The Halfway Point in the Andes

Every long-term traveler knows that maps lie. But they do not lie out of malice; rather, they lie as a consequence of the flatness and fraudulent nature of paper and pixels. As I sat at a low-lit café in La Candelaria before leaving Bogotá, I looked up a map of Colombia on my phone. The distance in the air from Bogotá to Medellín is only around 215 kilometers, or roughly 134 miles. Using the map to work out the straight-line distance, it would appear as if it were just a quick hop over central Colombia. A forty-five-minute domestic flight costs barely thirty dollars, whisking tourists from El Dorado Airport straight over the peaks before their coffee even cools.

Yet, true to our travel approach on Vagabond Journey, we chose the bus. Flying over a landscape teleports you to a destination without forcing you to feel the space between. It erases geography. However, the landscape of Colombia’s Andes Mountains laughs in the face of Euclidean geometry. In order to travel by road on Route 60, the bus will have to cross three different mountain ranges, dropping down steeply from cliff faces into the depths of over 415 kilometers of cracked asphalt, sharp turns, and deep river valleys. It seems straightforward on paper; in practice, it takes ten to twelve hours.

Our ride from the Salitre terminal was at dawn and we were already feeling the high altitude coldness of the city of Bogotá at 2,640 meters above sea level. Our bus had a strong odor of dusty leather, diesel exhaust, and black coffee. During the drive away from the capital, our driver had turned on the air conditioning on the ceiling to a freezing degree to keep his attention focused while driving along risky mountain roads – a common habit of bus drivers in Colombia. Outside, the misty Andean highlands quickly yielded to dramatic vertical drops as we began descending toward the Magdalena River valley.

The sensory reality of land travel in Colombia is defined by these abrupt environmental shifts. It took four hours for our bus to descend over 2,400 meters in altitude to arrive at the sweltering colonial river town of Honda, which lies at only 200 meters above sea level. It was when the door was opened briefly on the side of the road that the humid air rushed into the bus, similar to the opening of the oven door. The passengers got off to purchase some fried empanadas and cold sodas, drenched in sweat within minutes, before piling back into the refrigerated coach.

But once we’re back onto the highway, we move at a snail’s pace. The route is heavily traveled by many tractomulas – large eighteen wheel freight vehicles puffing out black smoke from their diesel engines while creeping up single-lane ascents. The road will not hold a straight course for fifty meters at a time. Each bend demands a downshift; each overtake entails an anxious maneuver around blind bends and deep gorges. During the rainy season, sudden landslides routinely block entire sections of asphalt, stretching nine-hour schedules into grueling all-day odysseys. It is, as any seasoned traveler of Colombia’s overland network will confirm, one of the most punishing corridors in South America.

After seven hours of travel, exhaustion has settled into your bones. The constant swaying of the bus has left your back aching, and your knees hurt because of the constant pressure on them from the seat in front of you, as well as the monotony of never-ending turns around the mountains. You take out your phone and hope that there is a faint cell tower nearby, allowing the GPS map to load in Antioquia.

It is during this crawl that a strange obsession takes hold: the focus on the midpoint. There is a quiet, intense satisfaction in finding the halfway mark on a long overland trek. You track the remaining distance to Medellín against the kilometers already covered from Bogotá, waiting for the exact moment where the spatial balance tips.

That midpoint is much more than simply a physical location; it is a significant psychological boundary. For the beginning of your trip, your thoughts will always be rooted in your place of origin. You think about the cold rains in Bogota, handing in the key to the hostel, and navigating terminal departure halls. You view transit as a tax—an uncomfortable void between two real places.

But the instant you cross that imaginary halfway mark somewhere near the jungle hills of Doradal, there is a change in cognitive gears. All of a sudden, it is not a case of being away from Bogotá anymore, but rather a case of approaching Medellín. The time left stops being an impediment and becomes a means of moving forward in anticipation of warmer weather, green hills surrounding El Poblado, and the relief of finally arriving at the Terminal del Norte.

The halfway point has a different significance for those who roam the earth for a lifetime. When you live on the road, you live in a state of permanent transition, in which “home” is rarely a fixed address but a seat on a moving bus. Suspended between two major metropolises, high in the Colombian mountains, you owe nothing to anyone. You cannot check into a hotel, you cannot meet a deadline, and you cannot wander a neighborhood. You are trapped in motion, forced to sit with your own thoughts while the mountain world turns outside.

When our coach, after much delay, reached the edge of the mountains above Medellín later that night and we saw the great basin of the Aburrá Valley bathed in warm lights, we all heaved a sigh of relief. Air travelers miss the warmth of Honda, the rumble of the mountain passes, and the sense of accomplishment from crossing the midline of the Andes. But for those of us on the bus, we didn’t just arrive in Medellín—we earned every mile of the way.