If Columbia has always been a mystery to you as it has been to me let me give you a brief impression of our 3 day out ride. (yes, Nancy can be brief once in awhile)

Southwest of Cartagena along the coastal roads, it is the land of grazing hotland cows that are shiny gray and look like water buffaloes. The land is mostly dry and more dry with some huge trees spread out across the flatlands. Mostly is hot, hot and hotter. The temperature read 112 degrees fahrenheit as we rode (that was with the thermometer in the sun). The night cooled down to 86 degrees at 10:00 at night. Two hours after sunrise and two hours before sunset the sky is on fire with orange hazy humidity. The roads are great to ride, because on our backroads route there are more cyclists than cars, and many motorcycles, and a few buses, who all work well together sharing the highways and byways equally. It belongs to everyone. What a unique feeling to ride without the fear of being squashed. So far, we've had lots of respect from all motorized traffic. (We get back to the main highway in a couple of days. Hope our report is the same.) And people call us amigos instead of gringos.  read more here... lee mas aquí... »

You´ve all heard of Colombia and the tremendous security/drug/paramilitary/guerrilla problems they´ve had over the years. Some of you told us not to go here because of what you had heard. We decided to go, however, because of what we heard from the cyclists who had actually passed through: it´s a calm country, beautiful, with incredibly friendly people. And that´s what we´re finding too. We haven´t had any problem, but we do read the paper and we do see the results of the strain they´ve had over the years.

Basically, Colombia got buried under the corruption of drugs and the challenge of a revolutionary insurgency for decades. They seem to be digging their way out over the last ten years or so, and the current president, Alvaro Uribe, is immensely popular for the progress he´s made. The guerrilla group, the FARC, is still there and still holds some very important hostages, some that it's had for more than 8 years. But it seems to be declining in power and influence. You might wonder from reading the paper that their primary reason to keep holding those hostages is that it's their last grasp on power. The FARC seems to be still quite dependent on the drug trade for its financing.

During the guerrilla years, private security forces were created by the big landowners, and developed into what's called "paramilitary forces" here. Essentially, they became private armies in their own right.  read more here... lee mas aquí... »

Hola de Randy y Nancy (Hobobiker.com) en Medellín, Colombia

¡Saludos a todos desde Medellín, Colombia! Nos estamos disfrutando mucho de este país tan bello, amigable, y hospitalario.

Aquí es una actualización sobre lo que nos ha pasado en el último mes.  read more here... lee mas aquí... »

There are new pictures posted of our Trip through Colombia so far and of the boat trip from Panama.

And you can always see all our pictures on the photos page. (We did add some more to the Panama pictures announced them.)

Randy and I have made a priority of visiting many pre-Columbian archeology sites during our bike trip from the north pole to the south pole. After a month of riding the beautiful country of Colombia we decided to go off-route and take a bus 6 hours from Popayán to San Agustín, a magical place full of thousands of pre-Columbian sculptures and burial sites. Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995, San Agustín is a place of natural beauty and important universal culture. Some artifacts have been carbon dated as early as 3300 B.C., and aparently it was one continuous culture from that period to the date it mysteriously disappeared in the 8th century A.D.

Who built these and why are both total mysteries. Some theorize it was all a city for the dead - since humans live a short time on this earth but a long time in the after life, the burials require their own city. This spiritual place is a burial place to honor those in the after life. The hundreds of burial sites found throughout the 50,000 hectare area are full of treasures, potteries and huge sculptures guarding the tombs of the dead. Standing erect are mystical megalithic sculptures representing gods, and mystical animals. Almost all the sculptures have mammoth heads two or three times large than the body, either short legs or none and also human and animal features intermixed. The majority have jaguar or eagle features carved into the huge free standing carefully sculptured rocks. Some are realistic and others are rather abstract.  read more here... lee mas aquí... »

We met some very nice people in Cali. One of them was Jose Lopez (and his whole family), an excellent and active cyclist who has ridden the entire country on his mountain bike. Jose belongs to a group called Colombia Nuestra Meta (Colombia Our Goal), which does major country-crossing rides and raises money to get bikes for kids in remote villages.

Last year, Colombia Nuestra Meta rode the entire route that we're riding (impressive!) and this year they're doing a route that's even harder, crossing all three mountain ranges that define this country, crossing it from east to west.

Jose met us and gave us a grand tour of Cali, and then gave us two absolutely beautiful cycling jackets (shown in the picture) - the nicest we've ever had. Our job is to take a picture of ourselves in front of famous South American sites with these beautiful jackets. It gives us a good excuse to get more pictures of us together.

Thanks, Jose!

Some more ramblings about our (wonderful) time in Colombia:

Colombia is such a diverse country. I'd say there's more money here than in any country we've been in since we left the US. Many relatively small towns have very fancy downtowns, with great services. (If you're looking for a place to invest, you should consider Colombia. It's looked on so poorly by the outside world, but is actually thriving and on the way up.)

On the other hand, we've seen poverty as severe as many other places, and lots of rural scenes. Horse carts galore, competing in cities with fancy cars in underpasses. Bicycles loaded with all kinds of construction goods and equipment. People living along the highway in shacks made of plastic sheeting. Beggars crawling around in the cities. Sometimes very sad.  read more here... lee mas aquí... »

The most commonly available map of Colombia (outside the country) is the widely available one from ITMB (International Travel Maps). As usual theirs is quite poor, but since it was the only one we could get before arriving in the country, we bought it.

However, we were able to get some excellent map resources at the national institute of geography, the Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi, and that did us very well. They offered a number of maps, but we bought their set of route maps "Mapas de Ruta", that gave 1:750,000 renditions of the major highway stretches of the whole country.

There are also a couple of widely available travel guides for the country, with lots of great information, but they're big glossy books with lots of ads and they're extremely heavy. One of these is the Guia de Rutas Por Colombia and another is published by the big telephone company Telefonica.

The GPS maps we used don't seem to be available, but a helpful visitor commented "If you are looking for very good maps for tha garmin GPS try Gisco at www.mygisco.com."

Take a look at this incredible video (view it full-size here). We were riding our bikes through southern Colombia, climbing into some of the most awesome mountain scenery we've ever seen, and here's a little sample. A big sample. Look at that waterfall! Nancy says "I was awed, I was brought to tears, and I was humbled by the realization of how small an insignificant we really are in the big picture of time and space."