Dragged ourselves  away from Villa de Leyva and headed for San Gil via the backest of back roads.

Day 1 to Gambita was a mixture of stunning scenery, interesting flora and fauna, friendly police, torrential rain, rough roads and riding into town in the dark to a “swanky” hotel with out the swank i.e. no hot water!

 

 

Day 2 was something else! We literally travelled 20km in 26 hours! We’d had trouble getting the gps to route us on a road that we knew to exist – it didn’t take long to find out why the GPS had more brains than us.

The “road” was really just a boulder strewn track hardly suitable for horses let alone two exhausted gringos on bicycles; 900m of climbing, 450m of descent, two broken spokes and a buggered rear derailleur. This is really remote country. We saw a couple of local trucks early on ( got invited to go fishing! ) and that was it.

After 8 hours of slog and 16km covered, we came across a basic shelter with a couple of people outside (turned out that they were from a nearby Dhaoist community) who said we could camp by their shelter.

Day 3. Struggled along with broken bike on a really broken road. Mainly pushing covering 4km in 3.5 hours.

Eventually reached a better road where we hitched a lift in a truck with our hero Rodolfo and his mate who took us to San Gil where we made repairs.

Camped at the “community”.

 

Crossing foot-suspension bridge – new bridge not built, river too deep to ford.

Our hero Rodolfo coming to the rescue!

The expression says it all!

Still had great views from the truck!