Month: May 2016

May 23,  2016

I left Los Mochis the following morning at first light and had easy miles with mostly good shoulder and no wind.  Wind patterns since about Hermosillo have been calm mornings gradually becoming a crosswind coming off the ocean towards afternoon.  More often than not the crosswind has a component of headwind.  Between the towns of Guasave and Guamúchil the original highway splits off the freeway inland with the two running roughly parallel all the way to Mazatlán.   I decided to try the old road as it looked better for camping possibilities running more in foothills.  This made for a few more hills to climb but not too bad.  Too often though there were shoulderless stretches.   I did find a good camp sight but at Culiacán got back on the freeway.   The freeway here is about like riding I-5 up the San Joaquin Valley in August-  a hot, humid, flat, agricultural landscape and heavy traffic.  Boring as it gets but you make good time.

I had back-to-back 75 mile days and felt pretty good, but then one morning after sleeping at the edge of a mowed cornfield, Moctazuma came to visit. The day started out OK, what’s a little diarrhea, but by about noon I was knackered. Unbeknownst to me, I was also on a stretch that had no services for 60 miles. There has always been something every 20 or 30 miles and I had gotten enough accustomed to it that I stopped asking about what lay ahead. Fortunately I had enough water.  I was down to a small piece of nearly rancid cheese, one hormiga stenched tortilla and a can of refried beans, but food didn’t really matter because I had no appetite. I just kept getting weaker and weaker as the day went until I finally stopped at the shade of an overpass and, with trucks pounding by no more than fifteen feet away, laid down in the dirt and fell into a delirious sleep for about three hours. The good news was that flies and ants don’t like to get this close to the moving traffic either.

 

The sun finally reached around and I got up and rode another six miles to the shade of a tree.  Now I was a comfortable 40 feet from the highway but the flies and ants were back.  About this time I was having hallucinations of Debbie and Graham, or Cecilia, coming to the rescue.  Two more hours of sleep and I pedaled again.  It was getting towards evening and amazingly I had covered over 50 miles for the day.  Still no services in sight.  I pulled into a buggy gravel pit with a water filled bottom and pitched the tent.   I have with me “the latest” in Thermarest sleeping pads, which weighs next to nothing and is rediculasly comfortable,  but this model really needs an air compressor to blow it up.  I also have a short piece of insulite that if thrown out on a sandy piece of ground works well enough for the dead tired.  The insulite’s what I use most of the time.  No sand to be had in the gravel pit and I didn’t relish the idea of sleeping on rocks in this condition.  It took every ounce of strength I had left to blow the damned thing up but was glad at least for that bit of luxury.

The night didn’t go well.  There were many trips out of the tent that I soon discovered went best when no clothing was worn.  How a tee shirt could be affected is indeed a high level physics problem.  Dressed such you are at the mercy of the bugs.  In the morning I had no choice but to load the bike and ride.  In 6 miles I came to a Pemex station, Mexico’s national gas distributor, and the accompanying Oxxo (ox-so) that has a slightly worse food selection than a 7-Eleven.  I got a coffee and a carrot cake that went down OK.  Nobody knew of any hotels.   I was considering writing on a piece of cardboard $150 (i.e. 150 pesos- they use the dollar symbol as well) for a ride to Mazatlán since $150’s what I had in my wallet.  That’s about $9.  But feeling better after the cake, I bought a couple of sandwiches, topped up with water and rode on.  I found it to be a fraction less energy to sit on the bike and pedal at some minimum speed than to sit on the curb at Oxxo propping my head up with my hands.

After about ten miles I knew I could make the remaining 30 into Mazatlán by just taking it as slow as possible.  But then a sign said “hotel next right” and I took that as a bird in hand.  I was at a beach town called Celestino Gasca that was more touristy and consequently expensive.  Money didn’t matter at this point and I checked into the Villa Celeste RV Park and Hotel.  Comparetivly expensive, it was still only $40 a night.  The owner was Noa Rubio, who spoke English, and his place was a slice of paradise where I traded the sound of pounding traffic and jake brakes for ocean surf.  Add to that I was his only custumer and his wife was a doctor.

I have to mention a train trip I took in about 1978 or 9 from Nogales to Mexico City where a couple of friends and I climbed the volcanoes Orizaba and Popocatepetl.  Orizaba’s the third highest point in North America after Denali and the Yukon’s Mt Logan. Taking that train was quite an experience for three untraveled kids not too long out of high school.  Along the way there was one place that the train went close to the ocean and you could see the surf.  As I crossed some railroad tracks leading to the RV park I realized this was part of that stretch.  I haven’t thought of that image in recent memory and triggering it here was a sort of dejavu- it’s been over 35 years.  The passenger train I’m told no longer runs.

I ended up staying three nights at the hotel.  Didn’t even get out of bed the second day.   Noa brought me bottles of water and some electrolyte powder to mix with some of it.  His wife gave me some diarrhea meds.  The second night they made me a soup of nothing but boiled rice.  Bland as it was, it was just what I needed.   The third day I was up and around but set out on the fourth feeling almost as bad as when I arrived.   Felt like I had to keep moving.

 

Infusing myself back into the arteries of a world on the move wasn’t easy after the beach hotel, especially when not yet up to par.  It turned out Mazatlán was more like 50 miles from Celestino and it was a tough day getting there.  Crossed the Tropic of Cancer a few miles before Mazatlán but surprisingly there were no signs for it.  Having lost the early start I did three sweltering hours in the afternoon sun and could hardly talk when I checked into a hotel at Mazatlán.  $18 bucks but once again clean and air conditioned.   One thing about hotels here is that they’re all wall-to-wall tile and much more sanitary by that feature alone.

After a late morning at the hotel I headed to downtown Mazatlan looking for a bike shop.   In Logan I had made some sheet metal strips that were put between the tube and the tire where the tire meets the road making them puncture proof.  These work well enough for several hundred miles but eventually begin to fragment due to continual bending at the contact point.  Thermal expansion may play a roll as well.  I’ve seen tubes with something similar attached right to the tube but they were always cumbersome.   A countinuous ring of narrow Teflon may be a good solution and you could easily transfer it from tire to tire as they wear out- someone should work on it.  Anyway, since abandoning the strips there have been a few flats and I wanted to get another patch kit as well as a spare tube so long as I was in a city.

So I descended into the bowels of Mazalán, found a shop and climbed back out again.   The “El Centro” of  any of these cities can really be chaotic with roads narrow and unpredictable.   Mazalán has about a half million people- buses and cars are everywhere.   Anyway, bouncing along a bumpy street I lost a pannier and didn’t know it.   Within a 1/2 mile I noticed it was missing and immediately remembered someone  whistling loudly but in the traffic I didn’t dare turn my head.   I went back to that spot but the pannier was gone.   It turns out to not have had anything too vital- lost the fancy Thermarest and a pair of binoculars.   Passport, IPad and money related things are intact.

On the positive side I’ve been carrying these hiking shoes that I haven’t worn since Utah and might not need again till the Andes.   The stove and fuel went- so long morning coffee- but that’s a pretty cumbersome apparatus for something I can always get at the next Oxxo.  I pretty much have to acknowledge that the paved road and the grocery store are what make this kind of travel possible.  Well, the paved road, the grocery store and this little plastic Visa card.  Even what I’m considering long distances between towns are easily made possible with a gallon of water and some sandwiches. So I’m lighter now but really just as functional.  I’ll need to rethink how I load.

After a short day of riding I’m a little beyond Mazatlán in a back street hotel in the town of Villa Union.   A little more colloquial, but it’s only about $9 a night.  Tomorrow I start for Tepic.

 

 

 

May 17,  2016

I checked into the Hotel Montecarlo in Los Mochis which is a clean, well run place costing about $23 a night. I seem to be making it about four nights camping out and then I’m ready for a shower and a bed.   Not as tough as I used to be. The Montecarlo is old and ornate with solid masonry structure.  It’s said that towns in this part of Mexico were founded by 19th century US mining companies, and the Montecarlo’s architecture could pass for that era.  The city of Culiacán, a 100 miles to the south, plays a part in Wallace Stegner’s historical novel Angle of Repose where mining engineer Oliver Ward lives for a time.

I got there about 11 am and checkout was noon the next day.   The 24+ hour stay is the usual strategy to maximize the break from the highway and to allow time, when it’s necessary, for resupply errands on an unladen bike.  The hotels seem to want you gone by a certain time, but don’t really care what time you check in so long as there’s a room available.

Barancas del Cobre (Copper Canyon) is about a 100 miles or so from Los Mochis and upstream on the Rio Fuerte river which passes north of town. Where the river meets the Seirra Madre Occidental mountains it splits into 6 tributaries that drain a tortured network of ridges and canyons larger in area than the Grand Canyon and, in places, said to be deeper. A passenger train, the Ferrocarril Chihuahua al Pacifico or ChePe, runs from Los Mochis over the crest of the Sierra Madre to Ciudad Chihuahua, passing through the tourist village of Divisadero, a sort of “North Rim” to the canyon. They say the train trip is worthwhile.

An indigenous tribe of Native Americans, the Tarahumara, live in the canyon with sects of the tribe living nearly independently of the modern world.   Their future holds the same uncertainties as many other primitive cultures where survival of their way of life depends on walking a fine line between trade with the outside world and absorption into it.  For the Mexican government the canyon provides tourist revenues, but continued development attracts more and more people and threatens the habitat the Tarahumarans depend.   The Government has made a national park out of it and has in place conservation measures akin to US national parks,  but there is little or no enforcement.   Ironwood (Olneya tesota) is cut for making charcoal and exported to the US and the hardwood Amapa (Tabebuia chrysantha) is used in woodworking.  They say only 2% of the original old growth forest on the 8000 foot plateau regions remains.  Open pit copper mines are still operational.  Marijuana and opium production are of course big business and the government makes perfunctory raids that includes massive use of herbicides.  The Natives are the end losers to all of it.

Life in the steep canyons has evolved in the Tarahumara people a culture of running as a means of transportation that still exists today.  In the 1990s some US long distance runners visiting the area saw the Tarahumara potential and arranged for them to run in Colorado’s 100 mile long Leadville Trail 100 race.  The event didn’t go well.  They had to learn all the procedures having nothing to do with running itself that goes along races in the US.   Things like head lamps and what was to be expected at aid stations were unknown.  They were told to wear running shoes for something this extreme.  None finished the race.   They came again the next year however and things were different.  They jettisoned the Nikes preferring their car tire sandals tied on with a leather chord (huaraches- now eponymous with a running shoe model made by, you guessed it, Nike!) and, with no acclimating to the 12000+ foot elevations encountered,  they placed 1st, 2nd and 5th.   The 3rd year Tarahumaran Jaun Herrera set the course record.  Tarahumarans typically celebrate the end of a race with cigarettes.  The notoriety from the running serves to strengthen their culture much the way WWII code talkers did the Navajo’s.  A sillouette of a runner is on the Chihuahua state license plate.

So I had the day to kill and walked around looking for a bookstore with a bird book as well as a bike shop with a rear tire for the bike.   It appears I will only get about a thousand miles out of the rear on Mexican roads.   Might get three times that out of the front tire.   Struck out on the bird book but got a decent 700c tire (made in China!) for about $5.

I couldn’t help but notice there is a dentist’s office here on about every other block.  Back in February,  I began the process of a tooth implant which is essentially the removal of a bad tooth and the installation of a titanium root to which a porcelain  cap is attached.  The root needs 3 months to “heal”, or bond in the root cavity, after which the cap’s put on.  The dentist in Logan sent me with the cap to have that part done by a dentist somewhere on the road.   Since my 3 months were up, and dentists plentiful, this seemed as good a place as any to get it done.   The first door I knocked on just did general dentistry but a guy in the office escorted me a block-and-half to one that did implants.  The receptionist scheduled an appointment for the next morning.   In my imagination I was going to get the cap put on and be back to the hotel in time for check out.  Well, it couldn’t be that simple.  The next day the dentist, Dr Gerardo Carlón, said the gum had shrunk around the implant enough that it needed to be “stretched” to accept the new tooth.  A smaller interim tooth would be needed for a few days and then the permanent tooth.   Whatever.  Suddenly I found myself with five days to kill in Los Mochis.

Communicating with the dentist and his staff was made possible with the iPad.   They of course had Wi-Fi and I could pull up Spanish-English and English-Spanish screens that you could translate sentences with.   I think it was probably the dentist’s daughter that was doing the typing for his comments and we were all getting a pretty good laugh translating jokes about the situation.  It would have been tough communicating everything with just a dictionary.

On the following Sunday Dr Carlón met me at his office, did the coup de gras, and a problem that’s been  looming for a couple of years came to a conclusion.  I payed him and then he asked if he could take me to lunch!  How many times has your dentist done that?  The answer was “of course”.  We went to a “taco stand”, Mariscos, that specialized in sea food and had 3 or 4 courses of food served that consisted of clams, shrimp, prawns, crappie, octopus, escargo and others that I was never able to translate the names of.  The sauces were amazing, incredibly rich, and naturally a little lime & hot sauce accompanies everything.

After lunch he took me for a drive to Topolobampo, a nearby town that’s on the ocean but in a sort of estuary where there are lots of birds and mangroves.   Fishing is a big industry- we had just eaten some of what they catch- and Topolobampa is a port for container ships and Pemex oil coming from the Gulf of Mexico.   It was unfortunate that we were out of Wi-Fi reception and therefore couldn’t translate conversations.  He was loading me up with all kinds of information that I was maybe getting less than half of, and that much only because he had the patience to repeat everything five times.  After a wonderful afternoon we made goodbyes and I went back to the hotel and prepared for getting back on the road the next morning.

May 10th, 2016

Guaymas is a picturesque city situated in a series of jagged volcanic peaks and valleys that abut the ocean.  There are some substantial cliffs in the city’s foot hills that could and may have sport climbing routes, one buttress maybe some multi-pitch.  I had a leisurely morning at the hotel and did a few maintenance tasks to the bike- mainly cleaning sand out of the gears from all the riding through construction- and then took a scenic and somewhat safe-feeling beltroute out of the city and on to Guaymas’ twin city Empalme.  Got groceries there and then headed out against a light headwind.  No shoulder for the first stretch and then more construction.

The workers were happy to let me through, and curious about where I was from and headed.  Slept nearby.  A few mosquitos about and  I’m getting close to the “malaria boundary”.   Next day saw some of the worst of the construction zones and I had to push the bike over course road base for maybe a mile.  The pannier rack finally broke where it attaches to the frame under the seat. I’ve known it was a weak point and something I’ve wanted to fix properly for some time.   If this thing would have broken while battling the semis on shoulderless highway it would have really been bad- the whole load sort of rotates rearward until it drags on the ground.

I keep a few pieces of scrap metal, a fine-toothed sawsall blade and a file in the front pack for repairs like this.  It’s actually the second time I’ve fixed it this trip and was really in need of a better repair at the first opportunity.   I found a weld shop in the town of Vicum.  Rodolfo, the owner, had a stronger piece steel strap to replace what I had on hand.  My explanation to him of the problem was probably as wrongly worded as it was superfluous- he knew what to do right off and did a great fix.  He didn’t see any need to be payed and I made him take $10.   This was quite different than with a guy at a tire shop a couple of weeks earlier that extorted $10 to lend me a 3/8″ drive ratchet (I had the socket) to tighten a crank arm to the bottom bracket spindle.  With this guy, I was standing there with my wallet open trying to understand how much he wanted and he reached in and grabbed a US $10 bill!  Two ends of the spectrum there- no different than home, I guess.

After Vicum is a 35 mile stretch to Obregon, a city of 300 thousand.  The cities of Obregon and Novajoa, 50 miles further south, are fully modern cities and contrast sharply from other towns thus far which have had  more “Old Mexico” centers surrounded by fast food and box stores thrown up at the outskirts.  Many businesses would be familiar anywhere in the US.

Cars here are generally late-model and would probably pass emissions in the US; however, a fair percentage of the older ones tend to belch smoke.  Building-lined, narrow streets in the cities trap the exhaust and the air there can really be bad.  Recycling doesn’t appear to exist on the surface but it’s said that they separate it out at the landfills.  And you’ll see people walking the highways in the middle of nowhere picking up aluminum cans.

I had coffee and quiche in an Crumb Brothers-like coffee shop in Novajoa, The Los Alamos Café, that served espresso, latte, cappuccino and anything you’d find at Starbucks.  A group of cyclists came into the café and were instantly curious about me, having seen the loaded bike outside. I gave the same broken Spanish answers to things like “paraundiba” (para donde va- where ya headed- never could find paraundiba in the dictionary and finally had to ask somebody to write it out). It turned out one of them spoke English and I finally had the satisfaction of a reciprocal conversation with someone and learned many things about the surroundings that I would have otherwise blown past. His name was Jorge (“hoargay”) and the group was employees of a cooking oil manufacturer out for a Saturday ride and coffee. The scene could have been in France or Italy. The oil appears to be safflower, and is grown locally from a thistle-type plant that may be called aceites del mayo. The name of the company is Oleico and is seen on Jorge’s jersey.

 

Soon the café owner, Alfredo and coffee roaster Fernanado came out and introduced themselves and we talked for a half-an-hour in very understandable English.  They left me with a hat with the Los Alamos logo on it.  Fernando is getting ready to take a trip to Ethiopia on coffee business.  These guys are thriving.

The ride from Novajoa to Los Mochis took two nights, each spent in beautiful desert camps where plants and birds are becoming less and less recognizable.  Saw parakeets and a woodpecker that looked like a Gila.

 

 

More road repair pushed me onto the now familiar   construction zones that seem to be laid out in 10 mile blocks.   There is always a decision to be made about what’s rideable and when you have to get off and push.   Riding one rocky stretch I finally gave myself a flat and pushed the bike to the nearest shade to work on it.  I shared the spot with Felix Lopez who was assembling reinforcement rebar for a concrete bridge abutment.   We communicated as best we could about tires, road construction and weather while I changed the tire.   He lived nearby and soon his family walked up to bring him lunch.  They shared with me an awesome bowl of minestrone-type soup and fresh corn tortillas.

The next milestone was crossing into the state of  Sinaloa and onto the city of Los Mochis.   On the last leg into town a man pulled along side and started to tell me something in the the usual blur of words that more and more I respond to with a sheepish “como?”  He pointed to the horizontally-laid, orange stuff sack that rides over my panniers.  The drawstring had come loose and it was now half empty.  Then I understood him perfectly “Señor, your shit’s scattered from hell to breakfast all along the highway”.  Thanks to him I recovered everything.  It’s not the first time Mexicans have saved me from myself.

May 3rd, 2016

Crossing into Mexico was relatively straight forward.  I hadn’t done much homework regarding up-to-date requirements for visas and so forth, and was a little apprehensive of  how post 911 world changes had affected Mexico- it’s been nearly 15 years since I’ve been down here.   One Spanish lady as far back as Nephi, of all places, warned that a visa needed to be obtained well in advance.  Hmm.  At the crossing, the border guards weren’t too concerned and it took a couple of attempts to explain to them I was going farther than the “frontera” , i.e. border towns.  They finally directed me to the adjacent immigration office.   When I began explaining my plans in very poor Spanish, the uniformed lady helping me began to shake her head.  My heart sank.  But then as she shook it she said “no problema, puedes ir (you can go)” or something like that.  Off I went.   Then a guard caught up to me after a hundred feet or so and told me to come back in.  My heart sank.  A collection of folks were by then standing around me, none spoke English, but I understood that they thought I said Wallmart, not Guatamala.  More sinking.  But it was OK, I just had to throw down $40 American for a 6 month visa, half of which I may get back when I leave.  She filled out two lines on postcard-sized form, I signed it and once again, off I went.   With that, it would appear that getting into Mexico is easier now than when I was last here.   In previous trips there has always been a sort of second border you crossed 30 or 40 miles into the country and that’s where you were asked specific questions on where you were going and for how long.   I’ve passed no such station thus far (~300 miles).

Navigating Mexican (Heroic) Nogales wasn’t fun, but taco stands and restaurants with Wi-Fi were plentiful.  As I was leaving town the wind had really picked up as well as the truck traffic.  Shoulder became nonexistent.  The wind and semi blasts made keeping the bike in a straight line almost impossible and excessive weaving……..well, I don’t even want to think about that.   Next hotel I passed I checked in to and stayed in a very clean room for about $35.

Next morning in diminished wind and much lighter traffic I started.   Several small towns are found over the next 50 or so miles so I was able to restaurant hop and keep the gross vehicle weight down.   After the town of Santa Anna though, there is a hundred mile stretch that appeared to have no services at all.  It was difficult to get info from the locals because they just didn’t understand what I was asking.  Their reply would always be that Hermosillo was the next town, but what I was interested in is where I would find the next water.   So, I pretty much planned for the worst, but did find gas stations with attached 7-eleven-type stores every 30 miles or so.

After the hotel at the outskirts of H. Nogales I took two nights to get to Hermosillo.  Did one 72 mile day and one 83.   I was pretty worked after the latter, but the miles were reasonably easy- a light headwind in places but fairly flat.   The road shoulders for the most part were very good, but in some places where there was construction going on, they could be unnerving.  On one stretch of non-existent shoulder that had an undermined, vertical drop off for ten feet, I transferred to the construction side.   It was a  Sunday, no one was working, and I had two lanes and a shoulder of freshly laid concrete all to myself for a few miles.

The campsites for this leg were good if  a bit prickly.   But the animal della dia would have to go to the ant (hormiga!).  E.O. Wilson would of had a heyday.  I doubt he’s ever seen this many of them at one time.  And one type of the little buggers really stood out.  I probably should have pitched the tent, but this one little bastard was so small he would have walked right through the netting.   They didn’t bite, but they stank.  They’d go right to any food source and the phormic acid trails had a definite odor to it that wasn’t pleasant.   After the 83 mile day it was all I could do to lay the tarp and pad out under the shade of a paloverdi and take a nap.  Within minutes I was woken up by masses of them- and no nests/hills in site.  But, thanks to my friend Brad in Flagstaff, I had a solution.   He recommended that I get a lavender concentrate at a health food store for defense against bed bugs once in Central America, which I did.   I splashed a few drops of that around on the tarp and it really works.  At least it knocked them back to a tolerable level.

I had only a few miles to ride the following morning to Hermosillo.   After a meal and grocery shopping I started out on another 80 mile stretch to Guaymas.  I would pick away at 40 that evening and do the last 40 early the the following morning.   After Hermosillo the wide shoulder disappeared and though the traffic was slightly lighter, things were far less enjoyable.

Towards evening I came to a roadside cantina.  They seem to appear every 30 or so miles and are used a lot by the truckers.   This one served food, but I just got a cold soda and a rest and then knocked down the last few miles to a camp site.   But leaving the cantina I did the unthinkable and left my pack.  Got 4 miles before I noticed.   I got all the bags off the bike,  threw them in some bushes, and sprinted in diminishing light back to the cantina.   The pack was there waiting for me but I had an exciting ride back to my stuff as darkness set in.   I had just enough light to get everything to a campsite set back from the highway and away from any cholla.  Lavender needed once again.

Next day road construction was encountered and occurred on and off for half the remaining distance to Guaymas.   All traffic was once again shunted to one side for two-way traffic while work was done on the other. Without shoulder, riding the bike in two-way traffic was less a question of danger than a flat-out impossibility.   There was no question as to whether I would even attempt it.  I had no choice but to pick my way through the construction zones, which meant being sometimes on dirt, sometimes good concrete, sometimes pushing the bike up and down mounds of freshly dumped road base.  The workers weren’t especially sympathetic- they probably have it worse than me- but would give an occasional wave and yell something that I would yell right back at them if only I had a better handle on the language.   Tough day,  tough duty for the bike.  But I’m in Guaymas.