Tuesday 20 April 2010

12,200 - 13,200 miles: Manzanillo to La Barra (The Pacific to The Gulf)

After so long amongst slim, healthy Asians what first caught our attention was not the colonial architecture or brightly painted buildings but the enormous size of the Mexicans. They were fat, really fat, like they had been inflated. A diet of fried food, ice cream and beer and a reluctance to break sweat (they have drive thru convenience stores) has produced one of the world´s fattest nations.



On our part its fair to say that having only cycled 200 miles in nearly 2 months we had lost our fitness as well as our sanity. A fact that became apparent a couple of hours into our ascent of the Western Sierras, when at the top of a rise on a humid morning Tracey was so red in the face I thought a heart attack was imminent. We had decided against a leisurely ride south alongside the blissful beaches, breaking waves and tropical sunsets of the Pacific coast in favour of a jaunt through the mountains. It would be the toughest riding of our trip.


Having come from the bleak mid-winter of northern Asia the pacific slope of Mexico was like a tropical paradise. Huge colourful butterflies and trees of red, yellow and blue distracted us from our burning muscles and at days end we jumped in a cool freshwater swimming pool and camped amongst trees with parakeets and hummingbirds. Though the return to developing world poverty was also a shock.



The vehicle of choice for rural Mexicans is a gas guzzling pick-up truck the size of a Japanese bus. The Highway is a veritable museum of Ford´s, Chevies and Dodge´s from ancient rust buckets held together with bits of rope through to the latest gleaming models, all come replete with at least one rather windblown/cold/dusty looking passenger in the back. Luckily Mexico is one of the world´s largest oil producers and the state monopoly Pemex dishes out gasoline at 8 pesos a litre (about 40p).



It is possible that the rest of this blog might read like the following days´ride: We spent all morning toiling up a quiet mountain road, stopping occasionally to refuel on nuts and raisins, after numerous false summits, just when we were running out of oxygen, strength and hope we reached a pass and sped down the other side at 30mph, dodging potholes, sun on our faces, wind through our hair, stealing glances at the majestic scenery of the Sierras. As we rode along roosters crowed, donkeys hee-hawed, grackles whistled and always in the distance was the sound of a brass band record. We passed through a national park in whose depths jaguars and pumas still roamed and we sought lunch in a small, dusty village with stone cobbles so big it was impossible to ride the bikes and we ate tasty bread rolls of black beans, white cheese and chillies in the yard of a friendly lady's house while schoolchildren in uniform stole curious glances and giggled. In the distance a snow-capped volcano smoldered and as we made our way into the city of Colima a cloud of vultures hung over a giant pyramid shaped rubbish dump. Although we were never quite sure how to navigate the city´s narrow one-way streets it didn´t really matter as all cobbled roads eventually led to the pleasant palm filled colonial plaza, the town hall decorated in a mural with a topless woman and a helpful tourist lady who dispensed maps and directions to cheap hotels.




Mexican town plazas were something of a highlight. Identical, timeless squares lined with shady colonial archways and painted churches around a neat park with palms and benches with teenagers making out. In the centre a lovely wrought-iron bandstand where once a week in the early evening the town's brass band belts out latin classics and elderly couples salsa and swing in their best outfits. Where clowns perform their circus skills, jokes and magic to families with young children and vendors hawk sweets, cigarettes and toys and men have their shoes shined.


The next morning we rode uphill for 20 miles towards Mexico´s most active volcano, Volcan Fuego, which periodically erupted clouds of smoke. It was another hot, tough day for Tracey who grew increasingly frustrated by the unrideable cobbles in the picturesque white-washed villages we paused in on the way. At lunch I was to learn the limitations of my spanish. I ordered Sope Gordo, expecting a filling soup I was instead served a local speciality - a soaked tortilla with lumps of duck fat on top. By late afternoon we reached a campsite with stunning views of the volcanoes looming above us and we sipped beer containing ice, salt, lime and chilli at a cafe with a wonderful view back down the valley with the ridges of the sierra in the hazy orange glow of the setting sun and the sweat and toil of getting there was forgotten.




We spent most of the following day going up and down as we skirted around the volcano and then found ourselves swooping down hairpin bends into some interesting dry canyon country. As we were to quickly discover, great getting into them, not so much fun getting out. It was also our first inkling that perhaps Mexicans might not be the most logical of road builders (after several weeks toiling needlessly up and down hillsides we did come to understand their logic; they had been too poor to build big bridges so they had no choice but to take the roads higher up the hillsides where the rivers were smaller). We also became acquainted with the scourge of the Mexican highway: American style trucks fitted with "engine brakes" which when used make them the noisiest vehicles on any highway in the world and at a range of 30cm loud enough to make you deaf. These brakes are generally used for the dozens of very annoying speed bumps used in every village to slow traffic and enable the locals to sell food and drink to passing motorists.








Along Mexican roadsides every 10 metres or so is a pile of rubbish with a sign asking that people do not dump rubbish. One could conclude that these signs are just adding to the rubbish but most Mexicans seem to be getting the message and using the latin american equivalent of the municipal waste site - the local river. This is not as bad as it sounds as the river also functions as the sewage and industrial waste system.


In between the piles of rubbish the roadside was also littered with thousands of crosses and shrines dedicated to loved ones who had died in road accidents. It wasn´t just the number of these that was tragic but their location: How did they manage to crash on a totally straight quiet country road with not even a bush to obscure their vision? In some countries drink driving is a problem, whereas in Mexico drinking WHILE driving is a fairly common sight. To ensure you don´t sober up when you stop for food you are nearly always offered beer or tequila before you even get a menu. When we declined we were sometimes met with such shocked expressions that we felt the need to point out we were exercising on bicycles, which seemed to reassure them we weren´t weirdy teetotallers or something. Whilst staying on the tarmac seemed to be something of a challenge for Mexican drivers we found their driving towards us was generally courteous.




By the afternoon we finally reached a wide, flat valley and hammered out quick miles through endless fields of sugarcane, one of which was our home for the night. The Mexican road atlas is pretty good but unfortunately in one of the hilliest places in the world, it lacks relief. Thus when we set out on a sunny morning not only did we not know that it was Valentine´s Day but we had no idea that what lay ahead was 10 miles uphill in granny gear. At the end of the climb we were 2km higher than sea-level, in cool air amongst shady pine trees and the intense but beautiful light of the high sierra. Friendly families on Sunday outings from Guadalajara waved at us from huge 4x4s. Seemingly no sooner had we reached the pines than we dropped down into an enormous high plains landscape of cactus scrub, weathered volcanoes and ranches with men on horseback - it was like the scenery in the closing stages of "The Good The Bad and The Ugly". The endless straight roads were littered with the reeking corpses of roadkill skunks and after cycling uphill for 4 days on a bike weighing more than 50 kilos my legs were finished and we made camp amongst the cacti and cows. The stars shone brightly and the temperature plummeted enough to be wearing a furry hat to bed.

We continued up and down through the plains on a gorgeous sunny day with a beautiful blue sky. At a junction somewhat in the middle of nowhere we asked a police patrol for lunch recommendations. Infamous for being corrupt they were surprisingly helpful and when we passed them later on they gave us a police escort, riding behind us for several miles up a hill to ensure traffic had to go wide around us - completely unnecessary but quite nice all the same.

Understandably everyone thought we were Americans, some simply asking which state we were from. Knowledge of the concept of "Britain" was almost non-existent with most Mexicans thinking this was a state in the US or Canada. We worked out that England and Scotland were more widely understood, though not by children who just looked perplexed. Having travelled such a long way and seemingly quite close to home we found it hard to relate to the way most Mexicans saw Europe as being on the other side of the world and their utter amazement that anyone without a moustache wasn´t north american.

The following day, fuelled on a breakfast of "huevos rancheros" at the local market we left the pleasant colonial town of Zamora and headed east. Tracey stopped along the Highway to buy a crate of strawberries which although very cheap seemed a bit excessive. We paused for lunch in the village of Chilchota which had lovely old colonial buildings in the latin american style, with thick walls, high ceilings and huge overhanging clay tiled eaves. There were lots of native Mexicans and the women were wearing traditional shin length skirts with laces and embroidery and brightly coloured tops and colourful ponchos. By mid-afternoon my legs were about as much use as my gran`s and we laboured past some very poor looking villages and brightly decorated graveyards before finding a camp spot behind some bushes next to an unremarkable ploughed field.




It starting raining in the early hours and was still pouring when we woke. We waited for it to stop, and waited, and ate a crate of strawberries, and waited, and ate our peanut stash and waited some more and then night fell and in the morning it was still raining and we had no food left so we packed up in the wet and cold, when of course it stopped raining and we could see it had snowed on the tops of the hills around us.

We stopped for a hot coffee and lunch in the town of Zacapu which seemed to have the highest concentration of shifty looking Mexicans in the country - and few nations do shifty as well as Mexico. That afternoon we dried out on the manicured lawn of a plush but unoccupied holiday villa overlooking Lake Patzcuaro where a kindly caretaker had let us camp the night for free. It was a lovely spot with pretty flowers and brightly coloured birds. Further east we spent several pleasurable sunny days resting our weary legs in the beautiful colonial city of Morelia before continuing towards Mexico City.



We thought we were on the main highway but as we climbed and climbed and the traffic reduced to almost nothing it was apparent that we were not. At the last village of any note we stopped at a wooden shack of a restaurant with a great view and ate tasty quesadillas with homemade salsas and crunchy fried tortillas. After that we climbed upwards for hours, into the pines, past people collecting drinking water from a mountain spring, the view south across the sierras on our right growing forever vaster. We reached the pass at over 3,000 masl and the air was thin and cold and we wrapped up in jackets and gloves for the descent. After negotiating a barbed-wire fence and hauling all our gear up a hillside away from the road it was all I could do to cook dinner and fall into my sleeping bag exhausted.

We were making our way to the Butterfly Sanctuary near Angangueo but had heard that the town and roads had been washed away in a flash flood, so we weren´t sure what we would find. After a hot day riding along a wide valley we reached the outskirts of Angangueo where there were truck loads of military and medical relief teams and a subdued atmosphere. The town stretched quite steeply uphill along the bottom of a narrow river valley and as we rode towards the plaza the level of damage worsened - the roads had been washed apart, culverts over the river had collapsed, two shops were destroyed, many buildings were still without services and the whole place had been limed to prevent the spread of disease. The landlady of a guesthouse invited us in as we passed and gave us a discounted rate on an upstairs room due to the fact they were in the middle of sorting through the debris of what was once their livelihood. The watermark in their courtyard was a metre up the wall and when I commented on this I was amazed that she said it was "nothing really". As we continued uphill the next morning it became clear why she had responded so stoically. The upper part of town was a disaster zone; whole rows of houses had been reduced to rubble, crushed cars lay overturned, a landslide had swept down one hillside destroying two houses, the road was gone. Gangs of workmen in masks were in the process of clearing it up. Open mouthed we pushed our bikes past the ruins of people´s lives.



Once we got out of the valley and back to tarmac the road was so steep we continued pushing, but as it was closed to traffic we had the pines, sun, blue sky and views all to ourselves. Up a dirt track at 2 miles above sea level we reached the reserve entrance and a guide led us along a forest track for an hour to see the amazing natural spectacle of millions of orange, black and white monarch butterflies emerging from their winter hibernation amongst the towering pine trees. They were mating in mid-air and afterwards the males fell to the floor to die and the females began their 3,000 mile migration back to the Great Lakes region of North America - a journey not so dissimilar to ours and over the coming weeks they would accompany us north along the Gulf coast into Texas.




We camped that night next to a Forest Police outpost close to the reserve. It was a clear, starry night and there was ice on our tent in the morning. We glided along through the cool mountain air, sunlight filtering through the pine forest, no-one else on the road, past the occasional rustic hamlet and then sped downhill for miles on a great new road. Unfortunately when we got to the bottom we discovered it was the wrong road and a 20 mile detour up an down hills in a foul mood in the heat of the day ensued. Once back on track we found ourselves in a very different landscape - a high, brown, treeless plateau with countless smallholdings dotted with mudbrick shacks with tin rooves inhabited by native Mexicans. I was astonished how similar it was to the altiplanos of Peru and Boliva. It didn´t feel like the safest place in the world to pitch a tent so we opted for a cheap motel, a cold beer and an evening stroll around the plaza in San Felipe del Progresso.

The smog from thousands of wood burning stoves lay in the valley on a sunny morning as we made our way east past farmers surfing on wooden ploughs being dragged behind horses and cows. We neared Mexico City on a minor road but every time we asked directions people tried to direct us the long way around via the highway. Late in the afternoon as we rode higher and higher up a mountain we realised why. We entered the pines again, the traffic disappeared and potholes proliferated. The air became thin and our legs like rubber and we made camp on a ledge above the road. At night we looked down on the lights of the city of Toluca as if from a plane, as indeed these were flying around below us as well.

In the morning we continued uphill for a couple more hours, the road and mountain silence all to ourselves. At the pass there was snow on the ground - we had reached what would be the highest point on our trip: 3,570 masl. In the mountain air, surrounded by nature it was almost unimaginable that down the other side lay one of the world´s largest cities, home to 20 million people, and that within two hours we would be riding terrified on a 10 lane highway of speeding traffic past barrios stretching up the hillsides. It took a couple more hours to make our way to the southern suburbs where we met Ismael and Caty a Mexican/Columbian couple who had agreed to host us through the Warm Showers website. We followed the irrepressible Ismael, towing his dog in a cycle trailer and blowing a whistle at the traffic, to their flat in the Tlapan district.




While they went to work we went sightseeing around the city and to the awesome pre-hispanic pyramids at Teotihuacan. The night of our departure I dropped my camera trying to take a photo of us all, so we had to stay another day while I got it fixed. Ismael and Caty wanted to ride out of the city with us and their Cyclovida friends so we stayed another day to wait for the weekend. On the day in question we were all packed and ready to go when Tracey broke a tooth eating breakfast. At this point Caty grew wings and became an angel, phoning around dentists to find one open on a saturday that would see Tracey, driving us across the city, translating what the dentist was saying and accompanying Tracey into the operating room when she had to have it removed (my grasp of spanish dentist vocabulary stops at the words for "tooth" and "pain"). Tracey was in a state of shock, drugged and told not to do any exercise for 2 days. We will be forever indebted to Ismael and Caty for their help, patience and hospitality but it was also a real pleasure spending time with such wonderful and inspiring people and as we finally headed off we hoped that we might be lucky enough to see them again one day.



The infamous Mexico City smog had been entirely absent during our stay but on the day we had to cycle uphill for miles to get out of the city it put in a superb performance - we could barely breathe let alone see anything. When we told people in Mexico City how we had been travelling - minor roads, through the mountains, camping rough - there had been raised eyebrows, concerned expressions and tales of highway robbery and these began preying on our minds as we made our way on a minor road towards the base of the 5,452m high Volcan Popocatepetl. We asked a man for directions who advised us the road ahead wasn´t safe. When we reached the village of Ecatzingo there were no guesthouses but a drunk man talking to the police offered to rent us a room at his house. It was a bit weird (we slept in his sister´s bed and it transpired he had addiction problems) but the house had a stunning view towards the smoking snow-capped volcano.


In the morning we asked for directions and a woman advised us the road ahead was some kind of path through the wilderness beset with bandits and we would be lucky to get out alive. We went to the plaza to see if we could hire a pick-up truck to take us but only the police had one. The chief looked like he was auditioning for a Hollywood action movie but he said the road ahead was no less safe than the one we had arrived on and that we would be OK. He was right and had we not expected to be jumped by a gang of men with sombreros, pistols and donkeys we might otherwise have enjoyed the quiet road and lovely spring-like forest scenery set against the backdrop of the volcano. It has to be said that every village we passed that day had a police station bursting with heavily armed men with moustaches and dark glasses - we didn´t know if it really was that dangerous or if it was just to make people feel safe, but either way I was glad to enjoy some spectacular views as we whizzed down out of the mountains to the highway. All of a sudden we were in an arid landscape and it was swelteringly hot. Along the way we sought shade and ice-lollies and a Canadian/New Zealand couple on a tandem came sweating along. Roland and Belinda were on their way from Alaska to Patagonia and the first foreign cyclists we had seen in 7 months.



We spent a pleasant evening in the friendly town of Izucar de Matamoros buying supplies and drinking huge glasses of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice before setting off east. On a lovely sunny morning farmers waved to us from their fields and in the villages colourful bunting was strewn from the colonial style churches but before long we were back in granny gear sweating up a mountain cloaked in dry, brown cactus scrub. At the top we stopped for an apple and the amazing view of several distant snow-covered volcanoes and a vast desert canyon below us, it was a huge landscape of the kind we hadn´t seen since the Middle East. The road ahead was straight and empty and we were soon surrounded by single stemmed cacti the size of telegraph poles. In the afternoon it was over 35C with a "hairdryer" wind as we climbed out of the canyon. Mexican ice-lollies are blended fruit frozen on a stick and in my humble lolly eating experience the best in the world. There is a man with a moustache in the village of Zacapala who sells possibly the tastiest, cheapest ice-lollies in the known universe and we ate two each. We also got chatting to the man in the grocery store who said that in 6 weeks time it would be an egg frying 45C, when ice-lolly man must be more popular than the Pope. By the time we got to the top of the next hill were knackered and made camp amongst the cacti, watching an orange sunset over the volcanoes and saw our first UFO amongst the stars. It took us a day and half more to reach the city of Tehuacan through some spectacular desert scenery, sleepy villages with identical plazas and an amazing array of giant cacti in Tehuacan-Cuicatlan Biosphere Reserve.


Beyond Tehuacan a wall of mountains lay between us and the Gulf Coast. We needed fresh legs to tackle the Eastern Sierras and gave ourselves the day off. Helpfully our route took us downhill for 20 miles, after which the mountains were another 600m higher and it was another 5C hotter. Earlier in our trip, fuelled with a heady mix of enthusiasm and niaevity we would have attempted the climb, but we were too wise and weary now. We found a cheap hotel in the village of Teotitlan and ate ice-lollies and were up with the roosters to ride in the cool morning air while the mountainside was still in shade and it felt like the best decision we ever made. The climb was still brutal though, uphill in granny gear for 15 miles with views back down the Tehuacan valley. At the pass we were amongst tropical forests looking across to ragged mountains and down steep hillsides dotted with villages and winding dirt roads and in the distance the clouds below us were making their way up the valleys from the Gulf. The contrast with the desert and giant cacti we had left on the other side was unbelievable. As was the humid heat as we sweated our way up a valley to Huautla, perched on a mountainside amongst the green of the jungle. Also staying at our hotel was Kenny, a 50 year old American riding his mountainbike around the hills and filming himself getting into scrapes of his own making. It was Kenny who told us that this was where The Beetles came in 1968 to take mushrooms, which explained why earlier in the day we had passed a "healers" surgery with a surrealist picture of a mushroom with an eye painted on its wall. I checked his story out and it seems that following an article about psychedelic mushroom ceremonies in Life magazine in 1957 Huautla became one of the starting points for the Psychedelic Revolution of the 1960`s and was visited by thousands of hippies and as well as the Fab Four, The Stones, Dylan, Donovan, etc before the local authorities called it to an end in the 1970`s. Today it seems almost impossible to imagine.




It was uphill out of Huautla and we passed tiny women in bright clothes and bare feet carrying huge loads of firewood on their heads and in a village we waved hello to a group of men wearing their traditional white trousers, shirts and cowboy hats. There was almost no traffic on the road and for about 30 seconds there was an amazing view of the mountains cloaked in sunlit mist and then we disappeared into the clouds. Cycling in the clouds may sound pretty cool but in fact its wet and cold and you can´t see anything. The scenery as we dropped out of the high mountains down towards the coastal lowlands must have been spectacular as when we finally fell out of the clouds we found ourselves amongst rainforest and above us towering cliffs disappeared into the mists. Parrots and toucans flew over our heads and the houses were the wooden shacks with palm thatched roofs and too many children found throughout the tropics. Naturally the locals were at it with chainsaws and as we continued our descent to Jalapa the green grass of cow fields covered the rolling hills. In the town elderly women wore their traditional clothes - white knee length dresses embroidered with colourful ¨hula-hoops¨and a matching hairwrap - but few foreigners pass this way and the stares and "gringo" mutterings felt claustrophobic.

I found the Eastern Sierra the most dramatic of Mexico´s many mountain ranges and it was mysterious and rugged, cloaked in jungles and cloud as we looked back towards it from a pass above Lake Miguel Aleman before dropping down into the sugarcane, maize and pineapples of the coastal lowlands. We weren´t done with cycling up mountains yet and it took another two days riding to reach the sea via the mist covered volcanoes of Las Tuxlas.

Feeling rather windswept we were deposited by a river taxi onto the sandy banks at the mouth of Laguna Sontecompan. We pushed the bikes along a dirt path and under a grey sky looked out over the brown sand and brown sea of the Gulf of Mexico. We sat amongst the decrepit shacks and rubble that constitutes the village of La Barra and drank a beer to celebrate. We had ridden 1,000 miles through the mountains of Mexico from coast to coast. Across the sea was home.