May 21st, 2007
Cartagena, Colombia
GPS: 

What a day!  Even with the Noble Factor sometimes – okay, often – complicating things, we still seem to be unusually fortunate as far as things-that-could-be-major-but-end-up-not-being-so.  For instance, last night outside Medellin was a massive thunderstorm.  Well, massive to us foreigners.  People here seemed to take it in stride.  

Not even forty kilometres outside Medellin we were once again on winding mountain roads above breathtaking vistas we were already wishing would change to straight roads, we happened upon a long line of stopped trucks.  A VERY long line.  Being motorcycles, we hopped into the oncoming traffic lane to see what all the fuss was about.

The road was washed out.  Not, like, a little bit washed out, but a lot washed out.  Approximately half the mountain had come down on the road, completely blocking it in person-high mud with a muddy river of mud washing muddily across the highway and down into the increasingly muddy gorge below.

Of course we were frustrated.  Here we were not even forty K outside Medellin, early in the morning, and truck drivers are telling us it'll be at least two hours before we're moving again.  We dug out our maps and GPSs to try and find another way around (we HAD to be in Cartagena that night) but no such luck – the only road between two major cities was washed out, and alternate, secondary highways would take us at least four hours longer.

After Justin failed to make it over the person-high mud, even on foot, we decided to wait it out, and shortly after that a front loader clanked its' way down the highway and started plowing that pile of mud into the gorge below.  Pretty cool stuff – we got some pictures and some video of it.  Every time the vehicle would plow its' shovel into the pile of mud, waves of thick water would splash out over the top of the blade and would come washing down the road.

About an hour and a half after we arrived, the road was clear enough that the policia let all the motorcycles through, and we were off!  With clear roads for miles and miles in our direction.

Apparently the rainstorm had not been local to Medellin – we kept coming across partial landslides that would block part of the road, and eventually came across other landslides that had already been cleared.  Right before we stopped for lunch, we passed through this town that had been swamped.  People were shovelling mud out of basements, pumps were running all over the place, and the streets were slick with mud.  Robbie caught his rear wheel on a piece of cardboard while trying to slow, and promptly dropped his bike to the ground.   I stopped to help, but was on a slope so that when I got off my motorcycle, the kickstand was too high, and my bike fell over as well, perhaps in a gesture of motorcycle solidarity.  Sure felt stupid when I had to get some locals to help us get our bikes back upright.  Dad and Justin stopped about a block down and were both enjoying the show.

I keep forgetting to mention – before we actually started this trip, and I'd mention it to people, the most common response was something along the lines of 'your butt is gonna hurt'.  That wasn't true for the first eight or nine days on the road, but we're all starting to get the sore butt syndrome.  At least for me, i think i'm getting some kind of bedsores – up to sixteen hours a day, sitting, only stopping every three-hundred fifty kilometres or so to fill – anyways, my butt is now hurting.  I've been shifting position more often, and it seems to be working.  But my shoulders and hands have adapted – they no longer ache, at all, after hours on the road, unless i'm driving through mountain passes.  In the dark.  While it rains.  For hours.  Then, I get sore.

I keep kicking myself for another thing, too.  On the way from Machala to Latacunga, in Ecuador, immediately before we started up the mountain pass that led to such amazing sights and such lousy roads, we encountered a festival in a town at the base of the mountains.  They'd had the road blocked off, and were directing traffic in a detour around.  We stopped, and as we were going to pull off on the detour, a woman (turned out to be a man dressed in drag, in a pink wig) gestured for us to come forward, into the cordoned-off area of town.  We inched our way forward passed a band on a truck playing some music.  There were actually several men dressed in outrageous drag.  They descended upon us as a group, and dragged us off our motorcycles to where people were dancing to the simultaneous clashing of the band music and Britney Spears' pop classic Hit Me Baby One More Time.  We good-naturedly (and quite self-consciously) danced a jig or two with our cross-dressing friends in a crowd of people.  One normally-dressed guy was passing around little plastic cups filled with what looked like fruit juice and smelled like fruit juice, but packed a punch and burn similar to that of cheap whiskey.

I managed to beg off after two shots left me gasping with my eyes tearing, and we got back on our bikes.  But not before Justin gave a victory lap to one of our colourful friends.  Wish we could have stayed – looked like a whole bunch of fun.

Anyways, that's the awesome story that I keep forgetting to tell.  I've been sitting down with the boys most nights now, and jotting some notes so that I don't forget any of the good stuff that happened in a day.

One of the things about Colombia that made me progressively angrier the longer I rode north was the fact that the roads got worse the farther we went.  I'm not talking about twisty roads and such – the pavement progressively degenerated until not fifty kilometres outside Cartagena, it was impossible to do highway speeds.  I found this out when I came across a downhill turn with a bump so large that Dad says I caught at least a foot of air when I ran over it at 110km/h.  No warning signs – nothing, just BAM i'm airborne.  I'm pretty sure my heart stopped for a moment, and I decided that I fricking love ABS on a motorcycle.  Sure saved my butt when I landed.

The bumpiness continued for some time, and Robbie actually ran into a problem with that, as well.  The day before, you may remember, Rob rode himself into a ditch and broke the poorly engineered latches on his fancy plastic luggage, so that now his side cases must be held on with ratchet straps.  They'd worked well for a long time, with the ratchet strap around the middle of the rounded case, and the excess strap tucked inside it.  This road was a bit too bumpy for this system to work completely, and one of his side cases popped off the ratchet strap.  The case stayed closed, and the strap stayed attached to his bike, so Rob dragged it down the highway for a while behind him.

We took the wrong exit into Cartagena that night, so we didn't manage to catch any pictures of us next to a 'bienvenido a cartagena' sign, and we got another tour of the slummy section of a major city.  However, Cartagena is a pretty touristy place, so the 'slums' in Cartagena are light years ahead of what we saw in Medellin and Lima.  Especially Lima.  I rolled over 11,000 kms on my odometer as we hit downtown Cartagena.  We're almost halfway done!

The airport in Cartagena is right on the coast, so we figured there'd be no better place to find a decent hotel, and headed for the 'airport' waypoint on our GPSs.  Turns out, we were wrong, and couldn't see anything near the airport.  Dad found a taxi driver that spoke english, and he took us straight to the tourist section of Cartagena, right on the beach, and found us an awesome hotel.  Clean rooms, english-speaking employees, hot water.  It was heaven.

We've been needing to do laundry for quite some time, now, so one of the requirements we gave the taxi driver for a hotel (they usually consist of hot water, secure parking, softish beds) was that they either have a laundry service, or are close to a laundromat.  This place didn't have a laundry service that was open (today was some kind of holiday), so our taxi driver (very very nice guy, great english) found a place that would do our laundry, and he'd even pick it up and deliver it to us the next morning.  Awesome!

Justin and I tore into the mini bar when we got into our room (gatorade and water, we'd been sweating all day and hadn't stopped much for liquids), and then we went out on the town for a bit of shopping to restock the mini bar, and to hit up a pizza place down the block that had an all-Michael-Jackson music video playlist on the too-loud television.  Amazing pizza, though.  You're ever in Cartagena, go to Ricco's Pizzeria.  

Apparently I have a bit of a problem with fashion sense.  Actually, I knew that I looked ridiculous, but I had no choice, and I didn't care.  All of my clothes had been sent to the laundry place, and the only thing I had to wear were my fluorescent green swimming trunks, my bright blue Amsoil shirt (thanks, John!) and my motorcycle boots.  Everyone was apparently embarrassed to be seen with me.  I felt bad, until I saw a woman in the supermercado doing her shopping in her bathrobe.  

Supermarkets here are awesome.  They carry everything – even booze.  Even BOXES of whiskey marked 'ECONOMIA' so that you know it's the cheap stuff.  Like coming in a box wasn't a good clue.

I'm stuffed, and tired.  More tomorrow – should have some time 'cause the plane's not arriving until 10:30am or so.

Ryan Noble,
Cartagena, Colombia.