To The Border

The city of Pasto sits in a basin around 9,000 feet in the Andes and it’s not a tourist town by any means, it’s a busy departmental capital at the very bottom of the country. We spent the night slightly out of town: 

Below is the view of the city from our campground, Pasto was tucked into a fold of the mountains. Its proper name is San Juan de Pasto founded in 1537 and with a population of 400,000. The name Pasto comes from the tribe that lived here before the Spanish essentially wiped them out. 

The vet opened at nine and we were there at 8:30 do Rusty got his walk first. Monday was the Feast of the Sacred Heart and a national holiday so traffic was light and quite a few businesses as well as government offices were closed. But the vet is open seven days a week, which was excellent for us. 

Our $55 bought a full check up for Rusty and he was extremely patient. He loved the thermometer up the backside and he stared balefully at me as Dr Mario held the glass tube in place. He is in excellent health aging gracefully, Rusty that is not the vet who was thorough and careful and youthful. 

Pasto is not a pretty city but it has a cheerful busy sit to it even on a holiday. 

We liked the place even though we had no reason to hang out. 

Breakfast of champions, scrambled eggs with hot dogs, rice and a rather stiff slice of fried plantain.  I’m told the cuisine in Ecuador is rather similar so that’s nothing to look forward to though I d joyed my eccentric plate of breakfast food. It held us through lunch so it was a real deal. 

We left Pasto driving south uphill on Highway 25 to Ipiales, the last town before the border at Rumichaca Bridge. And here began a rather surprising drive. 

The highway was fabulous, 40 miles of four lane freeway smooth and modern with ten more miles of excellent quality two lane a total drive time of 90 minutes according to Google Maps. 

The surprise was the constant up and down of the highway which ran up and over every mountain ridge in its path.

So the route was wiggly and that’s to be expected in the mountains but we started at 9,000 feet and ended at 9,400 feet yet we went up and down all day and not in a good way. 

And as usual the grades don’t show in the photos but in the way down I was using manual fourth gear to keep GANNET2 under 50 mph which felt like hurtling into the abyss as we drove down hill at impossible angles. 

Luckily there wasn’t much traffic and with two lanes we could pass slow trucks chugging down the grades on their engine brakes. 

Uphill I pushed too hard holding four thousand rpm and driving up at 8,000 feet at all costs and for the second time ever the temperature needle wobbled slightly. It never does that so I stopped as soon as I found a slight turn out for a u-turn on the freeway. Rusty rolled in the grass in the median while I opened the hood and let the engine idle for a few minutes before shutting it down for twenty. No harm done and perhaps I was being overly cautious but I am not in a hurry to cause problems in these impressive mountains. Layne continued to sleep on the bed in the back. 

This is the operations center of this impressive freeway:

And finally we arrive on the top of the last stretch, the altiplano high in the mountains. 

iOverlander users recommend free overnight parking at the cable car station. The teleferico transports people down the canyon to a famous church perched in the gorge at the spot where the Virgin Mary appeared to a peasant girl in the 18th century.   

Our luck was out as the cable car system is undergoing maintenance and won’t be working till Thursday. We need Plan B which will involve driving into the village and hoping to find a parking spot not too far from the church. 

The campground  at 9400 feet is c lovely with warm sunshine and a cool breeze and a large grass area to ourselves and two other travelers.  Rusty has matured in this trip and he ignored the goats grazing nearby. 

This is the church Instagrammed to death and reduced to a postcard. Layne has conceived a desire to see it before we cross to Ecuador so who am I to argue? 

By the way I wanted to thank the comment by anonymous who mentioned CPAPs don’t need water to operate. I tried it and indeed it worked fine. At these altitudes in this dry air I’m still going to use distilled water to keep my throat damp but it’s nice knowing I don’t need distilled water as a matter of life and death. Thank you. 

Pasto

We had no idea what to expect as we took Highway 25 south past Popayán, into new territory, driving a road unknown to us. 

This was Sunday in Popayán in the middle of a three day weekend. The traffic wasn’t heavy but we passed by roadside gatherings, a few bicycles and lots of families out for the day or weekend. 

We saw mountains ahead some covered in clouds. I had an idea we were going to driving up a valley, straight up to 10,000 feet at the border with Ecuador.

But the highway wasn’t like that. The road went up a mountain ridge, then back down and then it crossed a wide valley and then climbed another ridge before we reached the city of Pasto and camped at 9,000 feet with overnight temperatures near fifty degrees. 

I took almost a hundred pictures on the road. I use a small Panasonic with a short telephoto lens, set to be about right for the light, though I can easily adjust shutter speed with my forefinger. I don’t enjoy using my phone as a camera not least because it’s so fiddly. The GX85 sits in the window tray and I can pick it up and squeeze the shutter without looking at it and hoping for the best. This one, below, I took while pulled over and sometimes I use Laynes pictures. But mostly I discard a lot of crap and try to illustrate a story with the rest. 

When the road gets gnarly I turn to Layne and hope she got something I can use. These are mine of some difficult moments on Highway 25 to Pasto. This is the scene of a giant mudslide: 

A couple of years ago heavy rains destroyed the road in a huge mudslide that took months to fix. They did a good job but this is the PanAmerican and around here there no alternative routes. They dug out mud tracks which got slick in the rain and buses trucks and cars could barely move. It was pretty horrible and I only saw photographs. We couldn’t have driven it. 

We saw evidence of unstable soil along the highway and it was not confidence inspiring. 

There were some rocks in the road, not photographed for reasons explained above but there was lots of evidence of slides. 

There was one spectacular road dip where the highway slid a few feet and there it sits. Even the locals picked their way gingerly across the wrecked ends of the slide:

If the road had slid away into the void the authorities would have had to rebuild. Instead they have just ignored the mess. Imagine coming across this blind at 50 mph, and it’s worse than it looks. The truck stopped and proceeded very gingerly across the dirt. 

The drive was enjoyable in its way, an act of exploration through scenery that photographs snapped from the road cannot properly express. All I can tell you is we were above the tree line and we saw huge granite cliffs and sweeping folds and ridges in every direction. It was spectacular in ways we have never before seen. It was 130 miles and hours of rough bumpy road with random potholes through mountains that took our breath away.

Driving with headlights on in a tunnel is a law not taken seriously in Colombia. Yeah, I had a few gringo moments in the dark, “why can’t they …?” me yelling into the void after another near miss.  Note the mid slides at the entrance, which doesn’t help inspire confidence. 

He wanted $7:50 to give GANNET2 a long overdue bath. I gave him $12:50 and fed his dog as much as he could eat. Rusty retired to his bed in a huff. 

Passing as you do in Colombia. Every time I got ambition Layne flashed me filthy looks but passing safely is actually possible. Not necessarily like this: 

What a variety of landscapes on the road between Popayán and Pasto. 

And there is the capital of the department of Nariño, the land that stretches from the Pacific inland along the border with Ecuador. It’s cocaine cowboy country, and totally unsafe to travel outside the narrow corridor of the PanAmerican. 90 more minutes south and we’ll be at the bridge into Ecuador. But that’s after Rusty gets his pet papers in Pasto. 

We spent the night at a camping spot just outside the city at 9,000 feet  at 1 degree 12 minutes North of the equator. The dotted line below shows the rest of our route to the border with Ecuador. We plan to cross Tuesday morning.