Tonight I Will Have Desert

We couldn't possibly get tired of the glorious mountains in Colombia, but when we heard that we’d be passing pretty close to the desert, our memories of a night under the stars in Jordan’s Wadi Rum tempted us to divert our course and take in the Tatacoa desert.

But time is running out. We'd worked out how long to allow in Colombia based on taking a bus for around 500km through an area that is considered unsafe, but rerouting via the desert and a couple of other spots means adding 700km back in (and incidentally an additional 5,000m of climbing). Those aren't the sort of numbers that disappear in the rounding, so we've known for a while that at some point we were going to have to take a bus, and this section seemed like the moment to do so.

Whilst it might sound like a refreshing break, taking a bus when you have large, unwieldy and rather fragile baggage (like a bike) is actually quite stressful (for us and the agitated conductor who has 17 other oversized bags to cram into a tiny boot). It turns out the timings are also completely out of your control and the bus took significantly longer than advertised, so when we were unceremoniously evacuated from the bus by the side of the road in the small village of Aipe at 5.30pm we found ourselves in the unusual position of chasing daylight.

Google maps (ever our guide) showed a river between Aipe and the village of Villavieja, from where you enter the desert, with no bridge; nevertheless, we were confident that humanity can’t live so close together and be satisfied with merely a cheery wave from one bank to the other and so we believed there would be some way to cross (other than a 40km detour to the nearest marked road crossing). When the village ended we pedaled on, along a sandy track through some grazing land.  The sun had softened, the mountains on our right were now just silhouettes, having lost their contours in the fading light and the air felt heavy with the onsetting dusk. It felt great, out of the stuffy bus and on to a new adventure.

Rushing to the River

After 7 or 8 minutes looking for signs we were going in the right direction, we reached the river bank. A friendly man was watching the evening go by and confirmed we were in the right spot for a boat. Twenty or so minutes later and a canoe appeared upstream, replete with a motor and a motorbike as cargo - we knew we’d be ok.

A slightly anxious wait for the last boat of the day

The sky was drawn out with deep and pale evening blues as we clambered in, not unloading our bags but simply lifting our bikes fully laden into the look out position at the front of the canoe. The final moments of visibility from the daylight aided us over the sandy dirt road up from our landing point, onto the asphalt where we were greeted by a few street lamps and a teenager who sidled up on his BMX. ‘Desierto?’ he asked. I've been struggling with this, as the Spanish word for true is ‘cierto’. “Is what true?”, I wondered. Ah, yes, desierto. Straight on.

In moments we were out of town, and it was magic. The moon was half full but there were so few clouds in the sky and such limited light pollution that it was incredibly bright as we pedalled out into nowhere.

It was a blessing that the road was good because we wouldn't have been able to spot the potholes. We were just rattled by a gauntlet of cattle bridges which happily reflected the shine of the moon so that we could anticipate them from a distance. Over the 30 minutes or so it took us to ride out it grew darker but also brighter, as the final rays of light behind us left the sky and our eyes adjusted as the light of the moon strengthened.

The land felt so open, and even in the dark we could see we were now in cactus territory. The whole experience was so different to our normal cycling conditions that when we saw a fire off to the right, the tall orange flames licking upwards creating a glow, we could only imagine that it must be some sort of exciting ritual taking place (rather than the more likely burning of waste).

There were no buildings, so the only lights we passed were those of the odd motorbike which would temporarily blind us before our eyes quickly readjusted to lap up the greater visibility we had in the darkness.  We started to identify a small collection of lights and were sure it would be the observatory, our camp ground for the night.  We were surprised to find a throng of people there but, despite the pleasure of the ride, we were pleased to have arrived.

The crowd were there for a ‘tour of the sky’; the highlight of which was undoubtedly getting to look through a pretty mean looking telescope to see the surface of the moon in remarkable detail, as well as the ring around Saturn. Starstruck (not in the A-list celebrity sense) we slept outside of our tent, enjoying the view every time we rolled over in our sleep. The downside of this was that all of our exposed flesh was feasted on by midges and we both looked distinctly like we had chicken pox in the morning.

Spot the Meteor

In the morning, we had the extreme pleasure of waking up in completely alien surroundings, which looked like the surface of Mars. It's a real treat arriving somewhere spectacular in the dark, all sense of the gradually shifting scenery hidden by the darkness, such that waking up entails the surprise of a completely different landscape to the one that said farewell to the sun the previous evening. The desert was a labyrinth of red rock, punctuated by cactii with the odd bird perched imperiously on top. We ambled around them for some time, happily snapping photos before enjoying a nice return ride out of the desert, which didn't hold any of the ‘seen it all before’ that an out and back normally entails.

Sunrise Desert Style

An Alien Landscape

Enjoying Seeing the Desert

Back to the Lush Green by the River

Now back to the undulating mountains all the way to Quito.