Leaving the airport, going on just a few short hours of sleep, Simon and I expected to have to deal with heavy Bogota traffic all the way back to the hotel. Instead, we zoomed in and had time enough for a great rest. We pushed checkout time to the max and lesurely made our way out of town. We made the easy decision and headed south.

Bogota sits in a big north-south valley at 2600m. We climbed quickly as we left then the road straightened and started to drop. For an hour and a half, we slowly descended all the way to 350m, from 15*C to 32*C. The speed limit is quite conservative here (around 60km/h in parts), so as I approached the first police we’ve seen in while with real radar I was easily going 30km/h over. As luck would have it, Columbian police have no interest in ticketing Canadians! “Siga! Siga!” [Ed. Note: As I write this we are stopped at another country’s police checkpoint where they are not so nice.]

While the fastest, smoothest and most efficient way to Ecuador is to go over to Cali and south, we chose to take the eastern route first then cross directly to Popayan. (Have a look around… Why should HWY 24 be any different than HWY 40 or 43?).

As you can see, Google doesn’t really distinguish the two roads as being of a different quality. Simon and I can assure you that there is most definitely a difference. Along this trip this we’ve had many exciting adventures because of our weak or non-existent maps. Simon had brought down a bunch of exciting new navigation tools to ensure that didn’t happen again. A dedicated GPS, an iPhone with GPS, a sextant… (okay, maybe not that last one).

Yet here we were, in Southern Columbia, driving across supposedely decent roads:

Proper adventurous stuff then! And on Christmas Eve, we peaked at 3400m in Parque Nacional de Purace. We didn’t know we were going through it, so we stopped at the Ranger station to find out more. That’s how we met Pablo!

Pablo usually has a full house of volunteers and other workers at the station, but on Christmas Eve he would be alone. Even though none of us (Pablo included) take Christmas too seriously, we thought it would be nice to keep him company. So he let us stay there, and we checked out the hot springs nearby then took him to dinner. A quiet night with no power and a fire to keep the cold out (~0*C up here), we played some guitar and had a beer from our cooler.

In the morning we continued to Popayan, with a quick stop to try to see a condor. This was some really spectacular scenery – quite a different world at this altitude.

Popayan was alright and a great spot for a bike ride. It gave us a good base to make Christmas day phone calls to family and friends.

Back at it the next day, we powered south despite warnings of road closures due to landslides (people usually don’t have the right info about this sort of thing). A couple of spectacular driving days later and we made it to Ecuador.