Other states, other lives, other souls

My Colombian daughter-in-law has been building a lovely traditional two storey house above Medellin in a town called San Pedro de los Milagros.  She has been project manager from Minnesota via cell phone while at home with a new baby and a preschooler. Now that she is here for a few months, she is managing a three ring circus of workmen, visiting relatives, and two young children. The house sits at 8500 feet in lush green mountains. You can get there from Medellin or the airport in about an hour by bus.  At this stage, while we are visiting for a month in spring, it has 4 bedrooms with beds, a working kitchen, a working shower, hot water on demand, wifi, two working toilets, no inner doors, and an uncle next door with a pickup truck.
To get the bikes and many people, luggage, and house furnishings up to San Pedro, the uncle loaded his truck up to the max and 6 of us headed up the mountain, looking like a scene from Grapes of Wrath. What the new house has, above all, is a paradisiacal setting with plenty of challenges for serious cyclists.

When my husband Phil and I arrived in Medellin the first week of March we searched for two slightly-used mountain bikes to ride while we were there and then to leave as an investment in this house as a possible bike-oriented Airbnb.  Airbnb is serious business in Medellin.  There are whole high-rise apartment buildings devoted to Airbnb lodging.  One of Marcela’s cousins is an architect.  Among the various splendid office buildings, private homes and apartment buildings he showed me on his phone was a huge elegant high-rise, all Airbnb short term rentals.  How it is affecting the city’s housing and economy I don’t yet know, but it is a serious shift happening in many tourist-oriented cities.

Cycling is also serious business in Colombia. It is full of hills and mountains, so it is not for the faint-hearted. Medellin is a cycling capital with closed off roads days and  increasing numbers of dedicated bike lanes. San Pedro is not a well-known venue—yet, but there are plenty of places to bike and get those red blood vessels built.

With our newly-purchased bikes, we first set off into the town of San Pedro from the new house— about an 15k ride. Hills, but only a couple where we got off and walked.  There were Colombian cyclists, but the sight of two older gringos, especially a gringa,  turned heads. Traffic was heavy in some places but cars and trucks almost always beeped a warning and gave us berth.

Our second foray was the other direction toward the little town of El Tambo.  Except for the first long hill, the ride was pretty easy—low traffic, rural and verdant—cows everywhere. This area is known as the Milky Way, because it produces 30% of the milk for Colombia.  When the paved road ended, we were treated to some more bumpy mountain biking.  We heard deep drumming as we approached El Tambo. Maybe the beginning of Friday night wildness?  It turned out that it was a school marching band practicing in a school alcove, which was hard to see at first.

Our last ride was accomplished thanks to the uncle’s pickup truck.  Bikes in the bed, he drove us and three other Sunday passengers to El Belmira region and the pueblo of Belmira.  Belmira is over 250 years old, due to the gold mined there.  Now its economy is based on dairy farming and trout farming.

The Chico river flows by, the source of all the drinking water for Medellin.  With Ki-Ke acting as the sag wagon, we got to sample a lot of the flatter areas and downhills.  Ecologically it is a paramo, a high treeless plateau in tropical South America—intensely green, mogully, with frequent bands of trees, farms and cattle.

When we came back, an aunt, who is an avid spin class member, finally tried out a real bike on the bumpy lawn in front of the new house. Sadly, she ran over a tack and the tire went flat. The next day was another adventure, finding someone who would fix a tire in this rural area. Luckily we had a volunteer driver, a visitor with a car and fluency in the Spanish language, who made the job take an hour instead of a half day on foot.

I hope these forays into the mountains have prepared us for the final cycling trip: hurtling down a mountain inLos Nevados National Park for four hours.