For some reason I googled the most northerly point of South America and discovered it was in Colombia and was remote, difficult to get to and not very touristy, so that piqued my interest. After a small amount of research, it shot to the top of my ‘things I have to do list’. It’s called Punta Gallinas and is worthy of its own post which I will do next. The trip to get there was interesting and good experience for me on the road.

The first section to Cabo de la Vela seemed pretty straight forward. And to an extent it was. I had to ride to Barranquilla which I had done before and then on to Santa Marta which I’d heard a lot about and was keen to check out the hype. A lot of these cities don’t look very big on google maps but then I realised that unlike Australia, most of the houses are small and on small blocks of land. And as well as that each house has multiple people or even generations of people in the one house. So a city with 150,000 people probably has the same footprint as a city of 30,000 people back home.

Most of the roads on the way to Cabo were pretty good. There is a couple of amazing bridges which I stole off google because you wouldn’t want to stop and try and photograph one. In saying that, the bridges were often quite empty but the areas around the approaches were of chaotic. Many of the roads have tolls and the best part is that motorbikes and bicycles are free. They have a little slip paths off to the side for you to scoot around the toll both. It would be such a pain to have to deal with money on the bike and also end up being costly.

I was going to prebook a room in Santa Marta on Booking.com as I’d found a nice place to stay at a good price. They had 4 rooms left when I checked that morning so I thought I’d just turn up but then they had no rooms left when I arrived all hot and bothered and tired in the afternoon. They recommended a similar hotel a few doors away. It was okay, a bit more expensive, no breakfast but safe parking for my bike. I only stayed the one night and spent my second night at the original hotel which was much nicer. It was called the Parque de Los Novios which translates to boyfriends park or maybe lovers park and is just nearby. The room was clean, spacious, cool and the hotel had inside covered parking for my bike which was just outside my room but a couple of floors down. It also had a rooftop bar and pool which sounds a bit more glamorous than the reality, but it had a nice panoramic view. Thirty Aussie dollars. A good deal.

The seaside part of town where I was staying had a bit of a Bali feel to it. All the bars and restaurants and vendors etc. And like all the cities in Colombia so far, it was also loud. I had a couple of little things I wanted to buy for my trip to Punta Gallinas. I also needed some internet time to do a bit more research and download a few apps and maps offline so I wouldn’t get lost. That was obviously a waste of time, as I was to discover.

I bought a couple of rachet tie town straps in case something happened to my bike and I had to put it on the back of a truck in the middle of nowhere. It seemed a simple enough task but it took a few hours and a lot of walking but I managed to find a pair in dusty old packaging in the back corner of a shop. I don’t think they knew what they were. I thought about it later and who needs tiedowns in a country where there’s always someone in the back of the truck to hold onto things.

I also needed a phone mount for my phone so I could follow a route into town. My current system of stopping and memorising the next section was good for my memory but a bit tiresome with all the one way roads I found that I couldn’t drive down. That turned out a lot harder than I thought as well. I ended up finding one at a cycling shop. Good quality and he fitted it for me. The guy there was nice and also rode off road bikes and then warned me how hard the ride would be the Punta Gallinas and that I should consider taking a tour instead. Obviously he’d been reading all those negative reviews of the route to get there. Written by local tour guides with a hidden agenda. Maybe.

Santa Marta seemed to have a lot of parades and fireworks (maybe just unused from Colombia’s loss to Argentina in the Copa America). And a lot of cars had huge speakers in the boot. I snapped one photo of a set in the back of a taxi. There always seemed to be alarms going off at all hours. I did find a little beer that I liked called a Costeñita but it came in 185ml bottles. How ridiculous is that. I also found a 24 hour doctors surgery and chemist shop. It had a nice array of liquors in the front window and a good selection of cold beers inside.

The next stop on the trip was Riohacha. This time I prebooked. Probably an error but the room was nice enough and the parking for the bike was good but it was in a dead part of town and I was the only person there (the yellow building above). This town sort of had an oldtime Broome feel about it. It was remote, deserty and hot and humid and an indigenous population. And then I found a tourism board with this on it. It made sense. The pearl divers were doing a roaring trade back in colonial times but they’d wiped out the oyster beds by the 18^th century. Before that the pirates used to raid the area and rob the pearls from the indigenous to take back to sell in Europe.

It had a nice looking church which was popular and a bank which had a good exchange rate so I took out a million pesos because I’m sure there were no banks were I was heading and no eftpos machines. Are they still called that? It had a nice long jetty so I bought a beer off a beach vendor and wandered out for a different perspective. There was a fenced off section with chains, anchors, buoys and a nice statue of Mary in a glass case?

I forgot to mention that the road between Barranquilla and Santa Marta runs along and through the Sierra Nevada mountains (which are not part of the huge Andes Mountains nearby which run almost the entire length of South America and is the longest mountain range in the world). But perfect for a new rider like me to experience a few twists and turns and ups and downs. There were interesting little food stalls and restaurants along the way. I stopped at one that was BBQing these weird looking sausages. I have no idea what was in them but didn’t put my glasses on and they tasted good and went down well with a coke for lunch. The standard of restaurants that I eat at usually have a pretty dodgy toilet out the back. This one had an aussie looking gecko behind it. You can just see his tail. I felt a bit homesick.

I left Riohacha the next day and headed for Cabo de la Vela which is the last town before my trip to Punta Gallinas. I wish Punta Gallinas was as easy to say as it is to type. Those bloody LL’s again but this time with a G. No one understands me when I say it. The road is dead straight and follows a train line so how hard could it be. I had all the maps and apps you could ask for. Supposedly offline as well. It was only a hundred kms or so. I found a road off to the left at about the appropriate spot and was checking my phone when a couple of locals riding past on a moto were tooting and waving and signalling not to take that road and to follow them. I thought it may have led to an indigenous community so I thought I’d better follow them.

Well the road turned to crap and we crossed over the other side of the railway line and they continued to signal for me to follow. It was about then that I started having second thoughts. After about 15kms I decided to do a u turn and head back to where they’d first found me. In retrospect I should have just kept following them. As I turned around I noticed a guy under a tree (in the middle of nowhere) and then realised that he had an old motorbike. I tried asking him about Cabo but he seemed a bit weird and more interested in taking me to Punta Gallinas (which was at least 4 hours away). By now it was getting late in the day.

I just had to leave him mid speech and headed back to the original turn off. The road was beautifully paved and headed in the right direction and I was annoyed I’d wasted an hour going the wrong way. And then the road just ended. There was a sort of stoney riverbed and tracks leading all over the place. I started following one which seemed in the right direction and it led nowhere. I followed it back to the start. I checked my phone and could see that I still had 20kms to go and the maps showed a road. It had obviously washed away at some stage.

I was sitting on the bike looking at my options when a big tour bus came bouncing out of the shrub and swerved around me and up onto the bitumen. Okay. So I’ll take that track. There were occasional tyre tracks from the bus but they soon ran out. And then I saw another big bus in the distance. I headed for it and made a few more kms. I then spotted a few houses in the distance and headed for them. From there it was a few more dead ends and back tracks because of muddy lagoons but I eventually made it into Cabo before dark.

Despite looking on the internet some things aren’t like you picture them. Long and skinny with random buildings and no real centre. I rode through the whole thing to make sure I was in the right place. There was a Kite School on the beach and it seemed to be the only place open and it had a bar of sorts. I grabbed a beer and a water and asked around about accommodation. Luckily a girl from the Netherlands or somewhere spoke English and said she was staying across the road but it was booked out, She asked around and said that another place which I’d seen down the road might have something. Despite seeing stuff available on the internet before I came, I hadn’t booked anything.

I went down there and although I couldn’t see anyone staying there they were booked out. I was feeling pretty low. No accommodation. No internet. No tour shops. And it looked like my chances of riding to Punta Gallinas were shot as I had struggled to even get to Cabo. And it was now dark.