36 hours to forget....
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How did I end up in Cali?
I keep going back over the last 36 hours for someplace that I must have screwed up to be sitting in the chair I’m sitting in at this moment.
As I said yesterday it all started when the bike died in no man’s land between Colombia and Ecuador. I got that sorted and sometime in the early hours of this morning Sam Gamgee began his 11 hour trek in the back of a truck.
I arranged for a taxi to pick me up at the hotel this morning at 6am, its 10 hours to Cali in a Taxi so if I got there at four it would give me a chance to get the bike back. I thought we might be able to get there in eight hours so when the guy came back to me and said that he couldn’t leave till eight, I said ok, half glad of a few hours extra in bed after what was a really shit day yesterday.
The guy showed up at 7:50, all good so far. The first thing he asked me for was money for Gas, not uncommon in a long run, these guys don’t have a pot to piss in, and they don’t own the cars, merely drive them. I gave him 25 bucks to come off the total when we’d get to Cali.
This is the point at which things started to turn to shit. He drove down some gravel back roads to some yard where he beckoned to guy who came running out of a tarpaulin hut and started filling him up with black market gasoline from Ecuador. In Ecuador gas is half the price of Colombia so there is a huge amount of gasoline smuggling going on near the border. They have a signal which I had wondered why people were doing it all yesterday… it’s to hold up a half cut off 2 liter bottle of soft drink which a pipe on the end, if you swing it up and down in the air…that means you’ve got Ecuadorian gasoline for sale.
Things were taking a while so I stepped out of the car and as I was walking around I noticed the guys tires were as bald as Madonna’s bush, no way they’d take us to Cali. But he got a spare and put it in the trunk and I said…**** it Ois…. You’re in this now…stick with it. I got back in the car and as soon as he tried to start the car it was as dead as a dodo.
I said **** this…no way this will make it….and said to the guy …look I’m going to get another Taxi…and gave him ten bucks for his troubles. I flagged down another Taxi who ended up charging me a lot more, but still a fair price, but would only take me 100km to the town of Pasto…. The way I looked at it….it was closer to Cali…so better get going. You might be asking why didn’t you take a bus….I’ve just too much gear…and its all designed to be put in panniers which I had to empty before putting the bike on the back of the truck….no way I could put it on a bus.
Anyway when I’d got to Pasto the guy had rang a buddy of his …at this stage I had the eight ball firmly in my mouth and these Colombian Taxi drivers were screwing me to the wall but I’d no choice, the day was getting older and I had to try and get to BMW before they closed at six.
All told I was ten hours in the back of a taxi…. And the whole way the lads were playing Salsa music or whatever goes for Colombian elevator music....if I never hear a Salsa beat again it’ll be still too short a time.
Along the road every manner of hold up happened, massive funerals, construction, landslides, check points the end result being I got to Cali too late. So I’m stuck here till Monday at the earliest.
As we arrived in Cali a little after sunset the taxi guy brought me to a touristy hotel. I went in put the gear in a room full of mosquito’s and headed down to the restaurant. I went in sat down, never even ordered any grub and the waitress just put the grub in front of me, a soup, rice chips, round steak and a drink of baboon piss. I didn’t even try to argue…. Just said to myself…go with the flow Ois….go with the flow.
Everything feels very out of Control, but assuming everything happens for a reason no doubt when I go on my impromptu tour of Cali I’ll find out what that is!
There’s an advertising campaign running about Colombia at the moment, and it finishes with the lines “The only risk in travelling to Colombia is that you’ll never leave”….or words to that effect….. This isn’t what I had in mind!!!
At least I got some nice pictures from the back of the taxi I suppose!
Over and out
Robinson Crusoe
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