My troubles started innocently enough: I was staying with a Colombian cyclist in the Zona Cafeteria, the heart of Colombia, and he wanted to take me mountain biking to show me the area around his finca. A great day was had, bumping and skidding down (and back up) a beautiful river valley. Unfortunately my bike was not made for aggresive down hill biking, so when I had a look at my bike a couple of days later I was not completely surprised to find cracks radiating from several spoke holes. I guess after 7,000 miles of carrying me and my kit the mountain biking was the final straw. However all was not lost, only one crack looked like real trouble, the other ones were just hairline, so I fancied my chances of making it to Cali (2 days down the road), where I was sure to find a replacement. After 2 days of searching every bike shop in Cali (no mean feat in just 2 days), I concluded that finding a replacement would involve a 10 day wait for one to be shipped in. This was not part of my plan so I bit the bullet and went to get the severe crack welded. Now this is quite a desicion as welding aluminium is a tricky job and I had heard plenty of accounts of frames and racks being destroyed at the hands of cowboy workmen, on top of this for the second time in the trip I would have to rebuild my wheel only to have the prospect of repeating this three hour operation (that's right, I knocked an hour and a half off my previous time) when the rim gave in down the road. However el maestro did a superb job and after a few hours of reconstruction I was back in buisness.
The day I left Cali, for my ride up to Popayan, the weather was fine but as evening approached the clouds started to gather quickly and the rumble of thunder sounded over the mountains on both sides. I found a spot to camp and had just finished eating my supper when the heavens opened. Great timing I thought, luck is with you. Luck was not with me: it rained and it rained and it rained, easing off with the approach of dawn. Now so much water had fallen from the skies that despite being well up a slope I was now camped in standing water. This would not have been such a problem at the beginning of the trip but by now my kit was starting to show the inevitable wear and tear of life on the road and both my tent and one of my panniers had holes in them. This meant that about half my kit was soaking wet and I would need to spend time drying it out if it ever stopped raining. Well it didn't stop raining and so when I rolled into Popayan that afternoon I was looking forward to a hot shower and dry clothes. I, being the team player I am, put all my kit out on the balcony of my dorm room, not wanting to subject my fellow guests to the god awfull stink of damp cycling kit. This turned out to be a gigantic mistake: the next morning I went to see if all my things had dryed out over night only to discover that my shoes were missing, but for some reason the rascals had chosen to leave my stinky cycling rags behind.
The upshot of this was that I had to cycle to Quito, a week down the road, in shoes that were little more than slippers (Colombian's have tiny feet and Icouldn't find replacement cycling shoes anywhere). Every pedal stroke was agony as the soles were too thin to prevent the pedals digging into the soles of my feet and the grip on them was so lacking that my feet were constantly cramped with the effort of hanging on. Still though this was character building stuff, that was untill I choose the wrong tap to fill my water bottle from. The next 5 days were horrendous, struggling up and down vast mountainsides, constantly feeling weak and like my guts were going to drop out, not being able to eat much as it quickly made its return to the outside world in various new and disgusting forms. A couple of nights were so bad that I was forced to take rest days to recover, I will remember the two nights of pain I spent in Tulcan, just on the Ecuadorian side of the border, for many years to come. So at last on my trip, seven months in, the going got really tough and how did I react, did I get going? Well for two days I definately did not go anywhere apart from regular trips to the bog. However I managed to keep making progress (at about half the speed I would normally have made) and so I'm pretty happy to conclude that this trip has made me half-tough, quasi-Bear-Grylls maybe a camp Ross Kemp.
This post has been pretty glass half empty but now that I have the luxury of looking back at it, I can slip on the old rose tinted glasses and appreciate some of the great things during this part of the trip. To start with was the staggering beauty of the mountains: three times I climbed over 3000 m as I headed into the Andes proper and thanks to the proliferation of rain, when it cleared I was cycling above dollops of clouds left in the valleys below, giving a sureal feeling. Next was Miguel, a Colombian cyclist I travelled with for a couple of days, allowing me to see yet another side of this great country. And as always the people I stayed with were phenomenal, espeically Miller in Cali, who has opened his house wide to cyclists and is always ready, with advice and a smile, to help out his fellow pedal pushers.
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