Introduction

This will be my third bike tour in Colombia. It is such a great place to ride I keep wanting to go back. Finally, after a 2 year COVID-19 delay we put together a small group and we are going to do do it again. 

Previous tours were from Bogota to Cartagena in January 2017 and Bogota to Medellin in January 2018. This tour is partially inspired by Wade Davis's excellent book "Magdalena: River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia". 

We will start in Bogota and ride up the Alto Magdalena to its headwaters near San Agustin. The San Agustín Archaeological Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has many large artifacts dating from 1-900 AD. The site may have been in use from 1000 BC. 

From San Agustin we climb the central Andean mountain range to Popayan. This is a big climb with 50km of unpaved road through one the the most unique biomes in the world: a paramo. 

From Popayan we parallel the Cauca River to La Pintada before climbing up to Medellin. 

Here is a link to our planned routes: https://ridewithgps.com/collections/32531?privacy_code=p9JSBZbR9Uwyx9lZ