After trying to figure out how to install the dry saddlebags for the first time (it took me about an hour to get them hooked up) how I wanted and of course it still wasn't that good a job. I took a photo, said goodbye to my host and fired up the bike.
Since I had no real place I was going except south, I set the Map GPS in the phone to the city of Ibague and see how far I can go. Left about 10 AM I think and things were looking good through the downtown area of Medellin and then when I got south of Poblado the traffic came to a stand still. Being me and follow the locals, I did the lane split thing with the bags on and had no issues. I was quite a bit more tame because of the bags though. The crazy traffic lasted for at least an hour or two before I got past the town of Caldas and on to highway or route 25. Then I could start enjoying the countryside and twisty roads.
One thing about Columbia is there are mountains everywhere you're always going up, you're always going down, there are hardly any real flat areas. I was constantly downshifting and upshifting and downshifting and upshifting going up the different passes and none of the roads are really straight either, most of the time it's really tight curves that are fun on a bike but terrible for the truckers.
I came over this pass or mountain and straight ahead was this mountain that looked like it was drawn by a kid you know straight up and down almost with a real nice peak. Later, I ended up driving right around that mountain which was quite interesting and the engineering is incredible for the roads here some of the bridges are just incredible.
So you're just zipping along on the bike having fun in the curves and passing a few cars here and there, then all of a sudden you come to a mass of cars all stopped. Now here's the best part, on a motorcycle, every motorcycle just passes all the cars, they either go on the right side or they pass on the line on the left side all the way to the very front of the line. I must have passed hundreds of cars. Then when the construction area said we could go the motorcycles zipped off and down the road to the next construction area which seems to be all over the countryside.
After riding for quite a number of hours and really not making a whole lot of progress because of all these mountain roads and the sleeping police which are humongous speed bumps I decided to stop for the night in the city of Armenia. I finally found a place to pull over and broke out the phone and started looking for looking on booking.com for a place to stay after filtering through and trying to find one that had parking or secure parking for my motorcycle I finally found one and with the directions zipped over to it and checked in. Lidia, the charming receptionist sowed me the room which was very nice. They had me pull the bike into the lobby for safety. I went to the large mall in the next block for dinner.
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