A Fairytale Bike Ride

14 February 2014 - Once upon a time, the tres amigos came up with a wonderful idea to go on a quaint little bike ride around the countryside of Villa de Leyva.  We would leisurely admire the fincas perched on rolling hills, cruise up to a few waterfalls and take a dip, visit a few sites with fossils – really it would be a nice, splendid day.  Something for the storybooks.

Okay really, the bike ride was my idea.  I’ll take the blame.  Our cruise around the outskirts of Villa de Leyva was never just a cruise.  To start off, we rented some pretty sweet rides.  They had two sets of shocks and mountain tires that meant business – we were ready to take on the trails.

We hopped on our bikes and headed out of town.  From the get go, it was a bumpy ride – quite literally.  The streets of Villa de Leyva are cobblestoned, for lack of a better word… in reality, they are paved with quite large river rocks, that don’t exactly give you the smoothest ride. 

On top of that, we began to check each other out on our bikes and each of us was comically large for our stellar bicycles.  Looking like a bunch of clowns wheeling around on tiny bikes, we headed out of town.

The cobblestone road ended finally, but that was met with a gravel road that consisted of climbing up and down windy mountain roads for 3 hours.  On our tiny bikes that we quickly discovered only had three working gears, we huffed and puffed up and up seemingly never-ending climbs.  There would be a bend in the road, after which you would be certain that there could not be any way to go any higher, when you would round the curve and see that, in fact, there was even more mountain to climb.  This, “Ha! You’re a fool!” mountain mirage effect (as I’ve so generously coined it) continued for a good hour.  We were having a blast!

The sun beating down on our backs, sweaty sunblock dripping into our eyes, our legs aching from using bikes that would be better suited as a coat rack or hipster lawn art, we pondered how much further the waterfall could be.  We had been biking for about 2 and a half hours and figured based on the very rudimentary tourist map (those things get you every time!), the tres amigos decided that we had to be close.

The illustrious waterfall

An hour later, we arrived at the waterfall.  It was lovely.  There was water, it ran over a cliff.  We looked at it.  We ate our lunch of empanadas, looked at the time and realized we had no time to dilly-dally if we wanted to make it back to town in time to return our rental bikes.  Tires to the pavement people!

The way back was leisurely if you are inclined to use the word liberally.  We only had a third as many uphills this time and enjoyed some white-knuckle downhills that would have been a blast on a proper mountain bike.  The brakes were questionable and somehow the handgrips managed to give me bruises on my hands…but at least we weren’t pedaling uphill. That’s all that mattered.

And if you are wondering - yes, we did indeed spend the remainder of the evening lying on the beds in our hotel room in a coma.  We were full of leisure, finally.