I arrived in Pasto with no trouble, and was greeted warmly by Roberto, owner of the Casa Hospedaje La Bohemia, where I stayed for the night. I was sharing the hostel room with an Argentinian traveler who'd been stranded in Ecuador during the protests (El Paro), and his stories made me glad I hadn't even attempted to enter the previous week. He'd been on the coast when the Paro started, and after a couple of days stuck in place, had found a bus willing to take him to Quito with promises that other companies would be running to the border. After arriving in Quito and finding exactly nobody leaving the city, he and a friend hired a taxi to take them north to Ibarra. They didn't even get halfway to Ibarra before running into a roadblock, surrounded by indigenous rioters who slashed the car's tires and forced out of the car, and ending up stranded. After walking for two straight days, they were able to get a bus to the border when the Paro ended. I was stunned; after spending months in Ecuador in 2009, this didn't sound anything like the country I'd fallen in love with all those years ago.
Determined to make it to Quito by the end of the day, I loaded up and left Pasto early for the border town of Ipiales. By distance alone, it should have taken me around two hours, but extensive construction made for slow going; the road detoured into narrow gravel sections many times, and there were frequent stops for road closures that had both directions sharing one lane. I was starting to grow frustrated with all the stoppages and time stuck behind slow-moving vehicles, particularly when I ended up in a quarter-mile line of cars waiting at a complete road closure. And this, friends, is when the wheels came off the whole thing...
As I sat in the line, seeing no traffic moving in either direction, a group of local motorcyclists sped by in the opposite lane. This had been common practice everywhere I'd been, and seeing a rider on a BMW R1200GS at the tail end of the group, I figured there was no harm in trying to save a little time with the rest of them, and joined the group. I was proven immediately, disastrously wrong when, at the front of the line, I found two national police transitos with their ticket books open, stopping everyone who'd skipped the line as we'd just done. There was already a group of riderless bikes around them, and I realized that I was about to have a problem as one of them came up and took my driver's license and passport. The BMW rider came over, admiring the Twin and expounding on how much he wanted one; high praise from someone riding the bike that defined the "adventure bike" class. He introduced himself as Dario, a resident of Pasto on his way to Ipiales for business. He then explained, his expression turning grim, that the transitos were ticketing all of us for passing on a double-yellow line, and that rather than being a fine we could pay later on or right then and there, they would be towing all of our bikes back to Pasto and impounding them. Apparently practically any traffic infraction on a motorcycle can result in impound at the discretion of the officer, and Dario explained to me, lowering his voice, that the transitos were often in cahoots with the towing/parking companies and often pulled stings like this on Fridays, ensuring the impound lots would get a weekend's worth of fees out of unsuspecting bikers.
There was nothing I could do, even after not-so-subtly asking the transitos how much it would cost me to pay the ticket in situ; Dario later told me that if it had just been me, they'd likely have taken a bribe to let me go, but with seven or eight other motorcyclists and a line of cars watching, they weren't going to let just one go. As we watched, our bikes were loaded onto a tow truck, which promptly turned around and headed back up the highway towards Pasto. I'm honestly not sure what I'd have done if I'd been completely on my own, but fortunately, Dario had decided to help me out without my even asking, figuring that the whole thing was an injustice on its own, and doubly so for having ensnared a foreigner. His wife was already on the way to pick both of us up, and once she arrived, we crammed our various pieces of luggage and riding gear into their car and we followed the tow truck back to Pasto. Dario spent most of the ride on the phone, calling anyone he could think of to see if it was possible to get our bikes out of impound that day, but the one thing he wanted to make sure of was that the bikes got there safely, so after following the tow truck to a lot on the edge of Pasto and unloading the bikes ourselves, we filled out inventory forms and made sure they'd at least be locked up while we figured the whole thing out. Dario drove me back to La Bohemia and assured me he'd call once he found something out.
Roberto was sympathetic to my situation; he'd sold his family's car the year before because of constant trouble with the transitos; according to him, any time a holiday came around, or the cops were lagging behind on their end-of-month quotas, they'd show up looking for excuses to write tickets, whether it was "worn tires" or miniscule traffic violations, as had happened to me. After having to fight weekly tickets in the transit police office for six straight weeks, Roberto had sold the car and was, so he said, far happier for it. I waited the rest of the evening, but didn't hear from Dario again until Saturday morning, confirming that there was almost certainly no way we'd get the bikes out of impound before Monday. With nothing to do but sit around and wait, I found a few things to do around town, wandering through Pasto's Plaza Carnaval and perusing pre-Colombian artifacts at the Museo del Oro. I found the displays fascinating, particularly the explanation of how the intricate gold jewelry was made, but I had a hard time really focusing on anything, given the situation. I'd run into delays before, but this was different; other times, I'd at least been able to go somewhere on my own schedule and without having to rely on others, and I'd come to take that for granted. Being stripped of my bike, and by extension my mobility, felt like it had thrown my world out of whack, having been one of the few constants in my life for the last three months.
I'd hoped that Monday would bring better news, but the word from Dario was little more than hurry-up-and-wait. Our tickets still weren't in the Policia Nacional's computer system, meaning we couldn't pay them, so we'd have to wait. Dario had a friend of his working on it, who turned out to be a tramitador familiar with the police bureaucracy in Colombia; I couldn't help but laugh at the dark irony that one of the people I'd despised when it came to border crossings in Central America was now my best hope of continuing my trip out of Colombia. Our tickets finally posted in the late afternoon, but at an hour that made it impossible to get everything done before the offices would close. We were ready to go Tuesday morning, first to the Transito HQ around the corner from my hostel to pay the tickets, then to another government office across town to provide proof of ownership and obtain release orders for the motorcycles. Dario had business to take care of, but I wanted to get the Twin and get back on the road ASAP, so his friend offered to drive me to the impound lot. After a few minutes of waiting, a fee that was actually far less than I expected, and a quick inspection, I finally had my bike back. I went back to the tramitador's car to ask what I owed him, but he waved me off. "Have a good trip," he told me in broken English. "And maybe you can bring me some parts for my car next time."
Believe me when I say that I've never been so happy to see a motorcycle in my life. Although it had sat in an impound lot getting rained on for four days, the Twin looked none the worse for wear, and after blitzing it back to my hostel and loading up, I was, finally, back on the road. As it was nearly 5 P.M. by the time everything was said and done, my hope of making it across the border and to Quito that day had gone out the window, but I wanted to leave Pasto and get somewhere, so I settled for making the two-hour ride to Ipiales. And as a final middle finger in my direction, it rained the entire time; by the time I found a hotel with both reasonable rates and secure parking, I was soaked through. I didn't even bother leaving the hotel for dinner, and after eating a quick meal in the in-house restaurant, I collapsed into bed.
I awoke the next morning determined to make it to Quito as quickly as possible, but had planned one small detour before leaving Colombia. Just outside of Ipiales, in a valley formed by the Guaitara River, lies the Santuario Virgen de Las Lajas, an ornate Gothic church completed in 1949. I had seen pictures of the church before, but my first glimpse in the morning light was breathtaking. I have walked through Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, the York Minster, and the National Cathedral among many other famous cathedrals and churches, and Las Lajas is right up there in terms of pure aesthetic beauty.
Visiting early in the morning turned out to be a smart move, as there was almost nobody there, and I was able to walk all around the church, the 50-foot bridge spanning the valley in front of it, and the grounds without having to dodge other tourists. The interior was nearly as spectacular as the exterior, with the back wall of the sanctuary formed from the cliff into which the church is built, and very ornate mosaics and stained glass inside and out. I'm fairly well convinced that the only reason Las Lajas isn't mentioned in the same breath as many other famous churches in the world is its fairly remote location in Colombia, and perhaps the residents like it that way.
After taking in my fill of Las Lajas, I started up the bike for the final time in Colombia and headed for the border. I'd spent nearly a month in Colombia, longer by far than any single country I'd visited thus far, through circumstances both planned and unplanned, and despite the sour taste left in my mouth by the episode in Pasto, I'd absolutely fallen in love with the country. I'd experienced beautiful art, vibrant music and culture, astounding natural beauty, and above all, unbelievable hospitality and friendship from people I hadn't known existed just weeks before. Though I was looking forward to returning to Ecuador, Colombia would be a very hard act to follow.
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