A shorter post tonight and maybe photos added later as the WiFi and phone signal is pretty poor here. We are back up high tonight at around 2,600 m asl which is about the same as Bogotá.
The day started with an interesting 12 km getting out of the city in Medellin. On Sundays some of the roads are shut to traffic as Cyclivia for cycling and running on. This meant a traffic free few km to start with but soon as that closed road finished the traffic picked up. At about 12km the road started to climb out of the Medellin valley and we rose steadily on an ascent of about 1000m over the next 16km ish. The gradient generally wasn’t too steep and we passed a rather awful looking concrete prison. The road remained busy most of the way up, both with cars, buses and cyclists. There were clearly a lot of Sunday morning riders out and many of the road side cafes were full of resting riders. There were sone great views of the city below but difficult to get gods photos of due to the haze and city smog in the valley. At the top the landscape changed quite dramatically to a rolling farm land with a lot of dairy cattle. It felt a bit Alpine like. We had a lunch stop at 40km then continued on this attritional rolling hills, climbing a near 900m after lunch on this rolling road. It was hard going not least due to the variable state of the road surface. It went from smooth to severe pot holes, gravel, subsidence, then smooth again with regular occurrence. The descent sections needed lots of focus as pot holes and gravel could be round the next corner anytime.
I didn’t take many photos today as this was the second biggest climbing day of the trip, so some focus on keeping going was needed. We all arrived in the night stop town of Santa Rosa de Osos tired and ready to eat. The town seems surprisingly big and apparently has a lot of churches. I need to try to get a bit of a look around before dinner.
Tomorrow is the start of the descent out of the mountains. As I write this evening it’s raining, so I hope that blows through overnight.
Stephanie in Colombia 2022 