We cannot believe that it is day 94 on this trip, of 101 days (or actually a couple more for bike cleaning and shipping)!
There are three possible roads to the centre of the capital city of Colombia, Bogata. (Prounced Bog-ah-tah, not bag-oooh-ta as I am reminded by Sheryle!). We chose a different and very windy road, as this was the only one that had no landslips and truck accidents on it at the start. And it was fine and dry, so the first few hours riding was very special and very enjoyable through the mountains and over-hanging forest. Overall, the new highways and back roads of Colombia have been the finest in South America. This was later proved by some superb engineering of some mountain tunnels, including one very long one, of nearly three kilometres through an entire mountain.
And then it rained and quite hard. The roads became very slick, so that passing slow trucks including many semi-trailers that took up both lanes of course, had to be done with consideration. We were very careful riding over the white and yellow road lines, as these are particularly slippery. To make matters more "interesting" there were lots of refugees, mostly from Venezuela, chasing the slow moving vehicles up the steep hills, and climbing onto the back trays, with their children and small carry bags. The people were covered in plastic sheets of all colours.
We came upon a very long line of cars and trucks, over five kilometres and of couse "lane split" to the front of the queue to find out what was going on. A huge tree had fallen across the road, along with a small landslide and JC was nowhere to be seen - he had managed to get through just before the tree fell! As the rain poured down, some local men set to cutting through the branches with machetes. It was a slow process, but eventually they had cut a small tunnel under the branches, enough for the motorcycles to get through which we did. The next part was driving through some very impressive physical tunnels, one of which I stopped in, to take photos and put a neck-sock on so that the rain would not pour down my neck.
I had been riding with Ned, who was slower than me, so I went ahead to chase down Rahn, Paul and JC. As I was climbing a long slippery hill in a single lane, when a young man on a moto who was coming down the other two lanes crashed his motorcycle, thereafter sliding across the front of my bike right ahead of my front wheel. He slid a long way, more than 100 metres on the wet surface and managed to miss me, after my emergency stop. His bike would have gone over into the abyss, but was halted by a large concrete gutter. So I stopped, put on my hazard lights and went to get him back on his feet, and the bike upright. Others stopped to help too, which was rather good as it was pissing down, His helmet was grazed on all sides and he was a little dazed, but otherwise ok. His new moto had some significant damage. I rode on slowly, a little shaken at how close we had all come to a serious accident.
I was actually enjoying the riding despite the rain, as the views and atmosphere was spectacular. Eventually we all met at the agreed roadside restaurant for lunch, and Ned joined us followed by Willy and Sheryle in the truck. However, we were keen to get going into Bagota and soon moved on, slowing for the 15 kilometres of long queues as we arrived into the ciy of over 8 million people.
We stopped at the Biouxry Hotel, which is quite new and has a couple of good restaurants, where we enjoyed a couple of fine drinks and a good meal, which all seven of us attended.
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