El Guamo → Natagaima → Villavieja → Neiva
I woke up in El Guamo on Good Friday to the sound of nothing and wrote a journal entry. By the time i got on my bike, the town was a bit more busy, albeit in an obviously holiday mode. I continued heading south toward the Tatacoa desert, with a plan to stop at Natagaima if i was tired, or another village or hotel along the way if i still had energy to push.
What sucked my energy was not the ride - it was mostly flat landscape, broad fields, rice paddies, and the odd shallow hill. What sucked my energy was the company. I was still very much in the Bogotá weekender belt, and i had several encounters along the way.
At one point i noticed a watermelon vendor - something i hadn't seen since up in the Caribbean section of Colombia - so i excitedly pulled over for a drink. While i was there, a guy in a car with two mountain bikes on the back pulled over for a coconut. As he drank from his coconut and i drank my watermelon juice, he struck up a conversation about my bike ride. He said he had just spent a few days mountain biking around Tatacoa, and he understood my bittersweet emotions about not wanting the ride to end. He said when you get on your bike, you never want to get off.
It's odd, meeting people at these little beverage stands. Something i forgot to mention in an earlier entry is that a week or so back i pulled over to a tiny roadside restaurant that wasn't open yet, but i saw a local guy there buying a bag of ice, so i figured i should at least be able to get a malta. Amazingly, the guy did a double-take, then said "hey, were you in Cabo de la Vela a couple weeks ago?" Yes, friends, somehow in a roadside stop in the middle of nowhere, i met a guy who i had also chatted to almost 1000km away in the desert sands of La Guajira. Small world.
The guy at the watermelon stand paid for my drink and gave me 20000 pesos before jumping back in his car to go home to Medellín.
I got back on my bike, and within a couple of minutes i was joined by another cycle tourist on a mountain bike with only the tiniest drawstring bag strapped on the rack. He had braided hair and a white vaquero (cowboy) hat hanging around his neck. He looked the ultimate vagabond, traveling the Andes with literally just the clothes on his back. Turned out he lived in Bogotá, and there wasn't a hammock in his drawstring bag like i assumed, just his wallet so he could buy meals and overnight accommodation. In bike touring parlance these guys are called "credit card tourers" as opposed to "self-supported tourers" who carry enough camping gear, water and food to survive independently for a couple of days. Even still, he was much more the classical hippie type than me, having just jumped out of one of the creeks along the road to cool off.
"Immersing yourself in water is really important," he told me, after suggesting that we bike together to Tatacoa. He said he kept cool in the hot weather by jumping in the water and rinsing his clothes in every creek. I told him i don't even remember the last time i swam in my life. It's just not something that would ever occur to me to do, to jump in a river by the side of the road. And yet, i see it everywhere, all over the country, people love to do it here.
He talked a bit about how different parts of the country have different culture, especially the mountains, but even different mountain towns. I talked a bit about the pros and cons of bike touring - on the upside, being able to visit so many more places that you never would in a bus or even a car, but on the downside, not spending long enough in any one place to really understand the local culture thoroughly. He then explained it was his first time bike touring and usually he traveled around by bus or plane. When i said i wasn't looking forward to going back to work in an office, he said that he understood and that manual labor is much more rewarding. But... i didn't ask him what he actually did for a living. He wasn't conspicuously wealthy - judging by his clothes and his bike - but he also gave me the usual spiel about how Venezuelans refugees are roaming the country making it unsafe for law-abiding citizens and bla bla bla.
To be honest, i only really understood about half of what he was saying, partly due to the background noise of being on the road, but also due to my Spanish level. Although i can read fairly well and can make myself understood without too much difficulty, my listening comprehension is - as usual - at a level much, much lower than my reading and speaking ability. This is always my weak spot with languages, and i think it's related to my more general difficulties around focusing on people's speech. Even in English i need to really concentrate hard to hear what they're saying, especially if there is background noise. And in other languages if my mind wanders for just a second, then i've completely lost the thread of the conversation.
But also, while we were talking, i was thinking about how i could get out of the situation. I was thinking about how fucking awful it is to travel with a partner. How sitting here cycling with someone next to me had turned my peaceful, relaxing ride where i could completely drink in and enjoy the world around me into a stressful human interaction where i no longer had any freedom any more. I knew the dude could bike much faster than me, because he had no baggage and a much lighter bike, so i told him "i'll slow you down". Then he told me there were two ways to get to Tatacoa, and one of them was really dangerous, so it would be better to cycle together than to go solo. "I'm not worried about me, i'm worried about you."
Don't these people realize that it's far more dangerous for me to travel together with someone else than it is to travel alone? When i am alone, i am a ghost. I come and i go, and if people read me as a tough, adventurous man (which they often do), that's a good defense mechanism. With someone else eventually the conversation is going to turn to family and partners and gender, which is very difficult to hide in Spanish due to the stupid fucking gender-based adjectives. At some point i have to explain i am the opposite gender that they expected, or that i am trans, and then i become a more obvious target for violence thanks to "gay panic" or more general misogynistic attitudes. Like, dude, you really think it's safer for me to strip off and join you bathing in a river beside the road than it is to continue cycling on alone? For fuck's sake.
Anyway, i was immensely grateful to reach the turnoff for Natagaima and pretend that i was too exhausted to go on. I wished him well on his journey and headed into town to find a hotel.
Like. God. Traveling with a partner is the god damn fucking worst. I don't at all understand these people who never travel alone, or who get depressed when they are traveling alone. The ones who are desperate to find a "road dog" to share their days with, the ones who specifically stay in hostels to make new friends then book a group tour. Strength in numbers? Fuck no. Familiarity is vulnerability. I feel so much stronger, safer and calmer when i am on my own. Traveling with somebody else, ugh, i can't think of any worse way to ruin something i enjoy so much.
The next morning i headed out of Natagaima toward the turnoff to Tatacoa. I had checked on Google Street View, and there is a really cool little gravel road that follows a former railroad line through some tunnels and across a rickety bridge into the main area of the desert. But, heeding the warning of the hippie from the day before, i stopped at a tienda beforehand and asked some locals there if it was safe to go that route. "No, definitely not, you should take the highway." Still, nobody had told me why it was "peligroso", just that it was. So i asked if there were bandidos there, and they nodded yes. In the interests of safety, i decided to take a different route that would still take me to the gravel road, but would skip the bridge and tunnels and instead whisk me across the Magdalena in another ferry.
Annoyingly, i found out the next day that the only "dangerous" thing on the bridge and tunnel route is that there is a (single) "loco" guy living out there who collects trash. So, i guess, just the usual mentally ill homeless sort, who might yell things out or possibly accost you in a fit of confusion, but not the fucking trained killers with AK-47s that i expected when someone said "yes" to my question if their were bandits. For fuck's sake. Honestly, i think the vast majority of the warnings i have received about traveling to certain places in Colombia have not been warnings about guerilla armies or paramilitaries or drug cartels, but just about the poor. So many people here appear to be terrified of the homeless, the mentally ill, squatters and displaced peoples and poverty-stricken migrants. Either that or they're just embarrassed and don't want a foreigner to see it. That was definitely the case in China. Someone in Villavieja remarked apologetically to me about the poverty in La Guajira and i was like... huh!? You went to La Guajira and your big takeaway was how poor the people there are? Have you seen the shacks at the next village over?
Anyway, i took a ferry across the river and had a delightful chat with a vendor on the other side, then cycled on to a nearby village and had probably the best meal i have had in my entire time of traveling through the non-Caribbean portion of Colombia. It was just a normal "cerdo a la plancha" (pan-fried pork), but it was tender and well-seasoned, and the sides were fresh and filling. They gave me two big tumblers of a juice whose fruit i could not place - perhaps it was lulo? Either way, it was great, and i spent about half an hour afterwards talking to the owner of the place, who dreamed of getting out of Colombia. She said the economy was not doing well, and she hoped to be able to find work elsewhere. I explained her various options for getting a seasonal work permit and immigrating to Canada more permanently. We also talked a bit about the pros and cons of other destinations. Like, the US - way more Spanish-speaking people to provide you with support, but a more arcane immigration system and fucked up government policies that feel deliberately biased against Latin Americans. Europe - further away and perhaps more difficult to arrange, but Spain is right there, and people across the rest of the continent are perhaps more used to dealing with multiple languages.
I think something that a lot of hopeful migrants don't consider is how difficult it is to navigate a new country when you don't know the language. It might be okay if you're just traveling, but when you're migrating you have so much paperwork to do that requires a solid grasp of the language. Things get so much more difficult if you need to always work through a middleman.
Anyway, after the chat i cycled along the gravel into Tatacoa proper. The Tatacoa desert isn't really a desert, it's more like a badlands. I think it primarily exists due to goats and other cattle eating all of the local flora, and due to lower-than-average rainfall the whole area ended up a barren dustbowl. With the unusual mineral content of the soil, some of the eroded peaks have layers of different colors that look really cool, plus of course you are in an expansive valley between the Andes, so you have these epic mountains in the distance. It looks like a spaghetti western.
Unfortunately, it's also incredibly touristy. The closer i got to Villavieja, the more "eco hotels" i passed, the more constant the stream of Bogotá-plated cars became, and people taking guided dirt bike rides were ubiquitous. So for every moment where i felt like i was a lonely cowboy in the wild, wild west... there were many more moments where some dude hung his head out of the car asking "how much further to the ferry?" And, sadly, people have decided the cool thing to do out here is build little stone towers, which is cool when there is only a cairn at the top of a mountain, or an inuksuk acting as a landmark for indigenous travelers, or a unique art installation in the middle of nowhere... but when there are literally hundreds of these little stone towers and dudes are pulling over to get selfies with them... ugh. It just looks like a children's playground.
And that was my big, closing realization of this bike tour. I finally reached the destination i wanted to reach - the other desert in Colombia - and i was disappointed. Not because of the landscape. God, the landscape was awesome. Yesterday morning cycling out of Villavieja i was literally moved to tears by the vastness, the desolate plains, the mountains on the horizon... until i rolled past a dozen roadside estaderos selling beer to dirt bike tourists, and half a dozen so-called "eco" retreats with piscinas and tour buses out the front. Like. Fucking hell. I fucking hate "natural" environments filled with tourists. I know i'm a tourist too. I know those guys in the tour bus have just as much right as i do to enjoy the nature. But they're only coming here for the unique vistas. I'm coming here for the solitude. If there is no solitude, it doesn't matter how beautiful the place is. If i'm surrounded by other people, i might as well just be in the middle of a city watching it on TV. It seems i can't enjoy nature in a crowd. I wish i could. But it completely busts the illusion for me.
Which is what got me to cycle on to Neiva. You see, my original plan had been to camp in the Tatacoa desert - at least for a night, maybe two. I have a tent. I have a sleeping bag. I haven't been able to use them at all since getting to Latin America. I was finally going to wake up in the wilderness, just as i did in Canada and the US. Except it wouldn't have been wilderness, would it? Either i'd be steathily camped behind a cactus just off the busy tourist loop, or i'd be paying for camping in one of the many "eco" resorts featuring "pods" and "glampsites" and whatever other nonsense the Bogotá weekenders come down to enjoy. Like... no. I would have just woken up disappointed. So i decided to go to Neiva the long way around - heading deeper and further into the countryside via a town called Baraya.
That turned out to be an excellent ride. Outside of the main Tatacoa tourist loop, the landscape was still very arid and epic, but the only thing out there were cattle farmers (who are likely increasing the desertification in the region). There was some very steep hill-climbing on gravel, but i was out there all alone, with a tent and plenty of water, so it was fine. It was better than fine, it was awesome.
After Baraya it was back on a sealed road through the villages of Tello (bought a coconut) and Las Brisas (bought some cane juice) and into Neiva, which turns out to be a large city with suburbs and highrises and you name it.
And that's the end of my journey. Neiva is the last big city on the road south. After this it's just ever-smaller towns heading up into the Andes and eventually over the border to Ecuador. Both east and west loom the mountains, but there aren't any main roads heading over them - it's too steep and remote. The standard bus route to Cali requires you to first head back north to Ibagué and then back around. This is the last place where i can easily catch a bus back to the coast, although even still i will have to change in Ibagué or Bogotá.
I think that's what i am going to do. Cycling back to the coast will take 3 weeks or so, which would be fine, except rainy season has begun in Colombia, and most of those 3 weeks would be going back along the exact same road i just came. Another option would be to head up into the Andes - either cycling up there like a maniac, or shipping my bike up and then pedaling the hills down from either Bogotá or Medellín... But as of right now, that doesn't feel... right to me. It's not that i don't want to keep riding my bike, it's more that i don't want to keep riding my bike in the Colombian interior. I'm just not feeling it. I'm emotionally tired.
This morning i have been pondering several more options, including shipping my bike to Barranquilla but traveling by bus to one of the other big cities and trying to experience a bit of of the urban middle class culture over here, but to be honest i doubt it's going to feel any different from the urban middle class anywhere else in the world. I'm not enthused. But i am still going to spend another night here pondering. This entry has gotten way too long, though, so i am going to post it now and get some lunch.
What sucked my energy was not the ride - it was mostly flat landscape, broad fields, rice paddies, and the odd shallow hill. What sucked my energy was the company. I was still very much in the Bogotá weekender belt, and i had several encounters along the way.
At one point i noticed a watermelon vendor - something i hadn't seen since up in the Caribbean section of Colombia - so i excitedly pulled over for a drink. While i was there, a guy in a car with two mountain bikes on the back pulled over for a coconut. As he drank from his coconut and i drank my watermelon juice, he struck up a conversation about my bike ride. He said he had just spent a few days mountain biking around Tatacoa, and he understood my bittersweet emotions about not wanting the ride to end. He said when you get on your bike, you never want to get off.
It's odd, meeting people at these little beverage stands. Something i forgot to mention in an earlier entry is that a week or so back i pulled over to a tiny roadside restaurant that wasn't open yet, but i saw a local guy there buying a bag of ice, so i figured i should at least be able to get a malta. Amazingly, the guy did a double-take, then said "hey, were you in Cabo de la Vela a couple weeks ago?" Yes, friends, somehow in a roadside stop in the middle of nowhere, i met a guy who i had also chatted to almost 1000km away in the desert sands of La Guajira. Small world.
The guy at the watermelon stand paid for my drink and gave me 20000 pesos before jumping back in his car to go home to Medellín.
I got back on my bike, and within a couple of minutes i was joined by another cycle tourist on a mountain bike with only the tiniest drawstring bag strapped on the rack. He had braided hair and a white vaquero (cowboy) hat hanging around his neck. He looked the ultimate vagabond, traveling the Andes with literally just the clothes on his back. Turned out he lived in Bogotá, and there wasn't a hammock in his drawstring bag like i assumed, just his wallet so he could buy meals and overnight accommodation. In bike touring parlance these guys are called "credit card tourers" as opposed to "self-supported tourers" who carry enough camping gear, water and food to survive independently for a couple of days. Even still, he was much more the classical hippie type than me, having just jumped out of one of the creeks along the road to cool off.
"Immersing yourself in water is really important," he told me, after suggesting that we bike together to Tatacoa. He said he kept cool in the hot weather by jumping in the water and rinsing his clothes in every creek. I told him i don't even remember the last time i swam in my life. It's just not something that would ever occur to me to do, to jump in a river by the side of the road. And yet, i see it everywhere, all over the country, people love to do it here.
He talked a bit about how different parts of the country have different culture, especially the mountains, but even different mountain towns. I talked a bit about the pros and cons of bike touring - on the upside, being able to visit so many more places that you never would in a bus or even a car, but on the downside, not spending long enough in any one place to really understand the local culture thoroughly. He then explained it was his first time bike touring and usually he traveled around by bus or plane. When i said i wasn't looking forward to going back to work in an office, he said that he understood and that manual labor is much more rewarding. But... i didn't ask him what he actually did for a living. He wasn't conspicuously wealthy - judging by his clothes and his bike - but he also gave me the usual spiel about how Venezuelans refugees are roaming the country making it unsafe for law-abiding citizens and bla bla bla.
To be honest, i only really understood about half of what he was saying, partly due to the background noise of being on the road, but also due to my Spanish level. Although i can read fairly well and can make myself understood without too much difficulty, my listening comprehension is - as usual - at a level much, much lower than my reading and speaking ability. This is always my weak spot with languages, and i think it's related to my more general difficulties around focusing on people's speech. Even in English i need to really concentrate hard to hear what they're saying, especially if there is background noise. And in other languages if my mind wanders for just a second, then i've completely lost the thread of the conversation.
But also, while we were talking, i was thinking about how i could get out of the situation. I was thinking about how fucking awful it is to travel with a partner. How sitting here cycling with someone next to me had turned my peaceful, relaxing ride where i could completely drink in and enjoy the world around me into a stressful human interaction where i no longer had any freedom any more. I knew the dude could bike much faster than me, because he had no baggage and a much lighter bike, so i told him "i'll slow you down". Then he told me there were two ways to get to Tatacoa, and one of them was really dangerous, so it would be better to cycle together than to go solo. "I'm not worried about me, i'm worried about you."
Don't these people realize that it's far more dangerous for me to travel together with someone else than it is to travel alone? When i am alone, i am a ghost. I come and i go, and if people read me as a tough, adventurous man (which they often do), that's a good defense mechanism. With someone else eventually the conversation is going to turn to family and partners and gender, which is very difficult to hide in Spanish due to the stupid fucking gender-based adjectives. At some point i have to explain i am the opposite gender that they expected, or that i am trans, and then i become a more obvious target for violence thanks to "gay panic" or more general misogynistic attitudes. Like, dude, you really think it's safer for me to strip off and join you bathing in a river beside the road than it is to continue cycling on alone? For fuck's sake.
Anyway, i was immensely grateful to reach the turnoff for Natagaima and pretend that i was too exhausted to go on. I wished him well on his journey and headed into town to find a hotel.
Like. God. Traveling with a partner is the god damn fucking worst. I don't at all understand these people who never travel alone, or who get depressed when they are traveling alone. The ones who are desperate to find a "road dog" to share their days with, the ones who specifically stay in hostels to make new friends then book a group tour. Strength in numbers? Fuck no. Familiarity is vulnerability. I feel so much stronger, safer and calmer when i am on my own. Traveling with somebody else, ugh, i can't think of any worse way to ruin something i enjoy so much.
The next morning i headed out of Natagaima toward the turnoff to Tatacoa. I had checked on Google Street View, and there is a really cool little gravel road that follows a former railroad line through some tunnels and across a rickety bridge into the main area of the desert. But, heeding the warning of the hippie from the day before, i stopped at a tienda beforehand and asked some locals there if it was safe to go that route. "No, definitely not, you should take the highway." Still, nobody had told me why it was "peligroso", just that it was. So i asked if there were bandidos there, and they nodded yes. In the interests of safety, i decided to take a different route that would still take me to the gravel road, but would skip the bridge and tunnels and instead whisk me across the Magdalena in another ferry.
Annoyingly, i found out the next day that the only "dangerous" thing on the bridge and tunnel route is that there is a (single) "loco" guy living out there who collects trash. So, i guess, just the usual mentally ill homeless sort, who might yell things out or possibly accost you in a fit of confusion, but not the fucking trained killers with AK-47s that i expected when someone said "yes" to my question if their were bandits. For fuck's sake. Honestly, i think the vast majority of the warnings i have received about traveling to certain places in Colombia have not been warnings about guerilla armies or paramilitaries or drug cartels, but just about the poor. So many people here appear to be terrified of the homeless, the mentally ill, squatters and displaced peoples and poverty-stricken migrants. Either that or they're just embarrassed and don't want a foreigner to see it. That was definitely the case in China. Someone in Villavieja remarked apologetically to me about the poverty in La Guajira and i was like... huh!? You went to La Guajira and your big takeaway was how poor the people there are? Have you seen the shacks at the next village over?
Anyway, i took a ferry across the river and had a delightful chat with a vendor on the other side, then cycled on to a nearby village and had probably the best meal i have had in my entire time of traveling through the non-Caribbean portion of Colombia. It was just a normal "cerdo a la plancha" (pan-fried pork), but it was tender and well-seasoned, and the sides were fresh and filling. They gave me two big tumblers of a juice whose fruit i could not place - perhaps it was lulo? Either way, it was great, and i spent about half an hour afterwards talking to the owner of the place, who dreamed of getting out of Colombia. She said the economy was not doing well, and she hoped to be able to find work elsewhere. I explained her various options for getting a seasonal work permit and immigrating to Canada more permanently. We also talked a bit about the pros and cons of other destinations. Like, the US - way more Spanish-speaking people to provide you with support, but a more arcane immigration system and fucked up government policies that feel deliberately biased against Latin Americans. Europe - further away and perhaps more difficult to arrange, but Spain is right there, and people across the rest of the continent are perhaps more used to dealing with multiple languages.
I think something that a lot of hopeful migrants don't consider is how difficult it is to navigate a new country when you don't know the language. It might be okay if you're just traveling, but when you're migrating you have so much paperwork to do that requires a solid grasp of the language. Things get so much more difficult if you need to always work through a middleman.
Anyway, after the chat i cycled along the gravel into Tatacoa proper. The Tatacoa desert isn't really a desert, it's more like a badlands. I think it primarily exists due to goats and other cattle eating all of the local flora, and due to lower-than-average rainfall the whole area ended up a barren dustbowl. With the unusual mineral content of the soil, some of the eroded peaks have layers of different colors that look really cool, plus of course you are in an expansive valley between the Andes, so you have these epic mountains in the distance. It looks like a spaghetti western.
Unfortunately, it's also incredibly touristy. The closer i got to Villavieja, the more "eco hotels" i passed, the more constant the stream of Bogotá-plated cars became, and people taking guided dirt bike rides were ubiquitous. So for every moment where i felt like i was a lonely cowboy in the wild, wild west... there were many more moments where some dude hung his head out of the car asking "how much further to the ferry?" And, sadly, people have decided the cool thing to do out here is build little stone towers, which is cool when there is only a cairn at the top of a mountain, or an inuksuk acting as a landmark for indigenous travelers, or a unique art installation in the middle of nowhere... but when there are literally hundreds of these little stone towers and dudes are pulling over to get selfies with them... ugh. It just looks like a children's playground.
And that was my big, closing realization of this bike tour. I finally reached the destination i wanted to reach - the other desert in Colombia - and i was disappointed. Not because of the landscape. God, the landscape was awesome. Yesterday morning cycling out of Villavieja i was literally moved to tears by the vastness, the desolate plains, the mountains on the horizon... until i rolled past a dozen roadside estaderos selling beer to dirt bike tourists, and half a dozen so-called "eco" retreats with piscinas and tour buses out the front. Like. Fucking hell. I fucking hate "natural" environments filled with tourists. I know i'm a tourist too. I know those guys in the tour bus have just as much right as i do to enjoy the nature. But they're only coming here for the unique vistas. I'm coming here for the solitude. If there is no solitude, it doesn't matter how beautiful the place is. If i'm surrounded by other people, i might as well just be in the middle of a city watching it on TV. It seems i can't enjoy nature in a crowd. I wish i could. But it completely busts the illusion for me.
Which is what got me to cycle on to Neiva. You see, my original plan had been to camp in the Tatacoa desert - at least for a night, maybe two. I have a tent. I have a sleeping bag. I haven't been able to use them at all since getting to Latin America. I was finally going to wake up in the wilderness, just as i did in Canada and the US. Except it wouldn't have been wilderness, would it? Either i'd be steathily camped behind a cactus just off the busy tourist loop, or i'd be paying for camping in one of the many "eco" resorts featuring "pods" and "glampsites" and whatever other nonsense the Bogotá weekenders come down to enjoy. Like... no. I would have just woken up disappointed. So i decided to go to Neiva the long way around - heading deeper and further into the countryside via a town called Baraya.
That turned out to be an excellent ride. Outside of the main Tatacoa tourist loop, the landscape was still very arid and epic, but the only thing out there were cattle farmers (who are likely increasing the desertification in the region). There was some very steep hill-climbing on gravel, but i was out there all alone, with a tent and plenty of water, so it was fine. It was better than fine, it was awesome.
After Baraya it was back on a sealed road through the villages of Tello (bought a coconut) and Las Brisas (bought some cane juice) and into Neiva, which turns out to be a large city with suburbs and highrises and you name it.
And that's the end of my journey. Neiva is the last big city on the road south. After this it's just ever-smaller towns heading up into the Andes and eventually over the border to Ecuador. Both east and west loom the mountains, but there aren't any main roads heading over them - it's too steep and remote. The standard bus route to Cali requires you to first head back north to Ibagué and then back around. This is the last place where i can easily catch a bus back to the coast, although even still i will have to change in Ibagué or Bogotá.
I think that's what i am going to do. Cycling back to the coast will take 3 weeks or so, which would be fine, except rainy season has begun in Colombia, and most of those 3 weeks would be going back along the exact same road i just came. Another option would be to head up into the Andes - either cycling up there like a maniac, or shipping my bike up and then pedaling the hills down from either Bogotá or Medellín... But as of right now, that doesn't feel... right to me. It's not that i don't want to keep riding my bike, it's more that i don't want to keep riding my bike in the Colombian interior. I'm just not feeling it. I'm emotionally tired.
This morning i have been pondering several more options, including shipping my bike to Barranquilla but traveling by bus to one of the other big cities and trying to experience a bit of of the urban middle class culture over here, but to be honest i doubt it's going to feel any different from the urban middle class anywhere else in the world. I'm not enthused. But i am still going to spend another night here pondering. This entry has gotten way too long, though, so i am going to post it now and get some lunch.