Alto de La Línea test ride

Firstly, Happy New Year! / ¡Feliz Año Nuevo! Hope everyone had a great night. New years here is more of a family event so it was a pretty quiet one for us.

Yesterday morning when everyone in Australia was partying for New Years I set out with my friend Rolando for a ride to the nearby town of Calarcá. We found ourselves at the start of 'Alto de La Línea', which is probably the 2nd most famous climb in Colombia behind Letras. I never thought I would try to ride La Línea as when I came on the bus from Bogota, it was EXTREMELY busy with trucks going both ways around tight switchback corners. Also, like all mountain passes around here, it is prone to landslides when there has been heavy rain.

 

Small landslide from a few years ago

But seeing as the weather was fine and it was a public holiday so there were no trucks allowed on the line, we thought let's give it a test run and see how far we get. Well we ended up getting about half way up to about 2300m (summit is about 3300m). I would love to try it on a road bike, but was still fun crawling up on the MTB. Rather than coming back down the road and burning up our brakes, we came back to Calarca on a hiking track straight down the side of a mountain. The track was really washed out so we walked the bikes most of the way down, but near the bottom it was great to do some proper mountain biking on a single trail. After riding half the line I would like to give the full ride a go maybe next public holiday...

Having a chat with a couple of national police. I can sort of get by with the basic chit chat in Spanish now.

No more rides this week as I am getting ready for my big hiking trip to Nevado del Tolima. More on that later in the week.

On anther note, I am actually getting quite a lot of Spanish study done. Not the most exciting to blog about as I'm just learning the grammar and building the vocab. I think in a month or so I will be able to watch TV and movies with Spanish subtitles and follow along.

Full picture album