Pacific Coast (South of Acapulco)

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January 12th, 2005 - When Dreams Come True

Jan 10 Puerto Escondito - Lagunas de Chacahua 70 km (including side trip)
Jan 11 Laguna Chacuah - Jamiltepec 47 km
Jan 12 Jamiltepec - Cuajinicuilapa 70km

Jan 10

Dreamt that I'd rolled over and vomitted over the side of my bed; awoke with the sense of relief that tends to accompany awakening after a nightmare.... until I saw vomit everywhere. Even caked on the mosquito net. The night before hazily floated back into memory: three engineers from Quebec, at least ten rounds. Didn't stick around to find out if I'd made a fool of myself. Washed off my sneakers, clothes, panniers, helmet, and got out FAST.
(WARNING to fellow travellers: Avoid Bed 12 in Hostel Shalom)
Finally found out what hangover-cycling is like: shitty! Stopped at Laguna
Manialtepec and had a wonderful breakfast with five people from Seattle. Turns out they know this girl Zhara from my Spanish 1 class... MIT is small.
The rest of the day was idyllic (mostly) - cycled through beautiful landscapes of palm trees and lush farmland. Stopped to rest at a deserted white sand beach called Playa Roca Blanca.
My ass is hurting more than usual, probably due to the bumpy, pot-holed stretches that make up this section of Hwy 200... sometimes its hard to tell the difference between hardened roadkill and a poorly filled-in pothole.
Took a boat to Lagunas de Chacuaha, where there's a beautiful beach and a lagoon teeming with bird life. The village here has one phone line - whenever there's a call a loud siren rings out and announces who the call is for. Dragging my bike with all the panniers across the deep sand was so difficult... all I wanted to do was take a shower and sleep. I spent at least half an hour, frustrated, as the communication barrier prevented me from understanding that there was no running water, and therefore no shower, but if I wanted I could go to a water-tank somewhere in the village and for five pesos they'd give me a bucket.
Took the bucket-shower and slept in a cabana (cabin) right on the beach.

Jan 11

Got in a huge fight this morning with a loud, hyperactive, alcoholic Italian guy on the way back from the Laguna. I always forget how many people worldwide think that 9/11 was a Bush-backed conspiracy - in America, even the anti-Bush don't seriously consider that notion.
Today was sweltering too - I waited till it 'cooled down' to 125 degrees Fahrenheit (I'm sure it was around 100% humidity, too) at 3:00 to resume riding the 10km uphill to Jamiltepec. But when I got the chills and felt nasueas I decided that it was stupid and dangerous to continue in the heat. As I waited on the roadside for a pickup (camioneta), I talked to a friendly farmer who gave me a papaya from his garden.

Jan 12

Bike problems!
I stupidly dropped my bike the night before and immediately afterwards found that my rear wheel refused to move because I'd apparently messed up the brakes. I tried adjusting them myself to no avail.
Got a late start again this morning because I was trying to find a mechanic. At the first bike shop the lady just smiled and offered me a tire lever when I showed her the problem. (I missed 'El Maestro!') At the other shop, a teenage girl was the 'mechanica.' Again, communication barrier: she kept pointing to a specific spot where the spoke meets the rim and told me to bring the bike to the nearest big city, Pinotepa... but she did something that got the rear-brakes working again which was good.

As I was riding along to Pinotepa (I'm definitely in the mountainous territory!), I encountered another cyclist, Carl, coming from the other direction. Carl is by far the coolest person I have ever met. He's been cycling around the world for six years with 100 pounds of gear.
We sat down on a piece of cardboad in a garbage heap by the roadside, ate the papaya that the nice farmer had given me the day before, and talked for hours.
He examined by bike and proclaimed that something was wrong not only with my brakes, but with my hub, too. I figure I'll get it checked out in Acapulco.
Carl has been to most countries twice - once backpacking and once cycling - and in addition to this trip, has done loads of other expeditions I dream about, like hiking across the whole of Iceland and cycling the Silk Road.

Personally I think that one learns infinitely more through travel than through school or books (although one can obviously learn alot from formal education). But through a large number of incredibly diverse experiences one gains firsthand knowledge of people and culture - something that speaks to your unconscious as well as conscious, whereas formal education speaks only to your conscious memory. (I won't expound on this here) Anyway Carl is not only one of the smartest people I know, but also the strongest (cycling the Karakorum Pass, the highest road in the world, is no easy feat. not to mention solo cycling through China)....

Difficult cycling: I'm still in the mountains! Nothing nearly as steep as Chiapas, but the Sierra Madre here contain steady, unrelenting climbs. Not too mention the heat. Today I was either pedalling furiously or cruising downhill - no in-betweens - which makes for utterly exhausting cycling... which is why, 13km from my destination of Cuajinicuilapa, I felt like I was going to collapse. So I caught a camioneta to town.
I wish I could hitch more, if I wasn't a female travelling alone I'd definitely do it. I love standing there with the road stretching far in either direction: its just me, the wind and the cows.

Anyway off to see more mountains and beaches...

January 15th, 2005 - Why Haven't You Made Any Babies Yet?

Jan 13 Cuaji - Playa Ventura
Jan 14 Playa Ventura - San Marcos 76 km
Jan 15 San Marcos - Acapulco

A modified version of my essay about Cambodia has been published online in Glimpse magazines with photographs. Check it out here: http://www.theglimpse.com/newsite/viewarticle2.asp?articleid=355

Jan 13

How do I always manage to injure my feet? Walking out of my hotel in Cuaji I twisted my ankle and fell down in front of a whole group of people. Half of my left foot is swollen and black, complementing my stripe of a sock-tan very nicely. Anyway Cuaji was a very sketchy place: one or two men followed me in pickup trucks the night before ('Hi! Where you going?') and a couple women warned me not to walk outside the town center at night. So I decided to take a rest day at the beach and rest my foot.
Took a bus to Copala which turned out to be sketchier than Cuaji. Within the hour that I waited for a collectivo to the beach, three people put their fingers to their nose and sniffed, then asked if I wanted to buy drugs; two men kept asking why I hadn't made any babies yet; and everyone took turns repeating 'Why are you alone?'

I ended up getting a ride with another strange man (the collectivo just wasn't coming, I wanted to get out of Copala, and I'd been talking to the man for awhile, he seemed odd but harmless) to the beach, Playa Ventura. During the ride he repeatedly announced important dates in US history and made me repeat them in Spanish (cuatro de julio, mil setecientos y setenta seises). He stopped repeatedly at different beaches and asked if I wanted a 'companero' to go swimming with. I said no, I just wanted a hotel... when I finally escaped, I rode my bike about 2-3km outside of town and found my second paradise of the trip: a pretty grassy enclosure full of coconut trees, containing a fully stocked bar and a swimming pool. Right on a beautiful, deserted beach too - there wasn't anyone for kilometers in either direction. I slept on the second floor of a little house with a great balcony overlooking the sea. To top it all off, the bathroom had a floor-to-ceiling glass window: so even sitting on the toilet, I had a stunning view of the ocean.

Jan 14

Back on my bike. It's full of sand now. I remember hearing that sand is bad for bikes but I don't remember why... got chased by three dogs today, nothing nearly as bad as Chiapas though: this time the road was flat enough to get away. And I discovered that dogs hate when you squirt water at them. Still, it's not easy to maneuver the bike with one hand, look back and squirt the dogs with the other while simultaneously attempting to avoid becoming fresh roadkill by a careening bus. Nothing much in San Marcos.

Jan 15

Not one, not two, but THREE people vomitted in the hour I was on the pickup truck to Acapulco. I took a pickup so I could get here on Saturday ( I have errands to run, everything is closed on Sunday ) and to avoid the traffic. Somehow I squeezed my bike into one of the ubiquitous VW Beetle taxis... ended up at an interesting hotel: three floors set around a courtyard, full of stereotypical motorcyclists: gurff, heavyset, middle-aged Americans. They've been shouting drunken insults at each other across the courtyard (and across floors) all day... quite amusing.
Did a bit of riding in the city but the traffic is CRAZY. When the locals tell you to be careful then you know you're doing something stupid... Acapulco is by far the worst bicycling city I've come across yet.
Am utterly desperate for intellectual reading material. I've read my Mexico guidebook from cover to cover at least seven times. Acapulco, disappointingly, has nothing more than trashy beach novels which I can't bring myself to read - even in my desperate state. So instead I bought nearly every English-language magazine in the store - even one about Linux, something I would never do back home.

Observations:
1) Lost the ability to differentiate between catcalls (from Mexican men) and birdcalls (from birds). One of my personal highlights of Mexico has been the incredible diversity of birdlife - I get to see so many different species on the road. But catcalls, too, have their own special diversity. Now, when I'm riding along and hear a whistling sound, I don't know whether its coming from the Mexican farmer working the field or from a rare bird in the trees. I'm serious.

2) I hate how every car/truck/bus/pickups feels the need to honk loudly at me, but I LOVE the sirens! Lately, each day a couple vehicles have been turning on their sirens as a greeting... its not-startling and I take it as a complement - hot stuff, coming through.....