After our goodbyes this morning the road continued a winding climb. The streets in some of the villages were so narrow that home owners had erected posts made of 10 ft sections of railway track in front of their houses to protect then from passing trucks. In a couple of places there was a man with a flag to ensure that only one vehicle at a time tried to negotiate a particularly tight corner. Twice we were forced to back up to allow tanker trucks to pass. All very exciting!! And this is a toll road.

A number of police checks again today but our story, somos touristas, Australiano. No habla espanol usually gets us a smile and wave forward. However at one stop this morning the senior fellow spoke a little English and the stop turned into a lengthy chat, and exchange of email addresses and some photographs. Edison, if you read this buena dias.

Our road gradually descended until we joined highway 43, from Bogota to Bucaramanga where we were at about 500 ft altitude.

We decided not to stop for the night until the highway gained a bit of altitude so it was not until about 4:30, and maybe 30 kms from Bucaramanga that we tried our first likely stopping place, but got told NO - further up the road there is a place. Sure enough a few minutes later we came to a suitable place.

Just south of Lebrija we found a truck stop, restaurant, hotel and tire repair. After a number of conversations that led nowhere I found the man who ran the tire repair shop, and the hotel. It took me a while but I eventually got across the message that I wanted to park for the night but did not want a room in the hotel. He allowed us to park right next to his shop and hotel and offered to keep an eye on things for us. Initially we thought he was being a bit silly having us snug up so close to the building but once crazy hour at the truck stop started about 6:00 pm we understood his logic and were thankful as we were well out of the way of vehicles dropping into the stop.

We had many conversations with people wanting to talk about where we had been, and the camper. After dinner we sat at one of the restaurants for a drink and watched, and marveled at, the chaos in the parking area. Vehicles of all kinds parked willy nilly, blocking each other in. But it all sorted itself out without any friction. The troop of armed infantry watching the parking area added a surreal element to the scene.

The final entertainment for the evening was watching the tire repair man replace the valve stem on a tire inner tube - after of course removing the tire and tube from the bus wheel. It took about an hour, but in that time he took a tube that in the US we would simply discard, cut out the old valve stem and welded in a replacement. Amazing.