Small town, nice people

Nov 23

We are up relatively early in hopes of getting out of Santa Marta before the morning rush, I am not sure if we accomplished beating the rush but we did make it out of town quite easily. We are both going to have some bad driving habits when we return, it is common practice here for bikes to pretty much do what they want, where they want, and if the first two conditions are favorable, when they want.  Things like splitting lanes of cars at a light is a given, splitting the lanes while the cars are moving takes some guts, as does passing; on the right, on double lines, on curves, you get the picture. It does not even phase us anymore when we see a car or bus coming at us in our lane, we just move over as far as we can and let them past.

Our goal was to travel towards Medellin today which is about 800km’s from Santa Marta, at home this distance would be easily covered, here it is going to be a long day, probably close to 9 hours of travel time, and we would still only be about 2/3 the way. The route is fairly basic, follow route 25 from Barranquilla and just keep going South. One other very different thing about being on a bike is that there are no tolls to pay on the highways. So far every road we have been on has toll booths every so often and they are motorcycle friendly because there is a bypass lane that allows us to not only travel cheaper but quicker.

The day was long and the road was slow, we made it about as far as expected and by 4pm we were looking for a hotel in Shagun, not a very big town but it was supposed to have a couple of hotels. We found one out on the highway that allowed us to add another first to our trip list. The first night we spend in a "romance hotel".

Some travellers do not like these but we have never had a bad experience at one, the rooms are clean, generally on the cheap side, and often the room comes with a garage to park in for “privacy”. We would not want the neighbors to know who is participating in extracurricular activities. We got cleaned up and found a nice lady on the corner selling BBQ meat on a skewer with small Arepas (small corn flour bread). Each skewer was $1000COP (approx. 0.50CDN) so very affordable and tasty as well.

 

Some kids in the neighborhood. 

Nov 24

Another travel day as we make our way to Medellin, the road is very scenic as we climb up and up until we ride into the clouds. This also means that it is a high humidity area, ok it was raining cats and dogs all the rest of the day into Medellin. We would have liked to take more pictures but the rain made it totally impossible to see anything, it was not until we started descending that we finally were able to see what we had missed in the last few hours, the most magnificent valley and surrounding mountain peaks we have ever seen. The valley is very deep and we are once again reminded that although our Rockies are spectacular, we just don’t have roads like this through them.