Mompox

Colombia’s Mighty Magdalena

By Joe Berk

I felt a mix comforting mix of “been there, done that” and smugness when I read the Wall Street Journal yesterday. The lead photo in the paper’s “Off Duty” section was strangely familiar, and as the coffee kicked in I realized it was because I’d been there: Colombia’s Magdalena River. My Magdelena photo (one of many) is the photo you see above.

The Wall Street Journal article featured places not part of the borscht belt (i.e., typical tourist destinations), and the stops it recommended along a Magdalena River cruise were locales I’d been to: Barranquilla, Cartagena, Mompox, Magangué, and others. I’ve been luckier than most because I’ve had incredible motorcycle adventures: China, Mexico, the Three Flags Classic, Baja, the Western America Adventure Ride, and more. The ride through Colombia and along the Magdalena River, though, was in many ways greater than the other motorcycle adventures. The Journal’s story had me thinking about Colombia again, and I thought I would share a few photos of the places it mentioned with you.

Mompox

Ah, Mompox. It’s pronounced and sometimes spelled Mompos…an amazing city, unlike any I had ever visited. The night we were there I wanted to stay in the hotel and post a blog for my CSC readers, but good buddy and ride leader Juan told me: Joe, your readers will wait. You need to see Mompox. He was right.

Carlos, me, and Juan having dinner in an Italian restaurant run by a German in Colombia.

Magangué

We began our ferry ride to Mompox from Magangué (pronounced ma gong gay). It was brutally hot and humid and we had to wait a couple of hours for the ferry to arrive, but that ride down the Magdelana was worth the wait. Dreamlike, it was a scene from a 1930s adventure movie. Peaceful. Indiana Jones. That ferry ride had it all. There are more adjectives I could use, but you get the idea.

Headed downstream and facing north on the Magdalena River.

Barranquilla

I first saw Barranquilla (pronounced bar en key ah) on an earlier business trip to Colombia. I’d just purchased a new Nikon D200 (the cat’s meow back then), and it had a backfocus issue I later had corrected (you can’t see it in these photos, though). I felt like Indiana Jones at a beauty pageant. If there are unattractive women in Colombia, I couldn’t find them.

Cartagena

Yep, that Cartegena, the same one as is R0mancing the Stone (although that movie was actually shot in Mexico). On that same business trip, we took an afternoon to visit Cartegana, about an hour and a half down the coast from Barranquilla.

Two Colombian highway patrol officers on the road to Cartegena. My friends thought I was nuts when I jumped out to grab this photo. The Colombian police officers probably thought so, too.

A shopkeeper in Cartagena who agreed to let me take her picture.

There were many things in Colombia well beyond what the WSJ article covered: Honda (the town, not the motorcycle), Covenas, Volcan Los Nevados, La Playa de Belem, Barichara, Villa de Leyva, and more. I saw them from my RS3 motorcycle (the carbureted version of the RX3) and you can, too, if you don’t mind living vicariously through my lens and keyboard:

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AKT Motos in Colombia

After zipping through the Andes Mountains in Colombia for a week on RS3 motorcycles with my good buddies Juan and Carlos (the RS3 is the carbureted version of the RX3), I spent a day in the AKT Motos plant. AKT Motos is the importer and assembler of Zongshen motorcycles in Colombia.

The AKT factory was impressive, and not just because of the fact that they make motorcycles there. I’ve been in and around factories for most of my life. There are good ones and there are bad ones. I can tell the difference as soon as I walk in just by looking at the people who work there and the condition of the facilities. The vibes were all good…AKT is a good place to work and the people there love what they do.

Here’s the AKT Moto assembly line:

Juan Carlos grabbed the photo below of yours truly with Enrique Vargas, AKT Moto’s General Manager.

Here’s a video showing the AKT Motos plant in action:

Enrique is a genuine nice guy and he’s the real deal. He rides a different AKT Motos motorcycle to work every day (in Medellin traffic, that’s no small feat), and he races motocross on the weekends. Enrique is the guy who invited me on the Colombia trip, and I had a wonderful time on that ride. You can read about the adventure in Moto Colombia, our book about the ride through Colombia. It was the ride of a lifetime, and the book makes a great gift.

That photo at the top of this blog? It’s yours truly leaving the ferry that had carried us down the Magdalena River to Mompox, one of my favorite places in the world and unquestionably one of the more exotic spots I ever visited on a motorcycle. Here’s a video I did on that ferry ride with a few scenes in Mompox at night, and another riding through the Andes.

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New Header Images!

Hey, maybe you noticed, maybe you didn’t…but we’ve added a few new header images at the top of our blog. Gresh suggested we needed more motorcycle oriented pictures, and I agree with him. Gresh is smart that way. I never claimed to be the brains in this outfit; I’m just the good looks.

I’ll be adding more header images in the coming weeks, too. We’ve got tons of photos from our travels, and yeah, I like to show them off. The photos have to be ones that will crop to a 1200×280 pixel format, which eliminates most almost immediately. But I have a few that will work.

The way this header thing works is every time you visit the blog, one of six images randomly pops up. I could have set the header up so the images would scroll, but I did that when I wrote the CSC blog and I found it distracting (while you’re reading the blog, the header image keeps changing, drawing your attention away from the blog du jour). And I didn’t want to put a description directly on the image because I didn’t want it to take away from the photo, so I thought I would add a description here.

So, to get to the point, these are smaller versions of the header images, along with a brief explanation of each.

This is the original ExNotes blog header image, which will still pop up from time to time. I love this photo. I took it on the ride through Colombia in Mompox, a mystical town tucked away in a magic land. I’d like to invite you to read the blog I wrote on Mompox a few months ago. If you look real close, you’ll see my good buddy Juan, who I rode with in Colombia and on the CSC Western American Adventure Ride.

Ah, the whales Scammon’s Lagoon, Guerrero Negro, Baja California Sur. Gresh and I are going to ride there in March. It’s one of life’s real treats. We’ll be blogging the entire trip, and we’ll be insured with BajaBound Insurance (the best there is).

Wow, another Guerrero Negro photo, this time after the bikes had been put away for the evening at the Don Gus Hotel. I love the hotel and the restaurant (and the bar, too!) at the Don Gus Hotel. This was on one of the CSC Motorcycles Baja adventure rides.

One of the best parts of any Baja adventure ride is the cuisine. These are tacos we enjoyed on the recent ride with Janus Motorcycles. The food down there is fantastic!

Janus Motorcycles parked along the Malecon in San Felipe. This was a great Baja ride, and the Janus machines performed perfectly. It was a grand adventure. Hell, they all are!

A photo of Jordan Swartzendruber (on the left, hugging the center line) and Devin Biek (on the right), both on Janus Motorcycles. We did about a thousand miles in 4 days on these 250cc motorcycles. It was one of the coldest rides I’ve ever done, but we had a grand time!

And there you have it. Like I said, we’ll be adding more header photos in the future, and we’ll tell you about each one as we do so. I shot all of these photos with my Nikon D3300 digital single lens reflex camera and its 18-55 lens, which is a very reasonably priced, entry-level DSLR outfit. I find the photos refresh my memory of the great times I’ve had on each of these rides. In fact, those pictures above are making me feel like getting out on an adventure ride again. Soon, folks, soon…

…and more on Mompox…

Another blog a few entries down (it was on my magical journey to Mompox, Colombia) told about the isolated and surreal nature of that beautiful town. We had to take a ferry ride down the Magdalena River to get there, and I mentioned in the blog that my ride leader, Juan Carlos, had told me they would soon be building a bridge to Mompox. Well, they are, and here’s a video Juan sent to me about it…

There’s an old saying that goes something along the lines of “bad roads bring good people, and good roads bring bad people…” I think Mompox is going to change with improved access. I’m glad I saw it when I did. It was a special place on a special ride.

By Joe Berk

The Colombia adventure continues. For those of you just joining us, this is a series of blogs I wrote four years ago for CSC Motorcycles when I was rode an AKT Moto RS3 (the carbureted Colombian version of the RX3) through the Andes Mountains. Day 2 of that ride was absolutely awesome, ending with a visit to an enchanted town after a ferry ride down the Magdalena River.

Our second day on the road in Colombia started in Coveñas, and the humidity was oppressive. It was going to get worse as the day went on. We’re in the tropics, not too far from the equator, and hot and humid is the normal way of things here. On the plus side, you don’t care if it rains because you’re already drenched. It actually helps because it’s cooling.

Anyway, back to the morning in Coveñas. We ate in the hotel, and while we were waiting for breakfast, this dude was selling some kind of yams or roots, and Juan Carlos pointed out the scale he was using. It’s about as crude a scale as I’ve ever seen, but it’s sound technically, and it sure makes for an interesting photo.

Here’s a typical Colombian breakfast: Scrambled eggs with tomatoes and onions, bread, and a corn or flour tortilla with cheese (that’s called arrepo). The Colombians are big on cheeses, with different regions producing unique cheeses. It’s quite good.

The guys pointed out this car as we packed the bikes. This probably didn’t end well for the passenger, who most likely was not wearing a seat belt. The riding in Colombia is glorious, but it is stressful. Juan and Carlos said when they ride anywhere else (other than Colombia), it makes them sleepy because there’s only scenery. In Colombia, there’s scenery, but you have to watch out for everyone else. It’s intense. In a country full of twisties, people pass on blind corners routinely. I guess the theory is you pray a lot. People think nothing of passing if the oncoming traffic has room to move over, or if the oncoming traffic is a motorcycle. It’s weird, but you kind of get used to it. But it is intense (just like the heat and the humidity).

When we got on the road after breakfast, we only went maybe a mile when Carlos had a flat tire. Watching the guy repair it was interesting, and so was hanging out watching the world go by in Colombia.

And here are some of those watching the world go by in Colombia photos.

Here’s a photo of our RX3s somewhere on the road, headed to the ferry that would take us to Mompos, a remote town 45 minutes down the Magdalena River.

This church was across the street and just down the road from the ferry loading spot.

I only grabbed a few photos while we were boarding the ferry. The heat and humidity were getting to me at this point. It was about 4:00 in the in the afternoon, and it was sweltering.

Once we were underway, it got a little cooler on the river. You probably saw my video of that ride.

We arrived in Mompos and it was impressive. It’s the oldest town in Colombia, and to say it is off the beaten path would be an understatement. We had dinner in a restaurant run by an Austrian, where I had the best pizza I’ve ever had in my life.

After dinner, we chatted with the owner for a bit, and then we walked along the river front…I grabbed a bunch of photos there.

Folks, that’s about it for now. I’m a day behind in keeping you up to date on this trip, but Internet connectivity is dicey in these remote locations. As always, more to follow, if not today, then in a day or two (or three). Stay tuned.

If you’d like to see our earlier blogs in Colombia, please click here.

Did you enjoy reading the above? Hey, I wrote a book about that ride, and you can order it here. I think you’ll like reading it, and I know I sure had fun writing it!