Detour #60: Bogotà to Cartagena, Colombia
From Colombia’s cosmopolitan capital to its Caribbean coast is almost 700 miles. It’s an amazing drive through a diverse land with lush rainforests and craggy Andean peaks.
Monserrate Hill, Bogotá’s highest point, sits at a heady 3,150m above sea level. This is a city literally with its head in the clouds and the panoramic view from atop the hill is jaw-dropping.
Heading north, you wind through the lush greenery of Boyacá and Santander departments, marvelling at the sheer variety of plant life. This is a supremely fertile land, and everything from coffee and tobacco to sugarcane and an exotic array of tropical fruit is cultivated here.
The route takes you through Cómbita, birthplace of Tour de France racing cyclist Nairo Quintana, and traces the hilly ten-mile journey on which he cut his cycling teeth as a schoolboy. Highway 45A is smooth and curvaceous as it carries you north.
It’s well worth a detour of a dozen miles at San Gil to get to Barichara– ‘the most beautiful town in Colombia’. With rows of low, whitewashed, red-tiled houses with painted wooden doors arranged on steep slab-paved streets, this colonial town is perfectly preserved, like a ladybird in a chunk of amber, to be held up to the light and marvelled at.
A further two hours or so down the road is the Chicamocha river which has patiently carved out an eponymous canyon some 2,000m deep. It’s now a national park and adventure sports zone, but also host to a sharply snaking road that’s a drivers’ delight. At the top, a little shrine to Virgen del Carmen, the patron saint of truckers, bears testimony to a time when the road was much narrower and in poor condition, and vehicles frequently lost control and hurtled over. Now the road is smooth, cambered, well-marked and with safety barriers.
After Bucaramanga, the road begins to flatten out. The unrelenting heat of the plains is thickly infused with moisture as you enter the Mompos Depression, a vast area of wetlands, marshes and freshwater islands formed by the Magdalena River as it pushes north towards the Caribbean Sea.
Mompós is not as picture-perfect as Barichara; it’s much more lived-in, even a bit run-down, but clearly of fine vintage stock and pretty just the same. A ferry ride 40 minutes upriver to Yati will trim a hundred-odd road miles from your journey, but be prepared to queue.
The rest of the way to Cartagena is a mixed bag of straight bursts and flowing switchbacks. The city is vivacious, vibrant, a real charmer. Maybe it’s the Caribbean Sea’s lapping strokes that arouse excitement. Maybe it’s rustling tourist dollars that stoke its engines. Or perhaps it’s Cartagena’s innate joie de vivre, which draws both eagerly onto its shores. Whatever it is, it’s the perfect place to unwind after this fantastic journey across Colombia.
Words Sachin Rao
Photography Dan Gold / Delaney Turner / Jonny James / Marco Almanza / Michael Lechner / Unsplash
