Cycling in Colombia: Stephen Counsell - 1 day of your trip

What's the most eventful start to a bicycle tour you could imagine? Well chances are our guest for today's episode of Cycle Shorts - Stephen Counsell - has an experience that will rival most! He shares what it was like for one day of his trip which occurred in Colombia and that very first day of riding turned out to be quite eventful!

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SPEAKER_00 0:24

Hello everyone, it's Bella Malloy here, host of Seek Travel Ride, and welcome to another midweek mini episode of Cycle Shorts where we share what it was like for one of our listeners during one day of their trip. This week I'm excited to bring you the story from Stephen Council. Steven is from New Zealand and he's going to share what it was like during one day of an adventure that he and his partner took with two friends over in Colombia. It's quite an epic tale, and I'm pretty thrilled to say that Steven is an absolutely fantastic storyteller. So settle back and let's listen to Stephen sharing one day of his trip.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Like a lot of these things that started out innocent enough. We were in the backseat of the car going to yoga with our friend Sabina when she said, Hey, do you guys want to come biking with me and Jurg? We're going back to South America. And Lisa and I both said, Yeah, it'd be great straight away. Probably wouldn't have said yes quite so quickly if I knew we would have ended up in the back of a police van on the first day of our ride through Colombia. But anyway, off we went. My name's Stephen Council, I live in Queenstown in New Zealand, and this is the first day of our bike trip through Colombia. I wasn't in particularly great shape. I'd had kidney surgery that hadn't gone quite to planned and it only got out of a hospital about a week before the trip. And our friends Sabina and Jurg are both really great athletes. Sabina runs Ultramarathons and Jürg has done Hawaii Iron Man amongst many other awesome events. Lisa and I, yeah, not so much. And me particularly after my surgery in a really bad way. So anyway, day one we're leaving Cartagena in the north of Colombia and heading out all excited. Something to point out is Lisa and I had biked through France a few years before, and I'd made a clever little bike trailer. It converted from a suitcase that fitted our breakaway bike in and then converted to a one-wheeled trailer similar to a bob button enclosed. So anyway, day one, we're heading out of town. It's just light, just after six in the morning, I guess. And we left the pretty part of town and we were biking through some of the poorer parts. Incredibly crowded, to the point where we couldn't actually move on our bikes at at one point going through a little market because of the density of people. We had to just stop and I was wedged between a couple of vehicles quite happily. Anyway, as the sun starts coming up, and that's important, we're heading on to sort of the first part of I guess we would call it highway. And it was beautifully sealed, nicer than a lot of the roads we have around where I live. And there was a big wide shoulder, probably metre and a half, maybe two metres almost wide, heading up a hill. And it's our first hill climb. I'm clearly the least fit, and I'm towing the trailer with Lisa and my gear and Sabina and Eg so hey, we'll wait at the top of the hill. And I said to Lisa, look, you go ahead too, Lisa. So they all headed off up the hill and I could see them spreading out. And as I'm biking up the hill, I look across to my right at one stage and see the sort of thing you see a lot in Colombia a man on the side of the road in the bike lane, pushing up a hill at dawn, a great big washing machine. He looks at me, his eyes get wide because there wasn't many gringo bike tourists around at that point. And I did the same. And we said hola and kept on going. Not long after that, maybe 15 minutes up the hill and twenty minutes maybe, I suddenly found myself in the air, doing some kind of backflip, thinking, oh, this is gonna hurt. Not knowing what had happened. And I hit the deck pretty hard, and I'm lying there with my bike crumpled up somewhere nearby. And I was like, open my eyes and go, what happened? I see a big black boot in front of my nose, and I raise my eyes slightly, and I see the leg of a police uniform. Get up on my knees, and this guy helps me up, and he's a cop. And I'm going, oh, this can't be good. And I speak like four words of Spanish. And so anyway, he lifts me up, and I'm not sure what's happened. I look beside me and I see my bike trailer is just crumpled. It's made of aluminium mostly. And my bike lying there, and I'm just bleeding. But I shake myself off and go, I'm not too bad. And the policeman sort of leads me down the hill, I don't know, twenty metres or something, to a tiny p shack, two metres by two metres on the side of the road that was obviously there to sell vegetables in the shade or something. And I notice his motorbike lying on the side of the road. That's all quite odd. I really don't know what's going on. I explained to him, hey, uh my wife's up the road a little bit and my friends on bicycles. And so the next thing out of the bush beside us appears a man with a huge machete on a horse. He's riding bareback. And the policeman says something to him and the guy gallops up the hill, just disappears, and I wonder what was going on. Meanwhile, Lisa's my wife is way up the hill, and she's biking along quite happily. Sabina and Jurg are a few hundred metres ahead of her, and suddenly she hears horse hooves, turns around to see this bareback wild man galloping straight at her, and he's gesticulating with his machete. He's slightly terrified. This is day one, don't forget. And the sun's just come up, and she figures out that he's saying something to her about police, policia, policier, and pointing down the hill, and she figures out I need to go down the hill. She comes back down and finds me sitting with now three policemen, a van, a crumpled bike, and the police's motorcycle were lying on its side still. She asks me what happened. I say, I think the cop hit me from behind, but I'm not entirely sure what hit me, but I'm fine. Anyway, the van's sort of just sitting there and the policeman, who's actually I've gotta say, because people have preconceived ideas about Columbia, particularly friendly, and I didn't feel scared or intimidated at all. So anyway, they take me to the back of the van with my bike and pull open the doors, and sitting there, wide-eyed, is a man with a washing machine. Police basically look at him and go, right mate, you're out. Grab him by the collar and literally pull him out of the van, get his washing machine, dump it on the side of the road, and throw my bike in and gesticulate for me to get in. I'm about to hop in, and uh they're like, you know, and put me in the front passenger seat. Meanwhile, now there's policeman that hit me, who's driving the van, and there is two guys in the back with these huge guns that I don't know what they were, some sort of semi-automatic weapon that were quite terrifying looking things sitting in the back. Lisa's on her bike, so they put her in as well, and we head up the hill. So far, I've been on my bike or beside it for about an hour and a half since leaving our accommodation that morning. Quite a bit's happened. On the dashboard of the van is a police hat, and I asked the policeman in no Spanish at all but with lots of gesticulating, can I wear this? And he quite clearly says no. I put it on, and we're driving up the hill, I'm in the passenger seat, we get near the top, and I see Sabina and Yerg sitting in the shade waiting for me to bike up. So the van slows down when I point to them and say, Hey, that's my friends. And I lean out the passenger window with a police hat, and the look on their faces was somewhat astounding. The policeman explains to them, and I should point out Sabina and Yug both speak relatively good Spanish, having cycled all of the rest of South America in previous trips, that he had hit me on his bike because the sun was in his eyes, and he was going to take me to the police station, which was just down the other side of the hill, and we would all get together there. That's what happened. And down we went. This is really just the start of this story. The next thing, Jurg and I are bundled back in the van after I've had my grazes mopped up, and the same police officer that hit me drives us around the corner to what turns out to be a bike shop. It's not open yet because it's still really early in the morning. The bike shop's on the edge of this little town. I'd tell you what the town was, but I have no idea where we were because I didn't have a map at that point. And Jürg and I are sitting there, the police officer says, just wait here. And he runs around, bangs on some poor guy's door and gets him to come to work. The bike shop owner comes around and has with him a a boy who's probably twelve or thirteen years old. He opens his bike shop and the policeman basically gives him my back wheel, which is completely pretzelled, and says, Fix this. And the guy's kind of looking somewhat bewildered, and his shop is about the size of a single car garage. It has a dirt floor and on one side of the road there's the shops, all closed with their garage doors down, and on the other side of the road there are just fields with cows and scrub. Meanwhile, the policeman takes my bike trailer and disappears up the road a few doors. Jurg and I are sitting there watching the guy from the bike shop sit in the dirt and just undo all of the spoke niffles and just drop them by his foot in the dirt and remove all of the spokes from the rim. While this is going on, I hear some bashing bash coming from up the road. I what is that? So I went for a walk and had a look. Turned out there was a panel beating shop about four or five doors up, and there was a guy in there with a sledgehammer just beating the heck out of my trailer trying to knock it back into shape. I didn't really want to watch that, so I went back down the road. Meanwhile, the deserted street filled with people. There had been literally no one on there. A few cows mooing on the other side of the road, that's about it. And suddenly, out of nowhere it seemed, fifty or sixty people just appeared and they all trotting down the road, and there was a lot of shouting and screaming going on. It was maybe fifty or hundred meters away. The police officer, the same guy that had hit me, young guy, he's in his uniform, he has no weapon with him, he goes, Oh, back in a minute. And he jogs down the road to where all this commotion is. Crowd disperses, he comes back, and Jurg asks him, What was that about? And the policeman goes, Yeah, nothing. Just a knife fight, couple of guys. And Jerg asked him, What did you do? And he said, I told them to go home to their mothers. This poor cop, it turns out, had done a 24-hour shift, and he was riding home at the end of his shift, he was going up the hill, the sun was in his eyes, and the next thing he hits me, and me being a tourist, the last thing they want to do is get in trouble with the with the tourists, and his senior station officer gives him instructions to sort my bike out and do it all before he goes home. I felt really sorry for the cop. He was such a lovely guy. What happened to my wheel? Amazingly, the man that took it apart wrapped it, leaned it against a metal pole that was holding up the veranda roof of his bike shop, and with the 12-year-old on one side and him on the other, managed to bend it, beat it, and hammer it around a pole and straighten it out enough that he could relace the rim. And I rode that for another 400 kilometers until we got to a bigger town where I could get a really good wheel built. Actually, turned out to be a guy that was a Tour de France mechanic, built that wheel. And the only other thing that happened that day was they had to write a report for insurance because we asked them, could we get a letter or something to give our insurance? It took maybe an hour and a half or two hours for two men to write this letter on a computer, one finger tapping the keyboard at a time, it's very slow. And they translated it using one of the online translation things back in the day. And my one-wheeled bike trailer translated as a monkey, and so it turned out that Stephen was riding his bike along the road, towing a monkey, and the sun caused him to crash, and the police were able to assist him. They didn't want to admit any kind of culpability, and that was fine with me too. Anyway, that's the first day of the trip. It went on quite a long time. We had quite a lot of adventures, but that was a heck of a start. Cheers everyone.

SPEAKER_00 13:51

I only have one word for you, Stephen, and that is wow. What a way to start your adventure there. And listeners, if you are on Instagram, definitely check out our account on Seek Travel Ride, as I will be posting photos of Stephen's journey in Columbia, including that bike trailer that he had manufactured as well. So you can get a better picture in your mind of exactly what occurred there on this day. I don't even know where to start, Stephen. And in some respect, I don't need to because you told the story so beautifully. You had me laughing out loud a few times, and especially when the police van opens up and who's in the back? A man with a washing machine. Classic. Thank you so much for sharing your story. And listeners, I'm sure that this one had you laughing out loud at many various points as well. If you're enjoying Sleep Travel Ride and you would like to support the show, the best way to do so is to hit up the Buy Me a Coffee link, which is in the show notes. It's an easy and quick way for you to donate to the show and to help keep my microphone turned on each and every week to bring you these amazing guest stories. As always, I do like sharing the messages which you also put towards your donations. This week we have one from Claire Daly who says, Thanks for your truly great podcasts, so positive and inspiring. I look forward to working my way through them. Thanks so much, Claire. I hope that you have been enjoying listening to a few of the episodes in the back catalogue. Listeners, there's well over 80 there for you to trawl through. So no doubt many of my guests have got stories which will be inspiring for you to listen to. Another Buy Me a Coffee Listener. Richard says, just found your site, loved the podcast with Allie. Thank you. Well, thank you, Richard. I'm glad that you are enjoying the show, and I'm glad that you enjoyed that episode there with Allie, a long-term bicycle nomad. He definitely had some great insights for us all, some tips, and his experiences were also pretty mind-blowing too. Thanks again, Richard, for supporting the show. Once again, to everybody who has already donated on Buy Me a Coffee, an immense heartfelt thank you. And to those of you who would like to do so as well, just remember that the link is in the show notes. You can buy me a virtual coffee right now and show your support. Until the next episode, I'm Bella Malloy. Thanks for listening.