life @ 13

poor mexico. too close to the united states and too far from god

last time i checked in i think i was somewhere in the middle of my 9-day tenure in zacatecas. somewhere around day seven things started to get interesting. the whole week consisted of drinking (cantinas, corona factories), shooting the shit on the terrace, and generally enjoying the really cool hostel there. tons of people to meet from everywhere including a couple of guys from wisconsin out on a "spiritual mission" in the mexican desert. to keep the story short i'll just say that i was just about ready to take myself and the bike on a bus to laredo tx and hop on the greyhound bus i'd booked for monday the 26th. but that didn't happen, mostly because i was convinced that going home early was a bad idea. which i'm now really certain turned out to be incredibly true. i decided that me and biking in latin america had been worn out by that time, so out of good will and getting rid of dead weight i gave my bike to the hostel and got a few free nights and free internet in return.
so sunday afternoon me and zack, a quietly kerouackian type guy from new mexico, hopped a bus to fresnillo, the next town north, with the intent of wandering through the mountains and backroads to mazatlan. our plan was to hitchhike from fresnillo to mazatlan, which was almost entirely successful, and in almost every way exceded my expectations. the next 4 days can be drawn out into a really long story but i'll carve out the highlights
1. we took about 13 rides in 4 days, most of which were in the backs of pickup trucks
2. the first night we slept (froze our asses off) outside under the stars in somebody's ranch near fresnillo
3. discovered how ridiculously easy it is to hitchhike back roads in mexico (everyone stops)
4. were treated to some spectacular scenery in the sierra madres (desert to forrest in less than an hour), climbing from about 4000 to 12000 feet no less than three times in three days
5. i got to drive someone's truck for 5 hours
6. shared some beers and conversation in spanish with some guys at a little store in the middle of nowhere
7. hitched a ride with the general store delivery truck and got to experience and be stared at in a tiny huichol (indingenous people) village.
8. got lots of briuses from being thrown around on the really nasty roads
9. survived off quesadillas

and that's just the shit i can remember right now, sitting in a really slow internet cafe on an island near mazatlan. but the last few days were easily the best, roughist and most rewarding part of the trip so far. people were incredibly friendly, especially considering that they never see travellers there.
so we actually managed to meet our friends from zacatecas in mazatlan, which was really cool since we had a lot to talk about. life moves very slowly here, with tourists visiting from mazatlan during the day and the island being almost entirely deserted at night. but i'm pretty much ready to get moving again, probably back to laredo where my ticket is still good for another 9 days.

passing

the days are flying by here in zacatecas. feeling pretty worn out by cycling and colonial mexico and latin america in general, i've been more than happy to do absolutely nothing for 5 days. the hostel here is nice, with use of a full kitchen and lots of people to chat with. i'll probably leave tomorrow for saltillo, a 375k ride or a day's hitchhike, supposedly very easy to do.

what did i tell you about riding your bike at night?

at this point i'm not entirely sure what pearls of knowledge i've gleaned from my akward traverse of northern latin america, but today i did learn that when a nosy whore wearing clown makeup shows up at your door looking for conversation, this is the best time to excercise your right to not understand any spanish. funny things happen in cheap hotels.
so i was planning to make a short 45k trek from guanajuato to leon a couple days ago, but somewhere along the line i decided that i should push on to make for an easier next day. that did not happen. about 122k into the day and 30 mins. before dark i was informed by a wandering poet (whom i gave 4 pesos and half of my peanut butter) that there was no town for another 30k, which turned out to be almost correct. unable to choke down any more peanut butter, i pressed on slowly, eventually caught a second wind, and made it to the next town a good 90 minutes after dark. riding around the suburbs of madison after dark is one thing, but the highways and two-lane roads of the desert are another. but i made it ok, and learned several lessons in the process (like have extra food and water for the wandering poets).
i'm still working my way back, somewhat determined to do it all on the bike. however the forecast doesn't look too promising, and i'm not the kind of person who enjoys biking through thunderstorms.

(in your best falsetto)
you can try the best you can, if you try the best you can, the best you can is good enough
(or)
"work is for people with jobs"

at this particular moment i find myself tromping around coloniel mexico, which feels much more like eurpoe than mexico, and spends in similar fashion. apparently most of the towns i've been to (queretaro, celaya), the one i'm in now (guanajuato) and the next few (leon, aguascalientes, zacatecas) are wealthy not so much from tourist dollars but from silver mining. which is somewhat plesant, because although there is a fair amount of catering to tourists these towns (big cities, some of them) feel rich but real. guanajuato in particular is very polished.
biking the past few days has been tough. spent much of the past few days going straight at 20mph (30 kph) sustained winds, with distances of 70 and 110k but average speeds barely over 16 kph, which means i've been spending a good time sitting on my little swiss wedge of a bike seat begging the road to bend to the right. i thought about inventing a new ratio -- distance to average speed -- but quickly realized that it was um, concieved, several billion years ago.
the weather here is damn near perfect, with daytime highs in the upper 70s and cooling off to around 50 at night. if i plan it all correctly, i should be able to keep this up as i head north to and above the border, and of course then some.
overall, me and latin america are at a standoff, and one of us is going to have to start heading the other direction. but i think we all knew this because it's happening already. at this point i feel that most everything i'm capable of taking with me is already stuffed somewhere in my head, bag, or intestines. the next few days i'm going to hop from coloniel city to coloniel city (why can't they all be like leon, nicaragua?), which i'm expecting to be pretty uneventful. however there is a 375k stretch from zacatecas to saltillo which seems to be mostly uninhabited and my best chance to experience rural mexico, or at least to finally use my hammock i've been dragging around since san salvador.

hello. we're in deleware.

had a plesant if not noisy ride today along autopista 55 to queretaro. 111k, 23.1 km/hr. saw a bunch of bikers apparently making some similar sort of tour of mexico, except they had a couple of support vans to carry all their shit for them. which made me dream and maybe drool a little, but since they were barely going any faster than me and had inferior cadences, i felt ok.
queretaro has by far the cleanest city center i've seen this trip. i feel like i'm in rhode island or something, which is at least unexpected being in the milddle of mexico. but perceptions are usually wrong anyway, and i can already feel them changing. if i can find a cheap place to stay i might kick around for a day, if anything to enjoy the food.

it's always something. fortunately it's not everything at once

i think i'm through the worst of it here. yesterday i started around 10:30, biked about 15k to get out of the worst of the traffic, stopped at a mall and had a cinnabon (because the rain at 8000 feet is cold), biked about 2k before the rain got bad again, hid under an overpass with a few local kids for an hour, started biking again but got caught in sleet, was forced onto the non-toll road (more traffic, no shoulder) by the attendant, had my crank arm fall off 3 times (no bike shops on the highway), and then enjoyed a breezy descent (first 35k all uphill) through mexico's largest industrial district (sans roger moore) into toluca, where the cheapest hotel i could find was $20 a night. 73k, about 15km/hr average.
but today was much better. the roads leading out of toluca were flat and straight, and at some point i snuck onto the toll autopista (highway), which is well graded and has a nice fat curb lane. about 90k into the day i was feeling a little tired and out of shape and had about 60k to go until the next town, so i'm stopped here, except i don't know where here is. but they do have a couple of hotels ($8/night) and internet. i think i'm about three days away from guanajunto, the nearest town on the gringo trail, which is supposed to be a cool mexican university town.
i'm getting much more comfortable speaking spanish even though it's really not improving at all. but it's good enough to make really basic conversations, which is a long way from where it was 6 weeks ago. at this point i figure that if i really want to learn spanish the best way would be in an exchange for teaching someone english. which would be cool to do here, but i could do it almost anywhere in the US for free (while i'm making not hemmoraging money).
i think i'm going to like mexico. i'm just starting to get away from the heavily populated and industralized areas, and the people are changing pretty rapidly as well. mexico seems much less distant from the west at large, mexicans seem to have the greatest understanding of the US and the american way of life, and tequilla is cheap. and i might even try and drink some tonight for my 3 month aniversery. complemeses feliz

buscamos uno barro con mamacitas sin ropas -jeff to the cops in guatemala city

is there any coincidence that the mexico city bicycle shop strip shares the street with the local hoes? i'm not going to insinuate anything (because there is nothing to insinuate), but we can all think about it for a while and maybe come up with something. i think the liquor stores were on a diffent strip, anyway.
so i'm a little excited because i finally broke down and bought a bike computer (needed one for home anyway), so now we're all going to get decimal gritty accuracy on the mexico leg of the trip. also picked up a new tire and a new quick-release front basket, whose design is some combination of goofy, stupid, genius, and useful. reminds me of some people i know. paid $4 to see the city from the top of a 42-story building here, which was cool although not necessairly wirth $4. getting lost looking for bookstores with english books (didn't happen) was more fun.
so something will happen tomorrow, and i will go somewhere, hopefully not the hospital. actually the traffic here is pretty sane compared to saint salvador, but think good thoughts.

immuseable

mexico city is a cool place. i've spent two days here getting lost and eating out of street stalls -- very cool. the central area of mexico city feels very modern and western compared to just about everywhere in central america. compared to the US (coasts?), each country exudes the folliwing characteristics:

guatemala: stuck in the 1850s, but the natives still make up half the population.
el salvador: trying to skip from the 1850s to 1980 with some success and lots of busses
nicaragua: stuck in the 1950s but quite content to be there
mexico city: stuck in the 1970s and seemingly trying to catch up with the rest of the west
belize: stuck on the north american continent, hoping for an earthquake that will help it break off and join a carribean island.

...at least that's what i was pondering today, for what it's worth.
today i took the subway to the "velodrome" stop, where there was a velodrome but nobody there, so i went to a park and watched some pickup basketball games and most of a soccer match until i fell asleep. then i remembered hearing from someone in the hostel that "this place that starts with xoc..." is a good place to hang out, with gardens and stuff. so i scraped up 2 pesos for a subway ride, then another 2 pesos for a train ride to the gardens, which apparently are only accessible by boat, which you had to pay for. since i just had an excellent lunch of two giant cheese-taco things, i was content to walk around the town, get lost, use the internet for a couple of hours, and make my way back to the city center.
tomorrow i'm going to finally get ready to leave. as much as i like this city i think after another day i'll have had my fill. that and i'm easily spending $25 a say, almost 3x as much as nicaragua. i'm going to ride 60k to toluca, crossing a pass to get out of the basin here. toluca is the higest city in central america at about 8700 feet, much to the dismay of my nose. but i think cycling here will be much more enjoyable, as the climate is much more temperate, and i have an extra two hours of sun.
i had to leave some bike parts behind in san jose (souvenirs for pablo at TACA) so i'm going to try and replace them. supposedly there are some cool bike shops in town. and maybe, just maybe i'll drop 75 cent for a couple new pair of socks.

every time i come around your city bling, bling

among all the "you should have been theres" that you should have been there for, my arguments with the TACA manager and the eventual packaging of my bicycle (two tiny boxes and well over a roll of packaging tape) top the list. my reality tv show ratings would have sored, and the climax where migration is reopened for me to make it on the flight keeps even the most dedicated channel surfers through the commercials (for clean socks, unripped pants, and post-1970 technology bicycles?).
although my decision was on a whim, i don't think i'm going to regret spending the next month or so in mexico. at least i won't regret the weather. the city is a world apart from anything else i've seen so far -- where else can you take a $.18 subway to the front door of walmart? san jose was OK, similar in theme to other latin american capitals but much cleaner and thus more boring. furthermore, it's home base for a gaggle of (mostly american) beach and ecotourist vacationers, so i went from having the country to myself to sharing it with other not-necessairly-like-minded people.
so now i'm going to
1. hang around the big (big) city a few days, probably wandering around on the subway
2. take the 35 pieces that are my bike and turn them back into one
3. figure out how the hell i'm going to escape this city
4. go north
5. kill the amoebas with tequilla if the drugs don't work
6. ?????????
7. return back to the land of cheap chololate