10. Donkey Sunrise
Day 100 🎊🎉
I feel I should celebrate today. 100 days, wow! It went by so quickly … And I am still basically just starting. I better busta move then.
I left Medellín yesterday morning. I wanted to avoid the morning rush hours so I was on the road at 0645. Cloudy day, roads were still wet after night full of storms. But it wasn’t raining in the morning. I left the city like I was living here my whole life. Weaving through the traffic with other bikes, splitting lanes and doing the car slalom. Lots of fun once you get used to it 😉 The plan today is for 260km.
South of Medellin the traffic got easier and the road started to climb. From 1,500m at Medellin up 2,500m over the pass and down to 600m on the other side. The road was pretty narrow but good compare to the rest of the country. Very cools scenery as I was riding in and out of the clouds riding on the narrow ridge with deep valleys on both side. Thank goodness for my bike’s 136 HP that allowed me to pass the slow moving trucks. Some of the views were unbelievable with distant mountains with few valleys in between. And there were farm fields everywhere on those steep hills. Very nice morning.
I stopped for breakfast in a small town. It was a BREAKFAST. Huge. I didn’t expect that, I was stuffed. But it was very good. Fed and watered I continue through a deep canyon on a very nice road. Unless it was interrupted by a road construction. Which seemed to be every few km. One way traffic in all those places. That doesn’t mean anything here if you are on the bike. You just drive by flagman and nobody cares. But it is up to you to stay away from the oncoming traffic. At many instances there are just centimeters between my bike and the tires of a huge semi. Again, after awhile, you get used to it. But when I got going on the nice part of the road, it was really nice. I think this was the nicest road in Colombia. I was doing over 100 km/h, the speed unheard of till now.
I was doing fine but then I start looking at the clouds ahead. I was hoping I could make it dry all the way to the end. I couldn’t. 20 km!!! from the end the heavens opened up, again. 20 kliks, really … ?? The water wasn’t a problem, but the lightnings around scared the begeezus out of me. No point of being stupid for no reason. I parked the bike, sat down under a huge tree and played games on my phone. Nothing else to do. The storm moved on after about an hour and I could continue. And I could see on the road that the rain stoped about 5 km from where I was hiding … Oh well, I have no other pressing plans anyway.
In few moments I arrived at my destination, Donkey Sunrise ranch before small town of La Unión. A beautiful compound run by people who like bikes. Eleazar and his daughter Isa and her husband Tim own the ranch. Jorge, the ground keeper and Cara from California and Becky from Holland who live here for now and help running the place. All super nice people and we all got along very nicely. We chatted all afternoon and before you know it, it was evening. Well, that was way too quick. I am not ready to move on so I will stay one more day.
Beautiful morning and Eleazar made this excellent breakfast. It feels like heaven. Where are all my friends??? Oh yeah, they are all in Hell … I keep myself busy the whole day, get my plan of attack for the rest of Colombia. Hopefully got my tires sorted out for Ecuador, so it actually was a fairly productive day. No more big cities in Colombia for me, all nature from here. It should be pretty spectacular.
Adios