First, a quick note on the weather here. Or, more to the point, the sun. It rises at about 5 AM and sets at 5:30 PM, approximately. What this means for me, getting off work around 5 PM is that I have no daylight left. For some reason this makes it feel like I have worked from dawn til dusk... ... ... Well, I am used to still having a few hours of daylight left after 5 PM. Anyway, the point of all this is…
…After a long week with lots of work and crazy bus situations, it was Saturday. Consequently, I went for a bike ride. And wouldn’t you know it; the whole ride was a hill.
Now, thattsswwhaaat-I’mtalking about!!! Wait, what am I talking about!?!?!?
Essentially, there is this hill with a neighborhood on it. The road goes all the way up and around a bit until it gets to the top. Makes sense to me, so I decide to ride it. It took me about 30-45 minutes to climb I think. Not too certain, since I was focused on other things than watching time…but it was definitely a slow ride up--but pretty sweet going down before I went up again. Nice curves at high speeds, you know. Can’t beat that!
Anyway, for those 4 of you who actually care about this stuff, I tried to figure out the grade of the hill. After all the conversions from kilometers and other mind bending logic-er, math- I think it was about a 1000 foot elevation increase over 1.5 miles, about a 12% grade. The elevation at the bottom was around 8500 ft, so the top would have been 9500-ish. The view was pretty awesome, though it was cloudy. The pictures below should speak another 4 thousand or so words, leaving you with a pretty good impression of the area...
This is the view from the house of Jesus Ortiz, the Operation Reconciliation founder. His house is on the right.
The view into the valley from part way up the climb.
The brick road that winds up the mountain. You can see a strip of it below as well.
This is from the top. It was pretty sweet, looking down on this neighborhood from up there, thinking about all those poor people who had not just had as fun as I had!
Sweet!
In Truth,
Stephen
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3 comments:
So, I stole some more photos. Seriously, I think you should sell a travel guide to Bogota. I would buy it:)
You know, Stephen, the reason it took you so long to ride up the hill cannot be blamed on your crappy bike, oh no! It is because you are weak, oh so weak at climbing hills!! Muaahhhahhhahahahhaha!
Cody, they have a saying here that applies to you in this situation: "Pinta un bosque y pierdate". For anyone who doesn't speak the heavenly language, the gist of what that means is, "Draw a forest and get lost in it!"
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