Winter finally arrived in BC this month and it’s been back to the indoor trainer. It can be hard to find the motivation but our upcoming trip to Colombia has put the fear into me. On Sunday, we start an ambitious road cycling trip up and down the mountain roads of Colombia. Starting out in Bogota we ride west, over Letras (“the longest climb in the world”) to Manizales and then north to Medellin where we’ll stay for a couple of days. We then head south to Cartago and east back to Bogota. In 9 days, we’ll ride over 1100km and 26,000m of elevation.
A road cycling trip to Colombia has been on the bucket list for a few years now. I’ve been lucky to visit a few of the classic winter cycling destinations in the US but I’ve never been to South America. I love riding new roads and fancied mixing things up this spring. Colombia feels like a proper adventure and I’m excited to soak up the cultural experience alongside some challenging riding.
Rich and Steve took part in Haute Route last year as well
Similar to the Haute Route Alps podcast, the idea behind ‘Colombia Dreaming’ is to record an audio diary as a keepsake to listen back to and share with friends and family. In addition, I figured others may be interested to hear how we went about planning the trip and possibly even do something similar.
Part One sets the scene and covers how the idea for the trip came about. I also introduce Atenea and Omar from Tingua Hidden Journeys who helped bring our idea to life.
Other than Steve Savage, we have a different cast of characters from our trip to France. I’m excited about this crew and am comforted by their useful professions. We’ve got an emergency doc (Kevin Nemethy), fireman (Dave Johnson), respiratory therapist (Marty Heck), electrical engineer (Zack Michaels), PhD, in robot brains?, (Daniele Reda), and all-around bike expert (Steve). You’ll hear from them all in Part Two.
If you’re interested, please follow us on Strava and reach out if you have any suggestions or recommendations.
We don’t get into this in our conversation but for your info, Atenea has arranged for a vehicle to pick us up from the airport and take us to our Airbnb in Bogota. She has made arrangements to store our bike bags while we’re on the road and also connected us with a support vehicle and two guys to transport our bags from town to town. She provided hotel recommendations and tips for every place we visit. If we need help during our trip, she’ll be right there on WhatsApp. She has honestly been great to work with and I’d recommend Hidden Journeys to anyone looking for bespoke travel support while in Colombia.
https://www.hiddenjourneys.co/
If all goes to plan, I’ll have Colombia Dreaming - Part Two ready to go at the end of Feb.
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the podcast,
Rich
