Adelantero, An Adventure

“You´ve got to head back to the city, then turn at the first traffic light,” he said.  I had just pedalled five miles from Tecoman to get to the beach and the sun was just about to set.  I sighed and continued talking with the three young cyclists I´d met on the waterfront.  Soon they left to head home.

I spent the night on the waterfront, hammock slung between two palm trees, a strong ocean breeze blowing fiercely over me all night long, rattling the palm fronds over my head.  I´d wasted three hours that afternoon biking in circles around town, first following the misleading signs to the grocery store, then trying to find my way out of the acursed city to the highway leading east.  I´d asked locals for directions, but all they succeeded in doing was to further perplex me as I got lost again and again.

At last I saw a sign to Playa Real, a beach, next to a little symbol for highway 200, the one I was after.   I checked my compass to find the highway leading south, not east.  Puzzled, but happy to be leaving the wretched town, I pedalled into the sinking sun.

I spent a good twelve miles the next morning riding in more circles before asking once more for directions.  “Just follow this road here straight; it´ll take you to the highway.”  I rode down the street.  Pavement gave way to uneven stones, giving me a headache and jerking my bike all over, and finally turned to a dirt track which ended in an impassable wall of dirt.  I´d found the highway, but it was closed for road work.

I cursed loudly in spanish, english, and guaraní.  Only in Tecoman, the Godforsaken city of absolutely no urban planning.  I dragged the bike over the excavated earth ad pedalled on past the workers and machines anyway.

My bad mood cleared once I´d escaped the cloud of misdirection hanging over the city and twenty miles passed serenely.  I was well in the tropics now- palm trees and dense vegetation greeted me on all sides.

Having wasted my morning in the city, it was well towards midday when I spied the ominous peaks ahead of me.  Hoping the highway would just skirt them instead of summitting them, I advanced.  I spent a good half an hour at a military checkpoint having my things examined and showing the interested soldiers where I´d travelled on my map, and finally reached the foot of the mountains.

It´s one thing to climb desert mountains.  They are monotonous and unforgiving, but dry and usually breezy.  In mid-afternoon mountains covered in tropical forest are not to be reckoned with. 

For five hours I climbed hills, turned switchbacks, and sweated.  I have never had so much sweat on my body.  Great rivers poured down my arms and chest.  I had to take off my sunglasses because they trapped heat over my eyes.  At last I had to stop.  I lay in a gutter off the road, dying.  Slowly I dried out and rehydrated.

Time and time again I would round a switchback and see the top of a hill, making me believe I was finally at the top.  Time and time again I would reach the descent only to find it thirty feet long and leading to another longer climb.  Up and down lost all meaning.

But some trials have great rewards reaching far beyond what anyone might expect.

As the sun began to sink low over the peaks and I began to eye the dense tropical forest nervously, thinking I might have to spend the night, I reached the last bottom of the last hill.  The mountains were behind me.  My ecstacy overwhelmed me as I realized I was back at the beach, and lo! Here was a public park for enjoying the water and camping!

The bike rolled down the road and I stopped by the entrance to the beach.  “It´s twenty pesos to pass onto the beach over here,” a man in a vest with some initials on it told me.  I looked puzzled.  “The sea turtles are here today.” 

“Right now?  You´ve got to be kidding,” I assured him.  But as I looked over, sure enough, the beach was covered with little dark lumps moving across the sand.  I dug in my pockets for some coins, payed the man, and set off with my camera, incredulous at my incredible  good fortune. 

Sea turtles come to lay their eggs once a year at the very same stretch of beach where they themselves were hatched.  They return with uncanny precision every year in a window of about three days, dig a hole, and lay their eggs before heading back off into the waves.  I wandered among them in awe as local volunteers collected the eggs to take to a hatchery farther down the beach.

Some fifteen marines were on the beach, Mexico´s guards for these endangered animals.

“Did you get some good pictures?”  asked Angelo, a sergeant with the marines when I began to head back.  “The light was just great with the setting sun in the background.”

I assured him I had.

“Every year they come to this beach.  There are thousands of them and it´s only about four kilometers long,” he told me as a sea turtle ambled past him towards the campground.  He picked it up and sent it off in another direction.  “There´s another beach down that way,” he pointed east, “where they´re even bigger than these.”  I marvelled at life.

He pointed to the turtle that he relocated.  “This is an old one,” he said.

“How can you tell?”

“See the shell? It´s got some cracks in it here and here.  It´s probably eighty or so, a big adult. Some of them are real young and just hatched here a few years ago.”

We talked about turtles and mexico until I figured I´d better go set up camp, and headed off, still marvelling at life and my good fortune.