Travel and culture
Last week, we started a two-part series where I tried to wrap my feeble mind around an evolving fixation on borders. We started with grandiose adventures across the somewhat meaningless boundary between Queensland and New South Wales, followed by the thoroughly underwhelming frontiers in Europe and the more exciting crossing further east. Iran/Armenia, 2014 We… Continue reading Post Cards From The Borders, Part Two
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
If it isn't already, the village of Santa Ana will soon be absorbed into Mexico City. It overlooks the metropolis from a hillside above what by night becomes a terrestrial galaxy pooled on the floor of the Valle de Mexico, lapping at the foothills around the patches of darkness that betray the high places. Agustín Melo lives… Continue reading Agustín, The Migrant Who Returned
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
Kilometres: 7494 Tommy's "Taco-ed" Wheels: 2 Crashes: 1 We spent three days in Guerrero Negro in the end, haunting the eateries and internet cafes and returning to the local soccer stadium by night to sleep. A group of seven American cyclists - dubbed the "Seattle Seven" by the rest of us - stuck around for… Continue reading Guerrero Negro – La Paz: To the Bottom of the Baja
Kilometres: 6620 Tacos eaten: About 6620 Towns named "Rosarito": 2 New countries: 1 Well, I found Bobby B. Black aka Roberto Negro outside an apartment I was couchsurfing at one afternoon, fresh and stoked from riding over two days down from LAX to San Diego. How very strange to see him in the Americas once… Continue reading San Diego – Guerrero Negro: Welcome to Mexico!