Riding to Patagonia

[ducpainter]

Hard tellin'...not knowin'.

Too many variables to make any conclusions.

[1.21GW]

Hard tellin'...not knowin'.

Too many variables to make any conclusions.

To clarify, I'm not asking IF it is the cause of mpg gain, only whether a spark plug change CAN improve mpg by a few.  Anyway, back on the road so time to post some pics.


I spent a month in Medellin just hanging out in a rented apartment for what was effectively halftime on the trip. Didn’t really take the camera around with me, but here are a few pics worth sharing.  That iguana in the last image was one of a dozen-or-so roaming the botanical gardens. I don’t exaggerate when I say that it was the size of a full-grown possum.



















Medellin is located in a valley that has beautiful sunsets on a daily basis. If you’ve ever considered paragliding, I’d say there is no better place to try it than in one of the hillside towns on the ridges above the city. Do it at dusk for the full effect of majesty.

[1.21GW]

I headed next to Colombia’s coffee region, an area that is nothing but misty green mountains.  Unsurprisingly, the coffee is excellent.  The NY Times did a travel article on the region a few weeks ago (click here), so I guess it’s becoming a quite a popular tourist destination.  The area is also where you encounter an increasing number of refurbished Jeeps, nicknamed “Willys”, that are painted in all shades of color.

























Though there are a few larger cities in the coffee region, the main tourist destination is a little pueblo called Salento and its access to the 60m tall wax palms in the nearby Cocora Valley.  Travelers refer to them as "Dr. Seuss trees" due to their attenuated trunks and shock of tousled fronds that seem drawn from the pages of a children's book.  Their cartoonish proportions are so oddly out of place among the familiar forms of the region that they appear as alien invaders in a foreign land.  A 5-hr hike around the valley cuts through cloud forests with raging rivers and wobbly suspension bridges, and then down to the valley floor where the wax palms stand tall and erect like soldiers at attention.  Along the way, mustangs and cattle form ghostly figures in the fog.  And everywhere everything is green, and everything is wet.

[DarkMonster620]

Look at that, there is even a Benotto in one of the pics . . .

[ducpainter]

I don't think fresh plugs will give an increase of a few mpg all by themselves.

The next time it drops off, change them and prove me wrong.

[1.21GW]

Look at that, there is even a Benotto in one of the pics . . .

I've passed lots and lots of dedicated bikers in Colombia and, as I'm seeing now, in Ecuador.  The mountains provide good training ground I guess.  Like in your city, many Colombian cities shut down roads on Sundays for bikers.

I don't think fresh plugs will give an increase of a few mpg all by themselves.

The next time it drops off, change them and prove me wrong.

I accept that challenge. 

[1.21GW]

Next up was the Tatacoa Desert, named by Spanish conquistadors after the local rattlesnakes.  Tatacoa is a bit of an anomaly: a proper hot-and-dry desert (a mere 330sq km / 125 sq mi) surrounded entirely by wet tropical mountains.  Its mounds of desert clay have eroded into a maze of gullies that from a distance look like one giant spore colony spreading across the landscape.  Up close, the forms appear more like miniature versions of the grand sandstone towers of the American Southwest, such as in Monument Valley or Arches National Park.

The flat plane of the valley and the dry air combine for spectacular sunset vistas.  In my lucky case, I caught a rainbow, a full moon, and a spectacular sunset all at once.  Made for perhaps the best sunset beer viewing I've ever had.

[1.21GW]

This one's for you, Carlos.  Was stopped for a full half hour in northern Ecuador because there was some kind of bike race.  Turned out only to be like twenty guys.  

[DarkMonster620]

This one's for you, Carlos.  Was stopped for a full half hour in northern Ecuador because there was some kind of bike race.  Turned out only to be like twenty guys. 

That's what we do . . . Guille says hello and take care . . . don't forget to write . . .

[1.21GW]

So my bike came with an aftermarket exhaust purchased by the PO and wrapped around it were two hose clamps that were meant to hold a long since lost heat shield.  I never bothered getting a new shield but realized its importance when a few weeks into this trip I discovered a golf ball-sized hole burned through the inner knee of my Aerostitch pants.  I patched them with duck tape and have been riding that way for the past 8 months.

Finally, after passing exactly 11tybillion metal shops between Chihuahua and Quito, I decided to do something about it and hired a guy in Ecuador to make me a shield.  He did a great job of shaping it to fit the curve of the exhaust.  I like the rough finish, too.  Very Mad Max-ish!






What do you think, Monsterlover?  Does it pass the professional critique?




Here he is in action.  Gracias, Jose!

[koko64]

 

[DarkMonster620]

3rd world craftmanship . . .

[Howie]

 

[Mhanis]

Function over form is something not often seen around these parts!

Mark

[1.21GW]

From the desert I continued south to San Agustín and the archeological park that is home to an estimated 600 quirky statues that are part of the world's largest necropolis.  Almost nothing is known about the civilization that carved them, just a few points of data from carbon dating, a piece of indecipherable script, and a lot of archeological speculation.  The figures themselves are as inscrutable as the culture that crafted them: their lack of context invites you to imagine for each figure an eccentric personality and unique superpower, like a Pokémon character, as you stroll through the park.






















From San Agustín, I was contemplating my route to Ecuador when heavy rains caused a landslide that blocked the one road to Popoyán.  So that made my decision for me: I would head south to Mocoa and then across the Trampolina de la Muerte, a 60km unpaved single lane road across the Andes, to Posta.  The road is billed as Colombia's version of Bolivia's famous Road of Death, but in truth it wasn't that bad given in relatively dry conditions: only one river crossing was deeper than a foot, and that barely so, while muddy sections were few and fare between.

I did run into a scary moment when I passed a truck and due to poor targeting on both our parts ending up with my wheels about six inches from the edge of the cliff, with no railing to prevent a fall.  I stopped and tried to top-toe the bike past but my mirrors and panniers were pressed up against the walls of the truck, which was at an angle so the space ahead of me was shrinking.  I could lean the bike to the side to create space between me and the truck, by I would be leaning 450 lbs of bike and gear over the edge of sizable cliff.  Efforts at honking to get some help from the truck driver were ignored.  So I said my prayers and hoped I could power through the 6 feet I needed to reach safety without the handlebars getting jerked to the side and me going off the cliff.  I won't lie: half my brain was calculating if I had the dexterity to jump off in the even the bike went over.  It doubt I did.

A helmet cam would have made for good viewing now that all is clear, but alas I didn't have one.  Anyway, I obviously made it safely.  It was not the first time on this trip I trusted the marriage of heavy throttle and dynamic stability to get me over sketchy terrain.

Pictures of the Trampolina aren't that impressive, since the landscape was just overgrown forest.  But in the first one below you can see the scars of landslides up on the mountainside.  They are daily occurrences during the rain season and much of the riding is passing through the remnants of half-cleared rockfall.  In some images, you can see that they have started to add railing (even before they pave anything), but they still have a ways to go.