Where to begin, where to begin… so much has happened over the past week it is difficult now to go back and clearly describe events as they occurred. But maybe it started in El Brasil; yeah, that sounds about right. El Brasil is a small vereda along the Ruta 62 going from Puerto Berrio to Medellín. We arrived there after a grueling day of climbing the foothills of the Andes. We’d been having trouble all day; I wasn’t feeling well, the sun was beating down and sweat was pouring, and to top it off Siska’s bike was experiencing a lot of gearing malfunctions causing her to grind down to a halt on every uphill.

So we stopped in El Brasil at the roadside restaurant of Adriana. We spent an hour or so complaining about our own misfortune before we admitted that we had no other choice but to hitch a ride into Medellín; only about a hundred kilometers away but out of reach to us in our current state. Getting a ride from El Brasil proved to be a bit more challenging than expected and we ended up asking Adriana whether we could camp behind her restaurant. By this time the entire community knew about us and we spent the rest of the evening practicing our Spanish with the locals.

When it was time to set up camp I remembered that I had lost my tent poles somewhere during the floods around El Banco. No other choice then but to sleep outside underneath the stars in my sleeping bag. Off course it started to rain about fifteen minutes after I had tucked myself in, so I prepared for a miserable night; which turned out being not too bad were it not for the two inquisitive dogs I had to chase away between short bouts of sleep.

The following morning we awoke bright and early in order to try our luck at hitching a ride once again. Luck, once more, proved to be elusive. So we pleaded with Adriana and she finally found, after much calling around, a guy with a pickup who would be willing to take us to Medellín. Hurray!

Following the Ruta 62 into Colombia’s second city we went through some absolutely gorgeous terrain. There were waterfalls cascading down the mountains; breathtaking vistas into the valleys below, and some real quaint little towns we wished we could have explored (Cisneros especially comes to mind). We also came across the finca were Alberto Uribe (the father of former President Álvaro Uribe) was murdered by the guerrillas during a failed kidnapping attempt back in 1983.

In Medellín we took refuge at the Palm Tree Hostal in the Suramericana district. We rested and decided on next steps.

We got a call the following day from Ferney of Agenda del Mar; an environmental organization in Medellín with whom we had been put in touch by the World Wildlife Fund based in Cali. Ferney wanted to know whether we’d like to meet that afternoon. So while Siska was getting her bicycle fixed up at a nearby shop, Michiel and I jumped in a taxi and went to the El Poblado area of Medellín. Here we found that Ferney had been working hard to help us spread our message. So within ten minutes after arriving at the Agenda del Mar office, Lilliana; a reporter for El Colombiano, and her World Press Photo-winning photographer Jaime, came round. Expecting to see the bamboo bicycles we thus drove back to the hostel while doing an interview in the back of the car. It was printed the next day, a Thursday, on the front page.

As a result we got a lot of calls and emails from people in Medellín who wanted to meet up for a drink and a chat. One of the people who called was Jorge. He was organizing SiCLeada that Wednesday evening and wanted to know whether we’d like to join in and ride our bicycles around the city after nightfall. That sounded like a lot of fun so we met at the Parque Carlos Restrepo at 7pm and rode with a group of sixty other cyclists till late at night. I even managed to get lost at one point; thankfully I was with two other guys who seemed to know their way around town so we just pedaled back to the start and all was fine.

We knew that waiting for us in Medellín would be Dane. He and his friend Ryan had been riding their bicycles down from the United States when, about two months ago, Ryan’s bike got stolen in Medellín. Not wanting to quit the entire journey because of his friend’s forced return back home, Dane decided to backpack around South America during the time it would take us to ride down to Medellín. He had been waiting for us for over two months now so we were all quite nervous about this ‘blind date’.

We met Dane after our midnight run through Medellín. He had just returned from Cuenca and wanted to quickly say hello before going to bed. We would be getting to know each other better over the next couple of days.

On Thursday we did an early morning interview with the Channel TeleMedellin news and we received a call from Alejandro; a bamboo bike builder from Medellín who wanted to meet us and give us two beautiful bamboo helmets which he had made. On Friday we did another interview with TeleMedellin; this time for the English-language ‘city’ segment. We went out riding across town while being filmed from the back of the car; we shared why we decided to go on this trip, and we talked about some of the issues important to us. At night we organized a very tasty barbecue complete with vegetables, chicken, salmon, and steak for the four of us (Siska, Michiel, Dane, and myself) in order to get to know each other a little better.

Saturday was another fantastic day. We first went to BicilaVerde; a bicycle shop owned by Andrés, a guy we had met earlier during the SiCLeada. Andrés was great and he spent all day working on our bamboo steeds. After 13.000 kilometers they had taken some abuse and needed some tender love & care. So Andrés cleaned the entire bikes, replaced our front sprockets, fixed Michiel’s front derailleur, and changed our chains. During the time he worked on the bikes we ran back to our hostel, changed our shirts and combed our hair, and did a Skype interview with Michael Holmes at CNN International. When we came back to BicilaVerde our babies looked as good as new!

Later that Saturday we met with Ricardo. He had read about us in the online version of El Colombiano while he was in Miami, FL. Originally from Medellín he had called an employee, had him track down the reporter to get our telephone number, and invited us to dinner on Saturday night; after he’d flown back in from the United States.

Ricardo took us high up into the Las Palmas district overlooking Medellín. Here, the Palmitas restaurant is perched on top of a cliff with an absolutely spectacular view over the city down below in the valley. We had a wonderful dinner and we prized ourselves incredibly lucky to have met such a kind and generous host. Around 11pm we were back in our hostel after which we phoned a taxi and went out to a party we had been invited to. Arriving there late, around midnight, we saw people dancing rumba, salsa, and capoeira. There was so much high energy that we had a hard time matching it; we were tired after a long day and went to bed around 2:30am… Cycle touring is definitely not conducive to your staying-up-late-skills…

Sunday; another new day. We woke up and went back to the Wafflehaus; the place of the festivities the night before. We met here with Kelvin, a Canadian living in Medellin but actually on his own ratheroddjourney. Kelvin is making an online documentary about different kinds of travel and how travelers experience their adventures, so he wanted to do a short interview about bicycle touring. We were happy to oblige so we got in our kit, hopped on the bikes, and rode across town to the Wafflehaus.

Sunday night we met again with Alejandro and his girlfriend Isabel who took us out to dinner at Crepes & Waffles, to eat… you guessed it; delicious crepes & waffles. It was a real nice dinner and the pair had brought along several of their friends. That night we went to bed tired but content.

We had planned to spend Monday on exploring. Ever since we had arrived in Medellín it had felt like we had been running around from one place to the next; not taking the time to see some of Medellín’s impressive sights. So we first went up the famous MetroCable. Medellín lies in a bowl and there is a public transport gondola lift to take people to the outer barrios. From the end of the line, and the top of the mountain, you then get a spectacular view over the city and the ride itself takes you over big city blocks normally inaccessible to most tourists.

We also went to the Museo de Antioquia; home to the biggest collection of Fernando Botero (a native son) pieces in the world. His style of fat people – or voluminous as he calls them – is famous the world over and we were glad to be able to see at least some culture during our time in Medellín.

Later in the afternoon Michiel and I both began to feel a bit sick. Our noses got stuffed up, we continuously switched from feeling hot to feeling cold, and both our heads hurt. Maybe the past week had been a little too intense so we decided to feel sorry for ourselves and go to bed early. Not too early though because at 11:45pm we got a call from back home to once again talk to Giel on the Dutch radio.

Now it’s Tuesday and we are hanging around eating some extra portions of fruits and vegetables. Tomorrow is another day and we hope we can get back on the bicycles in order to make our way down to Cali. In only ten days my parents will fly in to Bogotá to visit Colombia so we’d better squeeze out these last couple of hundred kilometers so we can feast on all the treats and goodies brought from back home!