Paz De Airporo To Tunja

After the big day it was a tarseal cowboy jaunt for a while, looking out east of the mountains towards Venezuela there is an empty expanse you could hide New Zealand in ... it is just huge.

Entering into Aguazul the road was blocked with hundreds of trucks and cars .... again so we pushed our way to the end of the line, a young Policeman was there and just flagged us through, the next Policeman at mid point said no you can’t go through ... WTF so we had a language barrier discussion in the middle of the street as he said we had to wait two hours for when the bike race was coming through.

We only needed to go about 50 meters and we were home free. We parked Maya and I walked over to “the other end” 50 meters away and in pig spinglish asked if we could come through to another young Policeman behind some cones ....he kinda indicated ok.

Raced casually back to Maya, Ellen and put our gear on quietly outa sight of Mr.Plod no 2 who wouldn't let us through then hit the button without looking back while aiming directly for the policeman with the cones at which point he shifted the cones and we carried on through ... too easy. WOH HOH ... there are merits in not quite understanding and looking very different  

Our intention was to get to the salt church and we took a short cut so we didn’t have to backtrack on a road we had done, we had a great time wondering around backroads that turned out to be anything other than a shortcut .. I shoulda learnt by now.

This is common sight, the militars giving the thumbs up, it is not that they like our bike it means you are ok and safe to pass, great job you guys!!!! .... and I always thought they all liked KTM 950 Super Enduros  



We did however get to ride through beautiful gorges and mostly on tarseal .....to that point



Lake Tota was on the list to go back past then turn off into the unknown which it really did turn out to be.



There are bits of civilisation dotted around here and their



Later in the afternoon at 3800 meters and a road ending by a small lake that looked like a picture from Dr Seuss we opted to take the road down to Tunja.





We had at that point spent all afternoon skunking around in the back yard again on shingle etc .... hmmm we am not very good at staying on tar. 

We knew the road would go to Tunja as we had run out of other roads so by process of elimination it worked.

Tunja sits at 3000 meters so we didn’t pull out the speedos, alway a bonus to sleep at that height tho with cooler temps.

We made the most of the cooler temps as the next day we were heading back down to the lowlands ..... note slightly warm