Day 42: Chinú to Valdivia

175 miles

I am simply enamored by Columbia. The country is so vibrant and beautiful. The energy here is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. I don’t really know how to explain it. On a micro level everyone is so friendly and relaxed. But on the macro level, there is a palpable chaos. I think the best way I can explain it in one phrase is a violently chill chaos. All the rural areas of this country offer incredible taste of culture and the urban areas are alive with movement. I am struck by how relaxed everybody seems. No matter what time of day it is, you can find people sitting in chairs around tables and talking, maybe drinking a little bit, sharing food. I know people in Colombia use their phones probably just as much as anywhere else, but it does feel like they know when to put them down. Whenever I pass a restaurant, which is seemingly every couple of feet, people are engaged in the presence of one another. I very rarely see people on their phones. Every time I interact with people I am given smiles, and understanding sympathy towards my poor Spanish. The men here are very quick to ask me about my trip, and the woman are incredibly kind in an almost a motherly way. It is interesting that I haven’t had a single woman ask about my ride but it’s always the first thing the men ask about. I’m still trying to figure out the gender norms here. Whenever I say, thank you instead of saying you’re welcome, people always tell me “con gusto” or “with pleasure.” People are quick to throw around terms of endearment that I haven’t heard anywhere else. A simple thank you often elicits calls of “con gusto mi amor” “it was my pleasure to help you my love.” I feel very welcomed here. Colombia has a very notorious and rough past in terms of cartel and criminal activity. The country has come an incredibly long way on the safety front. I’m not immune to the fact that there is still crime and cartel activity. Colombia is still one of the largest cocaine producing states in the world, but it’s a lot safer for me to be here than it would’ve been 40 years ago. Much like when I was in El Salvador this spring, I feel like people are excited to have me in their country. Maybe I’m reading things wrong, but I feel very welcomed. I almost feel at home. I’m still on edge but I want to be more relaxed. The energy here is contagious. I want to stop at the restaurants. I want to put back some cervezas, sit and stay a while, talk with people, make some friends. I have no doubt that I will be back to do just that in the future. But as I’ve said many times before, I’m on a business trip right now. It hurts a little bit. I really do feel like I’m missing out. Anyways, I am just so glad to be here.

Climactically, Colombia seems the same as Central America. Right now is the rainy season in Columbia and October is supposedly the wettest month of the year. Yesterday I looked up “when is the best time to travel to Colombia?” and the google research yielded “any time of year except for October.” Oh well, a little bit of rain will be OK. I just hope to have good views in the mountains. It was very hot and muggy all day yesterday and for most of today. I don’t know if I’m technically in the Amazon rainforest, but I might as well be. I’m pretty sure this area is not considered the Amazon since there is a mountain range between me and the Amazon to the west. Regardless, I’m totally in a jungle climate. The one really cool thing about hitting the wet season is that everything is so green and lush. There are flowers everywhere and it’s impossible not to see life everywhere I look. It only rained for a couple of minutes today. Google had made it sound like I should expect nonstop rain. I’ve been in South America for 48 hours now and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much sun I’ve seen. It has certainly been nicer weather than I’d experienced since Nicaragua. I do miss the sunsets and sunrises though. It’s been very cloudy and I feel like I haven’t really seen any good evening or morning colors since Mexico. I’m sure that will change in Peru. Anyway, the clouds are nice because it makes it a little bit cooler.

Even though it felt like I was in the jungle, it didn’t always look like I was in the jungle. All day I was winding my way through rolling cow fields. Luckily, the fields have not been clear-cut. Farmers have left stands of trees across the fields, so that it looks a little bit more natural than any of the cow fields in the United States that I am used to. Nonetheless, it is very clear that the landscape here has been drastically altered by humans. What trees do still stand or absolutely magnificent. I genuinely cannot name is single species of flora that I see. I can hear monkeys and parrots, but for the most part, the only wildlife that I saw were some occasional colorful birds. There are signs all over the place warning about animals crossing. Colombia has very specific road signs. They have signs specifically for snakes, anteaters, monkeys, iguanas, and silhouettes of animals I don’t even recognize. It’s really cool. They’re occasionally also little bridges across the road between the trees. They are a little more than rope strung up between the trees, but it allows animals to cross safely above.

I’m very conflicted about the cows. My diet has been evolving incredibly quickly. I feel like it is impossible for me to get good nutrition now. I was barely clinging on in Central America, but now in Colombia, I’m finding it impossible to get good protein. Especially on the heels of my sickness, nutrition is of a paramount importance, and I feel that I am failing myself. I feel like I am falling well short of my protein needs. I can feel it in my recovery. It’s not the same as it was. In the US I was managing to get about 200 g a day and even that wasn’t enough. In Colombia I can’t figure out how to get more than about 50 g a day. All of those grams are coming straight from dairy as well. I am consuming far too much dairy. I would say about 50% of my diet is dairy. Chocolate milk, ice cream, cheese, and yogurt. And that’s seemingly all I’ve been able to get here in Columbia. The only plant based protein I’ve been able to find has been canned beans. I’ve had a couple of cans of beans, but there are some problems with eating canned beans for every meal. First off, I don’t have a can opener, so finding cans with pop tops can be difficult. I’m also still recovering from stomach issues, so eating copious amounts of beans isn’t really helping on that front. Then again, neither is that much dairy. Additionally, the cans of beans in Colombia have about 10 g of protein per can. For me to get to my protein needs even using beans as only half of my protein source, I would need to consume 10 cans a day. There is no shortage of protein, but it’s in the form of meat. I can find some chicken on occasion, but beef is clearly the meat of choice in Colombia. In grocery stores there seems to be no prepared foods. It’s only raw meats. There is a ton of street food with cooked meats, but I’m still worried about food poisoning, if not even more worried than ever before. My bout with food poisoning was not pleasant and seriously hindered my progress. It will probably take me almost another week to fully recover my energy levels and sleep. I feel like I’ve been backed into a corner. Street food is the most obvious and only available option if I want to meet my dietary needs, but I am incredibly worried about sickness. For lunch I gave in and got some chorizo at a roadside restaurant. Maybe this was pork instead of red meat, but I’m not that naïve. I’ve passed by thousands of cows in Colombia, but I have yet to see a pig. Eating red meat again feels incredibly hypocritical and wrong for me. The fundraiser I am doing in tandem with my ride helps support indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian and Brazilian Amazonian rainforest. While the money I am raising will go directly towards solar panel installation , the broader context in which my fundraiser is working operates to protect the rainforest from deforestation and exploitation by oil companies. The largest source of deforestation in the Amazon is for cattle grazing. Now that I am essentially in the Amazon, every time I am eating a cow. I am contributing to the very problem I hope to be working against. I am so conflicted. I genuinely feel like there is not a good answer for my problem. It feels impossible to be an ethical consumer while also consuming the things that my body needs to sustain itself. My fundraiser seems like a thin façade, obscuring my own hypocritical behavior. One could even say that perhaps it looks like the fundraiser is meant as a coping strategy for me, since I clearly cannot follow through with my own ambitions. I stop at every grocery store to try to do my best to find alternatives, but I keep falling short. My consumption of dairy is also contributing to the problem of deforestation, but to a much lesser extent since cows can produce a lot of milk over their lifespan, but you can only get meat from a cow once. I was able to find some chicken empanadas, but upon biting into them I found out that I’ve been lied to, and there was no chicken in them. It seems that I’d been scammed for my money and convince to pay an extra 500 pesos per empanada for chicken as opposed to cheese. 500 pesos is about $.15 so that wasn’t a big blow for me. More of an annoyance than anything else. But I do have to admit, my chorizo Empanadas were absolutely fantastic even if they were beef.

In the late afternoon, I got my first glimpse of the Andes. Huge mountains climbed up into the clouds. I couldn’t see much, but I was extremely excited. The Andes present a monumental challenge, but they also present some of the best riding in the world and unrivaled beauty. My days will certainly get shorter from a mileage perspective due to the elevation gain, but that is to be expected and very much built into my pacing of this route.

As I reached the foothills of the mountains the road found its way next to a large river, and I soon found myself in a massive canyon with green walls rocketing up on either side. The valley was so deep, and the wall so steep that the cow pastures disappeared, leaving the untamed jungle in its wake. Only now that I could see what the forest looks like without the impact of the grazing cows could I appreciate how incredible the jungle here is. Perhaps it is even more incredible than the jungle in Costa Rica. I have been to the Amazon rainforest in Peru, but that was during the dry season, and the forest felt much different. This forest had less massive trees, but seemingly more diversity and a quintessential jungle feel. I rode through tunnels of green as muddy waters poured down the hills around me. The air was full of noise and the forest was a blur of commotion. It was an incredibly exciting place to ride my bike. I was in awe of the beauty. It’s incredible to be able to ride in such lush jungle with palm trees and look up at 10,000 foot peaks.

I wound along the river in the steep canyon for several hours before getting to the base of my first big climb. I think this is the largest continuous climb that I will have this entire trip. The base of the climb sits at 500 feet before the road turns violently upwards for 8,000 vertical feet, topping out at over 9,000 feet. The sun was setting as I began this climb so I knew I wouldn’t make it to the top before I had to stop for the night. I began climbing forever upwards. The average gradient of the whole climb was only 7%, but ramps were up at 20 or 30%. There were many sections where the road had been washed away and when rebuilt it was flattened and then pitched up. This wasn’t your typical highway climb. Even though I am on Colombia’s Carretera 25, the main highway that runs north to south down the heart of Colombia, the road twists and turns in fantastical fashion. The Andes begin in earnest in Columbia and there are no flat routes across the country unless you stay right on the coast. This highway has no choice but to wind its way through massive mountain ranges. There are so many semis on the road that traffic gets quite bad. It was only one lane each way and the road meandered in erratic turns. Many of the larger trucks struggle to make it around the corners. When two trucks meet at a corner coming opposite directions it often creates an impasse as these trucks need both lanes to have enough space to turn as their turn radius is wider than the lane. In addition, the climbs are so steep that fully loaded trucks sometimes struggle up the steeper pitches or out of corners, dragging traffic to a halt. This is no problem for me when I am going uphill, but when I am trying to descend, the traffic slows me down and can be quite dangerous. I climbed the first 3000 feet of the 8000 foot climb before stopping in Valdivia for the night. I would’ve liked to go a little bit further, but there were no hotel options for another two hours. I found a hotel room for just nine dollars.