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Published: June 19th 2009
So i hope your impressed its only been about 2 weeks since the last blog and we´ve made it to equador!!
Obviously not without the usual adventures but more of that to follow!
Having spent a few days doing a bar crawl around bogata (well it means you see the city!) including having some local fermented maize drink which i still wonder if they aim to make it that bad, we decided to leave and head south. Obviously being the disorganised people that we are this did not happen early and then we spent 2 hours trying to find the right road out of bogata (1 vague tourist map and the lonely planet - who needs GPS!!!) Road successfully found we head off to zona cafe in the such of some good coffee. Obviously by now we are in the andes and so none of the roads are straight and poor daisy (now resembling a caravan!) is sometimes not the quickest up the hills!! So it takes us slightly longer than planned and we are somewhere random by the time its dark! Never mind we think its only about 100km we´ll push on and so into the night we head. Up and down these mountain passes in the dark we go and all is going well until about 25km from our destination when we round a sharp corner and there we find a horse!! Sadly the horse decided to go the same direction as us and i will never forgot the look of surprise on its face just before we rode smack bang into its side at about 40kmph!!!
Now i know you will all be very concerned about the horse and all i can say is by the time we picked ourselves and daisy up it was no where around but i imagne it woke up with one hell of a sore side the next morning! Whilst we amazingly got away with about a graze each daisy wasn´t so lucky!! Her front headlight has a hole in it, the mud guard broken and her speedo and electrical readout monitor was in the ditch 2m away!!!And so it was we limped into our destination on a bike held together with sticky tape and me getting off every 2 niles to prop up the mud guard at about 11pm swearing never again to drive in the dark. It was only in the morning we also realised that the most spectucular and dense coffee growing area we had driven through in the dark! (always good to do your research first!!)
Anyway a few more hours spent in wonderfully fascinating bike shops and daisy was back on the road!She is now looking like no other bike on earth. Whilst in guyana we added a few extra little touches to daisy like a windscreen made out of the plastic off a microwave door we found - obviously held on with sticky tape!!and a green plastic pig we found on the beach which we have named Heneritta and stuck on the headlight so she glows green at night! (amazingly out of everything she is the one thing everyone loves!!), we have also made a giant mudflap for the back out of a lorry mudflap and painted on it our route - sadly none of these things survived the horse!! Heneritta needed everting but is now back in full glory, daisy now has one eye and no lips and surprisingly between the lorry in guyana and the horse the microwave door did not survive but we have bought daisy a new proper one! The speedo gauge is no more but the revs gauge still works so we have stuck the display back on with sticky tape and bought a cheap rubbish one which is kind of attached to the side to give us a rough idea of the mileage and petrol. The suspension broke again in columbia and needed to be rewelded and then on our final route out of columbia the hydraulics went!! And to think when we started this trip 35000 km ago i rememer Aaron being worried because we scratched the paintwork!!!!!
The main thing is though she is still going and so, so are we!!! Leaving columbia turned out to be a bit of a mission, after the lack of coffee we headed south to Cali the salsa capital and checked ourselves into the party hostel with a warning no one ever sleeps. Well i would like to point out that despite being the oldies in the hostel guess who outlasted all the youngsters and at 7am was sat on the balcony debating going to bed!!! After that it was south again to an old colonial town before heading east into gurialla country to look at some old stuff. Yes i know old stuff and i do remember saying to aaron as we were up this mountain pass in the cloud and rain on horrendous roads "why don´t we just turn around - i don´t even like old stuff!". But on we went and did eventually make it to the town, obviously we got lost looking for the old stuff and ended up on a 60 degree hill in really thick mud. Cue the local family who lived in a wee little wooden hut to come out in the wellies and with the 3 of us pushing we just about managed to make it back up the hill (covering all the locals obviously head to foot in mud - we do like to leave our mark!)
Anyway old stuff eventually seen and admired (yeah it was nice!!) we set off again this time breathing a sigh of relief that the road back to the ecuador border was a main ´superroad´ as our map called it. Superroad my arse!!!! If no road surface, huge pot holes, sheer vertical cliff edges, no barriers, single track roads, blind hairpin bends and of course the local trucks and buses is super then the A1 is out of this world! Add to this thick fog, the fact the road was 120km long and that at several points waterfalls went across the road and you have a fair idea of our day!!!! It was a long one not helped by the fact i was highly hormonal and prone to fits of irrational crying at many stages - fun, fun, fun!!!
However with newly broken suspension we made it to educador which is lovely. No real crazy stories to report as such, just a lot of mountain driving and hairpin bends oh and a landslide across the road infront of us yesterday (cueing another farmtrack follow the locals detour again!) but some stunning views and roads and loads of sute villages and villagers!!
We´re actually pretty far south at the mo at a place called cuenca where we arrived yesterday to find a festival in full swing. I asked a local only to be told it was the festival of sugar!! There are piles upon piles of cake everywhere, just imagine a cake festival - it was what i was made to do!!!!Today i have since learnt that it is the festival of corpus christi (anyone want to fill me in?) but the cake is still everywhere so i´m happy!!!! I think we head to peru tomorrow but you know plans are made to be broken!!
Anyway hope your all ok, i must go the cake is calling!!!
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James Bonsall
non-member comment
Daisy, Daisy, When will they Patch you up?
Are you still planning on sell Daisy when you finish, or donating her to a museum? Perhaps we should set up an Ebay auction for you? We want photographs!