Gippers Travels: Crate Date

Monday, February 21, 2011

Crate Date

We left Manizales the next morning and headed to Bogota. The road was full of twists and turns, the ride was very slow going. As we headed up and down valleys the traffic came to a stand still. There were long line ups of trucks, several kilometres long, due to road repairs. Since we were on a motorcycle, we did our best to go around all the traffic. Seven hours later and 300 km we were in Bogota. We headed for the BMW dealership to look for a crate for the motorcycle. Our contact, had gone home; we missed him by thiry minutes. It being Saturday, we were faced with the decision whether to stay in Bogota until Monday as the dealership would be closed Sunday.

Enroute to Bogota

We went out for a quick bite after checking into a hotel in the Candelaria area. The next day was spent lounging around and switching hotels due to noise. We found a cheap pizza place for dinner, then washed it down with a complimentary beer from our new hotel, Casa Platypus.

Monday morning we rode around Bogota, it was 27C at 11 am. We stopped at a couple of Suzuki stores to see if they had any crates, but they did not. We went back to BMW and were in luck. We parked the bike in clients only, underground parking; quite special! They had several crates and were getting in more shipments of bikes while we were there. They also said they would crate the bike for us as well.

In the afternoon we headed north to Tunja. The temperature became cooler as we headed into the rural countryside. We stopped at Puente de Boyaca; where in 1819 Simon Bolivars army defeated the Spanish which led to Colombia's independence. It was late afternoon when we got to Tunja, so we decided to stay and did some sightseeing. Bolivars first military command was based from Tunja and you can definitely see the historic links in the main Plaza, with another statue of him on horseback. It is a lively bustling town with very friendly people.