Final: Day 6: Medellin

I wake up, stand up, walk a few paces. I am pain free. I luck out. My fall last night did not injure me.

This is the view out my hotel window.

I stroll down for my complimentary breakfast buffet. There's even an omelet bar. I don't know how to say mushrooms to the cook. Every guest at breakfast is either wearing a smart European cut suit or tailored business casual. There are no women here. A lot of flowers must get bought and sold here.

Other than resting, I have three goals today.

One, I have to go to the bus station to buy my final bus ticket-- from Medellin to Turbo. Tomorrow, I will complete my odyssey. I take a tiny Hyundai cab. I ask my driver what the top industries in Medellin are, like a seventh grade teacher.

"Tourism, textiles, and women."

I was not expecting that answer.

There are two bus stations in Medellin, north and south. I arrived at the south station last night from Cali. I leave for Turbo from the north station. Before I buy my ticket, I go to the Western Union office to see if they will exchange my Peruvian soles for Colombian pesos. My poor customer service representative has a terribly botched nose job.

I get my ticket. It's crazy how a bus trip to the Darien Gap can just be printed out like this.

My second goal is to buy a plane ticket from Turbo to Bogota. After completing my trip to Turbo, there is no way in hell I am going to ride on a bus for another 18 hours.

I go to the smaller, domestic airport in Medellin. Fortunately, they have a flight on a prop plane from Apartado (30 miles from Turbo) to Bogota. In November 2017, the largest seizure of cocaine in history (12 tons worth $360 million) took place in Apartado. Neat!

Talk about bad judgment. This huge sign inside the airport commemorated tango legend Carlos Gardel's fatal plane crash at the airport.

I take advantage of the free WiFi at the airport and FaceTime with my wife. I start to cry as I see my son on my phone. I quickly hang up.

My third goal is to meet my internet friend BK and deliver an Amazon Fire Stick to him. BK and his partner are retired American expats who now live in Medellin. We have a fine lunch and he gives me a quick primer on everything Medellin. It is so nice to speak English with someone who also happens to know a bit about my life back home.

I want to note that inside our menu, there is an advertisement for shipping services to Miami. Okay.

This is my lunch. Potato, chicharron, plantain, egg, rice, dried beef and a bowl of beans and rice. I must say, Colombian food is a bit on the bland side. This restaurant is very popular with the chichi locals. The men and women here can all be models.

After lunch, BK and I walk around a little. As we head towards my hotel, I have the worst stomach pain in my life. It was the bus station soup from yesterday. I am about to explode. I ask to sit down on the side of the road, multiple times, trying to gather myself. I am sweating, dizzy, and a hot mess. I don't know what to do. And poor BK. BK watches as I speedwalk the last block to the hotel. I made it to my room, barely.

The next ten hours was touch and go. I packed two rolls of Pepto-Bismol chewable tablets. Being the cheapskate, I brought an opened box of Imodium. I just had three tablets left in the box. How do I ration these effectively? I just need to make it to Turbo, which is about 18 hours from now. BK emails me the whole time with words of encouragement, health advice, and offers to pick up meds at the pharmacy (no prescription needed!).

Fortunately, my symptoms subside by the time I fall asleep. Tomorrow, Turbo.

Final: Day 5: Cali to Medellin

I wake up, look out, and see morning traffic in Cali.

It's Wednesday morning and I have been riding buses since Sunday night. I am seriously ripe. I consider taking the day off and riding again tomorrow. But I mustn't. I have to keep pushing. So I feed myself a cup of soup at the Cali bus station. In retrospect, I firmly believe this soup ruined me the following day. But for now, it's my first hot meal in three full days.

I take a bus from Cali to Medellin. The nine hour ride ends up being more like eleven. For the first half of the trip, it's straight and smooth across ranch country. The second half is slow and twisty. The scenery is right out of 1980s Nightline stock footage about the Colombian cocaine trade. There are Daihatsu Tafts everywhere.

Our dinner break is at a random village. Cali and Medellin each has 2.5 million inhabitants, and this narrow two-lane "highway" is the only route that connects the cities. How does meaningful commerce even happen?

While everyone is eating, I walk around. Here is our bus.

Every mountain village has one of these Virgin Mary statuettes protecting everyone.

We don't get to the Medellin bus station until 10 p.m. I didn't realized how tired I was. I didn't realize how hungry I was (my only meal all day was that morning cup of soup). I didn't realize how weak my legs were from days of inactivity. I realized it when I got my bag from the bus's luggage compartment and stepped up onto the too-high curb.

SPLAT.

I trip and fall flat on my face onto the unforgiving concrete. I deal with injuries at work every day, so I've seen all the possible injuries from falls-- torn rotator cuffs, compound wrist fractures, etc. A small crowd rushes to me and asks me if I'm okay. I look over my body for blood and deformities. None. I pat myself all over. I'm fine. I know I'm exhausted and can't think clearly. I need to get to my hotel, rest, and re-evaluate myself tomorrow morning.

Porsche butter

Source.

H/t to P.

Final: Day 4: Ecuador to Colombia

It's 3 a.m. We are in the Ecuadorean Central Highlands, somewhere north of Riobamba. We get to a toll booth, and our engine stalls again. Then, the bus starts rolling back, as if to parallel park. We are stuck again.

I start panicking. The hazard lights are not on because the electrical system is shot. What if a tractor trailer rear ends us? What if a gang of toughs comes on board and robs us all? What if?

There's not much that can be done. So all of us passengers go back to sleep while the drivers figure out what to do next.

It wasn't until the next morning, when I got out, that I realized we were safe all along. We were parked right next to a police station. There was even an ambulance with paramedics on stand-by.

But still. How are we going to get out of this jam? Am I going to have enough time with this delay to finish my journey by the end of the week? Should I selfishly call a taxi cab for myself and be driven to Quito (approximately four to six hours away)?

No. I will stay with my compatriots. Eventually, this Ferrari-liveried bus came to pick us up. It was smaller and not as nice as our original bus, but we were relieved. Handsome Dad and Joker Dad stayed with the original bus. Responsible Dad would be our chaperone and accompanied us through the rest of the trip.

The Ecuadorean Central Highlands was quite bucolic. Lots of farmland.

Quito is a strange location for a capital. It's not in just one valley. You would have to traverse a number of steep passes just to get from one neighborhood to another. Commuting is hard on the brakes, much more so than even San Francisco.

North of Quito, I knew we would be crossing the equator. So I kept an eye on my phone.

It was around here, at 8,000', that we crossed the equator.

The Northern Highlands of Ecuador has a strong German influence. At a rest area, I went to a mini mart. An older German woman ran the place. She wore a threadbare brown sweater. You could tell it was a nice sweater when it was purchased decades ago. Despite her best efforts, the grinding poverty is obvious. She had the weathered look of descendants of those utopian settlements in rural Paraguay. Anyhow, the mini mart had a bottle of water and a bottle of sports drink on display. Nothing else. I wanted the water so she opened a rusted icebox and pulled a bottle out for me. It was very depressing.

And at dusk, the green bus dropped us off at the Colombia-Ecuador border. We stood in line for a couple of hours. Vendors made a killing selling food and drinks to the travelers. The crowd leaned young. I estimate less than 3% of us were 35 and older.

Once we got the Ecuador stamp on our passports, we walked across a bridge into Colombia. A white bus would take us from the border to Cali. We were ecstatic. Not only would we get to Cali, we would get there on time. Somehow, the green and white replacement buses made up nine-plus hours of delays.

As we left the border in the middle of the night, the crowd at the back of the bus pulled out a bottle of Colombian rum and a plastic shot glass. I had two shots. The skinny Chilean insisted that I have a can of beer. Someone turned on the flashlight feature of their smartphone, flicked his hand in front of the light, and gave the back of the bus a strobe light effect. People were dancing. A woman we called Tia, a middle aged woman who was traveling with her mother (who looked like Tia 20 years from now) and her daughter (who looked like Tia 20 years ago) sang beautiful, soulful folk songs about home and love.

I looked out the window and gazed at the stars. The Big Dipper pointed at Polaris, which was barely above the horizon. My head bobbed about as the driver drove over 35 miles per hour on winding mountain roads. I felt euphoric.

As a side note, buses customarily travel in convoys at night through this portion of southern Colombia. But our chaperone insisted this was not necessary tonight because of increased military patrols. However, whenever our bus driver saw a bus parked on the side of the road, he would stop to make sure everyone was okay.

Baku Marshals Club pins

Gifts from Tarlan. Thanks!

Matt Groening and Seth MacFarlane draw each other

The moon if it were at the same distance as the ISS

Doug DeMuro reviews a first generation Hyundai Equus

He has reviewed a lot of cars. This is by far the most interesting.

Final: Day 3: Peru to Ecuador

I woke up in the morning, looked out the window, and saw this. This is about 12 hours north of Lima on the Pan-American Highway.

And this is a view from my seat of the inside of my bus. Argentina Jhon is sitting right in front of me.

We would occasionally drive past dry, dusty towns. In Guatemala and Peru, no wall is spared from campaign advertising. 

This is Chiclayo, and the Jesus of Chiclayo. Totally random place, right? Well, when I was withdrawing cash at the bank for my trip a few weeks earlier, I learned that the branch manager, a Chinese-American Chinese-Peruvian guy, was from Chiclayo. Small world.

This is downtown Chiclayo and it reminds me of Kashgar in Xinjiang Province. The architecture, the vehicles, the dryness, everything.

Here is a funeral home with a Ford Taurus wagon hearse!

When people think of the Pan-American Highway, they assume it's thousands of miles of straight, uninterrupted asphalt. Not so at all. A few sections are unpaved and many sections wind through cities and towns. Here, we are turning left into yet another anonymous town.

Before the border with Ecuador, we took a lunch break. It was supposed to be a breakfast break, but we were three hours late because of the radiator hose issue from the evening before. The bus's restroom is for Number One only. So this was everyone's chance at a Number Two.

The restaurant also has facilities in the back for quick bathing. After I brushed my teeth and washed my face, I hung out with this stuffed and painted iguana while everyone else had a hot meal.

As we approached the border with Ecuador, we saw the Pacific Ocean! You'll recall that because a bus recently plunged into the Pacific Ocean just north of Lima, that whole section of the Pan-American Highway was closed to buses.

The Ecuador-Peru border. It was a very quick and civilized process. The female Ecuadorean passport control and customs officers were all wearing skin tight, almost inappropriate-for-work, uniforms. And, it started raining.

After we crossed the border, there was a dramatic difference in terms of development. Compared with Peru, Ecuador seemed like a First World country. The cars were bigger and newer. The buildings' walls seemed thicker and more robust. Ecuador, after all, is an OPEC member and has oil money.

I might have been hallucinating, but I thought I saw a statue of a half jet, half shark at a traffic circle.

Around 9 p.m., our bus slowed, ground to a halt, stuttered, and stalled. This was my view out the window when we came to a stop. After a little banging of the engine with a heavy wrench, the bus started again. We traveled a few more kilometers and we stalled again. And again, we restarted.

We stopped at this restaurant for dinner while our drivers worked on the bus. I passed on the hot food and just had a couple of beers. But that BBQ grill outside smelled good. Because Ecuador uses U.S. dollars, I got my change back in Sacagawea dollar coins.

The drivers fixed the bus, for now, and we were off again.