We had an early start and decided to use an alternate route as there was a big climb we decided would make for too big of a day.
The problem with a new route is I haven't poured over it for hours figuring out the towns, the services and any contingent plans.
There was a brand new direct highway to Medellin. So we went for it. We left the planned route and started climbing on a very new nearly free of traffic road. It was really nice and was looking like it would save us a lot of time and really reduce the climbing on the day. It was working well.
Then we came to a new tunnel and it said no bikes. The lone police or guard or whatever he was said we couldn't go through. We tried to get a ride through but there really was no traffic. I was for just riding through but got overruled by the law abiding citizens. It was minutes between cars and there was a decent shoulder.
So it looked on our maps the a dirt road just before the tunnel looped around the tunnel. The road was beyond my technical ability and gearing. We walked most of it and it would have been a hard hike not wearing cycling shoes and pushing a 45 pound bike up the hill. We climbed 400m over 5km this way. When we got to a paved road it was on the went high over the tunnel and ran perpendicular to the tunnel.
The new road took us to a town, Risaralda, where we got some lunch. It also had a road down the mountain back to our short cut.
The blue you can see are bags around the bananas. The square dot patterns are coffee bushes.
When we decended it got hot and was time to find a place to stay. There was nothing in the area and we rode an extra 20km looking. We hoped this town on the Rio Cauca had more than the single dive Google Maps was showing. Asking around some helpful people pointed out other hotels. We picked the one across the street from the loudest bar. In most places that would not be good for a hotel but in Colombia it actually might be a bonus feature.
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