Grrr, I am crabby. Thanks to the lack of signaling in the
roads (or the cities for that matter) I was funneled into the wrong road, and
ended running 150 km in, and a 150 km out, and wasted nearly 6 hours in these
shenanigans.
To start at the beginning, I left Medellín at about 8 am
following the Highway of the East, which started as a great four-lane road that
plunged down from the highlands down to the coffee altitudes. Then, in the
middle of nowhere there was a traffic circle and the four-lane road went down
to two narrow lanes of a very windy mountain road (the traffic circle trick is,
alas, oh so common here). The problem with these roads is that very often you
get stuck behind a sloooow heavy truck, and then you have to gamble with your
life to pass, over and over again. Average speed, even for a dare devil like me
is no better than 50 km per hour. Incidentally, meeting long trucks in hairpin
turns is very dangerous for short vehicles like mine because the long bed cuts
across the curve, and if you are not carefully it can crunch you like a nut. In
one instance I had to break abruptly and engage the reverse in a hurry to
pullout of the nutcracker trap!
I went on for about three hours to Puerto Berrio, and it was
not until I saw the bridge over the Rio Magdalena that I realized I had been
going in the wrong direction. I stopped to have lunch, and with the help of the
waiter evaluated my options: go back and take “the road over the mountain after
Barbosa”, or keep going for another 4 hours to Bucaramanga, and from there try
to reach Cartagena. I decided to go back.
It was many kilometers past Barbosa, already in the
four-lane road, when I saw an inconspicuous offramp to Don Pedro. Hmm . . . no Don Pedro in my map, but the
road appeared to go in the right direction. So I took it, and in about 5 km I
saw another sign for “Atlantic Coast”. OK, that would be where I would like to go,
so I kept going, this time climbing and climbing another super twisty road. I
felt the road was never going to end, and was a bit apprehensive on what the
way down was going to look like (more about that on tomorrow’s blog).
Surprisingly, on top I found a bit of Switzerland, with rolling hills covered
by the greenest of grasses, and a perfect pastoral scene with herds of happy
Holstein cows lowing on their way back to their barns.
I had wasted the best part of the day, but resisted the
temptation to try to make up for the lost time, and at about 6 pm found myself
a small hotel for the night in the mountain town of Yarumal. For the record, I
had an excellent dinner of beef tongue, cooked in a tomato sauce and
accompanied by soup, salad, rice, and fried plantains.
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