Where to go and why?

Your lightweight cyclist in action again.

5. December 2016.
I have been in South America three times; especially in the first trip incredible events occurred one after another: I admired the mystical Machu Picchu, Inca's masterpieces of architecture in Cusco, walked on islands made of reeds on Lake Titicaca, flew over the mysterious animal figures in the Nazca desert, followed condors in the canyon of Colca, spent the night in the Martian-like landscape of salt lake Uyuni, observed fauna on the "Galapagos of the poor" (Ballestas islands in Peru), squeezed through claustrophobic tunnels in the silver mines of Potosi, climbed on my first 6000 m peak Chacaltaya, was lost on a cargo ship in the meanders of the Amazonian tributary Mamoré and returned to La Paz on a military transport aircraft. After returning home I felt like a superman and a few months afterwards I walked a few centimeters above the ground.

Love bike.

This time however, I opted for a cycle journey from Bogotá to Quito. Why these two cities, of which most people have never heard? The reason is somewhat complicated. Lately I started to enthuse over the theory of relativity of space and time. As I comfortably sat one day in my couch in a working-class suburb of the capital of a relatively stable Central European country called Slovenia, watching the calming family TV-show entitled "Good morning", I wondered whether something like "Bogotá" even existed? Accent on the final "a", which sounds so displaced to the ear accustomed to the melodic Slovenian language, did not persuade me. Less so the name of the local airport, "El Dorado", which resembled the fairy tales about tomb raiders. I wondered whether the Airbus that will fly from Frankfurt will ever reach its goal, or will it crash running out of fuel while circling around a point on the planet where Bogotá should be but is in fact a place where nobody lives and where, in general, there's nothing? That's exactly why I chose this destination: because of the adrenalin charge when you board a plane which takes you somewhere on the existence of which you strongly doubt and just hope that Bogotá and its airport will penetrate from the parallel universe into ours early enough so that the landing will be safe.

Events that unwrapped just before the trip, however, were not encouraging.
Metaphysical forces that I secretly track for some time now and am just about their spectacular exposure, were hugely active this time. There has never been so much talk about Colombia. Firstly, they signed a truce to the 50-year civil war, then refused it, got the Nobel Prize for it, then at Medellin, barely 200 km from Bogotá, an aircraft crashed due to lack of fuel (i.e. exactly according to my forecasts), pilots at Lufthansa begun a strike and just before taking off from Frankfurt a fault on the brakes was discovered in our plane. But, metaphysical forces can also be positive: in Lufthansa's magazine they, obviously knowing that I'm currently obsessed with the issue of time, printed the old Indian proverb: "People say that time is passing; and time says that people are passing." Pounding over this saying occupied a significant part of my journey and in the end I developed a mathematical formulation of it that will eventually stand alongside the theory of relativity.