a dumb move? I don't know. That's why i figured i'd settle into a nicer hotel today after just 35km on the road and give myself time to relax and recuperate and decide for real if it's what i want to do. I mean, it is what i want to do, i just don't know if i'll regret it along the way. Google street view doesn't show much of anything along there, just a guy in a pickup truck fishing from a bridge, which i suppose is better than a guy in a pickup with an AK. Hell, it's probably safer to ride gravel on this route than through some of the rural areas in East Texas. Least i've only been chased by one dog in Colombia so far.
Eh, we'll see how i feel tomorrow. Right now my biggest damage of the tour is having lost sensation in my fingers. When this happened in the US, i bought some padded cycling gloves and that protected my hands enough to help the nerves heal. But because this bike is shaped differently, i can't put my hands in as relaxed of a position while i ride, so they're really getting a thrashing. And a gravel road will just make that worse. That said, since i skipped Barrancabermeja, i was planning on making my next pit-stop Honda, which is only a few days away, and the famous point at which the Magdalena no longer becomes navigable from the Atlantic/Caribbean. Perhaps i can pause there and see if my hands can recover?
I dunno. In the back of my mind now is this sense of impending doom. April is tax month in Canada, and when i pay my taxes owed from 2021, i will have zero left over in my checking account. I will have to withdraw from my nest egg to continue. I am also getting really annoyed that i can't actually file my taxes yet because i haven't received a particular form that is required to declare my capital gains. This is some bullshit i never had to deal with before i had an investment account, and it is very bullshit. I guess rich people just pay their taxes late and don't give a shit because they have so many write-offs it'll cover the late filing penalty. I guess i could call my bank and give them a piece of my mind, but i'll save that miserable shit for Honda. Anyway, the point is that there is some kind of crushing depression lurking in the distance, because i know i'm getting close to the point where i will have to make a decision to either drain my savings to continue, or go back to cold, expensive, boring-ass Canada and try to find some work in an industry i hate while i replenish my savings and wait for other parts of the world to reopen their borders. Goddamnit, i don't want to think about it.
So i won't. I won't think about it, and instead i will just take a walk here in Puerto Berrío. Or, hell, maybe just sit here in bed and vegetate. There is a nice little courtyard outside with pink flowers. I like pink.
Let's rewind to San Alberto. Not just the scenery but the culture changed a bit on my way south from Aguachica. I was still in Cesar - clearly wealthier than La Guajira, but still a very campesino-feeling province. It felt like Aguachica was a turning point, where the roads started getting a bit more heavily-trafficked, and where there was a move from informal tiendas and market stalls to more structured and formalized commerce. I started noticing a lot more white Colombians. The food changed as well.
According to the theoretical regions of Colombia, Cesar (or at least the northern part) is still considered part of the Caribbean coast. That's kind of ridiculous when you are surrounded by hills and get food poisoning from the ceviche, but after i hit Aguachica i understood it. Around there is where things started feeling less culturally Caribbean and more culturally South American, in the sense of actually being whiter and more European. Now there is a standard lunch which is chicken breast with cheese melted all over the top. You can buy sandwiches with salami and hard cheese. People have pets, notably dogs - not sad and scrawny strays, but aggressive, barking guard dogs. All the properties are fenced. There are no people by the side of the road selling juice. There is less accordion music and more guitar music.
Or, at least, that's what it felt like till Barrancabermeja. After San Alberto i exited Cesar and entered Santander. The main difference, it felt to me, was that suddenly there were a lot more palm plantations, but perhaps that was just where the road happened to go. Sabana de Torres is a small town several miles off the highway, and the route i took left me zigging and zagging through steep hills covered in grid-planted palm trees. The town itself was pleasant but unremarkable. My next detour off the highway was to Barrancabermeja, a much bigger city on the shore of the Río Magdalena known as the oil capital of Colombia. But, also, it had a more Caribbean feeling than any of the towns i visited since Riohacha.
Which is to say, the accordion music came back, but not just the accordion music - soca and upbeat dance riddims too. The town was bustling, and - despite the very expensive hotels - it still felt charmingly chaotic, in the vein of downtown Barranquilla. I took a walk to the one section of the town that actually butts up against the river - a stinky fish market and dock. The river is something like 2km wide at this point and the water is brown and rushes past at an unnerving rate. It feels like just a bit of rain would put half the town underwater.
I had considered spending two nights at Barrancabermeja to celebrate having made my way back to the Magdalena, but my hotel was twice the price of the rural/highway hotels, and the motherfuckers called me up at 9pm to get my breakfast order. I ignored the phone twice, but it kept on ringing, so i answered in a pissy mood, then they asked me to choose a breakfast option for the next day and i told them to fuck off. (Well, less directly than that because i don't know how to say "fuck off" in Spanish.) The next morning i still got some dumbass menu with 27 options on it to pick my breakfast from. What the fuck, man? Just give me fruit, bread, coffee, the end. Or don't offer breakfast at all. I can't stand these ridiculous breakfast menus where everything has some kind of flowery name and the food has enough fat and stodge to totally ruin the rest of your day.
I have a theory that when restaurants start getting too middle class, they stop just telling you what the food is, and instead they start with the presentation of a dozen fancy-named dishes that all taste the same anyway. This was obvious in China, where if you go to a working class restaurant, the menu literally just describes the ingredients in the dish. Tofu with celery. Red cooked meat. Fish flavored eggplant. Dry fried potato slice. But then you go to a fancy restaurant and they start with all these bullshit dishes like The Emperor's Fucking Who Gives A Shit. Here in Colombia it's the same, where at the most basic restaurants they just reel off a list of which meats there are and how you want them cooked, but then you go somewhere a bit more classy and it's Del Fucking Barrio Who Gives A Shit. It's such a wank.
Anyway, being harrassed by hotel staff over the phone at night and being forced to pick from a million breakfast options when i was tired and just wanted some damn coffee really soured me on Barrancabermeja. I suspect the hotels and restaurants in town spend most of their time catering to cashed-up oil industry execs, so they're used to dealing with fussy assholes who consider themselves too good to just eat an arepa and drink a tinto for breakfast. Unfortunately when hotels and restaurants start groveling and treating me like some kind of royalty and not a normal person it just makes me feel disgusted and not want to stay. So i left.
Going back to the highway, i took a winding roundabout route through the hills. For much of the trip it looked like i was heading through the jungle, but every now and then you'd see hints of what was really hiding behind all the greenery - a massive extraction industry.
Somewhere along the way i passed a museum of petroleum, which had a whole bunch of different pumpjacks on display. It didn't appear to be open, which was surprising, because even though not very much is open on Sundays in Colombia, there were a lot of recreational cyclists on the road, enjoying a morning zig-zagging through the undergrowth and stopping into small restaurants along the way.
Santander is cattle country, when it's not oil country. I hate cattle country, because the only thing i can think about when i cycle past all these empty fields is what a waste of space it is. I'm not a farmer, so i suppose it's possible that the soil there isn't good to plant crops in, but when i pass fields full of nothing except a handful of cows, i think about all the calories that could have been growing there, in grains, or vegetables, or fruits. When i cycle past these palm oil plantations, or cattle pastures, it just seems so depressing. It's not really nature, but it doesn't really feel like food either, not in the same way that cycling past banana plantations or rice paddies does.
Anyway, cattle country it is, and that means that the restaurants on the side of the road don't sell fruit juice any more, they have open fires where they steam racks of beef ribs and other obscenely huge cuts of meat. I'm sure that's exciting to someone, but for me i can't think of anything more awful to eat when i'm on a bike tour than a gargantuan helping of meat. It doesn't have enough fast calories. It's too heavy. Fruits and vegetables and grains is what i crave. Meat and dairy just seems like a quick route to constipation or bloatedness.
But it's the regional thing. Currently i am in Puerto Berrío, having crossed the Magdalena, which leaves me in Antioquia, home of the famous bandeja paisa dish. Bandeja paisa is sort of like the standard lunch of Colombia if they replaced all the vegetables with meat and dairy. So you get carne molida (ground beef) and chicharrón (pork rinds) and chorizo (sausage) and a fried egg and a quarter of an avocado. There might be some rice and beans too, but it's basically just meat with meat and meat. Just thinking about it makes me queasy.
Last night i stayed in Puerto Araujo, which is a tiny village along the highway. It has a gas station and a handful of hotels, a handful of convenience stores, two or three bars and a small supermarket. The highway hotels of Colombia look a lot like motels in North America, but they have massive parking lots in the front because they primarily cater to long haul truckers. I usually avoid them because i prefer the smaller hotels inside the villages that have a central hallway with rooms off to either side - at night the hallway is filled with motorcycles and occasionally a bicycle or two. They're the same price as the highway hotels, and similarly cater to travelers who will only be staying overnight, but the two-wheel crowd is a bit different to the 18-wheel crowd. Either way, the rooms rarely ever have a window, and if they do it just faces into the hallway. No air conditioning. No hot water. Shower is just a pipe coming out of the ceiling. But they fill a gap that has been abandoned in North America - safe, clean overnight lodging for $10-15 a night. More comfortable than camping, more privacy than hostels, exactly the kind of thing a solo traveler needs.
My hotel here in Puerto Berrío is a bit fancier than that, but that's partly because the town is a bit more touristy than the highway villages. I'm not sure there are realistically many sights to see in town, but it is on the route to Medellín, and this corner of Antioquia has some fishing spots and waterfalls and apparently charming rustic villages dotted about the place. The hotel staff recommended i start cycling up the mountain to Medellín, but i feel like that would be short-changing my goal of following the Magdalena all the way south to the Tatacoa desert. Apparently going up to Medellín from here is less hellish than further south, where the Andes get stupidly steep. But i am awfully tempted to take a 55km gravel road that snakes through the hills on the west side of the Magdalena to a village called La Sierra which i think has a barge that transports vehicles back across the river to the 45 highway. Of course i could just cycle across the bridge and 15km back to the highway from here then follow it down to Puerto Boyacá, but it just seems more exciting to take a gravel road to a village and then a boat ride across this epic river at the heart of Colombia.
Just, cycling a gravel road here, it'd be a lonely ride, on a bike without any suspension and not many gears, in hot and humid weather... Is it a dumb move? I don't know. That's why i figured i'd settle into a nicer hotel today after just 35km on the road and give myself time to relax and recuperate and decide for real if it's what i want to do. I mean, it is what i want to do, i just don't know if i'll regret it along the way. Google street view doesn't show much of anything along there, just a guy in a pickup truck fishing from a bridge, which i suppose is better than a guy in a pickup with an AK. Hell, it's probably safer to ride gravel on this route than through some of the rural areas in East Texas. Least i've only been chased by one dog in Colombia so far.
Eh, we'll see how i feel tomorrow. Right now my biggest damage of the tour is having lost sensation in my fingers. When this happened in the US, i bought some padded cycling gloves and that protected my hands enough to help the nerves heal. But because this bike is shaped differently, i can't put my hands in as relaxed of a position while i ride, so they're really getting a thrashing. And a gravel road will just make that worse. That said, since i skipped Barrancabermeja, i was planning on making my next pit-stop Honda, which is only a few days away, and the famous point at which the Magdalena no longer becomes navigable from the Atlantic/Caribbean. Perhaps i can pause there and see if my hands can recover?
I dunno. In the back of my mind now is this sense of impending doom. April is tax month in Canada, and when i pay my taxes owed from 2021, i will have zero left over in my checking account. I will have to withdraw from my nest egg to continue. I am also getting really annoyed that i can't actually file my taxes yet because i haven't received a particular form that is required to declare my capital gains. This is some bullshit i never had to deal with before i had an investment account, and it is very bullshit. I guess rich people just pay their taxes late and don't give a shit because they have so many write-offs it'll cover the late filing penalty. I guess i could call my bank and give them a piece of my mind, but i'll save that miserable shit for Honda. Anyway, the point is that there is some kind of crushing depression lurking in the distance, because i know i'm getting close to the point where i will have to make a decision to either drain my savings to continue, or go back to cold, expensive, boring-ass Canada and try to find some work in an industry i hate while i replenish my savings and wait for other parts of the world to reopen their borders. Goddamnit, i don't want to think about it.
So i won't. I won't think about it, and instead i will just take a walk here in Puerto Berrío. Or, hell, maybe just sit here in bed and vegetate. There is a nice little courtyard outside with pink flowers. I like pink.