148 miles

I really enjoyed my time in Columbia. It has easily been my favorite country so far. I loved my time in Alaska, but the continental US was probably my least favorite part of the journey so far. I never would’ve predicted that Colombia would be my favorite country. Before this trip, I was quite apprehensive about my safety in Colombia and all the unknowns that came with my first South American country. I’m a little sad to leave it behind. My days here have not been that big, but they’ve been full of some of the best memories of my life.

I woke up at 4 o’clock. But instead of popping out of bed like I usually do, I couldn’t bring myself to lift the blankets off my body. It was 39° outside and the same temperature in my room. I’d had the foresight to lay out my winter clothes the night before to let them dry and air out the smell a little bit. I’m glad I did this because I absolutely needed pretty much every article of clothing that I brought with me this morning. It took me forever to get out the door. I wasted 20 minutes laying in bed lamenting the cold. I then was quite mad at myself for my lack of discipline. I wasn’t on my bike until about 5:15. I rode the 30 meters to the border, and was disappointed to find that there was already a line to leave Colombia. It was only about 30 people long, but they only had one agent working. I shouldn’t have been so lazy. I should’ve gotten out of bed and gotten to the crossing at 4:30 and then there probably wouldn’t have been as long of a line. It turned out that I would’ve been better off sleeping in until six because the line didn’t really move at all for over an hour and a half. At 6 o’clock four new border agents clocked in and the line disappeared almost instantly. For the better part of an hour and a half I had been standing in the cold. By time I got to the window I was practically shivering. I can stay warm on the bike with the gear that I have but when it’s below 40° and I stop biking I quickly become quite cold and either have to seek shelter or hop in my sleeping bag. It only took about 30 seconds for the Colombia to process me out of the country, and equal time for Ecuador to punch my stamp in. Luckily, I had a climb from the border so I could warm up a little bit. The first thing I noticed upon entering, Ecuador was the number of runners and cyclists on the road. I haven’t seen a runner on the road my entire trip. The only time I can remember seeing runners was on the short section of greenway I did through Calgary. For some reason in the town of Tulcan, Ecuador there were runners everywhere. Both men and women. There are also more cyclists than I have ever seen on a road before. Some of them looked quite quick, but there were also a lot of casual cyclists. On my way out of town up to the 11,000 foot pass I rode past a sign that declared the town the cycling capital of Ecuador. There were some Olympic rings next to the sign. The town of Tulcan is the highest major city in Ecuador at nearly 10,000 feet. Perhaps they have some sort of Olympic training facility here. Regardless, it is clearly a very athletic town. Just as in Colombia, cycling is a huge sport in Ecuador. In the 2020 (or 2021) Olympics Ecuadorian cyclist Richard Carapaz brought home Ecuador’s first and only gold medal to date after he won the road cycling race. He is a national celebrity and the pride of the nation. You would be hard-pressed to find an Ecuadorian who doesn’t know who Richard Carapaz is. He is affectionately known as Richie and his impact on the sport in Ecuador is very tangible.

As I worked my way out of Tulcan, the many volcanoes rose around me as I climbed up through an 11,000 foot pass. The sun was shining and the sky was a bright clear blue. It was one of those mornings that felt very special. The rolling green hills looked healthy and clean in the crisp air. Three large volcanoes ring the city sticking up like points on a crown. Their upper slopes rise above the tree line as the rocky calderas fall away into slopes of scree down to the farmland below. I sliced through the pass and had a quick little decent before more or less leveling out in a beautiful valley. The valley floor was at 10,000 feet, nonetheless, large peaks stood above the small cities lining the valley floor. I had short little climbs, but was generally I was descending more than I was climbing. I came into several little towns. The road twisted through the valley in great broad, sweeping strokes. As I rounded a bend and leveled off into one of these towns, I could see the pale spire of a church sticking out above the gumult of the village. I decided it was worth a small detour to go get a better view of the church. A lot of the churches in Ecuador’s small towns—from my experience—look very similar, but I find them very beautiful. The Spanish architectural influence is very apparent, but these churches also have their own unique flare. I sat on the steps of the church basking in the sunlight as I started to delayer. I’d been quite cold just an hour before, but at this elevation, the sun was so vibrant that everything had warmed up quite quickly, and even though it was only 50°, it felt much warmer under the sun. as soon as I took off my cold weather gear, I slapped on sunscreen because I could feel the sun absolutely cooking me.

After I left the church, I rolled through the valley for another 20 miles before the valley floor dropped out. In this valley, I could see Vulcan Cayambe off in the distance. Cayambe is one of Ecuador’s six glaciated volcanoes. Cayambe’s peak sits just below 19,000 feet but because the equator runs over the flanks of one of its ridges at 15,000 feet, the summit’s rotational speed around the earth’s core is faster than any other point in the world. The farthest point from the earth’s core is Volcán Chimborazo which I will hopefully see tomorrow. I had the privilege of climbing Chimborazo last December and it was absolutely magical. When the valley floor dropped out, it did so abruptly and the road recoiled in a series of snake like turns down to the valley below. Just 30 minutes after being in great green pastures of the Andian Highlands, I found myself at the bottom of a massive valley thoroughly entrenched in the desert. Cacti lined the hills which were otherwise devoid of greenery. The mountains that had been covered in grasses and trees now were rendered a bleak tan brown and without sediment and flora to stabilize the slopes, these mountains broke off in crumbling cliffs. It felt like all of a sudden I’d been, transported to the mountains in the Middle East. This could easily have been a mountain valley from Afghanistan. It was certainly beautiful, but it was also hot. It was 90° now and it wasn’t even noon yet. I was still over 5000 feet of elevation, but it felt like I was in a totally different world. It was hard to believe that just a couple hours earlier I had been shivering in Colombia. To be totally honest, I clearly didn’t do my research on this part of my route because I had no idea that there was a desert like this in Ecuador. Just about 30 miles as a crow flies to the west, on the other side of Cayambe, I spent 10 days this past winter whitewater kayaking in the jungle with a group of paddlers from Dartmouth. It rained pretty much every day and the forest had been incredibly dense and lush. I never would’ve guessed that just over the mountains a starkly brutal desert existed. This is often the case as mountains squeeze out all the moisture from the clouds, but I just didn’t realize the Ecuador had a corridor of desert. I stopped for some yuca and chicken, and of course in abundance of ice cream. If my professional cycling career doesn’t work out, and I decide that it’s too late to save the planet from climate change, perhaps I’ll become a full-time international bargain brand ice cream connoisseur. Every country has slightly different offerings. So far, I must say that while Ecuador lacks immense variety of choices, everything I’ve had here is quite good. That being said, I am going to dearly miss Colombia’s tres leches ice cream popsicle. I think that might be the best ice cream I’ve had on this trip. I probably had five or six of them a day on my way through Columbia. The ice cream, for the most part, in Central and South America comes in the form of popsicles. You can buy large tubs of ice cream at supermarkets, but that’s not very practical for me and at most of the roadside stops I am making, these popsicles are the only option. There are fruit-based popsicles and then you have ice cream based popsicles. The ice cream ones are my favorite. The dairy has more calories and sustenance than the fruit-based ones. Also, I commonly take ice cream for the road and it inevitably ends up dripping all over me. The fruit based ice cream leave me sticky, no matter what I do, but I can usually clean up the dairy based ice cream’s much easier. In Ecuador, their specialty ice cream comes in the shape of a cone. Not like your typical ice cream cone, but like an actual roadwork cone with the point facing the sky. As much as the flavor is exceptional here, I have to admit that when you get to the bottom of the cone, it is quite hard to eat these ice creams since the base is so wide and it is invariably starting to melt and drip by the time one gets to the bottom. A minor deduction in the presentation and practicability fields, but overall I have found that Ecuador is killing ice cream game. Keep up the good work!

With every descent comes an ascent (actually this isn’t true. The reverse is true), and soon I found the ascent to my earlier decent. The road turned up another valley and I begin a long, but relatively gradual climb. I quite enjoyed the desert look. It was such a shocking contrast to the climate that I’ve been in over the past couple of days. On my way up the greenery slowly started to return in the valley below. Much of it was aided by man-made irrigation dikes, but scraggly vegetation started to return naturally on the sides of the mountain as I worked my way up to the city of Ibarra at over 7000 feet. When I was close to the top of the climb, I came across two bikepackers. From a distance I could tell that they were carrying a ton of bags. Some bikepackers run a relatively minimalistic setup with only a couple of bags. My set up is essentially the smallest I’ve ever seen for a trip of my magnitude. I am running the most bare bones set up possible with the nicest and most compact gear in the world (shoutout Big Agnes). Other people prefer to travel with a lot more luxuries. I don’t even have a change of clothes, but some people bring books, five or six different changes of clothes, sneakers, cooking set ups, days worth of extra food and water, drones and cameras, pretty much everything you could imagine. Some people load their bikes up until they weigh over 100 pounds. The two bikepackers that I passed on his climb win the award for the craziest setup that I have ever seen. From about 30 meters away I could tell that they both had crates on the back of their bikes. I whispered to myself “no way….” Each biker had a little dog sitting in a milk crate on the back of the bike. I certainly have never seen somebody bikepacking with their dogs before. In addition, these people had bowling pins and several other strange objects that led me to believe they were some type of traveling performers. They appeared to be a couple and as I was passing they made it clear that they wanted me to stop. We chatted for about 10 seconds before they started begging me for water. I guess they hadn’t really been expecting the desert either. I still had probably 4 L of liquids on me so I happily gave them almost everything I had. I knew that for me I would be in the town of Ibarra in about 30 minutes. But with their bikes all loaded down on this climb it might take them all afternoon. We talked for a minute and sure enough, they are nomadic circus travelers. They said they were doing a big loop around Brazil. They were very odd and, their vibe kind of rubbed me the wrong way. It was still funny to talk to them. Although we are both bikepacking, we might as well be doing two entirely different things. Our experiences are just not the same on the bike.

I was in desperate need of a bike shop. I had high hopes, once again, that I would find a seat post in Ibarra. In addition, I’d had two flats on the day already. That brings my total number of flats up to 27 on the trip. As I was rolling into town, I got flat number 28. I frankly couldn’t really believe it. I was only 2 km from a bike shop and the town didn’t feel that safe, so instead of stopping to change the flat I decided to just walk quickly to the shop. When I got there, I was disappointed to find that it was closed. I kind of noticed that the city seem to be functioning a little oddly. It wasn’t until I got to the shop that I realized there was no power anywhere. I only had a couple dollars left on me so I needed to find an ATM, but with no electricity none of the ATMs were working. I tried to go to a store and pay with card, but that didn’t work either because there was no electricity, of course. I went to four different bike shops in the town, essentially every shop in the town, but they were all closed. I changed my tire, not just a tube but the entire tire. I’ve been riding with a spare. My rear tire has threads showing through now and I’ve been getting a lot of flats on it so I needed to put a new tire in. I had hoped that Ibarra would be a nice place to stop, resupply, and maybe even fix my bike, but instead I left the town feeling empty-handed. It was hard to be that glum though because massive volcanoes lined my sight and every direction. These volcanoes were so big and so numerous that I felt like my neck was hurting from all the craning I was doing to get a better view. You probably already knew what I’m going to say. The pictures don’t do it justice. The volcano that rose right outside of Ibarra seemed to stretch all the way to the sky. It was like a wall against the city. No matter where you were in the city, you could look up and see this thing. I could also catch glimpses of Cayambe through the accumulating cloud cover. There are also volcanoes to the west north and south.

Even though I climbed into the city of Ibarra, I had to climb up to get out of the city as well. I begin making tracks towards Otavalo. Many of the main cities in Ecuador are laid out more or less in a line. Tulcan, Ibarra, Otavalo, Cayambe, Quito, Latacunga, Amato, Riobamba, Cuenca, and finally Loja. The only big cities in Ecuador that don’t lie along this line are Guayaquil, Santa Domingo, and Manta. I found that there is pretty much consistent development along this whole line. Between Ibarra and Otavalo the development never really stopped. I found a smaller town situated in the sprawl that had a bike shop. I wanted to try one last time. Sure enough, the shop was open, but it was tiny and didn’t have anything that I needed. They were able to help me seal the bead on the tire that I had just put in though. Even though I wasn’t running tubeless the bead still needs to seat against the rim, but because the tire that I have is a 25 and my rims are designed for 28 and larger, it hadn’t been sitting on its own. None of the shops down here have wide tires. In general it seems as if bike technology is lagging about 5 to 10 years down here. Almost no one has disc bricks and the nutrition and training and gear specifics all seem to be lagging behind the rest of the world. I’m finding it very difficult to acquire many of the parts that I need because my bike is much newer. There are exceptions, of course. The largest towns will have one or two shops that carry high-end bikes, but for the most part in these medium size towns it’s been proving impossible to get what I need. Nonetheless, the mechanics were very kind, and I learned of the reason of the power outages. Ecuador is in a huge drought right now and much of Ecuador’s electricity comes from hydroelectric power generation. The drought is so bad that many of the lakes are running dry so there’s no hydroelectric energy. In September the government started instituting rolling outages that initially only went for eight hours overnight. The drought has continued and the energy problem has only gotten worse and now the outages seem to come and go at random hours of the day and often last for 14 hours or more. I could tell that it was a somewhat reoccurring problem because several stores had generators running. After I left the shop I found an ATM that was running off of a generator and was able to withdraw money. I now have $300 of cash on me, which is more than I have carried this entire trip. Ecuador uses the United States dollar as its official currency so I figured I might as well load up on US dollars while I’m here. They will undoubtedly come in handy in Peru, Chile, and Argentina and even if I don’t use them all, I can just take it all home. Having more cash on me doesn’t increase my risk of getting robbed because it’s not like I’m telling everybody on the street how much cash I have. Still, I don’t love having this much money on me. $300 goes a long way in Ecuador. It’s an enticing opportunity for some.

If I thought the volcanoes around the city of Ibarra were cool, then Otavalo took it to the next level. The city is really nestled between a bunch of huge volcanoes. It was quite beautiful. I worked my way up and out of the city to an 11,000 foot pass as the sun began to set. At the top of the pass there were a lot of restaurants and stores. I stopped for a while to get some real good food. There is a lot of street food here in Ecuador, but there is essentially no prepared food or protein anywhere else. The problems that I faced with nutrition in Colombia are only worse here. I really have to rely on only street food. There are almost no large supermarket chains and the only places they do exist are in the centers of the large towns try I’m trying to avoid. Luckily, I found a store with some premade food. It’s essentially just street food that’s been packaged and put in a convenience store instead of stove on the street, but I have a little bit more faith in the safety of this food for my stomach.

At the pass I had to don my cold-weather gear once again before beginning the descent in the dark. The moon rose and the sky faded into a liminal pink as the lights of Cayambe city twinkled far below me. Volcano Cayambe, stuck its head out above the clouds, illuminated by the moonlight. It was a beautiful scene, but I had to focus on the road. I was getting close to Quito at this point and the road was quite busy. I had a series of descents on increasingly wide and well-maintained roads. During my last ascent before climbing into Quito I found myself on nice wide strip of black asphalt. Even in the dark, I was able to haul along at about 55 miles an hour. This is one of the fastest descents I’ve ever ever done and even though it was pitch blackout I didn’t really hold back that much. I felt very safe and it was exhilarating. I was shooting some pretty small gaps and having the time of my life.

I knew that I would have a climb into Quito, but I forgot the city is all the way up at 9000 feet. It was already 8 o’clock, but I started a 3000 foot climb to get up into the city. I didn’t mind the climb, but I descended so far that I had to take off my cold weather gear once again. As I got to the outskirts of the city, the climb leveled off and I begin looking for a hotel. About 3 km before I stopped. I rode upon the scene of another deadly motorcycle accident. This person had clearly been hit by a truck, and the cops just shown up on scene. They were placing a plastic sheet over his head as I biked by, but I was about 15 seconds too early and saw the crash in all of its horrific nature once again. Before this trip, I’d never seen a dead person before and now I have seen two severely disfigured corpses in the past two days and three in the last three weeks. I’m once again surprised by how this sight just bounced off me and I kept riding like nothing had just happened. In a way I’m more shocked by my reaction to the scene than I was to the actual scene itself.

I tried 3 hotels before I found a vacancy and then proceeded to quickly lull off to sleep.