Adelantero, An Adventure

There are advantages and disadvantages to arriving in Guadalajara on a Friday evening.  Upon entering downtown, exhausted and having just suffered an inconveniently rebellious screw which had loosened, threatening to send my rear rack careening into the wheel, I passed unceremoniously through the heavy traffic and into the heart of the city.

I am rather fond of old Spanish colonial architecture and wasn’t disappointed.  The old cathedral, government buildings, theatre, and homes remained as ever, testaments to days long gone.  I passed live music in the plaza, an old man washing dishes in an ornamental fountain, and children enjoying the beginning of the weekend, tossing balls, and watched by their parents.

I wandered for an hour, starting from the center of downtown and working out, looking for a small hotel where I might stay the night.  It was dark by the time I found on that looked sufficiently cheap. 

Hotel Ontario was tucked away on a main street beside shops shuttered for the night and hidden behind a large tree.  I walked my bike inside and approached the desk.  A woman came over and asked what I wanted before having a good chuckle at my apparently comical bike.  “Is that your house?” she asked, laughing.  I shrugged and said yes. 

Eleven dollars worse off, I hauled my bike up the flight of stairs to a room at the back of the building.  Hotel Ontario is much larger than one would think, looking at the outside, but I found the room, turned the key in the lock and entered.  A tiny room greeted me on the other side.  In front of me sat a a reasonable sized bed.  I can be no judge of quality now that I have been sleeping in a tent for nearly three weeks, but it looked comfortable enough.  Off to the right I laid my key on a rickety dresser under an open frosted glass window with view of the top of another building.  With barely room to pass between the wall and the bed, I found the bathroom behind a shower curtain.  In typical latin american style, the shower head hung on the wall right by the sink and across from the toilet.  When you shower, everything gets wet. 

In all honesty, this was the only reason I had wanted a hotel room.  Not having showered since a generous convenience store employee offered me room in her house for the night on my second day, I decided it was time to clean myself up a bit.  Dust, sweat, dirt, and exhaust particulates clung to my skin making it difficult to tell where the tan ended and the filth began.  For days my legs, burned on my first days out, had been slowly peeling.  The dirt and dead skin keeping the sweat from making it out of the pores and onto the surface, instead forcing it into little bubbles under the layer that needed to come off.  I made an effort to remove all the skin, but I realized only a good washing would do the trick.

I emerged from the shower a new man.  Having dressed in real clothes, leaving my salt stained jersey and shorts to dry, I imagine the desk was rather shocked at the change as I came down to go find some food on the town.

So began my first real day of rest.  I had been reluctant to take a day off in the weeks earier because I was both behind schedule and also wading through the formidable Mexican desert of the North which left little in the way of diversion for a day off the bike.  Having made the mistake of not heeding local advice upon leaving Zacatecas three days earlier to take the slightly out-of-the way route to Guadalajara by going east before south, I found myself inadvertantly crossing the largest mountain range I have yet encountered.

Before arriving in the city of Zacatecas, I had already been climbing several days and when a cook with whom I chatted amicably for some time in a cafe assured me that it was just about all downhill to Guadalajara, I was beyond relieved.  I set off and at first was not disappointed.  For eight kilometers out of the city I just sat back and coasted down and down.  Once on the highway more descents were evident, but by the end of the day I was back to climbing

I set up camp for the night in the most beautiful of campsites.  Tucked next to a corn field and along a rolling stream, I found a little grassy patch shadowed by some large tree and mostly hidden from the highway above.  I slung my hammock, gathered some wood for my first campfire, and readied myself for a pleasant night.

The dew was thick upon my belongings as I rose in the morning and all I could do was wait for the sun to dry off the fly on my hammock before I could pack up and set off.  I was still tired and weary but I knew I had to get over those mountains some time, so I put on my audiobook version of The Phantom Tollbooth and pedalled away.  I climbed hills all morning and and afternoon and was relieved the next day to finally enter a town where I could stop, buy a coca cola, and rest. 

I could see mountains in the destance and assured myself that no civil engineer would build a highway over those if it could be avoided.  Surely there was some sort of Mexican Cumberland Gap here.  I set off again into the high sun.  What followed was the most arduous and strenuous physical trials of my existence to date.

My faith in the good sense of Mexican civil engineers waned as I climbed up and up, over peaks, and up some more.  My pace turned to grueling as my legs screamed out in protest and gave out great cries of anguish.  I came quickly to a point where I could only advance 200ft or so at a time before I needed to stop, get my heart rate down, and try to pay back some of my accrued oxygen debt, willing the lactic acid to leave my legs.  I dreamed sweet dreams of having great surpluses of Adenosine Triphosphate to power me , but they were only dreams.  My legs were gone.  I stopped right at sunset having just reached the state of Jalisco, 80km north of Guadalajara.

Cast in the middle of nowhere once more, I had run out of water.  In mid afternoon the day before, upon seeing how much I was sweating and knowing I had only a liter of water left, I set myselft beside the highway in the shade to wait out the sun a bit, conserving water, and enjoying a lunch of macaroni with olive oil and balsamic vinegar to the sweet sounds of heavy trucks engine braking down the mountain.  Not even a kilometer from  my campsite the next morning I was washed with good fortune as I spied a mountain stream, full from the night rain, washing under the highway. 

By late morning I was speeding downhill, back into civilization.  Twenty kilometers of racing downhill brought me to the very bottom of a river valley.  Twenty-six kilometers to Guadalajara now.  I stopped to rest under an abandoned mango stall.  It’s all uphill now, I was told by a passing farmer.

Up and up  I went, ears popping through a light afternoon rain, drinking Tang and wishing for the end.  I passed some of the most breathtaking views I had seen on the trip but could hardly enjoy them for the exhaustion. 

And yet, has there ever been such a beautiful sight as the sprawling metropolis of Guadalajara?  Has there ever been a city of more splendor to the tired cyclist’s eyes?  I looked down on the overcast city, covered by dense smoggy clouds, dirty puddles in the streets, cars, buses , cement, ribar, commercialism.  Sweet, sweet Guadalajara, today you are my home.