Travel and culture
Well, the experiment with posting something every week lasted about eight weeks. But I do have something that I hope will make up for it: an excerpt from (still tentatively titled) The Guest! A few months back a small online literary magazine that appears to be based in Britain (though they didn’t correct my American… Continue reading Book Report
I have been working — steadily and oh-so-slowly — on a book about the time I tried and (spoiler alert!) failed to ride a bicycle named Baxter from Canada to Argentina. Many of you probably remember me writing about that journey on this very blog. As that book is now nearing completion, I have a few things to report...
Kilometres: 12,754 Time it took to cycle from San Francisco to San Salvador: Eight months Time it took to fly from San Salvador back to San Francisco: Three hours and forty-five minutes Our team consisted of Robert B, Christoph the German and myself. We had two days' worth of supplies, a reasonable morsel of intelligence and… Continue reading Antigua – San Salvador: End of the Line
Kilometres: 12,300 or so New countries: 2 Size of Guatemala if you were to stretch it out and flatten all the hills: Probably enough to cover the Pacific Ocean "After all this," said Rob when I left him in Tuxtla Gutierrez for a two-month break from Baxter, "you're either going to be really excited to… Continue reading Cancun – Antigua: Gringos in Guatemala and Breezy Belize
Kilometres: 11,457 Oaxacan beaches visited: all of them Litres sweated: 11,457 We awoke with throbbing heads and unhappy guts in a Puerto Escondido hostel, and after a brief farewell Simon was gone. He took with him his trout (Simon-speak for "chat"), his charming smile and his invariably sunny disposition, and immediately thoughts turned to getting… Continue reading Puerto Escondido – Tuxtla Gutierrez: Oaxaca Beach Cruising
Kilometres: Ten thousand-ish Times we cooked with pool water: 2 Times Simon reminded us we cooked with pool water on his second night on the road: 242 Well, once more I've left it far too long to write. When I left you all I was still in big bad Mexico City. Cities, I've realised, do… Continue reading Mexico City – Puerto Escondido: Downhill all the way to the coast
The road east into San Luis de la Paz, Guanajuato does not give a good first impression. Dust wreathes Highway 57 to the west as it rumbles towards Mexico City and tattered plastic adorns the cacti. A ditch by the road into town snags tumbleweeds as they bounce their way across the desert floor and it's… Continue reading Luis the Cycling Patriarch of San Luis de la Paz
Kilometres: 9833 Mexican states: 13/32 Pre-jungle insect bites: 0 Post-jungle insect bites: approx. 345,423 "I'm dirty and salty and damn it feels good to be a cyclist again," I wrote with distressingly bad grammar on the first night after we left Guadalajara. From the very start of this trip, hosts and acquaintances in big cities… Continue reading Guadalajara – Mexico City: To the Huasteca and back again
Kilometres: About 8500 Movie nights in the tent: 7 or 8 Deaths wished upon roosters late at night: several hundred Regretful Quintens after an afternoon at the cockfights: 1 As the days went by, La Paz began filling with cyclists. For those of us heading deeper into Mexico, the marinas promised the chance of catching… Continue reading La Paz – Guadalajara: Mainland Meyheeko
We pick our way through the pick-up trucks crammed into a dusty side street and hand thirty pesos (AUD$2.50) to the girl at the gate. Her eyes are bright as she welcomes us in and we step into a walled-off lot of scrappy grass, a third of which is taken up by a building that was… Continue reading Ramiro the Cockfighter
