Keep The Streets Empty For Me

Today we headed further down south as we want to cross to Ecuador on Tuesday. Whilst we were driving the only highway from Popayan to the border, we noticed the environment around us changing multiple times. We started off in the green mountains, where the many trucks on the highway slowed our speed down to about 20 kilometers per hour. There isn’t a single car in the pictures below… but rest assured there are plenty on the road.

DSC_9426
Around noon we drove through the valley and made some good progress over flat road. We also stopped for lunch at the side of the road and had yesterday’s leftover pizza and salad.
DSC_9446
Not before long though we were back in the mountains. The roads were wider than this morning, so the drive was also more relaxed. Every now and then we saw a truck, bus or car coming down the mountain in the wrong lane – but somehow we are used to that now. We have not resorted to those tactics ourselves and accept our role as the underdog of the Colombian roads. We were pulled over by the police once today, but they did not want to check our papers as they were collecting money for a children’s charity. We felt a bit cheated as we were pulled over and thought it was something more official… but in the end it’s for a good cause.
_DSC9472
Gradually the landscape became dryer and dryer – and the temperature hit 33° C. The scenery reminded us of Mexico and the Grand Canyon.
DSC_9498

At the end of the road today, we started climbing again to above 2.000 meters. With that the rain came and the temperature dropped to 13° Celsius. Tonight we are staying in a motel just outside of Pasto. With such cold temperatures outside and no places available to camp, it’s an ideal solution. When we do the math, it’s even cheaper than camping, the car is off the street and secured, we can charge phone and computer batteries, we can have our home-made sandwiches inside, …


Memory comes when memory’s old

I am never the first to know

Following the stream up north

Where do people like us float?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWFb5z3kUSQ

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: