Back in the Saddle: A recap of the last four months

A long list of bullet points with highlights from the past few months. (For greater accuracy, feel free to insert “it rained” at the end of each paragraph).

➢ After a wild stint in the jungle at Palenque, Anna and I spent our last days wandering around the Gulf Coast, through deceptively named towns like Paraiso (“Paradise”) and Villahermosa (“Pretty town”), searching for an idyllic beach setting that in fact does not exist on the Gulf Coast. Finally, we conceded that the grey cities and more-ferocious-than-usual speed bumps were dampening our spirits, and there was little choice but to go our separate ways – she back to Mexico City to catch her plane, and I to the Yucatan to ride some more.

➢ I arrived on the peninsula. A likeable German girl in Campeche wondered if she could catch a ride to Merida, an assumedly easy ride three hours to the northeast. En route, we detoured away from the main road to investigate a crazy underground cave (with a tropical oasis growing in its center), and emerged just in time for a monsoon. When we sloshed into the streets of Merida, it was to find the city transformed into a veritable Venice. The pipes were completely submerged, our luggage was dragging through the water, and the "waves" lapped over my seat in some streets (not an exaggeration – it is/was somewhat unclear how/why my motorcycle still runs.) We spent the night blow-drying passports, socks and most everything else in our luggage, and I vowed to warn future passengers about the wiles of the Rainy Season.

➢ High-end hammocks became a new obsession. I bought two out of the garage of a Mayan family who insisted that I stay the night at their house (in a hammock) to watch DVDs of local bullfighters. Another was purchased at a maximum-security prison, with a bewildered hitchhiker in tow. This is a funny story if you hear the whole thing.

➢ Marisa visited. We went to a free, all-day reggae concert on the beach where, with only a handful of Spanish at her disposal, Marisa took on the swarm of Rasta-fied Mexican men who lingered at our tent to woo her in their foreign tongue. She was a champ. We moved down the beach to Playa del Carmen and perfected the art of Caribbean hammocking.

➢ Jason visited – and perched his entire six feet, five inches on the miniature seat behind me. We camped on the beach in laid-back Tulum, a lazy walk to the turquoise ocean, and swam in crystal-clear cenotes down the road. A sand crab took over our tent, and giant palm branches fell on us in our hammocked exile. We drove through alternating bouts of hammering rain and blazing sun, with short pause for a Vogue photo shoot, to reach the ferry bound for paradisiacal Isla Holbox. We walked for miles on a sand bar chasing down a flock of flamingoes, skirting minefields of horseshoe crabs and a tragically dead sea turtle. We were invited to a quinceanera in the town square, and while I got free dance lessons from the locals, Jason journeyed to buy after-hours beer from a man in a black silk kimono with odd animal skins on his wall. The Reality Bites soundtrack played on repeat.

➢ I got to the end of Mexico and found Belize. The immigrations agent on the Belize side of the border looked at me for a long time and finally said, “Do you know where you are?” “Yes,” I said (and in my mind added, “Belize? Right? Is this a trick question?”). He handed my passport back with a slight grin. “Okay then, just checking. Enjoy your stay.”

➢ I took a “shortcut” from the road outside of Belize City that led me over several hours of partly submerged red dirt road, past grasslands speckled with solitary palms, and through rainforest-covered mountains where giant cohune palms towered forebodingly over the diminished track. When I eventually arrived in seaside Dangriga, the grey-haired owner of the guesthouse scooped a handful of red clay from under the fender and exclaimed (in his buoyant Belizean accent), “This must be from the Coastal Highway!” I paused from scraping the red mud off my jeans with a broken board. “That… is a highway?” He belly-laughed. “We may not have a lot in this country, but we’ve certainly got an imagination – and a sense of humor.” Well put.

➢ A handwritten “Rustic Camping” sign at mile 29 ½ of the Hummingbird Highway (on the way back from Dangriga) lured me down a dirt path ornamented with blossoming Birds-of-Paradise into an abandoned eco-community, manned by a lone 17-year-old named Patrick. “This is sort of like The Shining” I mused, as the dark rain clouds swelled overhead and silence was drowned out by the drone of insects, birds, frogs and an occasional unknown from the dense jungle wrapped around the lodge. We talked at length about Easy Rider, poisonous snakes, and the acid he once made from a flower named Angel Trumpet. By the end of the three rainy days, we were joined by the official caretakers – an American-Belizean couple – and four lost-ish American backpackers. Patrick turned 18. We feasted on homemade tortillas, beans, rice and sugar out of plastic fruit.

➢ Made it to the end of Belize (or to the side of, anyway) and found Guatemala. I crossed the border several dollars poorer after an “unofficial” Guatemalan border fee, and another for an obligatory fumigation of my bike. But my shame at being swindled dissipated as the dirt road into the country edged past glistening green fields catching the last light of a melting sun, teams of barefoot kids kicking around soccer balls, some running towards the road with hands waving excitedly at the foreign oddity passing by… Sigh.

➢ I went pre-dawn to the jungle-enshrouded, mist-covered ruins at Tikal. A wrong turn on an unmarked path put me in the middle of a huge camp of howler monkeys, bellowing out deafening guttural cries from the towering branches above. Once back on track, I joined the tourist pack in the climb to the top of Temple IV, from which point the entire jungle appeared like a luxurious, green carpet – from which two other lofty temples peaked out of the treetops. Amazing, really.

➢ I met up with Andy, formerly of Rustic Camping, to explore Guatemala. Over the course of some days, we rambled through dusty, pot-holed roads and across rickety bridges to waterfall-ish natural wonders. We rode down mountains at night with the engine off and felt like we were flying. We bought black market gasoline, and chatted with the friendly purveyors while they fixed the bike chain at no extra charge. Andy jumped on and off the back seat to recite our favorite, “Excuse me, we’re looking for…” plea at least a hundred times – only to receive the standard Guatemalan, “Straight ahead, then turn” response almost without fail. Throwing rocks in mud puddles became a really fun game.

➢ On an expedition alongside a mountainous cloud forest, hopeful to see what Lonely Planet called “one of Guatemala’s most scenic roads”, Andy and I ran into a muddy construction site closed off temporarily to everyone but those on two wheels. “What luck…” we triumphed between ourselves, and chugged on ahead through bulldozers and other machinery of the big yellow sort. After some time though, we met up with a new mud – a stickier, more slippery kind that seemed to disagree with my tires, the soles of my boots, and most anything designed with traction in mind. This new man-eating mud took the bike down… again, and again, and again… until finally the rear brake pedal punctured a hole through the oil tank. We silently watched oil bleed all over the gooey road, and knew that our driving was done... To make quite a long story short, we packed the bike in the back of an S10-size pickup (not at all easy to track down), the tailgate just barely clasping shut, and with three other passengers thrown in beside me, the bike and all of our luggage, we rode the wounded passenger back to Coban. “You won’t find parts for this anywhere in Guatemala,” mechanic Pablo told me. So I walked away from a very good friend, promising to return with parts from the States. Thus began the bike-less chapter of the trip…

➢ Enter Guatemalan chicken buses, named for – you guessed it – the baskets full of live, feathery birds people stuff into the overhead luggage racks of the converted BlueBird school buses. We crammed in with the chickens, the kids and the vendors selling popcorn, chewing gum, toothbrushes and special pens, and our Guatemala journey continued. We trekked up a volcano and stood right next to the oozing, red-hot lava for as long as we could before it seemed like our shoes would start to melt or our clothes catch on fire. We found a packed bar in Antigua and rooted for Italy during the World Cup final. We drank sick amounts of juice. And at some point, we completely understood George Thorogood.

➢ Andy returned to Xela to master Spanish and I went to Lago Atitlan (via three buses and a transfer to the back of a pick-up truck shared by – I counted -- 21 other people). The first night, I was befriended by a crazy, curly-haired Mexican who proposed we find a empty fishing boat to go out on the lake… Instead we found an occupied fishing boat, navigated by a kindly Mayan man wrapped in a plastic tarp. He invited me into the hull of a tiny canoe-sized vessel, tossing a few stray dead fish to the back to clear a space, and rowed out into the lake – a brilliant, rippling pool of mercury under the near-full moon. Lighting somewhere off in the distance flashed on and off to silhouette the volcanoes towering over the water. It was something incredible…

➢ On the other side of the lake, several days later, a motley-crew of travelers from England, Italy and Israel organized a group to rent dirt bikes for a tour of neighboring villages. Little did I know, cruisers and dirt bikes are very different creatures. A combination of rough road, a sharp turn and an overconfident driver left me with an impressive gash in my right knee, a banged up rental bike and a seriously damaged ego. I putted back to our budget hospedaje, where all-knowing Rudy (the owner’s brother) cleaned my wounds with vodka, covered them with the seeping gel from an aloe leaf, and assured me that we all have rough days. Miraculously, the monetary damages to cover a bent rim and broken brake handle amounted to a whopping US $3.

➢ I left Atitlan to explore the little-visited ruins on the western edge of the country. During this time, my status as a wallet-holder changed from “with” to “without”. See “The Great Guatemalan Wallet Caper” for entire story.

➢ I flew from Guatemala City back to the Midwest for the Elyssa’s wedding, with an unplanned 36-hour trip to New York added on to replace my driver’s license (Can’t cross international borders on a motorcycle without it). Thus it went: Guatemala City – Chicago – Michigan – Chicago – New York – Chicago – Guatemala City. Yeah… Lesson learned: Don’t lose things.

➢ With some help, I jumped a bus from Guatemala City to Coban to deliver my backpack full of bike parts. In an astonishing, this-would-never-happen-in-the-US act of heroism, Pablo and his team of giggly mechanics replaced the oil tank and seal, the chain, the chain cover, the air filter, the rear-view mirror, the license plate holder, the front headlight, the rear brake pads and the oil – all in less than a day. I was out of Coban by the evening, and made it to southern Guatemala that night, where I slept in my broken tent behind a gas station, with the permission of the owner's wife who was making kick balls out of cow stomachs.

➢ I crossed into El Salvador for a whirlwind tour of the small country. A helpful lawyer on the street in San Salvador arranged an unnecessary police escort to help me find the road out of the city, complete with flashing lights and no-stops at red traffic signals. I drove along the Pan-American Highway. I took a boat to relax on what I assumed was a populated beach for a day, and was dropped off on a peninsula where I had to cross through cow fields for 30 minutes until they met a row of palms and a totally deserted strip of sand on the open ocean. (Every local on the way there and back kept asking if I was looking for Kristy, their Peace Corps volunteer. They could not fathom of me being in their dusty, unpaved "village" – i.e., collection of several houses – just to go to the beach.) I stayed at the hostel of a giant she-man who terrified me and we made plans to go to Argentina together.

➢ From Cancun I flew to Seattle for Jo’s wedding. Originally, the plan was to return to Cancun to a job as a motorcycle tour guide, but with that opportunity coming loose at the seams, and my general disposition not being that of a chatty, amiable tourist wrangler, I decided to stay in Seattle to tackle the unruly bamboo choking Alison’s back yard. This led to some light work with the contractor who was building a new deck… First staining, then drilling, then sawing, and in the end I was working for days at a time on my own, building the deck. Sometime mid-September, I flew back to Cancun.

➢ The thing about motorcycling in Latin America on a large-ish cruiser is that sometimes (all the time) parts are hard to find. Tires are really hard to find, which is why I had to fly back from Seattle with one in hand… And as it turns out, checking in a tire at the airport has the potential to invite a good number of comic remarks… sometimes from a fun pair of brothers headed to The-Island-Whose-Name-We-Cannot-Mention. So perhaps it happened that when I arrived in Cancun, instead of starting the (still undesirable) job as a motorcycle tour guide, I went to a forbidden island. Perhaps. Perhaps you should also look at the pictures before I take them off the Internet…

➢ Once returned from TIWNWCM, I booked it out of Cancun, headed for Honduras. I'm currently still in Belize and can now start blogging in Real Time.