CSC Blog

Wow, what an adventure!   Zipping around Colombia for 9 days on an RX3 motorcycle with my good buddies Juan and Carlos, a day in the AKT Moto plant, two easy flights (Medellin to Bogota, and Bogota to Los Angeles), and here I am, back in California!

First things first…it’s the 24th of December, and we at CSC want to wish all of you a very merry Christmas.   Enjoy the holidays, my friends.   It’s been a great year.

On my last day in Colombia, we spent the day touring the AKT Moto factory in Medellin.  It was impressive, and not just because of the fact that they make motorcycles there.  I’ve been in and around factories for most of my life.  There are good ones and there are bad ones.   I can tell the difference as soon as I walk in just by looking at the people who work there.   A good plant is one in which people can’t wait to get to work in the morning.  AKT Moto is a good one.  The vibes I felt were all good…AKT is a good place to work and the people there love what they do.   Just like CSC Motorcycles.

Let me start by showing you a quick peek at the AKT Moto assembly line…

Juan Carlos grabbed the photo below of yours truly with Enrique Vargas, AKT Moto’s General Manager.   Enrique is a genuine nice guy and he’s the real deal.  He rides a different AKT Moto motorcycle to work every day (in Medellin traffic, that’s no small feat), and he races motocross on the weekends.   Enrique is the guy who invited me on this trip, and I had a wonderful time.   It was the ride of a lifetime.

So now I’m home, and I’m already missing the riding, the people, and the scenery in Colombia.   The hardest part of any adventure like this is getting off the bike and not wanting the ride to end.    But that’s okay…it’s less than 3 months until the Baja ride, and I can’t wait to get on the road again!

Yesterday was our last day on the road.   It was yet another glorious day of adventure riding in Colombia.

The night we spent under the Volcan Nevado del Ruiz was freezing.   It was the coldest night we experienced on this trip.   I had on every layer of clothing I brought with me when we left.  Juan told me not to worry, it would warm up as we descended.   As always, his prediction was right on the money.

I had mixed emotions as we rolled out that morning.  This ride has been one of the great ones, and I am always a little sad on the last day of a major ride because I know it is drawing to a close.   But I am also eager to get home.   This was a magnificent ride, and it  was a physically demanding one.   We experienced temperature extremes, from the humid and sultry tropics to the frigid alpine environment we were leaving.  The riding was simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.   We road magnificent winding mountain roads, but at times the traffic (especially when we were passing the big 22-wheeled tractor trailer trucks) was unnerving.   My neck was sore, most likely from the stress of this kind of riding.   But it was grand, and riding Colombia is one of life’s grand adventures.

Juan knows all the good spots in Colombia, and he took us to this one where we could grab a few photos with the volcano steaming in the background.

I had to get a shot of the three of us with the bikes, using the D3300’s self-timer.   If we look like three guys (the three amigos) who were having the ride of their lives, well, it’s because we were.

We rode on.   We went through towns, we went through the twisties, and we passed more trucks.  Another day in Colombia, another few hundred miles.  At one point, Juan took us on a very sharp 150-degree right turn and we climbed what appeared to be a paved goat trail.  Ah, another one of Juan’s short cuts, I thought.   And then we stopped.

“This is Colombia’s major coffee-producing region, and we are on a coffee plantation,” he announced when we took our helmets off.  Wow.  I half expected Juan Valdez (you know, from the old coffee commercials) to appear, leading his burro laden with only the finest beans.   It was amazing.  I had never been on a coffee plantation (or even seen a coffee bean before it had been processed), and now here we were.  On a coffee plantation.  In Colombia.  This has been a truly amazing ride.

That big stand of lighter yellowish-green plants you see just left of center in the above photograph is a bamboo grove.   More amazing stuff.

These are coffee beans, folks.  Real coffee beans.

The beans are picked by hand, Juan explained.  It’s very labor-intensive, and these areas are struggling because the world-wide coffee commodities markets are down.

Juan picked a bean and showed me how to peel it open.   You can take the inner bean and put it in your mouth like a lozenge (you don’t chew it).   To my surprise, it was sweet.  It didn’t have even a vague hint of coffee flavor.

As we were taking all of this in, two of Colombia’s finest rolled by.

Juan told me that the police officers in Colombia often ride two up.  I had seen that a lot during the last 8 days.   Frequently, the guy in back was carrying a large HK 7.62 assault rifle or an Uzi.   Colombia is mostly safe today, but that is a fairly recent development.

Vintage cars a big thing in Colombia.   A little further down the road we saw this pristine US Army Jeep for sale.  I thought of my good buddy San Marino Bill, who owns a similar restored military Jeep.

Here’s one last shot of yesterday’s ride…it’s the Cauca River valley.

The Andes Mountains enter Colombia from the south, and then split into three Andean ranges running roughly south to north.  You can think of this as a fork with three tines.   There’s an eastern range of the Andes, a central range, and a western range.   The Cauca River (which we rode along for much of yesterday) runs between the western and central Andes.   The Magdalena River runs between the central and eastern ranges.

Okay, enough geography…we rolled on toward Medellin (or Medda-jeen, as they say over here) and dropped Carlos off at his home.   Juan and I rode on another 40 kilometers to La Ceja (or La Sayza, to pronounce it correctly) to Juan’s home, and folks, that was it.   Our Colombian ride was over.

Like I said above, I always have mixed emotions when these rides end.   It was indeed a grand adventure, and I don’t mind telling you that I mentally heard the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark playing in my head more than a few times as we rode through this wonderful place.

In the next few days, I’ll post more impressions of the trip.   In a word, our AKT Moto RX3s performed magnificently.   The RX3 is a world-class motorcycle, and anyone who dismisses the bike as a serious adventure riding machine is just flat wrong.   I’ve been riding for over 50 years, and this is the best motorcycle for serious world travel I’ve ever ridden.  Zongshen hit a home run with the RX3.

I’ll write more about the minor technical distinctions between the AKT and CSC versions of this bike, my experiences with the Tourfella luggage (all good), and more in coming blogs.  I’ll tell you a bit about the camera gear I used on this trip, too (a preview…the Nikon D3300 did an awesome job).

Today I’m visiting with the good folks from AKT Moto to personally thank them for the use of their motorcycle and to see their factory.   It’s going to be fun.

More to come, my friends…stay tuned!

A delightful hotel, sweltering heat, more mountain twisties, freezing cold, fog that cut visibility down to 30 feet, dirt roads, riding at 13,576 feet, hot sulfur baths, and a burbling volcano that killed 23,000 people in 1985…all in a day’s ride for us.

The hotel first…it was the Epoque, a great little boutique hotel in Honda that was one of the coolest places (in one of the hottest cities) I’ve ever parked a motorcycle.   It was arranged in a square around a small pool (which we enjoyed immensely the previous night).   Here are a few shots of the courtyard, Juan and Carlos having breakfast, and an antique record player in the dining room…

From there, it was another trials ride following the boys from Medellin as we twisted, turned, climbed, and descended cobbleboulder streets in Honda.   Juan took us to the first bridge to ever span the Magdalena River, where I grabbed this shot of a Colombian woman taking in the humid morning air of Honda…

Here’s the bridge.  It has planks across the bottom as the road surface.   It’s real Indiana Jones stuff….

We saw the Magdalena River museum, and stopped in to check it out.   Folks, it was hot.  I was soaking wet by now, drenched in sweat.

The museum was interesting and it had some bizarre art.   This guy reminds me of a boss I had a couple of decades ago…

The Colombians used steamships on the Magdalena, just like we did on the Mississippi River.

We left Honda and started to climb.  The temperatures dropped mercifully.   We stopped in Fresno.   Yep, Colombia has a Fresno, too.

That’s me in the town square.  I’m the guy on the right.

Two young ladies in a small store in Fresno.

As we were sipping energy drinks, Juan pointed out our destination for that evening, the Volcan Nevado del Ruiz.  It was showing a little steam, and I stuck an arrow in this picture so you could see it.

We continued our climb.  The roads were magnificent.

The photo below shows my front tire, with chicken strips that are about as small as I’ve ever been able to make them.   I was getting better at keeping up with the Colombian motorcycle community.

Our riding positions are Juan, me, and Carlos.   Juan is amazing.  I’m struggling to keep up in the twisties, and I know he’s dialed it back for me.  He’ll ride through the corners (and the roads are all corners, folks) standing on the pegs.   At one point, we were taking a set of curves at speeds way above those at which I would normally ride, with the bikes leaned over at an unimaginable angle, when I looked ahead and saw Juan.   He was standing on the pegs, similarly leaned over, and while all this was going on, he was reaching back to check the latch on one of his saddlebags as if it was the most normal thing in the world to do.   The guy is an incredible rider.

As we continued to climb, we entered the clouds.  Literally.   We left the pavement and got on a dirt road headed up to the volcano.

4,138 meters!  That’s 13,576 feet, and it’s as high as you can go on a motorcycle anywhere in Colombia.   Juan told me he once did this ride on a Yamaha DT100, carrying a passenger on the back!

That’s not dirt on my RX3, folks.  It’s volcanic ash.  This was not your typical motorcycle ride.

Yours truly, posing with Carlos, on the top of the world, on top of a volcano with indigestion.   Wow.   This volcano is the very same one that blew in 1985 and wiped out an entire community.  It was like Pompeii, as the guys explained it to me.   23,000 people lost their lives in that event.  And here we were, riding in conditions where I could barely see Juan’s tail light in front of me, on dirt roads, in bitter cold.  Wow.

Here are a couple of shots showing my helmet and my jacket, dusted with Volcan Nevado del Ruiz ash.

We left the volcano, rode another 20 kilometers on this dirt road, and found our hotel in the middle of nowhere.

The hotel had hot springs, and they were awesome.  I had a good soak, we had dinner, and that was the end of Day 7 on this epic journey.

Today is our last day.  We’re finishing our great circumnavigation and headed back to Medellin.   Much of our ride today will be on dirt.   I’ll take a few shots and post about it tomorrow.

Later, my friends.

Let me see if I can get this right:   I’m a guy from California riding a Chinese motorcycle in Colombia headed to a town called Honda.   Yep, that was yesterday’s ticket.

We left Villa de Leyva early in the morning, climbed higher into the Andes, and wow, was it ever cold.   Juan Carlos stopped so we could grab a few photos..

As I was taking in the scenery, this Colombian SUV rolled into the scene…

We next stopped at the point where Colombia was born.  The last battle of the Colombian war of independence (against Spain) occurred right here at this bridge in Boyaga…

The Colombian rebels defeated the Spanish regulars here, and at that point, Colombia was born.   There are a lot of parallels between how Colombia came into being and our Revolutionary War.

Boyaga is actually pronounced “boy-jogga.”   In Colombian Spanish, a y is pronounced  like a j.  So is a double l (as in ll).   A montallanta (a tire repair place) is called a “monta-jonta.”   Interesting.

Following Juan through these small towns was fascinating and taxing.  We’re up in the Andes, and everything is steep.   Juan is incredible…we climb these steep cobblestone streets, cut across some guy’s front lawn, grab a dirt road, pick up a new street, every once in a while (while still riding) he pulls up alongside a guy on horse or a tractor to confirm directions (Juan’s GPS, as he calls it), and we cut across the Colombian countryside.  It’s amazing.  Here’s a sampling of what it looks like, both in the dirt (and there is a lot of dirt riding) and through the small towns…

We hit a last stretch of twisties (a 50-mile stretch) and then we pulled over for a photo of the Magdalena River valley.  Our destination (the town of Honda) is down there somewhere…

Honda is a another steep town.  This street (that’s our hotel, the Epoque, on the left) is a typical super steep Colombian town road.   The road is a one way road…I tried parking the bike facing down hill, but it was too steep.   I thought I could just leave the bike in first gear and kill the ignition, but the street was so steep it pulled the bike through the compression stroke.  That’s why the bikes are facing uphill.   These are unusual riding conditions for me, but totally normal to the Colombians.

Today we’re headed to Santa Rosa de Cabal.   You can read all about it tomorrow morning, right here on the CSC blog!

Actually, it’s pronounced “via da layba.”   I’m learning how to be a Colombian, and how to speak like one.  Colombian Spanish is different than Mexican Spanish.   Much to my regret, I don’t speak either one.  Someday…

Juan Carlos and Carlos told me they’re making me an honorary C0lombian because my riding has progressed significantly in the last few days.  Folks, these two guys are the best riders I’ve ever ridden with, and for them to tell me that was quite a compliment.  Every rider I know in the U.S. would be subpar compared to your typical Colombian motorcyclist.  The way they carve corners and carve through heavy traffic on these mountain roads is a thing a beauty.   They are the best riders I’ve ever seen, and the two guys I’m riding with are beyond incredible.  But I digress…more on that later.   The focus of this blog entry is Day 5, which was yesterday for me.

As you know from reading the blog, we stayed in Barichara.  It’s an awesome little town and we stayed in an awesome little hotel.  Getting there was an experience.  We passed through a bunch of small towns up here in the Andes Mountains.  In these small towns, everything is either uphill or downhill.  The roads are either cobblestone or dirt.  And when I say cobblestone, I’m not talking about little rocks.   These are 6 to 12 inch boulders that are basically mashed together to form a street.   The cobblestones (actually, cobbleboulders) throw the bike left and right and up and down, and this is all going on while riding up or down extremely steep hills.   The RX3 is the perfect bike for this.  I couldn’t imagine doing it on anything bigger or heavier.

We stayed at the Artepolis Hotel, and it was an experience.  The guy in the room next to me was an Austrian photographer who came here just to photograph the place.   It’s that stunning.   Here’s the hotel the next morning (it was dark when we arrived the preceding evening, and we had to ride up a rough dirt road to get to the hotel)….

The next morning Juan and Carlos wanted to ride a bit and get some photos.   They took me to the edge of a cliff and we got some great shots…here’s one of Carlos I especially like…

And here are a couple more…

We continued on a paved road to a little town called Guane, and along the way I spotted a couple of Colombian vultures perched in a tree not far from the road.  I always wanted to get a decent shot of a vulture during my Baja travels, but my results have always been mediocre.  I’m carrying my 70-300 Nikon lens on this trip, and I thought I would try for that vulture photo I’ve been wanting for years.   The lighting was perfect and I think I did okay…

After photographing the vultures, I grabbed a couple of shots from the saddle on our way to Guane…

Guane is a beautiful little town with a magnificent church…I was working the little Nikon D3300 and its 18-55 lens as best I could.   That camera is really doing a great job on this trip.  I bought it because I wanted something light and small.   You folks who are planning to ride to Baja with us in March might want to give the D3300 a look if you don’t already have a camera.   It really adds a lot to the adventure if you can capture stuff like this.

In many Colombian towns, the taxi services use tuk-tuks.  Tuk-tuks are little three wheel things that have two wheels in the back and one wheel up front.   I’d seen them in Thailand, but encountering them again in Colombia was something I had not expected.   The ones in Colombia are made by Bajaj, an Indian manufacturer (as in India, not Indian motorcycles).  They’re powered by a little 200cc single, and I was surprised at it’s ability to haul Carlos, Juan, and me up and down the hills in Barichara (we took one to go to dinner in Barichara).   Juan told me he tested one at Bajaj’s request a year or so ago and he was impressed with it.

The tuk-tuks are often customized with really cool paintwork, and so are some of the other commercial vehicles.   Here’s the artwork on one such vehicle in Guane that caught my eye…

After our brief exploration of Guane, we rode back to Barichara.  The guys had been telling me I had to see the cemetery, and they were right.   It seemed weird to visit a cemetery for the artistry, but it was impressive…

After that we were back on the road, headed for Villa de Leyva.   I had mentioned to Juan that I wanted to get photos of the police motorcycles in Colombia, and when he spotted a few motor officers in one of the many small towns we rode through, I checked another photo op off the list.

This first photo shows one of the more common Colombian police bikes, the Suzuki 200 single…

Here’s another bike the Colombian police use…the Suzuki V-Strom 650…

There’s a lot more to tell you about the Colombian police motorcycles, but that will come later.  I’m seeing and learning so much I just can’t get it all into the blog.  I’m thinking maybe another book is in order.  We’ll see.

Juan found our hotel just outside of Villa de Leyva, we checked in, and then we rode into town.   This is the town square…it’s the largest in all of Colombia.

If you’re really impressed with that last shot, so am I.   I wish I could take credit for it.   It was a photo for sale in one of the Villa de Leyva stores, and I shot a photo of that photo before they told me I couldn’t.

It was a good day.   The next one would be even better.

More riding, another Andean crossing, a bit of rain, and we arrived in Barichara!

Barichara is a artist’s town, and it’s one of the most exclusive places in all of Colombia.  It was another glorious day of mountain riding.  I did not take too many photos on the ride to Barichara, mostly because of the rain, our late arrival, and I was enjoying our dinner too much that evening in Barichara to break out the Nikon.  But I did get a few photos.

My lunch at a restaurant along the Chicamocha River…

One of my “from the saddle” shots of a hydroelectric dam on the Chicamocha River…

A couple of shots chasing Juan Carlos through a massive tunnel in the Andes Mountains..

A fine feathered friend at a fuel stop…

And finally, a shot after the rain ended of the Chicamocha valley…

I’m enjoying the AKT Moto RX3.   It’s different in a few minor ways than the CSC bike, and they are both fantastic motorcycles.    I’ll do a blog after I return home describing the differences.

I’m calling it a night, folks.   More to follow…as always, stay tuned!

Vaca Loca means “crazy cow” in Spanish.  It was a traditional thing in many small Colombian villages years ago.   Juan Carlos explained the story behind it to me, but I forgot most of it.   I tried finding the story behind it in my Colombian guide book and on Google, but I struck out both times.   I think in older times maybe it was something like running with the bulls.   Maybe not.   It evolved into a guy running through the street with fireworks while dressed up like a cow.  Anyway, it’s rare in Colombia because of the danger inherent to fireworks, but it still goes on in some places.  And I got to see it.   And now, so will you…the Vaca Loca in La Playa de Belem!