26-27 January 2017

Lenin and I continued our pattern of switching bikes every twenty kilometers, since the road was predominantly downhill or flat from Bogotá to the southern border of Colombia. From Giradot, we were able to make it about 90 kilometers to stay at a tire mounting place at a truck stop, just outside of Natagaima. The family who ran the place were very welcoming and even fed us dinner and breakfast the next day.

Churro runs after us on our way to the desert.

We left late in the morning, and veered off the main road onto a dirt road that brought us on the other side of the Río Magdalena. The condition of the road slowed us down considerably, but it was beautiful. I think we only passed two cars the whole way, until we reached Villavieja, the small town at the entrance to the desert. It was dark when we arrived, and while Lenin was hoping to camp in the desert that night to see the stars, it was cloudy and raining a little bit. We ate dinner in Villavieja and then biked around town in search of a place with a roof where we could lay our sleeping pads. We came to a construction site by the river, and the security guard there said we could spend the night in the house that was being built. He even let us sleep inside his tent! It was a quiet night until a crazy guy came and started banging on metal pipes in the house. The security guard was sleeping soundly in his chair through the whole thing, so Lenin had to get up and try to make the guy stop. The security guard was reluctant to phone the police until the crazy guy actually tried to steal something.

El Desierto Tatacoa

​The next day, after breakfast, we started pedaling into Desierto Tatacoa. At the top of a hill, Lenin and I had an argument so bad that we didn’t even want to travel together anymore. I can’t even remember why we were fighting, but we were so angry that we declared we would go separate ways. Lenin threw one of the bags from the road bike to me, and I put it in the trailer and biked all the way back to Villavieja with Churro. Not knowing what to do when I got to town, I started heading back until I saw Lenin again. We stopped at a juice place and talked more calmly, agreeing to keep on going together.

Getting ready to swim in the oasis

​Climbing back to the desert, we encountered a man whose motorcycle was broken. Lenin fixed it for him, and the man invited us to have coffee when we reached his ranch a few kilometers into the desert. We ended up talking to this guy for an hour at his place, which offered hammocks and camping to tourists as well as food. We stayed to have lunch and then biked the rest of the way down the desert road to swim in an oasis, which was really just a swimming pool fed by a natural spring in the middle of the desert.

The desert is pretty small, so we didn’t need more than one day there. We decided to pedal back to Villavieja and try to make it to Neiva as quickly as possible. After finishing dinner in town at 6pm, we pedaled furiously for 40 kilometers to make it there by 8:30pm.