Across the Andes
Two hours out of Cucuto on the border with Venezuela, we had passed through some low foothills and had started to enter the mountains of the Andes in Colombia. There were plenty of deep valleys and soaring muntains whilst the road weaved its way along the middle slopes of the valley.
There were grand views across the valley of the tree covered slopes ont he far side.
And views back down the valley that we had just come up, with the oad hacked out of the steep vally slopes.
The valley was ften wide but there were some choke points were it narrowed considerably.
More majestic views...
...and just one of several btidges that took the road across major tributaries of the main river.
A view of another type of bridge across another tributary.
Looking across the valley, there were some fields, lots of grazing and scattered trees.
The road had been gradually ascending along the middle of the slope so that there were steep dropd down to the river somewhere out of sight below us and soaring peaks above us. All of a sudden the road turned away from the valley that it had been following and wound its way up the side of the valley in a series of steep and tight hairpin bends.
We hd long views back down the valley that we had just come up at every hairpin.
It took a long time to reach the top of the pass. Every time I rthought that we were there, we turned a corner and had more gradients to climb up in low gear. We reached the top at an elevation of 2,421 metres. It was cool and windy.
Almost as soon as we had reached the top, the road dipped and started to descend.
Looking down the valley on the far side of the pass.
We could see the road winding its way down the valley.
We descended to 1,400 metres and followed a valley
The road followed the base of the valley, never very far from the river in the bottom of the deep gorge.
Another view of the road that followed the river downstream on the small stretch of ground between the high water mark and the steep cliffs surrounding the valley.
We didn't follow it far as we turned away from the river to climb up the valley side to reach the next valley as the road weaved its way through the mountains. We crossed a pass at 1,773 metres but it was noticeable that the vegetation was different. This area was in a rain shadow so it had fewer trees, a lot of shrub and grass. There were also no farms or roadside shacks as the area didn't have enough rain to grow crops.
We descended into a broad valley. It had a lot of fields and a town in the distance. We had dropped to 1,400 metres but we weren't yet out of the Andes. This was just a road and fertile valley.
We drove into the town of Abrego with the intention of stopping in the centre for lunch. We had not been keeping an eye on the calendar. It was Ascension Sunday and being a good Catholic country, evey family was out to celebrate in the centre of town. There were bands playing, street vendors selling their wares, street parties, funfairs in the parks and main plaza. And there was loud music blairing out from every cafe. And no where to park
We drove on to the outskirts where it was less busy and somewhere to park the truck whilst we had lunch.
We followed the road along a valley, with elevations oscillating between 1,100 and 1,400 metres through several towns. At Nueva Madrid, the main road left the valley and started climbin agin into some mountains. As we climbed we headed into low clouds. The temperature had dropped as had visibility.
After a lot of hairpin bends negotiated in low gear, we crested the pass at 1,539 metres and started a long descent in low cloud. The cloud persisted for a long way down this side of the mountain before we dipped below the cloud and had views across the valley. This was the edge of the Andes and we descended through more dramatic scenery and foothills, descending more than a kilometre. We reached Aguachica at an elevation of under 300 metres.
We followed the motorway northwards with the mountains to out right and flat plains stretching off to our left for as far as the eye could see.
Looking back up the valley seeing how the road engineers had hacked the route out of the valley sides.
We drove on through the dark to reach El Banco, our stop for the night.