Villa de Leiva

After all the excitement yesterday, I treated myself a little bit better by staying in a really nice Finca, where I received the warmest reception until now in this trip, it was like visiting family or very good friends, after not seeing them for a long time.

This overnight stay had breakfast included for a change and after that, I said goodbye and moved on to take a look at lake Tota, due to my previous experience and against my plans I decided not to ride around the lake.

Well it's nice but as a lake did not impress me much I turned around and continued to Villa de Leiva.

Now I had to make a decision about wether I'd ride to Popayan or strait back to Cali, spent a long way pondering what to do as I don't like to ride the same road twice on the same trip but as I got closer to Bogotá, I opted for the shortest path. Bogotá was, as expected, very hard to cross and while coming from the north it takes ages to get into it, getting out of it takes a lot longer and as I got out it was all about finding a place with WiFi to spend the night and plan the next days.
Along the way, between Fusagasuga and Girardot I had the worst experience of this trip, I got stopped by the police which was actually nothing new, in average I got stopped at least 3 times a day, but this guy, agent 009662 (that was the number on his west) started making false accusations, claiming that I should have the number of my plate on my helmet like others had, which is not true and asking if I understood what he was saying and that he would confiscate the bike and I could not continue my ride. Clearly trying to force me to bribe him but I stayed calm looking hat him, time was on my side. This was the only time I regretted to having used the most famous traveler Spanish phrase "No fumar espanol!" :-) After a while, realizing that I wouldn't bribe him, he gave my papers back I said that should put those numbers on my helmet in the next village I cross, so that he didn't had to admit his fault and trying to give me impression, he was being nice to me :-(
With this unplanned forced stop it was soon dawn and I looked for the next possibility to spend the night, normally, in this situation I check for lodging along my path in the GPS, if there are a couple of them at around the same distance, this means that I've a good change of find something according to my needs, mark one of them and follow the indications, looking around for possible places to spend the night. The second one I found was one of those typical Colombians, where the reception is in the Garage, a drive-in reception so to say. Asked for the price, they with and without AC, asked for WiFi and they said yes, done. I did froze almost all day driving above 2600 meters most of the time but some 50 kilometers before I crossed a mountain and descended to around 600 meters with the temperature climbing to 38 degrees, so I took the one with AC. Went into the room, one of those without windows, it's also quite common around here. Checked WiFi but got no signal, asked at the reception and the guy told me that he had already bought a repeater but it's not yet configured but should be very simple to configure he said. I thought about the kind of repeater that you plug into a power socket and then navigate to the website and enter or choose the SSID you want to repeat, enter it's password and you're done. He went inside and came back with a router, not exactly what I would classify as "easy to configure" for an end user but OK. He unpacked the all thing and started watching a video about how you can set the thing up. I had a look at the paper that came with the router but more than go to this address and login with this user and password was provided. Meanwhile I had asked if there was a restaurant in the neighborhood, he answer no but his father in law told me that he had bought a lot of meat for dinner and if I wanted, I could eat with them, nice :-)
After a couple of minutes watching the guy I decently took over while his mother in law brought me one of the best "Limonada natural" that I've drunk in Colombia and once I was done you should have seen his grateful face ;-) In the end I only had to pay for the room. Unfortunately for me, another guy came around and checked in on the room next to me, the AC was shared by both rooms, half was on my side the other on the other room and he had the part with the command and set the temperature to 18 degrees or less, much colder than I use to set it and normally, I turn it off to sleep, so I decided to change to a room without AC. The room had a fan and windows to the street that you could not close completely. If someone told that sleeping in a room to the street was that loud I would not believe it, it was extremely loud and very hot all night so I had not much sleep that night. The next day drove further to close the circle in Cali.

On my way found this oversized transport being done at during daylight and blocking everyone.

They blocked the road for a couple hours in both directions, not even ambulances were allowed to pass, well there not even space for a bicycle anyway :-)