Overlanding in Colombia

Hey there travelers! We’ve all made it safely to Colombia and have taken a little break from the YouTube channel. More adventures are on the way however and we’re considering changing the format a little bit to be shorter, more frequent updates with less editing. Our opportunities for uploading videos are slim down here as we struggle to find WiFi that’s any faster than DSL. Oddly, we’ve had pretty good cell service through TIGO. Most of the 4K videos we’ve been uploading over the past year have been between 4-6GB which would probably take a week to upload and quite frankly, we don’t stay put that long anywhere. Maybe the next time we embark on a big overlanding adventure Elon’s Starlink internet service will be a thing for travelers? Fingers crossed!

When we arrived back in the states from Mexico we stopped in Phoenix for a long weekend to stay with our great friend Dena, got our steering rack replaced from our new friend Scott at Avid Cruisers, cleaned out Hermés then hightailed it to Austin to visit family then Houston where we got him stuffed into a container. We expected more of an experience in Houston, but we literally just dropped off the truck at a warehouse where it sat for a week before being driven to the port where it was put into a container. During that week we were in Florida relaxing and making some last minute preparations before we flew from Miami to Medellín.

We spent a couple of weeks in Medellín and really fell in love with the people and the city. It’s hard to even imagine the city’s crime-ridden past. The city is full of culture, tourists, and amazing restaurants. If we had to pick a favorite area of Medellín, we’d land at Laureles. Comuna 13 is cool to visit for a day and see all of the street art and climb the never-ending maze of escalators that bring tourists to the top of the once, most dangerous area of the most dangerous city in the world. Of course, now it’s just a bunch of tourists and tourist trap shops and vendors lining the sides of the “black-diamond” steep streets.

From Medellín we flew to the port town of Cartagena (the walled city). It was a new experience for us taking domestic flights in a foreign country. Domestic flights in Colombia are dirt cheap. We paid roughly $150 USD for our family of four and all of our luggage (which costs extra) to make the 1.5 hour flight to Cartagena. If you find yourself flying to Medellín you’ll have to expect a 45 minute taxi ride from the airport to the city. The airport is actually in a town called Rionegro (7,000 ft) which towers high above the valley floor of Medellín (4,800 ft).

We arrived in Cartagena just shy of New Year’s Eve and spent the holiday weekend amongst mobs of tourists. The city was more “alive” than we’ve seen anywhere other than maybe New York City during this same time. Restaurants had hour waits and wouldn’t accept our modest bribes. Street artists were on every block. And the music! The music was everywhere and kept the party alive. While this was cool to see, it was a bit of culture shock from where we’d come from just half a year earlier in the most remote stretches of the Canadian Yukon Territory. We were ready to move on before the holiday weekend, but became hostages to the shipping port which has a myriad of hoops to jump through in their labyrinth web of government-mandated requirements. You’re basically sent on a scavenger hunt all over distant areas of the city to fulfill the requirements of DIAN (the tax agency of Colombia). After fulfilling the requirements over a couple of days, we waited, and waited, and waited for the shipping company to complete the paperwork to release our vehicle that we already removed from the container the day before. This made me a little uneasy as our house on wheels was sitting in the middle of a shipping yard. Speaking of containers, when we went to unload the vehicle I was expecting to have to reconnect our battery since our shipper in the States asked if we wanted it disconnected for the trip. “Of course,” I said. I even told them I’d leave a 10mm wrench in the console that they could use to do so. When we popped the hood, the battery was still connected and completely 100% dead. Not even a light came on the dashboard. This was incredibly frustrating because of a few reasons. First, the high-end battery is close to $300 new and was bought for the trip. Leaving it drained for weeks, has really decreased it’s usefulness on this leg of our trip. Second, they drove the truck straight in to the container so it was hard to get to the engine bay to jump start it. Typically, vehicles are backed in to containers to make this sort of thing easy. Third, my 10mm wrench for disconnecting the battery was missing which made removing the battery impossible. Nobody has been in the container since my shipper from the States. There’s a security lock that has to be cut in order to open it. So, we had to hire someone within the shipping yard to come with a spare battery and jump start it. Not an easy task given the amount of room inside the stuffed container as you’ll see in the photos! Let’s not forget that my Spanish language skills at this point in our adventure are not much better than “no habla Español.”

After we got things sorted at the shipping yard and were awaiting release of the vehicle we realized we needed to purchase local Colombian-mandated insurance for the vehicle (SOAT). This is typically very easy and you can basically buy it at any corner store. However, this is just before the holiday weekend and Colombians like to celebrate any and every reason they can think of. So, it’s Thursday December 30th, no problem right? No, everything is closed until Tuesday January 4th for the holiday. Luckily our new German-American friend Dieter came to the rescue with a contact of the seemingly only insurance agent in all of Colombia that wanted to work. We were thrilled and THANK YOU DIETER if you’re reading this! But, not so fast! Colombians don’t like to pay taxes or insurance, and they have the luxury of doing so online. So, what do they do? They wait until the last couple of days of the year to pay for their insurance. So much so that they essentially crashed the government website! Finally our insurance agent was able to get through by most-likely hitting refresh on the website all night and get us our SOAT (pronounced So-Aht locally). We were free! and finally able to escape the madness of Cartagena and it’s $250 USD hotel rooms.

We booked it East to escape the madness and made a big itchy mistake of camping half-way to Santa Marta in a boggy beach-side campsite on a causeway. We were attacked by mosquitos and sand flies like we’ve never seen before. It was truly horrific and miserable in every way you can imagine. The next day we made it to Santa Marta and found refuge high above the clouds in our first wild campsite of South America outside of a small village called Minca. We were thrilled to be offroading once again and climbing high into the Andes mountains for the first time. Temperatures dropped as we climbed and our shorts and flip flops were traded out for pants and jackets. Our legs were itchy and red from the day before, so we took it easy for a couple of days up in the sky. On our way up to this “camp site” we found an amazing waterfall in Minca where we swam in the frigid waters and enjoyed nature.

It was on our way down the mountain from Minca that we noticed our steering wheel was seemingly loose or sticking. Something definitely wasn’t right. When we got back into cell coverage I called my mechanic in Arizona who gave me some things to check. Luckily Scott knows his stuff and diagnosed it straight away. It turns out, the alignment shop he took our truck to after replacing the steering rack when we left Baja didn’t tighten the bolts on the steering shaft and the knuckle that connects the shaft to the rack. So, one of the bolts completely fell out and the other two were extremely loose. A pretty careless mistake and if I were in the States, I’d be filing a law suit. It turns out the company is now out of business so I can’t even express my thanks to them. A testament to the laborers in Colombia though, is that they were willing to drop everything they were working on at the mechanic shop and get me fixed up. After they got things sorted, I asked them what I owed after two hours of work and they said don’t worry about it. You can pay whatever you want or nothing. “It’s fine.” I gave them $200,000 COP which is roughly $50 USD and they were almost in tears. This has been our experience in most of Colombia. People genuinely just want to help. It’s never about the money.

Speaking of money, as we’ve been traveling throughout Colombia we’ve been shocked with how far our American dollars go here. The Colombian peso has become so inflated that it takes 3,000 of them to buy a bottle of water. And as I understand it, in the last couple of Covid years, the price of food has doubled. The average salary in this country hasn’t changed a whole lot to reflect the rate of inflation and is around 4.7 million per month (roughly $1200 USD). The cost of a flat of eggs (30 eggs) a couple years ago was about 7,000 pesos ($1.76). Today, we’ve been paying about $15,000 COP at local markets (Roughly $3.76 USD). Cheap by US standards but for locals here that make around $156k COP per day ($40 USD), it’s become almost unaffordable to buy food. I mean, that’s eggs we are talking about. Imagine wanting to splurge for nice steaks or a bottle of whiskey. It’s sad really and we see the poverty all around us. Yet, people are still friendly and grateful for what they have. Also worth noting is that the average salaries are calculated on people who work in the cities. In small villages these numbers are drastically worse. Imagine working two days to be able to afford the equivalent of a carton of eggs. Which doesn’t actually happen because they have chickens running all around their houses, but the theory still applies.

As we’ve been traveling throughout the country we’ve been learning a lot about the local culture and have become attached to the local foods. Every town/village no matter how small it is has a little mom and pop restaurant that serves “typical” food. These places are hard to find, but if you watch the locals, you can follow them to the staple restaurant. You’ll have to wait though, Colombians don’t eat lunch until about 2pm which we’re also adjusting to. Once you find the little restaurant that will have an open door (dogs and chickens coming and going) and 4 or 5 tables to sit at, you take a seat and know exactly what to expect. You’ll first be served a bowl of chicken soup, then you’ll get a glass of fresh squeezed juice (usually blackberry but not always), followed by a plate of typical food. Usually a piece of grilled meat (chicken, steak, or pork and sometimes fish) boiled yucca root, a little salad, rice and beans. It’s usually more food than we can eat and it’s ALWAYS delicious. At this point you’ll ask for the tab and you’ll nearly choke when you hear that it’s $30,000 COP for a family of 4. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’ll spell it out for you. $1 USD currently exchanges to $4000 pesos. Yeah, $7.53 USD for our family of four to gorge ourselves on family-style meals. We’ve found it drastically more expensive to prepare our own meals with grocery store bought food than to eat out. I don’t know how this works, and I’m not sure I ever want to figure it out. Whenever we are traveling between places, this is a staple for us and it’s refreshing knowing exactly what to expect in unfamiliar places.

When we headed south from the beaches near Santa Marta we made our way to a tiny village way off the main highways. We arrived just before sunset and watched the end of a heated soccer match between the villagers. Most of them didn’t wear shoes, and some only had one shoe. It was shirts against skins in an all-out guts to glory match. Really fun to watch and as we sat on the sidelines we talked with the local kids with our very little broken Spanish. Caden shared his scooter with the kids who had never seen one before. It was probably 10 minutes before sunset when one of the kids said that the mosquitos would be coming soon. It was almost at that instant that the soccer match came to an end and within a minute everyone was gone. We found it odd, but figured it was dinner time or something. It wasn’t even close to dark yet. As I was setting up our camp kitchen made by Dissent Offroad, I felt a couple of mosquitos and went to grab the bug spray. Before I could even open our cubby where we keep that I was swarmed with mosquitos. I quickly put the kitchen away and closed all of the doors and yelled at the family to run to the car and get in. This is just a few days after we got attacked on the causeway and worse by about 30 times from what was my worst experience ever, just those few days ago. We sat in the car with the headlights on in despair. It was dark, we already traveled about 8 hours that day and were hungry. We discussed just sleeping in the car, which was going to be very uncomfortable because we couldn’t even get out to move stuff out of the cabin. Finally, we couldn’t take it anymore and decided to drive through the night to the next big city going south (Bucaramanga). The drive was another six hours or so and we made it into the city around 1am. We found a few hotels, but couldn’t find a place to park our truck. There was no street parking, and the hotels all had underground garages that our 2.5 meter tall truck wouldn’t fit in. After an hour and half of driving around the city and talking to people we were able to find an open air parking lot that charged a nominal fee per hour. We checked into the hotel a little after 3am and slept like we’ve never slept before! The old overlanding saying goes, don’t drive after nightfall. However, after being in traffic all day, driving through the night was actually quite nice for a change. Not that I recommend it, but it’s never really a big deal whenever we do travel at night.

From Bucaramanga we headed through San Gil to a town called Barichara and camped at a very well-known campground called Guaimaro Campground. We only intended to stay a few days, but fell in love with the town of Barichara, and our new friends that we made over the following week. Guaimaro has this way of slowing down life and making you appreciate the small things in life. It was easier and more comfortable to stay than it was to venture out. The friendships that were being crafted were real. And Caden? Well, he was thriving in the environment. He found peace in helping around the campground and following the owners around all day. Joep and Julia were fantastic hosts and were more than kind to Caden. This was a real turning point for Caden on this trip and I think it’s a memory that will stick with him his entire life.

When we finally forced ourselves to leave the campground we took part of it with us! Our new Colombian “besties” Tato and Laura left with us and we camped a couple of nights together under the stars at another fantastic campground (Raquira Silvestre) which was recommended by our great overlanding friends Dieter and Marcela. It was here where we parted ways with our new friends that we’d essentially been living with for a couple of weeks and made our way to what has become our favorite place (so far) in Colombia. The town of Villa de Leyva is nestled in the mountains with panoramic mountain views from everywhere in the town. The streets are ancient and made of old cobble stones. Horses are a common mode of transportation, and it really feels like going back in time. Things are simple here and the old Spanish architecture feels rich. The town is painted white, and the old red clay tiled roofs give the town a classy but rustic feel. We’ve been here in this town now for probably too long, but it’s hard to leave.

This is our life in Colombia and it’s changed a lot from our travels through North America and that’s okay! We’re having a lot of fun defining what overlanding means to us. And, the more this starts to feel normal to us, the more fun it becomes. Adventures are everywhere around us, and we can’t wait to see what’s around the next bend in the trail! Thanks for following along!

-Leon

P.S. It took a lot of time to write this and compile everything. Please leave us a message below if something resonates with you. We love hearing from our readers. Even if it’s just saying hi! 🙂