Jeremy's Bike Blog

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It can be draining to be a solo traveller who stands out distinctly from the locals.  I’ve had some taste of what it must be like to be a celebrity; gawked at by nearly everyone, and continuously approached by maybe 5% of these strangers, asking the same things over and over and over again.

I’m not complaining.  For one, I’m just as prone to gawking.  When Jung and I were taking a coffee and ramen break at a roadside rest stop one afternoon, a couple of blond hair, blue eyed boys came in and bought some somethings.  I didn’t notice what, I was too busy gawking at them and their actual celebrity-looking dad, watching over the scene proudly from the outside.  I was out-gawking all the locals in the market at these (other) gringos.

For two, I’m grateful for the privilege implicit in being able to visit places, as, when, and how I want, in which I stand out.  The last time I did so for this long a duration was my 5 month stint in and around India.  It’s impossible, at least for me, to not let it go to your head a bit, this ongoing context of being extraordinary.

I’m riding out of Oaxaca on a few hours of sleep, but not just feeling pretty well rested, but somewhat reborn.  I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the hours and hours of nuanced verbal interaction with other native English speakers, but also eager to reunite with the solitude that is being in remote regions of foreign lands.

I don’t want to sleep indoors, I don’t want to eat anything out of a package, and I don’t particularly want to talk to anybody.  So I don’t, for a few days.

I take a number of obviously inefficient turns down gravel roads into tiny communities.  I glide down steep descents and chuckle to myself in the shock of butterflies smacking me in the face at 40 mph.

I return waves and smiles, but I don’t preemptively offer them as I have in the past.  After they invariably ask, I tell people where I’m from, but then let the conversation hang if they linger on unable or unwilling to continue on their way.  This has led to some rather endearing situations.  In one, a fairly macho seeming dude slid down a wall next to me, where I had just done so to indulge in some food, so that he could sit next to me in silence.  In another, an old man with the most beautiful mix of blue and green eyes sat down in the shade next to and talked to me while I just stared back, smiling slightly, occasionally saying “no entiendo/i don’t understand”, while giving him portions of the banana and peanuts I had stopped to munch on when he showed up.

South Oaxaca and Chiapas is very tropical.  The heat started with hair-dryer like headwinds through seemingly endless wind farms, but as I’ve approached the Southern coast of Southern Mexico, it’s become insanely humid.  I am usually as drenched as if I had just taken a dunk in the ocean within about 10 minutes of pedaling.  It rains most afternoons, and I can’t even consider donning my rain shell until it no longer feels as if each drop that lands on me is sizzling off like a drop into a frying pan.

After a couple days of outdoor solitude, I’m ready to re-domesticate myself a bit.  It’s impossible to keep taking myself and my thoughts so seriously when I encounter the random group of women, either a couple decades younger or a couple decades older than myself, who can’t stop giggling hysterically over my presence. The groups of younger woman are somewhat shy to interact, whereas the groups of older women get their kicks out of saying things to me and seeing how I respond.  If I’m in the mood, I’ll ham it up, and say whatever I’m going to say, and that they are not going to understand, with theatrics.  I have yet to encounter an exception to the rule that the more theatrical the response, the more raucous the laughs I get in response.  Eventually I’m unable to play it straight any more and I’ll join in the laughing.

I’ve gone through several army and police checkpoints.  No shakedowns.  Varying degrees of friendliness.

I’ve gotten the ‘specialty’ at dozens of ramshackle food stands and figured out that it works pretty well to say how much you’d like to pay, but leave the choice of food up to the people providing it.

And I recount it like this because day after day of pushing out ~100km/60mi, and then setting up camp or finding shelter before the downpour starts in earnest, have started to blend together.  I did 5 before getting to the last main town, 10km from the border to Guatemala.

There, I made arrangements to stay with a Warm Showers (couchsurfing for bike tourers) host.  They’re a young couple named Oscar and Estephania.  Oscar meets me at the town plaza, and we bike together back to their flat, which is a commercial building that they’re converting to a live/work space.  They have a startup business based on bicycle delivery, and Estefania does two deliveries the night I stay with them.  Their friends Hugo and Juan Carlos come over, and while Estefania is out on a delivery, the 4 of us walk to an Oxxo for some beers.  Joining us is Lana, an elderly beagle, off-leash.  She gets attacked via neck bite by a dog we walk by, but neither Lana nor Oscar is at all phased.  She struts into the Oxxo with us, but is immediately ordered out by a cashier on duty (who suspends his cashiering duties to help corral her).  Back at the flat we hang out on the roof, drinking from the same big bottle, then the next, until we deplete the three that we’d purchased.  Estefania joins us and we geek out a bit on elevation profile apps for the phone, and star-gazing apps for her iPad.  Oscar is the only one who speaks much English, and for all the improvements I’ve made in my general knowledge of Spanish, hanging out with these exceptionally friendly and interesting seeming non-English speakers sadly drives home the realization that my conversational Spanish is still woefully inadequate.  Thankfully, Oscar is a patient translator.
The party breaks up and I fall asleep on my air mattress on their tile floor.  Other than a basic mattress, a desk, a folding table in the as of yet sink-less kitchen, and a few folding chairs, they have no furniture yet.

In the morning, for breakfast, Oscar, Estefania and I bike to some outdoor food vendors who are all part of a local organic food cooperative.  We return to the flat where I pack and then we all set out for the border.  We stop at some mayan pyramids along the way, nibbling on sweet lychee that is all around, free for the picking.  We go to the next town up the road so I can stock up on some food this side of the border, and to check out a locally famous chocolate maker.  They accompany me all the way to the Guatemalan border, where we part ways.

I cross, with some difficulty, then feeling a bit defeated and a bit like taking a day off from doing serious pedaling, I turn around a few hundred meters into a climb that promises to go on for many thousand more, and I get a dingy room for 100 mexican pesos in the dingy border town.