San Gil

About 4 hours further north from Villa De Leyva is San Gil, a nice small town in the Colombian highlands packed with adventure activites, and a big backpacker draw because of this. I had booked 2 nights at the Macondo hostel as I had it had a very helpful Australian owner who knew all about the local activities but when I first arrived I spoke to the Colombian staff about the activites and they said, yes you can do most of these activities everyday...but you need 4 people for that and 5 for this, etc, to which I thought it was going to be another dull couple of days. I was just looking at fights out of Colombia to somewhere interesting when the owner, Sean, came by to ask if there was anything I needed to know, so I asked about the activites again, in particular an all day bike ride that went through the picturesque town of Barichara and he straight away phoned up ´Gringo Mikes´- to verify how many people were going, they had 3 other people so I signed up for the 55km ride for the next day. I spent the rest of the evening watching Andy Murrey win the US open on TV.
I put the fact it was 55ks to the back of my mind, and offroad on full suspension mountain bikes, we started off with a delicious and very large breakfast at Gringo Mike´s resturant, and then a fairly short drive to the start in the nearby hills with the first 15ks all downhill, the tour wasn´t cheap but we had 2 guides, new Kona bikes and the 4x4 support landrover following at a distance behind in case we couldn´t make it all the way. The bikes were set up to each persons height and weight, and then we set off, I´ve never bicyled down anything so fast with so much confidence and now I know the joy of a good quality full suspension bike and what a difference it makes.We went through Barichara which is actually a really rich town, a place where celebs buy property, in fact it would appear Colombia is far from being one of the cheapest south American countries, its actually now one of the most expensive, so all those people who travelled in Colombia several years ago probably found it quite cheap, but now it is not the case. It is the 3rd most expensive country, they even have great cycle lanes like I saw in America and Canada so they can´t be too hard up.After a rest stop we carried on up through the town and descended on the only bit of actual road into another valley, a superb 4km of winding tarmac, a two wheeled dream. From there the landrover took us up to the lunch location where we had the delicious pack lunch prepared by Gringo Mikes resturant overlooking Suarez Canyon. We still weren´t even half way through the distance and the next bit involved about 15kms of up hill and down dale, but mostly up hill, which became a gruelling battle of mind over matter and came very close to getting into the back up vehicle but didn´t and pushed on through to the end for a reward of cold beers as the sun went down. A long day, an tiring day but an excellent day and four new friends.

That evening the biking group met up for dinner and three of them were also getting the same bus to Santa Marta/ Taganga the next night. The next day I went to some nearby waterfalls with Sarah from the bike tour and that evening got the night bus to Santa Marta. It was certainly nice to eat out with other people in a proper resturants and not feel like a loney no friends loser.

Santa Marta sounds nice but it´s just a dirty boring town but has a nice shopping mall where I had a Colombian version of an Irish coffee.

Notes:

Gringo Mike's bike tours is one of the best activities I did on the whole trip.