HIGHLIGHT OF THE DAY: Driving through the spectacular Andes again
BUMMER OF THE DAY: Missing Zeme today L
WORD OF THE DAY: ANDES
DISTANCE TRAVELLED:
I am starting to sound like a broken record, but today was going to be a long day. Mark is now getting the travel times from locals and the lady at the restaurant said the drive to the Zona Coffee was around an 8 hour drive. So we need to add 2 hours extra for Rosita and also a lunch stop, so we knew we would be hitting the double digits for another day in the truck. I may sound like a crackpot, but I am still enjoying my truck days and as the time passes and we are closer to the end of the trip I feel sad. Sad that I am leaving Rosita, sad that I will no longer be in a group, sad that I will be saying goodbye to people that you have shared an epic adventure with. Whether you have made lifelong friends or not it is the companionship and I am going to miss everyone, there is no doubt. I know, I know it is a different attitude to a week ago, but it is just starting to hit me now and I am a very sentimental kind of person. I always have been. So it is now the 4th last truck day, 7 nights till we are back in Quito and my time in South America is done. With the exception of Easter Island (who belongs to Chile) I can safely say that I am ready to leave and I have a full 12 months before my round the world ticket brings me back here. I was just going to forfeit the leg from London back to South America, but I am now thinking that maybe I will use it to get back to the continent and maybe Zeme and I can do the last 3 countries left to do of French Guyana, Guyana and Suriname. Why not? Anyway a long term plan and I have a lot more things to think about than April next year at this point, but it nice to have a long term plan for travel, I have always been that way.
I have been getting our travel mileage from Gray since Torres de Paine last year to add the information onto my blog. When I returned from Ethiopia we got a little slack in getting the numbers from Gray and in fairness me reminding him to get them, so I got his taco disc’s this morning and worked out the mileage myself. Gray has a machine in the cab where he has to legally each time he drives the truck has to record his driving hours, distance travelled and the speed that he has gone over the day. They look exactly like a CD but are made of paper. So I had to sort them into order and then subtract the end kilometers from the start kilometers to give the distance travelled for the day. I didn’t do the 28 days I missed in Brazil, but I probably should have worked that anyway so that the people that did know how far they travelled and I guess it would be good to know how many kilometers I missed. I think I will ask for them back to work that out.
Bogota is a massive city and after an hour of driving, we had to refuel Rosita and it took us another hour just to get out of the city limits. It’s Sunday, so the roads aren’t as busy and it’s interesting to watch people go about their morning. Passing food markets, meat markets and flower markets with people doing their Sunday thing. There is a lot of graffiti on buildings, but 60% of it is quite good artwork or interesting pictures. There doesn’t seem to be any effort to clean it up, but there is a lot and it would be a mammoth task to just have it all done again. Yeah I probably wouldn’t bother too much either.
12 noon and we are back to driving in the beautiful Andes. Not only is the scenery green, tropical and spectacular, but the temperature rose a good 10 degrees and the sun also came out to play which just helps lift the mood of the truck and we can open our windows and let in fresh air and I can stick my head back out the window again. You can always tell when we are on main roads, as there are always trucks on these routes in this part of the world. After around an hour we verged off to the left and Agatha and I saw the trucks verge right. We looked at each other and figured that Gray must be taking a short cut. Well when we stopped for lunch at 2pm the truth came out that we had taken the wrong turn but it worked out okay for us as it was the prettiest drive of the trip so far. One wrong turn meant one spectacular drive for us. I was to find out later that Gray in fact had done a little loop and we passed the petrol station we had stopped at hours before and none of us in the back had picked up on that fact! Cheeky monkeys! The other dead give-away was the road was in pretty bad condition in some sections and I found it hard to believe that it was a national highway. Mark rekons it added around 2 hours to the trip, but most people were unaware so if they don’t know why tell them? The blog doesn’t count as it has passed and they won’t be reading this post till they are well and truly home I am sure.
We stopped for lunch at a service station on the valley floor and a police officer stopped with flashing lights behind the truck. Marks first words were what have we done this time but he was just being nosy and want to say hello. He looked through the Tucan brochure, checked out our trip, we gave him our lunch leftovers and then we were back on the road again. This was the real scenery started, they never fail to impress, no matter what country you are in. We started the climb up the mountains to the maximum altitude we would make of the day of 3000m. Thanks to Moon for all the altitude readings that he has on his fancy watch and I keep asking his how high we are the second we go up a small mountain. I really need to invest on one or at least a fancy gadget that will tell me. I’ll add that to my list of things to buy when I am back home.
So we are now sharing the roads again with hundreds of trucks of all sizes in both directions. It makes for some pretty interesting driving as some of the bends in the road seem so tight for the trucks that at some sections the ongoing traffic has to stop for them to get a big enough swing to get around the bend. There was a lot of roadwork’s happening building massive bridges, we saw around 4 in different stages of being built and on some sections of the mountains they were widening the bend to give them extra room. It really was a stunning drive, the road butts onto the edge of the mountainside for most of the drive and scenery was lush and tropical. We spent most of the afternoon at 2400m and at 5pm we were stopped for a passport check. This was the first one in Colombia and they were quite thorough getting us all off the truck, which we haven’t done in a long time. As the men came off the truck they were given a pretty intense pat down, which that has never happened before and the ladies were asked to stand to one side. The Police had what looked like near new automatic machine guns slung over their shoulders and none of them looked a day over 20. They are all so young, I wonder if they have compulsory service here? I will need to check that. They then took all our passports and one guy sat at a bench seat and proceeded to look at every single passport to make sure we all had an entry stamp in there. The Police all looked friendly enough and at one point one of them came over to tell marina what beautiful eyes she had! Was that a pick up line? He was cute in a Colombian kind of way. They obviously don’t do a head count as Shaz had her passport locked in her big backpack so decided to just risk not getting checked and it paid off as they didn’t even notice that a passport was missing. Agatha also had hers packed and handed in a photocopy, which after a few exchanges they accepted even though they didn’t actually see her entry stamp. At the end of the day I think they are just being nosy and want to check us all out. What started with 2 Policemen when we drove off there were 8 of them, so the freak show had again worked its magic. I am going to have to get used to it when I move to Ethiopia, as I am a ‘freak’ there, but armed with the local language (well after I learn it) I will feel a lot more comfortable and if I can converse with them I may not fell so out of place and the freak factor will be replaced with some ‘shock’ factor that I can speak their language.
We got to see yet another beautiful sunset as we descended to 1200m, and it was one that stretched across the whole horizon with hues of reds, yellows and oranges. Just magic, and another truck day that ends with a night time arrival. This is how we roll on this section of the trip and travelling in the Andes. We finally arrived into the coffee plantation at 8.30pm. 12.5 hours after leaving Bogota this morning. The drive did seem to go quick today, the marvelous scenery I think made the trip go faster and I do have prime position with my seat and this is why I decided to stay where I was than take Debs seat on the other side of the truck. I always get seats on the side of vehicles that have the window facing the sidewalks that is one of my tips for over-landing and an important one at that.
Well no trip after 12 hours on this section is complete without some drama and this one was a doozy. The coffee plantation was located at the top of a small hill that required Rosita to come down a steep hill, this was no worries for Rosie with only one tyre slippage at the top, she then had to cross over a very narrow bridge, which at this point I was getting a little worried as she then had to do a sharp right turn off the bridge up another large steep hill to get to the top and the accommodation. This is where the problem arose. As it had rained the day before there was a patch of grassy section after the bridge before the concrete track started for Rosita to get some traction. So after 10 minutes we all hopped off and walked up the hill and left Gray to try and get Rosita up the hill. The main problem was that it was dark, pitch black and he really couldn’t see what he was doing. Well after 45 minutes he finally decided (wasn’t really up to him as he would have kept going till midnight) that we had to get the food and bags to the accommodation, so the managers of the property backed down there car and loaded the bags and the food we needed for cooking, yes it was 9.30pm and we still had dinner to prepare, and got that all going. Dinner was on the stove quicker than you could say jumping jackflash and Gray was in there chopping and cooking. That man is a machine, 12.5 hours of driving, 45 minutes trying to get Rosie up the hill and then straight into the kitchen. AMAZING STUFF.
The accommodation is pretty cool. There is a pool, a round house that is self-contained with a fridge, a bar area downstairs, three bedrooms upstairs and an en-suite. There was another building with dorms and then there were rooms attached to the main building that contained the kitchen, sitting area and the dining room tables and chairs. It will be nice to spend a full day here I think. Dinner was on the table at 10.20pm with lots of help and hands thanks to people helping my cooking team out tonight. We will all certainly sleep well tonight.
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