We are unfortunately sick again. We are very unclear what the culprit is, but some sort of stomach bug or food poisoning took me out for the count last night. I slept only two hours in between the stomach pain, vomiting and diarrhea. Mark too has been hit with some gastrointestinal distress this morning, and with nothing but a big day of climbing ahead of us on our route, it was an easy decision to take the day off.
We stayed at a cyclist specific accommodation last night: a spare room in a housing complex with a clean bathroom, shower, place to do laundry, easy storage for our bike, and a dry area to lay out our sleeping pads. It’s the kind of place we are always happy to take the opportunity to use, but we decided if we were going to be taking the day off sick, that we wanted a more private toilet, a bed and a fan. We were lucky that the first hotel we tried met our needs for only 50 soles/night (~13.50 usd) and let us check in at 9:30 am.
While we are drinking electrolytes and napping, I figured it would be a good time to remember a few funny stories I had forgotten to write up in my blog when they happened.
A taxi cab in Panama City
We had made it across the Panama Canal on the busy PanAm 1 into the city. It was hectic, but at least traffic was moving slower and the stretches of riding on the highway were broken up by some nice bike path.
We came to a busy intersection in the heart of the city where we pulled up alongside traffic at a red light. When the light turned green, honking and yelling commenced as a taxi cab failed to get going. We tried to ride around the cab on the right, but knocked off this rear view mirror in the process!
We got off the bike to pick up the mirror, honking and yelling ongoing in the background, only to realize that the cab was stalled out, the driver unable to start the car. Mark and the passenger in the cab started pushing the cab down the road while traffic drove around us. I walked the bike on the sidewalk as they tried to move the cab out of the way. A woman passed me walking the other way on the sidewalk. She slowed down, looked at me, the tandem bicycle, the broken down cab, Mark, and then back at me. We looked at each other with the same shrug and thought: what are these Gringos doing here?
Eventually we found a shoulder big enough for the taxi cab and we offered him $20 for his mirror, and then realized we only had $10 on us. The cab driver didn’t seem to expect anything from us and gladly accepted the $10 bill. After a couple more attempted starts and engine sputters, the cab was running again. We waved goodbye and got back on our bike.
A few kilometers later, we heard cheers behind us and looked back to see the same cab rolling by! The driver was surprisingly excited to see us again and we waved and gave thumbs up before heading off in separate directions.
We were glad that he did not seem to be harboring any resentment, and laughed at the coincidence of running into him again, wondering every time we saw a cab for the rest of the day if it would be the same one.
Cooking for the vegetarians
It is an awkward situation we run into often in the US as well: someone offers to host us and cook us a meal, then we tell them as politely as we can that we do not eat meat. We go through the usual explanation of being vegetarian and then our gracious host racks their brain for a possible meal without meat.
We ran into this situation with a friendly family in Santa Fe de Antioquia, Colombia, who invited us to stay at their home for the evening. They insisted on cooking for us, despite our best efforts to offer to buy our own food. The mom of the family ended up cooking an entirely separate meal for us. It was really kind, and we were grateful for the company and hospitality, but it was one of the worst cases of cooking for the vegetarians that we have seen.
She had cooked up some spaghetti, and waved me over to ask if we wanted tomato sauce with it. I took a quick look at the bag and said yes, not realizing that it was ketchup, not pasta sauce. She served us plates full of pasta with ketchup, topped with slices of boiled egg and Parmesan cheese.
We were really hungry, so we ate fast and thanked her over again for cooking. Only the next day did we dare to broach the topic with one another other. The hospitality was so kind, and we really enjoyed the company of this family, but it was one of the worst meals we had ever eaten.
Why are you so wet?
Just outside of Manizales, Colombia, we pulled up to a construction site that had traffic alternating one direction at a time. The worker at the front of the line told us it would be 20 minutes, so I ran off to go pee.
When I came back, Mark was talking to the worker explaining that he was a very sweaty person. This was not a totally abnormal conversation, because Mark is a very sweaty person. But when the construction worker eventually walked away, Mark explained why he was delving into the nature of his sweat glands with this stranger.
We frequently joke that Mark looks like he has just jumped into a pool after only an hour or so on the bike, and apparently this guy thought the same. Manizales is an incredibly popular area for cycling, so this construction worker undoubtedly saw hundreds of other cyclists a day, maybe he was one himself, so surely he knew how sweaty people got on a bike. Looking at Mark, he must have assumed that he had gone for a swim with his clothes on, or maybe fallen into a stream: “why are you so wet?” he wanted to know. Thus, Mark explained, told his other sweaty guy joke, admitting that he looks like a Gatorade advertisement, and before long we were on our way, heading up the last hill to town, sweating all the more.
Are you two siblings?
We have started getting this question less now that we are in South America, we are more often mistaken for Argentinians here (until we speak). But all throughout this trip people have asked us if we are siblings. Blond hair, blue eyes, and our nearly identical cycling outfits have strangers tentatively questioning, ¿Son hermanos, o…?
We laugh and explain that we are actually married and that this trip is our honeymoon, which usually gets a smile and congratulations in response!
“Tamale”
It was our last day in Colombia. The road to the border near La Hormiga was rural and hilly, challenging riding any day, and a full morning of downpour did not make it feel any easier. We had ridden hard for a few hours before we started looking for a place to buy a mid morning snack. The multitude of roadside frito/cafe stands seemed to have disappeared just when we needed them, but alas, we rolled up to one on the porch of someone’s house. They made room for us at the table on their porch and we were happy to be sitting dry for a few minutes as the rain outside hardened.
We bought buñuelos (fried balls of yuca dough and cheese), coffee and two tamales. We were excited to find cheese tamales since usually we only saw them filled with chicken.
Our excitement at the meat free find, however, faded with the first bite. These were yuca tamales, wrapped in banana leaves, filled with a sliver of cheese and steamed into a texture which was somewhere in between glue and slugs. Like much of the food we had in Colombia, it had very little salt or flavor. It was hard to eat, but sitting on the porch of the people who had prepared it, we did not mention it to each other and instead did our best to finish the tamale and wash it down with the pre-sweetened coffee typical in much of Colombia.
Mark finished his, but I was not able to stomach the last quarter of mine, clearly to the disappointment/confusion of the woman from who we bought them. We payed, said thank you, and headed down the road waiting until we were out of ear shot to express our dismay at what we had just eaten. We agreed it was the worst thing we had ever had.
For the rest of the day, we were so scarred by the memory of the tamale, that we ate only chips, soda, juice and cookies. We did not feel great after a day on this diet, but it was the best thing we felt like we could do to erase the memory of the worst food we had ever eaten.
Thanks for reading!
Hopefully we’ll be on the road again tomorrow finding more to laugh about than our bowel movements!
– Nic