Arrival: Bogotá, Colombia

Liv and I had been fairly busy in the lead up to this trip. She spent the last couple of months working hard on her film ‘Nite Ride‘ and screened it for cast and crew on November 30, just three days before we left for Colombia. A couple weeks prior to that we got married (yay!) and in between all that we managed to pack our house up and move out with the help of friends and family. So we hadn’t really done a ton of planning for this trip.

On December 3, 2018 we flew from Calgary to Toronto and then onto Bogotá. After 10 hours in the air we arrived at our AirBnB at 11:30pm with our bikes and gear in tow. The only major obstacle was having to unpack our nicely tetrised together bike boxes because they wouldn’t fit through the x-ray machine at YYC.

Our first few days have been spent at a relatively slow pace. We went for breakfast at La Puerta Falsa, did a bit of walking around and got some groceries to cook lunch and dinners, and have visited a couple museums.

This afternoon we did a test ride of the bikes that we have slowly been assembling to make sure there were no major issues with them in shipping and they seem to be in good working order.

We plan to be in Bogotá until Sunday before heading north on the bike adventure.

It’s about 20c during the day time and 10c overnight. It usually clouds over in the afternoons and gives off a bit of rain. We actually started a fire last night to keep warm in our place.

Bogota is located at 2,600m, which matches the height of some of the mountain peaks you find in Alberta. Being closer to the equator means that when it doesn’t rain, it’s about the perfect biking weather.

We’re in the historic district of La Candelaria, which seems to have a lot of hostels and restaurants and such. Getting around the city is a bit difficult by foot, it’s quite large and spread out but we will be doing some exploring of other districts in the coming days.

Looking forward to relaxing here until getting out of town on Sunday. Will likely be a slow pace at first as we get used to the bikes, gear, climbs and elevation but our goal for the next month is to make our way north to Cartagena.