The Road From Hell

As roads go I’m sure there are worse even in this country but, hellfire, this was a public highway connecting two tourist towns, we weren’t in the back of beyond or seeking four wheel drive adventure. Colombia didn’t care.

For us it was an adventure, unplanned with an unknown outcome. For the locals traveling between San Agustin and Popayan it was just another bus ride.

We did not intend to make an adventure of anything but that’s how things go wrong, one small step at a time and there you are suddenly racing the encroaching darkness.

We really did enjoy the beauty and the mystery of the Archeological Park in San Agustin but we were ready to go around eleven in the morning after three hours rambling. What to do? 

Google Maps says Highway 20 between the two cities is 84 miles and should take three hours and 40 minutes. I took a few street view shots and saw paved road so it might take us five hours if we’re slow. It was eleven in the morning and the sun sets at six. No problem? Right? 

We had considered returning to the campground in San Agustin for another night before leaving early Sunday morning. That plan was scotched by the two young French hitch hikers who gave us a really bad feeling such that we didn’t want to spend another night anywhere near them. So we set off. 

We passed another campground mentioned in iOverlander but we were on the road and it was a lovely day with smooth pavement so let’s get on with it, curling through the Andes. 

I don’t drive very fast on these roads by US standards, mostly between 20 and 30 miles per hour. On main roads we cruise at 40mph and on freeways I’ll hit 50 for a high speed journey.

Road conditions change in an instant and hitting a pothole at speed, never mind a motorcyclist reading his phone, can put a dent in your car, or your day. 

The road wound up to 9,000 feet among the pines and temperatures dropped to the seventies. Google said we were three hours from Popayan. 

The hassle on these roads in Latin America is the absence of pull outs. Honestly I’ve taken for granted so many public facilities we have in the US ( and other countries obviously!) but around here there are no scenic overlooks or picnic areas or boat launch ramps or as someone mentioned in a comment recently a simple pocket park. The road allows for stopping only in the travel lanes which people do but we don’t have the nerve to make lunch parked on the road. It’s an unexpected pain!  

So when we saw a pull out by a restaurant we thought let’s just get lunch and take a break. Instead it turns out the eatery was still under construction so Layne made wraps and we paused for fifteen minutes and ate as I drove. That short lunch served us well in the long run instead of taking a slow hour at a sit down restaurant. 

The cement road looked new and was great, no potholes and not much traffic.  Ironically there was a small village around the corner with several functioning eateries but we pressed on. 

And then the cement ended. The rubble road began at kilometer 83 which means we had fifty miles to go to get to the paved highway on the other side of the mountains. Was this all dirt? It couldn’t be…could it?

We kept going with no other option but we did a few time distance calculations, we passed the kilometer 83 milestone at the beginning of the dirt at 12:50pm. 

Pretty soon it became clear we were averaging about six miles per hour. We had fifty miles to go and it was early afternoon. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that we looked to be spending the night on the road. “Let’s lock the doors,” Layne said suiting the action to the words and pressing the central locking button on the dashboard. 

The road surface was profoundly awful a mixture of potholes all over the place and random lumps of stone causing our heavy van to bounce and lurch. I couldn’t speed up as we are trying to reach Patagonia, not the next town like the locals who passed us incessantly on motorcycles, in cars and buses and all sizes of truck. Now that we were lurching slowly along all the other vehicles caught up to us and left us in their dust.

I was always the one to pull over if I could find a slightly wide spot. If not I’d flip our mirrors in to pretend we’d have more room. 

They rarely slowed down and motorcycles slip by as though they couldn’t possibly get hurt. We kept lurching on. 

Some bits of the road looked like they had once seen asphalt but it was an illusion as nothing made the road easier to drive. We met some locals from god knows where filling in holes. They do it to make tips so we handed over a 50 cent bill and each time they were delighted. That’s how poor they are. 

One couple had their dogs with them so they got their treats too of course. I kept forgetting to photograph them until they were in our mirrors. Duh! 

We passed a bridge over a deep canyon and saw some sightseers stopped there. I pulled up and asked where the asphalt was. He looked thoughtful and said thirty or forty kilometers with a shrug and a smile. “Only the few and the brave drive out here!” I said and he laughed and repeated the joke to his family. They waved later when they passed us.

That depressing news meant there was no way we could reach civilization before dark. We had no cell signal but we had our offline Google map on my phone so we knew how far we had to drive and almost all of it on dirt. Difficult dirt to boot. When we found a wide spot I pulled over and pulled out our deflation tool. We rode on on 50% deflated tires which was much more comfortable. Clearly asphalt was nowhere close. 

Oh and by the way you’re in a national park (who knew?) and don’t mess with the Andean bears please. Bears? Now they tell us we’re in bear country? This was getting better and better. We’re at 10,600 feet, it’ll be dark in four hours and we are far out of cellphone range and making six miles an hour. What could be better? 

Well you remember how Layne locked the doors and I agreed? I haven’t mentioned these mountains are the home of the holdout guerillas who disagreed with the civil war peace treaty twenty odd years ago. They are pissed off, well armed and I don’t doubt slightly crazy living in the wild. I had promised myself we weren’t going to deviate from the main Panamerican Highway and of course here we were, miles in the middle of absolutely nowhere. 

But let’s face it by now we were experienced on this gruesome track so when we saw a monster truck rumbling toward us we knew what to do, and when we saw a kid with a shovel Layne got a two thousand peso bill ready to hand over. 

Occasionally we could see out of the tunnel of trees and the views were spectacular. Our fear of guerillas was diminishing as we saw so much local traffic, a few cheerful waves and ever hopeful we figured out an alternative plan for the fast approaching night. One thing that puzzled me was the fact that we weren’t dropping altitude. We were still at 10,000 feet. When did we descend to Popayan at 6,000 feet? 

It was endless and I had no delusions about this dirt road being anything remotely technical such as would delight an off roader. We had no trouble with the surface other than it was totally uncomfortable even with deflated tires. 

Rain clouds made the scene gloomy if grandiose but no rain came and the clouds passed. 

This section sticks in my memory as the absolute worst. Take a close look. 

The afternoon sun came out and we caught glimpses of flatlands ahead with what looked like farms. We might be there! 

Sure enough look what we saw at four o’clock in the afternoon! It was at kilometer 51 after 32 kilometers of horrible dirt that coated GANNET2 like talcum powder. That’s 20 miles that took us three and a half hours. Figure out that average. 

Oh lovely cement! Oh glorious cell phone signal! And guess what? iOverlander had a gas station stop just 16 miles down the paved road. I felt like the Scott Antarctic Expedition getting a reprieve from

the storm that killed them. I know that’s a bit over the top but it felt good rolling smoothly again. But there was one slight problem. 

Once again we found a pull out next to a restaurant because we needed to relate the tires. You’d forgotten about that hadn’t you? We could have rolled slowly on deflated tires but I had no taste for taking the risk of deforming brand new tires.  So Layne went to buy us a dinner to go and I got out our faithful DeWalt air pump. Rusty was ready to relax and stop jerking around. He loved the cool air at 10,000 feet,  65 degrees was perfect for him and not bad for us promising good sleeping weather. 

And the learning curve continued to slap me round the head. I figured deflation takes 45 minutes with our small portable compressor which is fine for our modest kind of use. Normally I check the tires weekly with the DeWalt and it copes okay with our occasional deflation routines. However we were at 10,000 feet and reflation here took twice the normal time. By the time the four tires were at 80psi (rear) and 70 psi (front) sunset was just 15 minutes away and we had 16 miles to drive. Yup, we were going to be driving in the dark. Oh well. 

The truck driver Emilio told us his seat bounces worse than anything and Layne took that as a challenge. “We bounce like this!” She told the restaurant staff. Oh no Emilio said my truck is much worse in the dirt. I bounce like this! And they bounced in their feet to prove thirty points to general hilarity in the restaurant. He drives deep into the night on that hellish road to get to his family on the other side to spend Sunday with his family, a weekly drive on that road. 

Good luck to him. I thought of him still driving as I fell asleep that night.

We made it through the town of Coconuco, a one lane Main Street filled with pedestrians, dogs, motorcycles and loud Saturday night music. It was too dark for pictures and I had my hands full not killing anyone. 

We made it to the gas station and there was a small parking area. We pulled in, opened a bottle of wine from the fridge and  ate the restaurant dinner, meat rice beans and plantain, and reflect how we handled a difficult day. 

In the morning we filled up with gas and drove the twenty miles to Popayan.