PowerCycle

11/30 Well my day off in El Rosario has now turned into 3 days off thanks to a wicked case of Montezuma’s Revenge. Thankfully it hit that Friday night after I’d finished riding for the day. I can’t imagine how much it would have sucked if I’d been on road in the middle of nowhere. I’m feeling a lot better today and expect to be back on the road tomorrow. I suspect one of my favorite riding foods was the cause–apples. They say unpeeled fruit is a prime culprit. Looks like I might have to stick to bananas.

It actually rained and pretty hard too. This was on Saturday and Sunday. It wasn’t an all day thing; it drizzled for a couple hours and then once on Saturday night it poured for a good 30 minutes. Considering the brutal drought conditions here it was a very welcome event.

The only motel in town is the BajaCactus Motel and its surprisingly clean and modern. The TV has 2 channels, both Spanish only, so I’ve been watching a lot their version of MTV and some soccer. Their MTV actually has music videos. I don’t know what they’re singing about but wow are the women just stunning. Every song is the same though: guy sees hot girl, he sings to/about her, she ignores/teases him and they either hook up (10%) or the songs ends with him looking all dejected (90%).

Honesty though, after watching a couple hours of it I found how women are portrayed on the videos to be very sexist and/or demeaning. In one video a girl walks in on her boyfriend and catches him with another woman. Rather than beating the crap out of both of them she jumps off the balcony (they show her walking away at the end though). Seems a bit messed up. Maybe in all music videos its like that? I thought it was mostly limited to rap music. These songs were like country songs that should have just been depressing like all country music is.

The location of the motel officially makes it the loudest place I’ve ever stayed. It sits along the highway at the bottom of a huge hill so the off-road trucks and 18-wheelers rev up their already loud engines to start the climb. Of course right outside my window are 2 dogs that love to bark all day. There’s some goats out there making a ruckus too.

Right next door is the famous Mama Espinoza’s Cafe. I’m not sure if she is the owner but there’s an older lady who works there and she’s so nice. She helps me with my Spanish every time I go in. The food is great too.

11/27 I’m in the Mexican groove now. Woke up, found a nice restaurant and then pedaled on down the road. Traffic south of San Quintin was a lot less than any other part of Baja so far. Made for some very relaxing riding. Ran into another military checkpoint but they just waved me through.

There are some pretty good stretches between towns now. I’ve been doing pretty good on water but for the next couple hundred miles I’m going to carry extra just in case. I’ve been noticing that almost every town as different name than what’s on my GPS or the map I purchased. Not a big deal I guess; just kind of weird.

The landscape changed quite a bit once I climbed inland toward the end of the day. The land is devoid of everything but rocks and waist high shrubs. Starting to see a few more cacti. I’m really looking forward to getting into the desert. I love open land with no structures for as far as the eye can see. Hopefully I’ll get a lot of that. I’m going to be riding past my first active volcano tomorrow. How cool is that?

I’m going to stay in town tomorrow and get caught up on my web site and doing some cleaning (bike/clothes). They don’t have wifi in the motel but the restaurant next door does. They keep internet access locked down big time here. I have yet to run into a place that had it open. Finally got to take a hot shower too.

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11/26 Happy Thanksgiving! Today I’m thankful that I didn’t have to eat tacos or burritos for dinner. They actually have a Chinese restaurant and a pizza place in town so I splurged for some pizza. It wasn’t turkey but for me it was just as good. Grabbed a motel for the night (US $16). No heat and no hot water at this place either.

A rare treat appeared while riding today… a bike lane! I was really not liking the highway up until this point. Ever since Ensenada the road lacked a shoulder and to make it even worse, there was usually a drop off. To add to the misery there are also reflectors sticking up a half inch every 10 feet. Sometimes they’ll be on the white line, sometimes inside it and sometimes a few inches outside it. Sometimes there are 2 of them stuck next to each other; sometimes 3. I kept finding myself weaving in and out of them which is bad because when you are riding in traffic its best to be predictable. As soon as the bike lane started I noticed that the reflectors were spaced evenly about 15 feet apart. Maybe this section of the road is newer? It kind of looked like it. I ended up making much better time and going up hills was much more relaxing since I didn’t have to bail off the road to let trucks pass.

Something else appeared today and it was anything but a treat. Out in the middle of absolutely nowhere I saw someone stand up in some dried grass about 100 feet in front of me. They were up off the road about 30 feet next to a fence and there were no cars around so I thought it might have been a hitchhiker or maybe farm worker going to the bathroom. As I got closer it dawned on me that I was seeing a lot of flesh. I can’t emphasize “a lot” quite enough. This was very large person and it quickly became clear that they were completely naked. Then they turned toward me and I realized it was a woman. It was clear enough that she wasn’t in trouble because she just stood there paying little mind to me or the cars that were approaching. Giving her a lift was out of the question so I kept on riding. So far that’s makes #1 on my list of strange things I’ve seen this trip.

I’ve been drinking a lot of liquid but even that hasn’t been enough. If you’re not stopping to go to the bathroom every few hours you probably aren’t drinking enough. I didn’t go once today and I drank at least 8 liters of water/Coke/juice. The sun is brutally intense so I’ve been burning off moisture without even sweating. I’ll have to be careful so I don’t get heat stroke, especially when I get into the Desierto Central.

Today marked my first time using an Internet Cafe. It cost $10 pesos for one hour (US $0.77). You can’t use USB drives so I couldn’t upload the couple posts I have in the queue but I managed to check email and make sure my FB friends were having a good holiday. Using Google (search/maps) was rough because everything defaulted to Spanish. The help section is only available in English and that directed me to a change language dropdown on the bottom of the page. I couldn’t find it though.

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11/25 It was bound to happen I suppose. While riding through a small town just outside Ensenada a taxi driver decided to open his door right when I was about to go by. I hit my brakes but couldn’t avoid the door. After coming to a rather abrupt stop I fell into traffic but fortunately everyone stopped in time. The taxi driver was pretty useless. He ended up just muttering something in Spanish and then going inside a store. He didn’t even check to see if I was OK. Jerk.

A bunch of things flew off my bike so I had to hunt them down before moving over to the side of the road and taking stock of the damage. My right front pannier has a nice tear in it so now neither front bag is waterproof. Something tore open the big tube of sunscreen I just bought so I have crap all over the inside. The bottom water bottle cage is broken but some guys who saw what happened came over and rigged it up to hold the bottle using some twine. The handlebars were way out of alignment so I had to re-adjust those. I’m really just glad my front wheel came out unscathed.

As for my injuries, I have a sweet looking red letter C (for the Calgary Flames) emblazoned on my chest. My right arm got banged up pretty good too but nothing crazy.

After a few minutes of recovery I was back on the road. The rest of the day went a little better but not by much. I hit the military-run immigration checkpoint after 15 miles but they just waved me by.

2 dogs chased me along the road for a while and I was pretty sure one of them was going to take a bite. Traffic is fairly constant and of course I was going uphill at the time. I think they kept chasing me because I don’t know the Spanish word for “stop”. I’ll have to work on that one. My Dog Dazzer didn’t work on them either. I might need to find a decent stick. The bear spray that I still have strapped to the frame is a little overkill.

It’s starting to get pretty desolate the further south I go. It’s not desert yet but there are hardly any trees and everything is brown. A couple exceptions were some ranches. One of them looked like they were growing cacti although I have no idea what you can harvest from a cactus.

Traffic is heavy enough that you can’t mess around too much. There’s rarely a shoulder and when there is one there’s usually a drop to get onto it. I wish I would have picked up a helmet-mounted mirror.

I’m still in awe at how friendly people are here (minus taxi drivers). Had a bunch more waves, several of which were from truckers which is exceedingly rare. One guy leaned out and yelled “Peace!” really loud but he was American so that didn’t count.

Staying at the only motel in town. It was US $15 which is reasonable considering there’s no back window and its getting down into the low 40′s at night. No heater either. The TV has an antenna on top but I can’t get any channels. No hot water either which sucked because a good shower was the one thing I was looking forward to.

Met one of the guys that lives in town while guzzling down some Gatorade. He lived in California for a while and had picked up some English. I’d read that people in poorer countries will often ask how much things cost which can be a little uncomfortable considering my surroundings. So when he asked how much my bike cost I remembered how someone else had handled it. They suggested that you tell them that in your culture you don’t talk about how much things are. He seemed to appreciate that a little more than just making up some ridiculously low number. He went on to tell me that he left for work (farm worker) at 4am this morning and had just finished at 4pm. He made US $13 for the day. I’m glad I didn’t tell him what my bike cost and I’m not going to bitch about motel rooms not having cable from now on either.

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