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.

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.