Adelantero, An Adventure

As the story of Panama City continues to unfold, permit me to regale you briefly with not this final chapter of Act I of a Panamerican adventure, but rather to begin with some reflections upon the very first.

Mary and I crossed the bridge outof El Paso in late afternoon.  No customs, no passports, only a toll for the bridge and a “move along” kind of wave from some men with assault rifles.  In a moment I had left a foreign and strange feeling city and entered a familiar town.  Every Latin American city is the same in so many ways.

The roads in Ciudad Juarez were in poor shape, the buildings were crumbling slowly, there were vast lakes across some avenues, and the army could be seen here and there.  Yes, all Latin American cities are the same in so many ways, and it was comforting to know that I could find a hardware store, replacement auto parts store, and a place to buy a coca cola on every street, even though I had need for none of these things at the time. 

Mary remarked about how few Americans visit Mexico, even though it´s just a hop, skip, and jump away.  Even when they do, it´s to visit Cancún and the beaches.  Never the border towns which are so close.  The Mexican culture is there in Juarez, probably more than most, but most are not interested in seeing that.  Beautiful mountains and beaches and ruins and rainforests hold more splendor. 

But Juarez, I was warned, is dangeous. There are drug wars there! they told me.  But I saw none of this and no doubt it was my excitement about starting such an adventure that made me so fearless as I biked, in the dark of my first Mexican night, through all of Juarez.

I write to you now fully seven countries away.  It is time now, as I wait for my passage to South America, that I might reflect upon it all.

I read today an article in GQ about Juarez and it showed me the Juarez I was too excited to notice.  There have been over 500 murders in Juarez so far this year.  500 murders.  Ponder that a moment, do a little bit of math.  But it´s still not the Juarez I was warned about, still not the Juarez of the New York Times.  In America know nothing about Mexico.  Reading that article today, 4,000 miles from the place itself, I felt much as I had when I climbed the slums of Lima two and a half years ago and really did see. 

It makes me realize that this is no voyage of discovery.  I am not finding myself by stepping out of my comfy American life;  I have already done that.  It is just an adventure, like mountain climbing or deep sea diving.  Some thrills, some great views, and a lot of hard work.  And I feel that with that realization, some of the value has been lost from the trip, if it ever was there to lose.  The destination, it seems, and getting to it is all that has mattered.  Panamerican adventure only because I pass through the Americas, not because I have allowed them to become part of me, and that is what I thought it was for.

What has changed?  Why do I not let all of America embrace me as a son, cry its thick spring-fed tears over my shoulder and tell me its dreams and nightmares? I hope I can learn again.  Maybe becase now that I carry all that I own with me always, I have more to lose and guard it more carefully.  Certainly, now that the bike is safein my lodgings and I wander the streets with little, I see more and I am affected more.  Even in my modest hostel, surrounded by travellers, I hang close to the bike, enveloped by my own thoughts, giving little of myself.

Sweet Mexico, tonight, so far away, I hurt for you!  And I hurt for not feeling it before.  Again and again it is illustrated for me why I will never live contentedly, why I will always hate some part of me for cowardice if I do not give all of myself to you.  I will give my life for yours.  Some day I will.  And so it is that I will never live in peace until I no longer live, perhaps.  There´s too much work to be done, too much of myself that belongs to the world. Tonight, once more, I dedicate myself to you.

A doctor from the Sudan, once when I last felt this, before I began again to warm to the sweet scents of comfortable life, told me I was the type of person who is “across the border.”  That my ideas and heart knew no borders, no arbitrary lines of demarcation. I could think of no greater compliment.  But stamps in my passport are no assurance that I deserve it. It is every day that I must decide to cross the border again. 

Tonight I am across the border once more, and let no thing let me amble back across it again.

As written on Monday, 11 August, 2008 over a cup of Capuccino in Tapachula, Mexico.

Today, the fates have worked against me in their small way.  Only some small number of miles from the Guatemalan border lies a city by the name of Tapachula. It´s a fair sized city, as Mexican cities go, and I pedalled into town with every intention of collecting some wired money and heading out as soon as possible.  After all, the excitement of crossing a border is considerable and there´s no sense in delaying it. It should also be noted that there are only a few advantages of being in a city.  These include the ease of internet access, coffee shops, and abundant food.  All of these luxuries can be had quickly enough, as they were today, and then a city may be left behind in peace.

I bought some food and set off through the city, minding pot holes and puddles, looking for a Western Union agent.  It wasn´t long before I spotted the vast yellow monolith down a side street showing me where I might find an Elektra store.   Elektra is the local answer to the question of where one can buy most electronics and a motorcycle in one shopping trip. It is also a convenient location to collect money wired from abroad.

Inside the Elektra I found a cramped sales floor filled with televisions, motorcycles, and washing machines. Along the back wall were a series of cubicles and teller´s windows.  I stepped toward a free window and began the process of collecting money.  As it would turn out, all was not well, and a small discrepancy made phone calls and consultations necessary on the other side of the protective banker´s glass.

I leaned on a washing machine and watched women´s weight lifting and men’s single sculls on the fifteen televisions against the other wall.

By and by, a man sitting comfortably by a sales desk hailed me.  In heavily accented English he asked me if I was Mexican.  Naturally, I told him I was not, and indeed an American.  The largely one-sided conversation that followed was full of strange details about this curious man´s life that I will try to recount to you.

Seated in his plastic chair in an old t-shirt and pair of weathered slacks he asked me first if I was in the area to buy cocaine and marijuana.  “No, no,” I told him, “I´m just travelling through.”  I looked myself over.  In my salt-stained cycling jersey and shorts, with my bandana, sunglasses, and one and a half months of beard, did I look so much like a drug trafficker?

“Just travelling?” he asked.  “So you´re just going to get some money then off you go again?”  We had shifted to Spanish by now, as my command of the language was better than his english which he said he had learned by teaching his kids from a book written in both languages with stories in is such as one “about one woman with loads of kids who lived in some sort of old shoe.”  I said yes and recounted briefly the theft of my wallet.  “And they won´t give you the money?” I had been waiting for the bank staff to clear up my difficulties for twenty minutes now, and recounted briefly my Western Union woes.

“No drugs at all for you?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head a little.

“I used to drink,” he told me in a serious sort of way, and for the second time in a month I heard the tale of an alcoholic who´d turned around.  “1978.”  He pronounced each syllable with deep meaning.  “Thirty years ago exactly, and not a drop since then.  It was because of my wife, you see.  I hit her, and that night I promised her I would never drink again.  I drank all sorts of things: tequila, whiskey, brandy, but I haven´t touched any of it in thirty years. 

“I hit my wife, like this.”  Here he began hitting his own face lightly.  “And cut her here,” he indicated a line across his forehead, “when I hit her with my foot. They took me away but I didn´t go to prison.  My friend was with the police , and he told me ´I won´t send you to prison but what you´re going to do is go home and tell your wife you´ll never drink again.”  I thought to myself that being far outside of justice, this was also an interesting look at the idea of Machismo in Mexico, but held my tongue.  “I did,” he went on.  “Never again, I told her. It was a test of will power.”

As quickly as the subject arose, it was gone.  “Where are you from?  I mean, which state?”

“Wisconsin,” I told him.  “In the north, near Canada.”  I had taken to telling people I was from New Mexico, as somehow it is difficult to communicate to people that while I´m travelling from New Mexico, I am from Wisconsin originally.

“Ah,” he said, “I have to kids right across the border from Chihuahua.  One´s a lawyer (he said a lawyer of rights, licenciado en derecho, but I´m uncertain how this translates) and the other is the kind of lawyer who puts people away.  They tried to get me to come to the states with them, but I wouldn´t go. They got me papers, a passport, a visa, but nothing would take me away from Mexico, I said to them.  ´I love you,´I said, ´but I´m staying here.´”  I smiled at this.  I had heard many stories of people whose children or other family members had gone to the US, even some who´d gone and come back to Mexico, but this was a new take on the issue.

“I´m a mechanic of building machinery,” he told me, shifting topics again.  “I´m the master of a building firm; I have twenty-seven men working under me.  Some of them do cocaine and marijuana.  They ligh up a joint and as soon as it´s done, out comes another.” He mimed taking a cigarette out of his breast pocket lighting it, then repeated it several times. “And the others,” he pretended to snort cocaine from the sales desk.  “I tell them, ´you can go and die, but not me.´ And one of them did.  From the cocaine, I saw it- blood and black coming out of everywhere,”  I grimaced as his hands showed me mortal secretions flowing from his nose and eyes.  “It´s terrible stuff.

“But what about your money? Aren´t they going to give it to you?” I looked over at the window.

“I hope so, let me check.”  I moved off, to be told it needed to be fixed stateside.  It had begun to drizzle, and it looked like a long night was ahead of me once again.

“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.

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.