Tatacoa Surprise

We got to the desert yesterday morning.

They told us the Tatacoa is small but we were not expecting it to be this small. 

We drove until we felt we had seen what we needed to see. 

And then we turned around and went the way we came.

Layne suggested it was because we’ve driven the huge southwestern expanses back home. Personally I missed the atmosphere of a national park, public land, a sense of value in the place. 

I didn’t like the circus atmosphere of the private businesses. There is serious work done at an observatory but the hotels restaurants and campgrounds held no appeal to us. 

This isn’t a wealthy corner of Colombia and I appreciate the effort to bring work to the nearby town of Villa Vieja but I’ll just say we spent 15 minutes and that was that.  

Dry, arid, shade-free and 100 degrees of inferno heat. No way. 

We got back on pavement and added air to our deflated tires using our portable inflator. That took about forty five minutes so Layne cleaned fruit in the kitchen and…

…and Rusty enjoyed what shade he could find until he got fed up and went inside to help Layne. 

Villa Vieja got a wave on the way to the main road. This little town is the gateway to the desert and it was suitably dusty with some complicated road works and no signs showing us the way out. 

We sort of followed Google Maps and tried not to run too many one way streets the wrong way. 

Thank god for electronic mapping I thought to myself as we found our way out. In the old days we’d have been fighting over vast sheets of paper. 

The secondary road led out of town toward the main road south to our next destination, some prehistoric rocks in a place called San Agustin. The white fog is the desert, the blue fog is as far as we got and the red dot is San Agustin. We average 20mph usually on Colombian roads and talking to other travelers that’s normal.  

The secondary roads are not well maintained and that slows you down with potholes and ripples and bumps. Then there are the food sellers usually found on primary roads. In the city of Neiva we came across a log of marshmallow. I thought it was cheese until the street seller handed it to me. Very weird some of these foreign customs! $1:25 with a 25 cent tip. 

Then another reason you don’t go fast is thanks to big trucks struggling to make the turns and the city streets. 

Road building can slow you, quite aside from the fact you don’t know what’s coming so even if the road is open I rarely go faster than 40 mph so I have plenty of time to slow down to avoid obstructions. 

Even in open roads trucks often struggle to get up hills and you can be dawdling at ten miles per hour until you see a safe passing zone. 

Colombians seem to me to pass on blind faith half the time.  

And motorcycles are surprisingly useful… “what the actual fuck” goes through my mind a dozen times a day when I see riders risking their lives in so many different ways. Or carrying garden chairs as you do: 

By early afternoon we made our goal found by Layne, a hotel with parking and a swimming pool. 

The charge to park overnight was five bucks so we also bought dinner which added ten bucks to our bill. 

It was one hundred degrees until the sun went down. We are looking forward to gaining altitude on the road ahead and around here in the bizarrely named town of Gigante we are at 2900 feet above sea level. 

Not exactly KOA but we have cold showers, clean toilets you wouldn’t mind using and an onsite restaurant. 

If it were cooler we might stay another night but as it is we want to drive back into the mountains. This low altitude is burning us up!