Best Ride Ever

Some mountain farming and grazing land

The 'Suzuki Boys' of Columbiatouring.com

Medellin to Cerrito (near Cali) 190 miles

We left Medellin with an escort of riders. Several from Ruta 4o, a club run by the owner of the BMW dealership of Medellin. The other 6 escorts run a motorcycle tour company in Columbia. They ride Suzuki V-Stroms like mine. We hit it off.

The V-Strom boys had plotted the best mountai riding I've ever done. This is the Andes and they are indescribable. Massive, steep, beautiful and more.During the entire ride there were few straight pieces of road longer than 400 yards long. The road was smooth and had white lines painted on the sides and a yellow center stripe. Lovely. The twists and turns did not stop, hour after hour. If we were'nt leaning hard left e were leaning hard right. I got into that illusive rhythm that motorcyclists always try to achieve. The Zen where your conscious mind lets go and allows your subconscious mind and all of your senses to meld with the bike, the road, and the flow of life. Bend after bend was an effortless dance. I didn't want to stop for lunch or dinner. Who knows if this magic will continue tomorrow. I can only hope.

In addition to the perfect riding, this route provided incomrable vistas round every turn. These Andes are better than advertized. My photos cannot capture the scale of these behemoths. It would take the best National Geographic photographer a year to do them justice.

The entire range we rode through is made up of thousands of peaks and sub-peaks rippling across the landscape and providing a thousand times the land that a flat valley would. Farming is modern and everywhere. Coffee seems to be the main crop but also banana, sugar cane and several I'm unsure of. The high elevations provide ideal growing conditions for these fincas. It is a thriving area and may explain the wealth of Medellin.