August 10 
Easy peasy breezy ride from El Tunco to Usulutan. I can tell we’re getting better at all of this because the chaos of Usulutan didn’t stress us out at all… we just went along with the flow, got stared at, and tried to wave to people as much as possible. Our heart rates were no different post-Usulutan than they were pre-Usulutan. We are at one of the two gated hotels in this town, and they put us on the fourth floor. There are a half a dozen volcanoes in eye shot but with the clouds so far we have only seen one. 

El Salvador is so relaxed. The pace and tempo of this country… it is 180 degrees opposite from USAmerican cities. We have a hypothesis that the roads are so good here because very few people drive (pedestrians and bicycles rule) and when we they do drive, they drive slow. No speed bumps required in El Salvador. The crops of the day were apples, sugar cane, and more watermelons. They have enough watermelons to feed the world. And their traditional breakfast is so good! We had a repeat of yesterday’s breakfast this morning. When we are back in Portland I hope we figure out how to cook plantains. 

Tunnels. Wicked dark tunnels in El Salvador. They don't run electricity through them, so the only light you have is the light at the end of the tunnel and your headlights. They are equally scary and fun.

Outside of the Justin Beiber and Kenny Loggins songs I had in my head all day, the chuckle of the day was eastern El Salvador kilometer road markers (not sure why, but there were none of these in western El Sal). They look just like headstones in USAmerican cemeteries. I clarify with “USAmerican” because the cemeteries in and Mexico and C America are very bright, colorful, three-dimensional places - very very different from the monotone, grid-like, homogenous Christian cemeteries of the USA. The photo we posted on our Google map has been painted red and white (it was just one that we happened to be in a safe place to pull-over), but most of them are just concrete with the km and the km number. I wonder if El Salvadorans come to the USA and see our cemeteries and wonder why we commemorate the dead with kilometer markers?

There is a soccer game going on next door to the hotel. Whistle-blowing and fun yells. 

Ernie got to have a nice visit with some Brazilians today. They were doing a 12 day surfing trip. All ponchy, early middle aged dudes who had known each other for a long time. They asked if we were going to make it to Brazil and when Ernie said no they said “oh you have to make it to Brazil!”. He says, “I liked it that they made lots of noise up until a certain hour and then stopped making noise at a reasonable hour”.

August 11
Happy Birthday Me! Tara turns 41 today. Woop! We got woken up by a bird on our hotel window sill (need to research). It looked a bit like a grackle but had quite the song. I popped up to get a better view of Mr. Sexy Song and wow! A great view of the three other volcanoes that were covered in clouds yesterday. Bueno.

And that was the end of the fun for today. After that was really hard… but up and down we are committed to the ride. We were on the road by 8, had some great pavement and no traffic, so we got to the border of Honduras by 10 am and that seemed too early to justify being done for the day. So we crossed into Honduras at Amatillo. No bueno. It stretches for 5 km so the gaps in between real immigration officers and police and fake immigration and police is simply too long and filled with too much chaos. I don’t have it in me to write about the entire thing (its now almost 9 and we have just finished showers and my one and only consumption of calories for the day - a bag of Lay’s Original baby!). It took three hours and it sucked. So many aggressive scammers, even some that were working “with” the police. I will never forget that one disgusting man and his behaviors and his disgusting self and his crooked hat on his crooked ethics… He was offensive in so many ways. I have nothing but amazing things to say about the actual aduanas - they are so helpful and patient. That said, outside of their little air conditioned booth/windows they seemingly turn the other cheek...  

Whatever. With that awful taste in our mouths and seeing it was only 1 pm, we thought we could make it to Choluteca, Honduras (~80 km??). There are no crops growing here - the crop of Honduras is pavimento (pavement). And the road was really great until the last few dozen kilometers when it wasn’t. At one point late in the day it took us an hour to make it ~5 km (not miles… kilometers). We were in an east-bound queue waiting for the west-bound traffic for 38 minutes. Not so bad in a car with the AC, but in full moto gear, full heat and sun, full humidity, full dehydration, and full emotional exhaustion of being kicked around by the border people for a few hours… it was very hard for Tara! Ernie was a rock as always, and helped me through my emotional mini-meltdowns. And the chaos of the construction traffic! (It was our first real Central American traffic). After our lane was given the green to go there was a mad scramble and dash for the cars and trucks to get to the front of (what previously was) a single file line. Once the opposite lane cleared, 75 vehicles rushing out. 100% of that behavior is to screw over the people behind you. There is no sense of working together to get through a situation. And I bet most of the vehicles knew what was ahead, which was a single lane of crap road - huge holes and drop offs on both the right and left side. There was a sign on the side of the road and I asked Ernie what he thought it meant and he says "I think it means there is a hole on the road that you can fall into". It's like a fire when all the people rush out, cause a big jam and everyone burns to death. By 5 pm we were finally moving but we were still outside of town as the sun was going down fast... Tara’s anxiety and stress was hitting the red zone realizing we might be driving at night. Luckily we found an overpriced hotel that charged us an extra 19% gringo fee right as we came into town. Honduras is not making my list of favorite Central American experiences. 

I don’t mean to complain. It was hard. It is over. Ernie and I are good. The bikes are good. There is AC and our bits are clean. I am on the trip of a lifetime. Mañana we cross into Nicaragua. 

Happy Birthday Dad! 

​Super chill day. Enjoyed a traditional El Salvadorian breakfast at our hotel (plantains, eggs, and beans) and afterwards we went for a long walkabout. The shops, the surfing areas, and the bizarre low-tide but non-low-tide. The coast is full of rocks, but the rocks are only here because of a summer storm (normally the beach is sandy). The rocks are cobbled - they remind me of Yaquina Head in Newport (they even have that familiar sound at high tide). So the pools have the topography of a good low tide but none of the biology. (And to Kristin, seriously… how is it that those rocks are still erect? They look like cobblestones in mud!). 

On a side street Ernie asked some locals about surf lessons. The price was right so Ernie asked “what time?”. “Ahora” he said. Ha! We asked for 30 minutes to go back to the hotel and get some things. Given the rocks here at El Tunco, it was better to ride east to the next sandy beach. Ernesto got a few hours of fun and surf on a perfectly overcast day. It was incredibly fun to watch him having an incredibly fun time. No abuelo here. 

By the time we got back it was about 3 and the clouds had come in and the heavy rain was on its way. We were both hangry so had long late lunch at El Coyote (yum) and watched both people passing by and a beautiful white and gray cat prance across the rooftops. It was easily the cleanest and healthiest looking cat we have seen since leaving the USA. Perhaps it has never actually been to the street?

Ernesto says “I had fun surfing. And I enjoyed watching the cat on the tin roof that never went down to the street. It was a pretty gato.” 

August 7
We had a loud night on CA2 (hotel was right next to the road). I really dont’ know how the semi trucks drive these roads at night… I guess with 18 wheels they can afford to lose a few and still go until morning. As we enjoyed our morning coffee and saltines the rain clouds disappeared for just a few minutes and for a short while we had a lovely view of Vulcan Acatenango. Muy bueno. 

100km ride to the border today, but for us it was a bit more as we made a few wrong turns around Escquintla. The first wrong turn we pulled over at a tourist restaurant stop, and the security guard immediately came over to tell us we could park our bikes right out front if we wanted. We smiled and thanked them and told them we didn’t need food, we needed directions ha ha! He was super cool, told us exactly where to go. We fist bumped. And when we made it back around and drove by on the opposite side of the divided highway, we gave an enthusiastic set of honks. The ride from Escuintla to the El Salvador border was definitely the most scenic part of CA2. A few very beautiful portions with a body of water, topography, forest, vines, etc. Lovely.

We saw a Guatemalan funeral today. I am not sure if it was traditional for the entire country, but it was very moving. The casket was in a car/hatchback, but the car wasn’t driving - it was being pushed by about a dozen men. Seemingly the entire village was following behind on foot. We estimated around 100 people, and of all ages. Everyone was dressed very casually. We didn’t see a cemetery ahead, and don’t know how long they had been walking. Again, it was very moving. 

The crop of this part of Guatemala is sugar cane. There is a bit of coffee, but by far the majority of what is growing in southern part of the country is sugar cane. Which is very fitting… Sugar cane is not planted in rows or in any sort of grid. And its very bushy and wild looking. The chaos of the crop matches the chaos of the country. 

This border town is nothing like the western border. Much smaller, much less traffic. We have high hopes of a long but easy crossing tomorrow morning. 

We just saw a commercial on Guatemalan TV for a drink that, according to the commercial, is supposed to make a man sexy and attractive to women (think Axe body spray commercials but for a beverage). The name of this drink is “Predator”... 

I’m experiencing some Pavlovian conditioning regarding the rain and wifi. It rains here and the wifi stops. When I get back to Portland will it start raining and I’ll put my computer away?

Ernesto says “I’d like to say thank you again to Tonya for sending us our titles. I appreciate her doing that and I know it was a pain in the ass. And Guatemala has weird lollipops”

FYI - tonight was the second time we have been given a candy treat in exchange for a screw up. The first was yesterday at the gas station when they ran out of change. They owed us 2Q, they didn’t have 2Q, so they gave us a 2Q candy instead. Then after we got back from our frontera walk about, it turns out or hotel door is broken and we were locked out of our room. There was no fixing this.. i.e., no way to lock our room other than being in it, so they gave us two lollipops. I think we shall see if we can’t take this custom north. 

Late night addendum. The power went out. POOF. Total darkness and calm and quiet throughout all the streets of Ciudad Pedro de Alvarado. Seriously, no light. Just dark. This is surprisingly freaky in a Central American country. Many dark thoughts in Tara’s mind as to what was going on and what could happen in the hours to come. We dig for our headlamps, which are in the always locked case with our passports. Nothing like fumbling around for your things in a room you don’t know in complete darkness! Eventually we would have successfully navigated the scene, but the power came back on before then. After writing this bit o blog I shall be repacking the headlamps in our “always open” case.

August 8
Hola El Salvador! You are lovely! So tranquil. So green. So colorful. So nice to be through Guatemala. Sighs and smiles by Ernesto and I. We had a 150 km ride from the border to El Tunco, which is just west of La Libertad. The ride here was so nice. Jungle cliffs met the ocean on a lush, windy, and well paved road. I can’t even imagine how beautiful it was before the power lines and cell towers. The crops are corn and watermelon, and we must have seen tens of thousands of watermelons in piles along the highway. Are they for sale for passers-by? Are they piled there waiting to be picked up by a truck? 

We unknowingly picked a gringo town to spend our first few nights (we decided to plop for one full day on the coast of El Salvador). El Tunco is stupid with gringos, and well, we would rather be somewhere stupid with mariposas! But it is nice and we are going to have a great visit. While we were enjoying a $6 dinner, a woman came over to us to sell us the goods on her head. Nuts and sweets, beautifully arranged. She was so short. So pretty. So chatty. So affectionate. Probably connected to us because we were old like her :) We bought three dollars worth of nuts and gave her a five, and she said she only had one dollar in change (total lie). So I asked for another bag of peanuts to make up the difference, she laughed, and said she gave us her "richest" bag.

Hopefully tomorrow shall be full of surfing (Ernie), beach chilling and reading (Tara), and snorkeling around that big awesome rock in between the beginners surfers area and the advanced surfers area (Ernie and Tara together). Even after our brief walk through town this afternoon we can tell this town exists for gringos (which is too bad) and that it is a total sausage fest (which is also too bad). Our hotel is very nice, has AC, and we have a private deck with a hammock (which Ernie is enjoying right now and I’m giving him a push every now and again). It is on a strip with some hostels, so within 10 minutes of arriving to the hotel we met a guy from Eugene, OR (Brandon. Duuude. Brah. Trust fund.). There are germans and South Africans. And two other adventure riders from Australia. They flew over, bought bikes on Craigslist in California and Arizona, and have been on the road since June. They are less half our age and their bikes and gear are less than half as good. During our introductory scene, they were staring at us and our bikes but not really being sincere about it… I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but now I know what the look was. Ernie and I are old enough to be their parents. We are easily and by far the oldest gringos in this town. The Aussies were the 20-25 year olds taking this trip because DUDE they can! Let’s do it BRAH! Before we have wives and kids and jobs and woah! We’ll figure it out MAN! They are on used Kawasaki’s that look beat to shit and their stuff was in black plastic lawn and leaf bags that were bungeed to the bike. We are on Triumph Tigers. Elite British motorcycles equipped with waterproof hard cases. We are the privileged grown-ups, probably seen as a mid-life crisis to them. They see us as comfort and cushion and they are bare bones and hard core. We have a Jet Boil with a french press and real paper maps. Yes, we need reading glasses for our maps but we do know how to read and fold them. When Brandon of Eugene came out as we were unpacking the bikes, he was like “totally inspirational man”. Yes he was a little bit high, but he was also looking at us like we were his parents. It isn’t what we see in the mirror, but we understand that it is likely what they see. And that is ok! Life at 40 and 50. Woah. Dude. Ha!  Ahh… kids… we are proud of you and love that you are out there, but we’ll talk later when you are old enough to have an intelligent talk about what privilege means. 

Border crossing was fine… we managed to shoo all the helpers away and do it ourselves! It was definitely easier this time around as we knew the basic principles. Leaving the country you have to get passport stuff and vehicle stuff, and photocopies of everything. Entering a new country you have to get passport stuff and vehicle stuff and photocopies of everything. Always ask “is there anything else we need to do here?” And then ask “where do we go next?”. It took us two hours and our only costs were in photocopies. Interestingly, when we were entering El Salvador there was a guy with a badge with a 5$ request receipt, saying we had to pay him $5 to enter El Salvador. The border patrol guy was right there, and Ernie was looking to him for confirmation or some cue on whether or not this had to be paid. And the border patrol wouldn’t look at Ernie. It was all a scam, and yet the customs agents and country police were doing nothing. We drove off without paying and doubted we would be gunned down… It just raised questions about authority and respect and where the power (if any) lies. I guess the first rule of thumb is that if there no gun there is no respect. Although every security guard at every hotel and gas station has a shotgun… 

The highlight of the border crossing for both of us was a colorful sign right in between the two service windows. It was the only thing in color. It was only an 8 x 10 poster, and it had two rather lengthy paragraphs as thought bubbles by two young people, one girl and one boy, each in a bottom corner of the poster. We didn’t understand all the text verbatim, but we gleaned that it basically said “us El Salvadoran customs officers are good people and we don’t take bribes”. That took up the right and left thirds of the poster. The middle third of the poster was the nativity scene. Yep. Baby Jesus in the hay, three wise men, sheep, goat, the whole thing. It was like a Kevin Bacon game gone awry… what is in someone’s head that can go from the Christian nativity to customs corruption in just one step? No separation of church and state here.

We are watching geckos feed. They are so good at catching bugs. 

I just mistook a moth for a bat. Holy crap! Ernesto says it has a 5” wingspan. 

And smelling weed. Damn kids. This is a hotel not a hostel. Grandma and grandpa want to go to bed soon, so you better settle down before 10 pm. 

Crossing into El Salvador today we passed the 5,000 mile mark. Wow!

August 4
‘Rest and research’ time is apparently like house guests… after three days you want it to end. We were mentally and physically ready to go yesterday (Thursday, after arriving Monday). I love rest and research, but by Wednesday we were researching in circles, reading the same information twice and different information on the same websites… We have finally made a decision to cross at the southernmost point, Ciudad Hidalgo, and we will do so tomorrow morning. We are very excited to get on with the next part of our journey in Central America and we are most certainly done with Tapachula, Mexico. We have been to Walmart every day for five days. On several days we even went twice. 

As suspected, the iguanas proved to be entertaining. There are three resident males and one female that live in the 20m stretch in between the Holiday Inn and the mall. We have a favorite, befriended him, and fed him cucumbers and carrots most days. He wasn’t the largest male, but he was the most handsome. I know you aren’t supposed to feed the wildlife… I know I know. I justified it because neither Ernie nor I have ever fed pigeons or squirrels, and iguanas fit the same urban ecological niche (to LD and CLW, please debunk my niche logic privately).

The FedEx package arrived Thursday afternoon - woo hoo! A final shout out to SuperHero Tonya Butts! It had been opened and poorly taped back together (grr), but both our titles were in the envelope and undamaged, so whatever. After it arrived we immediately walked to the copy shop and made our final, requisite photocopies (we need 1-3 copies of 3-6 documents at each of the next 5-6 border crossings. True parenthetical. Yep, the governments of Central America are actually keeping 1-2 hard copies of every person and vehicle that crosses their border. The natural reserves here that are inaccessible to humans are actually secret government stashes of file cabinets). 

I remember Ernie and I talking a few weeks ago about how often the procedures change for border crossings down here, as there is no official website one can go to and get current guidelines for these countries. Most of the information we can gather is from blogs and postings of other US or European travelers. Postings from 2005 were different from 2010 which were different from 2015. We are trying to follow either the most detailed, the most well-written, or the most recent, but without peer-review we have to just pick a plan. For example, as of two years ago the only place to cancel your vehicle permit in this part of Mexico (and thus get back your $800USD deposit) is 60km away from the Guatemalan border. It is completely unmarked, and requires a U-turn on the highway to access if you are actually headed south to Guatemala. This is actually what we tackled today, and it turns out things have changed. We rode the 60km back up into Mexico and ended up visiting the migration and inspection station for travelers headed north, from Guatemala, and put ourselves through an inspection we didn’t have to. It was fine and easy (as we didn’t have our luggage or a stamp in our passport saying we had been to Guatemala) and the employee was incredibly helpful and kind and had a good giggle that “no, in fact there was no reason for us to be here” (in spanish). Ha ha ha! She did corroborate that two years ago one did have to come to this unmarked location to get your vehicle deposit back, so that made us feel better. Ultimately we were both happy to make the trip as 1) we got back on our bikes and 2) it was our conversation with her that made our final decision about where to cross tomorrow (as she told us some good up-to-date details that we actually believe about our two border crossing options). 

OH. And we drove through the fake police checkpoint again on our way south. But this time there was a single man in his police car hanging off the right hand side of the road (almost exactly where we were previously pulled over by the scammers). It is likely the policeman was doing nothing other than social media on his cell phone in the comfort of his AC’ed auto. As we slowly cruised over the speed bumps I made sure to completely scan the entire scene again - doing a full comparison in my head. I saw two of the same women that were selling empanadas. The three sleezy men that molested us Monday were likely part of a pack of a dozen hanging off to the left of the road - in the shade doing nothing. I wouldn’t have even noticed them today if not for our experience Monday. Ernie and I talked about it later, and we have nothing but positive things to say about the Mexican police and immigration officers. They have been kind, helpful, and patient, and after having driven a stretch of road twice today - and having two VERY different experiences - we have no doubt their presence contributed to our safety for these past few thousand miles. Gracias por todo officers! (especially the todo we didn’t even know about...) 

We bought our first souvenir: a reusable shopping bag from the Walmart in Tapachula, Mexico. Many layers of irony and humor there… When we bought it on Tuesday, and it was to carry away four items: a 12 pack of beer, two 2L bottles of water, and a salad (ok ok, not a salad… it was a small bag of gummi bears). When they rung up the reusable bag, Ernie asked me, “I wonder if they will put it in a plastic bag?”. I laughed hard and loud (eliciting even more stares and glares). They did not end up putting it in a plastic bag, but they did put the water and beer in the reusable bag and then placed the gummi bears in a small plastic bag all by itself. You know… on the side. I guess the bagger decided that there just wasn’t enough room in the 2 foot wide cotton bag for a 4 inch bag of gummi bears. And there is no correcting them or asking for no bag or requesting they put more things in a single bag. Seriously, bagging is serious business down here. In fact, there are often two baggers at the end of each checkout line, and they are often older men and women (abuelos and abuelitas). To tell them you don’t need their services seems akin to insulting their grandchildren. And they are machines. They communicate very little verbally, but they have plans and often a conveyor belt style of operation. Anyway, come Wednesday, we go back to Walmart for more water (and ok ok, more beer and gummi bears), and we bring our reusable bag. The woman behind the counter wants a receipt to prove that we already purchased the reusable bag... She didn’t make us buy it twice, but it got close to that. Ernie and I had a grand chuckle over the immense disconnect between the idea of using a reusable bag in Mexico and the reality of using a reusable bag in Mexico. Next time you hand your reusable bag to the checker at New Seasons, imagine the conversation if you needed to show proof of purchase of the bag itself - it is right out of Candid Camera. Ernie is laughing as we remember the scene ourselves…. He says, “The bags were all so prominently displayed. And they were so well stocked. Is everyone afraid to buy one in case they lose their receipt and it gets repossessed?”

August 5
Hola Guatemala! Your roads are terrible! I think Ernie said it best when he said “I don’t think we are going to ‘do’ Guatemala, I think we are just going to ‘get through’ Guatemala”. True dat. We have read some incredibly wonderful things about this country, its people and places, its history, etc. But since the planning stages of this trip, and at least once a week still, we talk a lot about the type of infrastructure that we “need” for a route. I put need in quotes because while we could probably make it (as in survive) through most of the major roads on our map, we want a reasonable level of safety so that we are still having a fun and nice time. And unfortunately the infrastructure of Guatemala doesn’t make the cut. There are two paved highways that cross Guatemala, the northern one is CA1 or the PanAmerican Hwy and that is the one that crosses through all the amazing sights. However, that road is even worse shape than the one we are on, which is southern CA2 or the Coastal Hwy. According to the locals, all the semi trucks take CA2, but all the local buses (i.e., the chicken buses, or the ones infamous for driving crazy) take CA1.  And also according to/what we learned from the locals, we didn’t feel confident that we could navigate the streets of Antigua or Guatemala City. So we choose CA2, and given the potholes and chaos on CA2 so far, I am certainly very happy with our choice. The handsome Guatemalan we talked to at the border this morning would also be happy with our choice. “The roads are shit!” he exclaimed in his perfectly pressed Manuel Noriega shirt (he spoke very good english). “Be very very careful”. He was very sincere and very excited for our journey. 

So, the border crossing… It was all very calm and non-threatening. We didn’t feel the crazy energy that was described by so many of the blogs (likely dependent on day of the week and the time of day). We were very happy we crossed at Ciudad Hidalgo. In fact, I think our best descriptor of the ordeal is ‘ridiculous’. With our ATM stop, it took us four hours, and we did not do four hours of productive things. The copies… why all the copies? There were no signs… no indicators of where anything is. We had to ask several policia how to find the crossing. We didn’t expect it, but there was no rushing on anyone’s part…. We saw several employees texting or facebooking while they worked on our papers. One woman in Guatemala did our whole bike inspection with her earbuds in. In Mexico there was a good 15 minutes of a woman trying to take pictures of the VIN numbers on our bikes… she was so terrible at taking pictures. It was as if she never used the camera before, and this was a major requirement of her job. It was documentation for the hell of documentation. It was all calm, which was a relief, as yelling and chaos can really jack up the tension. Mostly it was really hot and useless. Which, for someone like me who really thrives on efficiency, it was just ridiculous. In total we made 13 stops:
1 - bank window for Mexican vehicle permit closure and to deposit our refund (or at least get paperwork proving our refund would be deposited “soon”)
2 - passport exit stamp out of Mexico (which was in a hot dog stand-hut-thing, no sign, around the back of the migration building, with a 1960’s turnstyle to get in)
3- drive across river to Guatemala and get waved into “an area” - all the guys in were in matching blue polo shirts
4 - get “fumigated”, which just means spraying chemicals that are illegal in the USA on our tires. Pay some money and get a small piece of paper as a receipt.
5 - drive 20 m ahead and park. Go to immigration booth. Fill out form. Drip sweat on form (as remember, its 98 degrees and 98% humidity, and we are in moto boots, moto pants, and moto jackets). Get stamp in passport that is good for the next four countries.
6 - photocopies. Store #1 had a “don’t pay attention to the man behind the curtain” scene and Ernie and I didn’t want to go behind the curtain… what dirty room lay behind? “Hay un otra tienda?” We ask. 
7 - copy store #2. Get copies of Mexi exit stamp and Guate entry stamp.
8 - Vehicle import building (by far the largest building, it even had a TV!). Fill out many forms.
9 - back to copy store #2 for copies of vehicle forms
10 - back to vehicle window and write stuff on the copies
11 - go to bank window across the hall, pay money, get receipt.
12 - take receipt back to vehicle window, get sticker and put sticker on moto
13 - go through a gate where a man checked our paperwork. This is worth mentioning because this gate is in the middle of the whole fucking thing. This man sees every single person walk back and forth across his gate for hours and hours taking care of their paperwork. And then come gate time, he inspects as if he has seen us for the first time and we just did all that and got fake papers. Good job Gate Dude. 

We arrived at the Mexican border at 11 am, and were through the gate in Guatemala by 3 pm. We ended up with a helper, and ultimately he was very professional. In fact he wasn’t as expected (i.e., sleezy-scammer). He was very polite and well dressed (he had way nicer shoes than us, and by that I mean he has nicer shoes than Ernie and I have back in Portland). He cost about $10 USD (so about $3.25 an hour), and everyone has to make a living, right? Ultimately we would have been fine without him - he probably saved us an hour of time. The highlight (to me) of our interactions with our helper was during one of the waiting periods, when Ernie gave him some shit… Ernie made it clear we appreciated his help, but he asked Mr. Helper straight up why he did not represent himself as a professional that offered a worthwhile service, as opposed to someone that takes advantage of a situation to guilt a tip. Why did he not make his intentions known? 

Moto stickers and sweat accumulated, we cruised out of there and headed inland. It is ~250 km across Guatemala and it will be slow going. And Crazy. CA2 is a two lane road with a bit of a shoulder sometimes, and at one point today, when there was no oncoming traffic, our eastbound lane turned into three: one car or truck lane, one car or truck or moto lane, and one strictly moto lane (from left to right). And it all seemed totally normal. We averaged 40 km/h during our first leg. 

We are at a nice hotel (Hotel Tourista y Jardin in Coatepeque). Pretty swanky for local standards I imagine, and the grounds are beautiful. It is nicer than we need, but I’m happy to be on that end of the spectrum, as the other hotel I had in my notes had a sign out front advertising the price for three hours… Here we have safe motos and clean rooms and no hourly guests. The wifi is crap (it took 20 min to post one pic on our website), so I’m thankful we did some hotel research in Tapachula. Our tentative plan is 150 km tomorrow (Sun), 150 km Monday, then cross into El Salvador Tuesday. 

We met two other gringos at the border crossing today. Ben and Grant from Colorado. We had a nice little visit and exchanged a few stories. They are in a Sprinter van, likely filled with very comfortable things, so we are having a slightly different experience.. They have allotted a whole year (if not more). We exchanged blog sites and I’m looking forward to hearing about their adventures. Safe travels Ben and Grant!

After we unpacked the bike we went in search of food (no snack break today, so we were running on empty). We found some in a tin roof covered ___ where there were two other men and a happy looking woman who did the cooking were welcoming enough (it wasn’t a restaurant, but it wasn’t street food either). After a bumbling conversation, she had sopa (soup) and only sopa. Sopa it is! And it was delicious. Served with a side of rice, tortillas, onions, cilantro, and limes (total of 30Q, or $4 USD). After we made a quick stop at the cervezeria (where you buy by the individual can or bottle, “packs” mean nothing here), and then back to the hotel before dark (always before dark in Central America). On our walk we saw some great new plants and critters. Bird #1 had a great crest - must research. Bird #2 was a LBB/nothing great to look at but wow what a song - must research. And then a big weevil! Who immediately played dead when I picked it up ha ha ha!! (this is really funny if you know about weevils, like me, and never actually picked up a large tropical weevil, like me). The plants might be officially out of league now - I am at a loss for even getting them to Family. Everything is so different. It looks different, it smells different, its proportions are different. Bueno. 

Ernie’s Black Mountain Rag is sounding really good. 

August 6
I rescind my earlier statements that described this route as a highway. It does not deserve the descriptor of “highway”. It is definitely the worst paved road conditions either one of us has ever experienced. We dubbed some of the potholes as albercas (swimming pools). I’d love a picture of me standing in one of the alberca potholes… but that would be entirely too dangerous without the assistance of at least two dozen policemen. I am amazed we did not see any bad things happen today (albeit it we tackled it on a Sunday, and we started our journey at church time). We successfully made it through our 150 km stretch today, and I’d say one third of it was really terrible (riding ~5 mph), about a third of it was ok (averaging ~25 mph) and about a third of it was easy (40-50 mph). And we experienced our first chicken buses! Those who wrote about them on the internet were not kidding. They may be painted with bright colors and happy cheerful things, but they are road bullies. At our snack stop at a gas station today I wandered around, eventually towards a young woman standing in the shade by CA2. We chatted. I was being a gringo and keeping a decent distance from her. Out of nowhere she flags me to come in close to her, and if it weren’t for the look of desperation on her face I wouldn’t have moved. Seconds later a chicken bus pulled into the station at top speed - made my heart skip a beat!

There is no transition that makes this next tidbit better, so… the hotels do in fact get worse than ‘by the hour’. We saw a hotel place today that advertised the price by the minute. Let our imaginations soar. 

Entonces(?), this moment is a totally different scene. We are at Hotel de Pacifico, west of Escuintla, and it is the only gated scene for about 50 km. It is $40 USD per night, which we were not happy about, but as the afternoon progressed it has paid for itself. We arrived about 3 pm, pretty beat up from the ride of potholes and heat and madness. The rain begins about 4 (see videos), but the wifi is still working so Ernie and I research potential places to stay through El Salvador. Bueno. We take a bit of a walk around the place looking for bugs and there is a pool! Bueno… muy bueno… And funny. The pool is finished, but the 32 rooms being built around the pool are not even close to finished. With the clouds they look post-apocalyptic. 

We also had a feel-good moment start to the day when we freed three baby geckos from our bathroom light fixture at the hotel in Coatepeque. We watched them walk around the globe for a few minutes to ensure they were actually stuck… the poor buddies would walk up the globe, get past the equator, and then once they actually hit a point of inversion they would tumble down the bottom of the light fixture. Oh no! We must save them! The geckos went in the light globe to eat the bugs that died in them but now the geckos can’t get out! Ernie crawled up, took down the globe, and we set them free outside. I hope they didn’t become bird food. As the birds start singing and hollering at 5 and stop at 8, and this was right at about 8 am. After the concert the chachalacas gave us, they must have been hungry. 

It is likely one of Tara’s top stories of the trip occurred today. When we arrived at the hotel and were unloading the bikes, there was a kid (10?) who was all wet, but not really in swim clothes. I said Hola and he stared dumbly. Then I asked “Hay una alberca?” (Is there a pool?). He said “No”, smiled, and ran off.  A few hours later when Ernie and I were in the alberca, I see the kid. He is staring, but not so dumbly this time. I looked at him and said, without question and quite a bit of old woman sass, “Hay Una Alberca…”. He grew a shit-eating grin from ear to ear and quickly went underwater. The look on his face… unforgettable. I believe both “gracias” “pequena mierda” are the phrases I am looking for.

Outside of the excitement of the day (see below), we had a quiet and calm ride to Tapachula. The roads got pretty awful coming into town… lots of swerving to avoid the massive potholes. And not just us and cars, but big trucks too. We check into the Holiday Inn. Why the Holiday Inn? Our logic was that with the FedEx-ing we are about to do would have less chance of getting messed up if we went with a corporate hotel in the business district rather than a little local hotel in the messy downtown district. Maybe silly logic, and maybe to a Mexican FedEx driver there is nothing messy or chaotic about a downtown hotel, but here we are. We manage to communicate with the front desk that we don’t know how many days we are staying (ok she says, just come pay every morning). She gives me a mailing addresses, says FedEx is ok and we can have it delivered. Connect to wifi and chat with Super Hero Tonya Butts. She has the moto titles and is 10 minutes away from the FedEx facility in downtown Vancouver. She sends me their phone number and I call and ask employee Jeff if I can pay by credit card over the phone for an envelope my friend is about to come drop off (because a quick online FedEx inquiry yesterday quoted us $600 for a package from Portland to Tapachula). He says, “sure!!”. I say “Great!!”. He asks, “What is it exactly?”. I said “documents”. He says, “Huh. Well those will fit in our special international envelopes for $47.50. Give me a minute and I’ll tell you what day it will arrive”. Friday August 4th. That is the fastest one can get an envelope from Portland to Tapachula. Longer yet much cheaper than expected. So… we are at the Holiday Inn Tapachula until Friday. This is not awful, and it will be good for our backs and bits to have a few days off the bike (as we have been riding every day since Baja). We will also get to do some more research about what to expect and what is possible (or not) in Central America. We can do a bit of bike maintenance too. I guess I had hoped that if we were going to get a four day break it would be in someplace that inspired us creatively or biologically! There are however iguanas that live in the dirty creek that runs along the main road, so they could prove entertaining. The only tourism here is Guatemalans who come up to buy things from Home Depot, Walmart, etc. The hotel is next to a mall. A mall with a Walmart in fact. Literally right next to a mall… a 20m covered walkway connects the hotel to the mall. We may or may not have walked over to the food court and eaten a large Domino’s pizza. 

The excitement of the day was at an old police checkpoint about 50 km outside of Tapachula. There were two lanes, and traffic was being directed to go in both lanes. In hindsight, we see how it was an old police station because the building where the officers normally hang out was covered in vegetation and the speed bumps were nearly disintegrated. In hindsight, we see there was no one in a uniform, only badges, and no nice trucks. In hindsight, we also see how there were women and children selling corn and empanadas and no men with guns. Yet in the moment, with the yelling and commotion, Ernie and I get flagged down to pull over. Showing their badges and awkwardly shooing us off the road. In hindsight, we see how it was all wrong… the way they jogged-skipped as they followed us, their clothes, their haircuts… It was all just wrong. But Ernie thought he saw someone official and I was already really nervous and anxious about not having our moto titles and knowing we needed our titles and what if now is when we have to show the titles??? We stupidly get out our vehicle import permits, but luckily we both got them back in our own hands very quickly. I realize Ernie and I are now having two separate conversations so I go over to him and we regroup (us two and three of them). Meanwhile traffic is still steadily going by and every vehicle has to slow down for the speed bumps, so every local that goes by is just staring at us. Badge guy #1 is telling us things we already know about what we will have to do with our vehicle permits and exit stamps for our passports, and he is trying to prepare us for entry into Guatemala today, asking us to take care of our permits and passports with them. We tell him repeatedly we are not going to Guatemala today, but he is persistent (about what I’m still not sure). He tries to point out differences between our paperwork and their badges. Then we figure out that they are trying to force badge guy #3 to go with us to the border town of Hidalgo. At that point Ernie and I come to and realize this is all a scam. We say no, none of this is necessary and we get the hell out of there. I say (in terrible spanish as I’m upset at this point), “If that guy wants to go to Hidalgo he can go but we are leaving”.  In fact, was he going to hop on the bike or what? We are so very lucky that they didn’t actually get any of our papers (or something worse).  Yes… we should have known. But in the moment it all happens so fast. Ultimately we are both very, very thankful for the experience, because now we know what to look for, which (at least for us gringos) seems required when the scene is chaotic. And I imagine the scenes that involve documentation will only get more chaotic!

As we’ve been reflecting on it and talking about it, we also have a philosophical issue to grapple with... If we are all smiles and welcoming to unknown people and situations, we get the chance to meet and talk to new and interesting people but risk getting taken advantage of. To eliminate that risk we need to have our guard up, assessing each new person and situation with skepticism and a baseline of distrust. Neither one of us want to spend this journey doing the latter, yet neither one of us want to spend the rest of this journey getting kicked around by the people and countries to come. 

On that note - we are peacing out for a few days. Our next blog post will be from Guatemala. If all goes well, we will get the titles on Friday, drive further north to where we are going to cross Saturday (about 4 hours away), then cross the border on Sunday morning. Gracias por todo Mexico… el bueno y el malo. Adios!

​July 29
I don’t think I ever actually wrote the name of where were last night - right in between Tehuantepec and Salina Cruz, whose motto is “La Tierra de Inmortal Sandunga”, or “the land of the immortal sand dunes”. They are pretty epic… They look like mountains that were blown up and sand poured out. There is a mirador (view point) from in town in Salina Cruz, but if I do say so, the view of them was much better when we got to see them hundreds of feet above as we rode in from the west :)

Lovely easy breezy day to Santo Domingo Zanatepec. ~120 km away, an easy amount of kilometers. And the crop of today was wind turbines. Probably a 50 km stretch of them. Go Mexico. This part of Hwy 200 is very flat, but the views of the mountains were spectacular. And lots of white ibises. And a few rounds of “One Less Lonely Girl”. And we saw one gringo today! We made up a great narrative about him, he is a wind turbine engineer and he keeps a place in Oaxaca. 

Found Hotel San Rafael with no problem and we were unpacked and walking around town by 2:30. The school, the cemetery, the chickens, the perros, the houses, the “construction”. The sounds and smells and puddles. A paved road intersected by a cobblestone mess. Just lovely. 

On the walk back to our hotel (which is awesome! it has hammocks outside every room, AC inside every room, and is $280 per night) we found Restaurante El Higo. No one was there, but there was music blaring. Are they actually abierto? Or just Bajabierto? There is a teenager sitting behind the enormous speaker. I ask if they are open, she says yes, we sit outside. El Higo is just along Hwy 200 so there was heaps of good driveby fun, for both us as the people-watchers and the Mexicans as the gringo-gawkers. We order two beers first and don’t get served a menu. But there is a sign out front (neon pink cardstock, written with Sharpie) that advertises “Tacos de Cecina”. Ok! We will try some of those. We have had diarrhea for three days and we haven’t eaten any restaurant food in three days (since the chicken of shame). So if we are going to have diarrhea regardless, we might as well have restaurant food! We order five tacos (two for me, three for Ernesto). They are delightful. That pounding and chopping sound we heard during the 20 minutes it took for the tacos to arrive was her chopping fresh onions and cilantro and “tortillas hecho en mano” (making tortillas by hand). It didn’t take long to decide we needed more tacos. I need at least two more, and Ernesto thinks five should do. So we order seven more tacos. A total of 12 tacos. Truth be told, I could have eaten two more, and Ernie says he could have eaten at least three more, but best not to push our luck. By tacos-round-two the rain had arrived, but we were comfortably protected under the tin roofed porch of El Higo. 
 
Soo… as we have been researching more about Central America we have come to learn we have made another mistake… It appears we will need our moto titles. Given the headache I had before we left Portland about my moto title, we now had experience on our side to know that getting a new/replacement is more difficult than getting a new/replacement passport. We googled, asked some folks… decided our moto registration was enough and we did not need the titles. Oops. BUT, da na na NAH. Enter Tonya, our dear dear friend Tonya… she has collected our titles from our Prescott house and is going to FedEx them to us. We have to pick a town with a corporate hotel, hopefully we will arrive to said hotel on Monday, she will mail, the envelope will arrive one to ? days later, then we’ll drive to the border the day after we get the titles… This could easily be a week hiccup, but we will make it work. I wonder which will be cheaper… overnight shipping from Portland to Tapachula? Or a round trip flight from Tapachula to Portland?

July 30
~175 km rainy ride to Pijijiapan, Chiapas (our ninth and final state in Mexico). The town is pronounced Pee-hee-hee-ah-pawn. Hee! Our attempts to blend in with a town’s people and places again failed miserably this afternoon. But it was still nice to explore, trip a lot on curbs, get honked at incessantly by taxis, catch up on the latest fashion and shoe prices, and eat a few tacos. 

We experienced a major change in scenery today. Montane jungle was off to our left (or NE) most of the day, and during a few bits we got to drive through it. Thick and lush, every shape of leaf you can imagine, hot and humid and thick clouds. I know the reality is that the clouds are low and hug the mountains, but I like my version better which is that we have climbed so high and gained so much elevation that we have made it up to the clouds. Once we entered Chiapas, Hwy 200 opened up into four lanes, which is very luxurious! I’ve haven’t written much about this, but down here you need to watch behind you just as much as in front of you. Which goes against everything I learned about moto riding. Down here, unless there is no one around, you don’t get the whole lane. At any time someone could turn in with you, pass you, share with you, etc. Every moment I’m looking behind me is a moment I’m not looking ahead of me… so with hazards in both directions communication is key. Ernie always leads, so half of his communication to me everyday is the road hazards ahead (potholes, unmarked speed bumps, etc.) and half of my communication to him every day is “car passing” or “truck passing”. Why? Because they don’t actually pass AROUND you via the on-comming lane, they just sort of shove you off to the right hand side of the road. So it's much safer if you prepare and get out of the way. This is especially true for on-comming traffic, as there is a mutual agreement between both sides of the highway that the middle of the road (or straddling the yellow line) is for whomever happens to need it at that moment… so just hang off to the side/in the shoulder if possible and hope there are no rocks or potholes there. I can honestly say that I never thought I would describe a divided four lane highway as “luxurious”, but it is. 

Our snack break today happened to be by one of the pedestrian overpasses. We’ve been seeing these things ever since we entered mainland Mexico, but haven’t ever seen a person on one, nor had we been up one ourselves. They are often in kind of chaotic areas where it wouldn’t have been easy to pull over. I took advantage and walked up it. It was quite sketchy. The stairs were unreasonably steep. There is no way that some slow grandma or pack of children would be safer on those stairs than if they just slowly walked across the highway. Why is everything in Mexico just a little bit dangerous? They even figured out how to make pedestrian crosswalks dangerous. 

On our walk back to the hotel this evening we got a visit from the policia. Was rather humorous - they wanted to be sure us gringos knew if and how to call in the first sight of trouble. Mostly I think they were bored and wanted to visit. 

A final thought of the evening… the concept of clean and dirty and laundry have been redefined since established campgrounds have no longer become “a thing” (and when we were camping, everything was just dirty all the time). Ernie and I both packed two sets of “warm things” and two sets of “cold things”. Four “outfits” total, if you will, two for each season. Most of which is quick dry, but not quick dry enough to dry in a few hours if we want to go explore in town without stinking of our terrible stink. In this weather, there is really no point trying to clean dirty clothes for another dirty day (exception being skivvies, which we have four pairs of), so instead of two outfits we seem to have one “clean” outfit and one “dirty” outfit. The clean outfit gets put on after dinner, after a shower. And the dirty outfit gets put on every morning before we pack up the bikes. Man… my dirty shirt is so dirty… the smell is fascinating at this point. Ernie’s too. I’m a bit tired of the green however, so I’ll think I’ll rotate out which shirt is clean and dirty come Central America. 

July 27
Early to bed and early to rise! We got up and out early (on the road by 8:30 am), which was fortuitous, as there was construction right out front the hotel. Which, apparently, was in the process of expanding. And, apparently, expanding without warning the businesses/patrons on the other side of the construction. None of the cars nor the big bus in the parking lot of Hotel Pepe’s were able to leave the hotel come 8 am… For how long? When would they be able to get back on the highway???They didn’t know (I talked with the bus driver - he was pissed!). Wha?!? Can you imagine… taking a bus in the USA (so you and 40+ other people) and getting stuck on the wrong side of some road construction and the answer/solution to when you can get around and back on the highway is “I don’t know”.  Ha! But with the motos we were lucky as we could hop a few curbs, squeeze through a dirt passage, and make it back out the highway (and yes, the Tara of a month ago would not have been cool simply hopping a few curbs and squeezing through a dirt passage). We got out of town no problem thanks to yesterday and had a nice scenic drive for at least 50 or so km. It was full of steep ravines - the kind that remind me of the scene in The Princess bride when Buttercup pushes Wesley down the hill and he shouts “Assss Youuuu Wiiissshhhh”. 

Was wanting clw as a tour guide today - so many wetlands and estuaries!!! Funky algae that I wanted to know all about. Were they bueno or no bueno clw? I was trying so hard to make sense of the landscape, but alas, I needed clw. We had lots of questions about the differences between all the bodies of water we saw today… was by far our biggest freshwater day of the trip and they all looked so different. At times we could even see all the different bodies - rivers and estuaries and isolated lake-wetland things…. What was growing in them was so different! They were also full of many cows and birds. Herons and egrets for sure. Decent amount of chachalacas! I swear I saw a pink spoonbill, but it was not confirmed by Ernesto so it can’t be counted. Same for a few jacanas - their legs and walk seem to be the giveaway but I need confirmation.

One funny I forgot to write about yesterday - Anotonio. The X year old from our snack break (or however old about 2 ½ feet tall is). We stopped for gas and after filling up we pulled under the one sliver of shade and drank coke’s and ate chips. Anotonio came over and sat right with us. “Da me dinero” he said (give me money). After it was clear we weren’t going to give him money he started asking questions. Which, was fun as his spanish was about as perfect as mine, which is to say as good as a 2 ½ foot tall child. He asks what we are doing on the motos. I say we are traveling through Mexico. He says, why? I say to experience the country. He says, why? I say to meet its people. He says, why? I just start laughing… and he looks at me oddly while I’m laughing with just makes me laugh harder. Kids and their “why?” Are the same in every country, and it is just a wee bit funnier when they say “por que?”

We drove through a secret today - Punto Escondido. This stretch of Hwy 200 is not covered in guidebooks and while we largely see why, we think even Lonely Planet and the like would like to keep at least one part of Mexico sacred. It is the second place on my list to come back to - a more real and genuine but just as lovely and more easy to navigate Puerto Vallarta/Zihua/Acapulco. With so many real estate signs, we hope it does not turn into that. 

Crop of the day = limes! And they smelt like limes! Like key lime pie in fact. We drove by a few lime packaging-type facilities and the smell was pretty overwhelming. They are shorter citrus trees than expected, so it makes a bit of sense why they are so cheap (as a man could pick all the hundreds of fruits off one tree while standing comfortably around said tree - is that politically incorrect to say?)

Currently in Puerto Angel. It is nice. Much better on foot than on a moto. The streets are very steep and patched-potholed and who knows what is at the top if these crazy streets if we were to choose to ride up or down it... The hotel “could” be right up there, or it could lead to another road that is steeper and chunkier than the road we can see… What should we do? We talk to a taxi driver - “claro que si” he exclaims. I.e., of course we can make it to that road and hotel! Which is all of no help, as we learned in Zihuatenejo that cab drivers will support any gringo in any stupid endeavor. Any way, there was one hotel we saw driving in, but we would have to go back and really scope out the driveway from a different angle. We decide we can do it! And we do it! Unpack bikes, turn on AC, then take our sticky stinky selves down to the playa. Although in this town the major attraction is a large dock. Disproportionately large… as if it were for a boat hundreds of feet long rather than the 20’ simple fishing boats that are lining the shore. Children are jumping off. A woman is selling snow cones and some Mexi version of an elephant ear. We are dripping with sweat and disoriented and tired (it was a 200+ km day averaging only 40 km/h). So we decide to just sit and have a few cervezas. We are in the shade, there is a nice breeze, and we are chatting about the last few days and the days ahead.  A fish truck with a bluefin tuna pulls up and hangs. I am curious… bluefin? Really? Here? What do they do with all the money? Or is it just a logo? So I ask the waiter, he says “Si Si Si”.  I think they catch tuna, but not bluefin. Either way Mr. Truck is waiting for the day’s catch. Luckily during our second beer we got to see it. Marlin. Couldn’t read the kilos while I was interrupting their entire exchange. Why was this white woman in Keene’s and an iPad was so curious about their fish???

Post beers and marlin-fun-times we gave ourselves a tour of the fishing boats on the beach. Cast nets and trolling/long lines. Mostly done on a small scale, but nothing seemed official. 

We are at one of our first hotels that isn’t worth the money… The AC isn’t doing anything (and in some places they have two prices, one with AC and one without). Ernie and I are paying the “despite-your-insane-driveway-at-least-we-could-make-it-up-this-one-so-we-didn’t-have-to-ride-around-anymore-tax”.  Given what we spent on the hotel we enjoyed a ramen noodle dinner (augmented with chili lime peanuts, so don’t feel bad for us! Yum!). Our patio made us feel even more hot and sticky, but it is a lovely view.  After the sun got low in the sky we took a break for showers and an attempted body cool down… Fail. We are back on the patio and sweating. There is a nice breeze however, and town is coming alive for the evening. (We make such terrible Mexicans… for many, many reasons... but a big one is that we want to be “home” chilling by 8 pm and not out and about looking for where to eat dinner). 

There is sunset aerobics in the town square. Ernie is trying to play guitar but the 60’s style hispanic aerobics pop is overpowering his Black Mountain Rag, so he stops. I look at him and he can tell I want to ask him why he stopped. We are both a bit baffled by the aerobic scene. He says, “I am wondering if they are they all tourists? Or are they the fishermen's wives that come down? I doubt they are they fishermen's wives but you never know…”

July 28. 
It has now been 30 days since we left Oregon. Wow! I said to Ernie this morning, “Happy One Month Anniversary!” He giggled. There was a pause and I followed up, “We haven’t fought yet. I don’t think we are going to”. He said, as if it were obvious (which by the way, I love it when he  does that) “I wouldn’t have wanted to come on this trip if I thought we were going to fight”

Another 200+ km day. No more please! Ernie is tough and can handle the longer stretches better, but I get cranky after about 4 hours of riding, and 200+ takes us at least 5 if not 6 hours. We are going to try and plan some shorter days to leave Mexico and enter Guatemala Wednesday, August 2. (We have more on this plan and our latest mistake in an upcoming post… Super Hero Tonya Butts is going to save the day with some missing paperwork). 

We got up and out of Puerto Angel early, so that helped. Although not as early as the fisherman! As we drank coffee on our lovely balcony there were already boats (at 8 am) unloading their catch. Mostly skipjack tuna, I believe caught with a small purse seine net. I think the baited (trolling?) hooks are for the marlin, mahi, etc. 
. 
We had a nice ~45 minute water and snack stop in Santiago Astata. There was a taxi and public bathroom area in the shade outside of town that had benches. We had a nice chat with a man (we never got his name) who was curious about us. He gave us some good pointers about the roads in Central America as well as the roads to get to Guatemala. My personal favorite part of the experience was the old man in a red plastic chair across the street. I didn’t know what he was doing at first, but by about 30 minutes in I figured it out. He was the man in charge of shouting what bus was approaching (see pics). I have so many questions… Does he do this every day? What if he is sick? How long has he been doing this? About how many people rely on him shouting which bus has just pulled into town?

Ernie had a quetzal sighting today… uncorroborated by me, but knows them from his in Costa Rica so he has a trained eye. I am ready to see one please!

Once in town we decided it was worth every peso to get a taxi to take us to the bank (which was downtown) and then to the grocery store. We needed more coffee and treated ourselves to good ingredients for Tacos al Ernesto. It took about two hours in total, so it was nice to be driven through a town without having to worry about anything related to driving.

Oh… and that super steep driveway to the hotel? It was way worse going down. Even Ernie said it was bad! Both of us got a big adrenaline boost. 

“Ernie, would you like to say anything about the hotel driveway this morning?”
“It was very steep and bumpy, and there was a lot that could have gone wrong but didn’t. The guy starting at us from the top didn’t help a whole lot either.”

July 24
We did it! We successfully navigated the unmarked whacky directions we had to go into and around Acapulco and to our hotel! We didn’t even have to make one U-turn!!! Well, except for the one we took 200km before Acapulco and except for the one we were instructed to take in Acapulco. Which… think about it amigos... how many times has Google Maps (or any directions that have not included something like “turn left at the tree”) included a highway-based U-turn as part of the instructions??? We are awesome. Shout out to my father for fostering, nurturing (and at times likely forcing) some serious knowledge and understanding of maps. I remember him teaching me how to memorize the basic layout of a city based on a map - basically to pick some main streets in each direction or corner or boundary or whatever makes sense for that city and have that layout memorized in your head. That way no matter what way you end up if you make a wrong turn, eventually you will have something to orient yourself to. Or tricks to picking markers about when to turn or change direction. I still have that map in my head for Missoula Montana. This has all proven to be a necessity in towns that don’t have street signs (which is to say most if not all towns and cities we will be in since we left US America). I mean, anyone can follow a map if everything is marked well enough to match the roads to your map, but without that, one must rely on a certain spidey-sense for things like “we just headed SW for about 10 km and based on our map this is where the turn is…” (And FYI - No. We have not turned into some metric geniuses. Ernie and I reset our bike odometers and Google maps to be on km). So thanks for the skills Dad! Our shared map allele on an X chromosome is also probably what also fueled me to spend $100 on a handlebar mounted compass. It was a pricey bit of gear, but so far worth every penny. 

Long ride today… we pushed about 250 km and are tired. Arrived in Acapulco about 4:30 pm (and beat the rain!). We unpacked bikes, turned on the AC in the $30 room, then left said room for some food. We are still unsure which towns shut-down their restaurants for siesta from 5-7, but we were hungry enough that we took the risk taking a walkabout in the weather as we were already drenched in sweat. I don’t even know the name of the place we just ate at, but there were lots of cars out front which is why we chose it (we had peanuts and only peanuts for both breakfast and lunch, so we were quite hungry). I thought the most beautiful part of Ernie’s plate was the giant slice of perfectly ripe avocado, which he ate first. And I thought the best part of it all was the tortillas - hand made, corn, and perfectly cooked. 

The real highlight of today was Ed Alberts. Ed Alberts of Zihuatenejo, Venezuela, Olympia WA and New Jersey. We made one (and only one) wrong turn getting out of Z to get to Hwy 200 to begin our journey to Acapulco, and on said wrong road we pulled off for Ernie to fix his headset cable. While we were pulled over, a tall friendly fellow stood on the sidewalk watching us, smiling. He had on a floppy hat, shorts, and a great old-man button down shirt. While Ernie fixed his cables, I got off the bike and checked the map just to make sure we were going to do it right next time. A long (short) enough period of time passed that I felt I should acknowledge the man standing and smiling at us. I did, he did, and after our spanish pleasantries, he spoke English! He was the first person in what seems like weeks. I know we shouldn’t want to talk to English speakers, but it was nice to connect on “that” level and have a conversation that meant something a bit more. We talked for about 20 minutes. Lovely. His first bike was a Triumph and since then he has had 35 bikes in his life. He has two homes in Z (one rental and one to maintain residency) and he just moved to New Jersey (after leaving Olympia WA). He is retired. He is from Venezuela. He is very jealous of our trip. He so graciously offered us to stay in one of his homes in Z for a night. Probably a month if we wanted. He was so very kind… and so very curious and genuine about seeing us gringos on the side of the road as he was just walking about his morning business. He was so very nice. I hope we inspired each other. 

Post Ed Albert, the stretch of road from Zihuatenejo to Acapulco is nice, but definitely the least beautiful stretch of mainland Mexico we have seen thus far. No more mariposas, no reptiles, not very many birds. Lots of power lines. We did get some good road crabs on the stretches by the beach (again, with their claws up and out as they crossed the road, as if that would do anything at all to protect them). A few roadkill foxes. The only crop of this area, albeit miles and miles of it, was cocos (coconut). So many cocos!  Beautiful agricultural land… in it’s own way I suppose… perhaps like the Mexi version of corn crops. Most of the coco farms double up and have goats or cattle under the palms.  I have a hypothesis (with no data to back it up) that they plant the trees far apart so that they can plant a new generation of trees and it still get sun to both generations… leaving lots of open space for things like goats or cows or horses. It is pretty spectacular to see kilometers of palm trees in a relatively open line/grid system. 

There was a potentially scary yet in reality hilarious moment late in the day with a very tall truck filled with plastic garbage (broken chairs, broken fruit crates, 100 liter bottles with holes, etc.). There was a little man sitting atop all the plastic garbage, presumably to keep it from falling out of the truck. But alas, two broken plastic fruit crates came bumbling down from 15’ above Ernie, right in the road in front of him. If we weren’t going so slow it would have been scary, but it was hilarious in slow motion at ~5 km per hour. 

Almost as hilarious as me humming and/or singing Justin Beiber for most of the day “One less lonely boy… One less lonely girl… One less lonely girl”. That is pretty much the whole song. It just repeats so it was easy to learn yesterday when the segment about the Beebs was featured at the hotel at breakfast. Ernie was laughing when I sang and hummed it today, but i wonder how funny he will think it all is a week or month from now when I’m still humming or singing “One less lonely girl…. One less lonely girl…. One less lonely girl…” 

Now we are just chillin’ at the hotel. It is small and clean enough and there is lavender scented toilet paper (which demands it’s own blog post… as, wtf?). The AC works well so we are happy. I need to get crackin’ and find out what is ahead. Acapulco is the last tourist town so we aren’t sure of accommodations for the next week or so, as we think we have about 5-7 more evenings until we cross to Guatemala.

There is a bar next door that is apparently very popular. It is full of young people and the DJ is playing very repetitive, uncreative, and loud “boom boom” music. Every fourth count of eight it is accentuated by a deep vibrato tiger roar. And maybe every eight count of eight there is a lyric or two. If it continues through the evening there will be no sleeping. If you ever get the chance to ask Ernie to impersonate the music, I highly recommend doing so. 

July 25 
The bar shut down at 10 pm last night. Yay! Then sleep. Well ok… we stayed up to 11 and finished watching that strange movie about the two kids running from bad guys but the movie never tells us why they are running or why the bad guys are chasing them (and the movie was in English, so we can’t blame it on a language barrier). It was the first hotel I’ve ever stayed at that just gave a flannel sheet as the entire bedding. No sheet plus blanket combo, just a twin sized thick sheet on a queen bed (or as they call them here, “matrimonia”). 

By 10 am or so we were out, and it was an easy drive out of town to the east. We can tell the towns are changing a bit… the stuff they are selling is different and how they are selling it all is different. I whole study could be done on the way Mexican women try and attract you to their shop. 

By 2 pm we arrive at Playa Ventura. We picked this place for no other reason than our map and km between towns that seemingly have services like gas, food, and hotels. Wow! This is the beach I have been thinking about and hoping for in Mexico. Which is funny, as what we have read sort of implied the beautiful playa ended after Acapulco, so I kind of kissed my thought goodbye. In fact there was even a moment of acceptance this morning early in our ride. I said to myself, “Tara, your expectations for the perfect Mexican beach are too high and that beach does not exist.”  But alas… here it is! Ernie and I feel free and light and the way a Mexi beach is supposed to feel. It is all so pleasant and welcoming… This beach is truly lovely. And steep! So steep…. Ernie and I were out on the beach for a few hours and at one point we laid out on the sand, butts to the ocean, heads to the shore, to patiently spy on fiddler crabs, and we were lying at a 45 degree angle. We were poor spies as we kept laughing, but we had a blast watching them dig our their burrows as we gently got swept up and around by the waves behind us. The sand was so coarse and soft. The perros are friendly. No one is here in Playa Ventura. There are about four hotels and ours is one of the most central, and we are one of two booked rooms. And there are rocks on the beach… yes…. rocks! I cannot wait until they empty a bit. Tonight? Tomorrow? I do hope I am here and the sun is out when the pools empty a bit. Based on the critters we can see from our palapa I imagine the tidepools are exquisite. Although we arrived at about 2 and now its about 6 and we have seen very little change in the water… it isn’t a new or full moon so perhaps the tide won’t change much this time of the month (makes it sound like a moody woman).

(Pause and backtrack)

Within an hour after arriving to town we were camped out under a palapa and did so for about three hours. Was soooooo great. Honestly the beach and reading experience I’d been waiting for. The sound of the ocean while reading “The Storyteller” by Vargas Llosa - thanks Bonnie!), the few people walking by…. Heck, one guy came by with his cast net looking for his next spot. A CAST NET. And his two dogs. We drank a few cervezas, fed our leftover chip crumbs to our local perros (out of a coco), and then headed back to the outdoor hotel showers to get the sand out of our bits. Seriously… I had about a pound of sand in my crack - forward and backward. It was very funny and very awkward trying to get it all out. I asked Ernie if he had the same problem (at least for his backward bits) and he laughed and laughed and watched me wrestle with the situation - he just kept laughing and eventually said “no, he didn’t have any problem, probably because his shorts are baggy”. Total lies. I think he is just more sophisticated than I and wouldn’t admit to such crack issues.

Damn these perros are sweet (we are back at the beach now, waiting for the sunset). We went walk about looking for a taco place that we read about on the internet, but they were closed (either for the day or for siesta, but damn us gringos don’t eat dinner at 8 pm!). So we found another place and the gansta’ dude that went with it. He sweet talked us and it was funny (and no harm no foul at 75 pesos for dinner and cervezas). We fumbled with our spanish and he talked us into one full order and one half order of taqitos. They were good, but very small and felt more like a tease of an appetizer than a meal. And they were served in a soup-liquid then piled with cheese and a whopping dollop of mayo. I quickly dug out my two mini taquitos and then strained the rest out in and stashed in some napkins. Brought it right back to the same perros and coco we left the chip crumbles in earlier and our little buddy gobbled it up. Except the onions. I can hear my dad saying, “see, even the starving perros in Mexico don’t eat onions”

(Pause) 

This is the first town that I have felt the desire to come back to. I can easily picture a week in fall or winter where all Ernie and I have to do is enjoy this town, it’s people, and it scenery.  Read, relax, and of course plan it around the lunar cycle for tidepooling. Bring hammock and cooler. Ernie has had a few so far, but for me this is the first place I would spend a full on “vacation”. It is so very lovely and genuine. I can’t really guess what it is like during peak season, as there seems to be a bit of a carrying capacity to the place…. Even with a few hundred people however (as opposed to the few dozen now) I imagine this town is just as charming. 

Doh! Two perros and attempted chinga! It was an unsuccessful attempt, but el senor is being persistent. Now el senor perro is rubbing his banana in the sand!!! Dios Mios! Guess they got a lesson from the marine iguanas of the Galapagos…

As I wrote all that (as we sit by the beach, take two), Ernie was playing guitar. He stopped with the perro on perro action and we’ve decided that is enough blogging for today.

Although… “Ernie, have you any final thoughts?”
“I am enjoying this evening”

July 26
Today was hard. And sad. It started off terribly… on our way out of Playa Ventura we saw a dog get hit by a car. It had a collar. It was awful… the sights and sounds will haunt me in my dreams tonight for sure.

Stressful arrival and navigation in Pinotepa Nacional. No signs in or out of this city… Our map (or the map in my head) was useless. Over 1-2 hours we found our way out of town for tomorrow, which is great as we have a long day of riding tomorrow and want to get up and out of town smoothly - if that is possible. 

With all camping and RV parks a distant memory, we are staying Hotel Pepe’s, which is bright pink and on the outskirts of town. With tourism completely gone from the towns and cities, it is very raw. Working city with working people doing their thing. 

I feel very different than I did 24 hours ago. But that is how this shit goes. Up and down… up and down… We are committed to the ride. 

It is 6:30, and Ernie is already asleep. 

Also… after 2-3 days of snacks, we may or may not have walked into town, bought a whole chicken fresh off the grill, and eaten it right out the plastic bag on the bed… 

​
July 21
Playa de Iguana to Punta San Juan de Lima. Adorable tourist town, especially this time of year with only Mexican tourists. After scanning for a cheap hotel we check in and walk to one of the half dozen bar-restaurants at la playa, we got to sit and watch three great scenes. Scene one was this old man sitting alone drinking a clear alcohol - slowly but surely. He had his cell phone with him on the table and it was blaring tejano music and he was smiling. I’ll say it again, Mexicans sure do love their loud music… Scene two was the VW bus driving on the beach selling… ice cream? Ice pops? Something that tourists would likely want but we didnt’ see them actually make a sale. We think it was ice-something because of the music blaring out of the bullhorn affixed to the roof of the van - that circus-kids-ice-cream-truck-kind of jingle. They weren’t having any luck so they (i.e., the two 25 year old hombres driving and selling the iced goods) seemingly decided it was time for a break. They pulled up under a palapa and there they hung for the next hour. And left the music playing on the VW bus. It would have been charming if it was our only auditory stimulus, but it was competing with the old man’s cell phone tejano behind us…  And scene three was the family of ~12 next to us that had come to San Juan for the day or vacation and was all smiles. A super sassy and adventurous “Grandma”, her studly esposo the “Grandpa”. She rocked a bright red bathing suit and ran (literally ran) back and forth from the restaurant to the beach when she wanted to. He rocked original tinted aviator glasses - bright gold rim. No shirt, and just enough in and out of shape body to make it all look good. They had 2-3 kids, and each of them were with their esposos or esposas and with their 2-3 kids. And everyone was laughing and dancing (adults) or entertaining themselves with sand and waves (kids). The only time I saw anyone pick up their phone was for a photo. Happy peeps. 

Oh and I guess scene four was the waiter himself. Early 20’s, tall, and perfectly asymmetrical. Over the top friendly and treated Ernie and I very well. I think we both ended up ordering food that wasn’t even on the menu (?!?!?). He was muy bonito. 

We were quite hungry. Our last meal was Pepe’s tacos two days ago. Yesterday was fruit, nuts and chips and this morning we only had coffee. At this point it was about 4:30 pm. 

SO - all of this put me in the mood for what I consider to be the big news of the day… I ate fish! I ate something from the ocean! I only tried it as it was Ernie’s dinner and he was hungrier than I, but after lots of questions, I took a large forkful and put in it my mouth. Mahi mahi. Dorado. Dolphin fish. I asked what I could to the waiter, then asked Ernie all I could about his opinion about its freshness and preparedness… Holy shit I ate fish! And it was good! I admit it. In fact, if I could go back and redo it, I would get what Ernie got, which was just grilled mahi mahi. Fresh, never frozen, nothing but heat and a bit of salt. And as Ernie said, “this fish has had a better life than that chicken”. And unless that chicken came from the San Blas chicken lady where the chickens lived happily in her house until she picked them up by the neck and then the next second (a dark poof), I believe that to be true. And yes, I need to have a full proper meal before I can call myself any sort of eater of things from the ocean, but it was a start. Eat local and support fresh sustainable fishing…. Woo hoo!

Post dinner we wifi-ed about places to stay as we are coming up to another tourist stretch - Zihuatanejo and Acapulco. We don’t want to repeat previous mistakes, but wifi is so weak we only had enough patience to book tomorrow. Looks like after Acapulco and into Guatemala we are going to lose camping… a few RV parks here and there but with no shade they are miserable and nothing we want to be a part of as this heat and humidity continues. I guess the tourist part of southern Mexico is north - Yucutan and the like. 

A note about the drive today - miles and miles of bananas and/or plantains. Not sure how to tell a banana vs plantain as they grow, and it was likely there were fields of both as there were both for sale on side-of-the-road stands. It is fascinating to me how the micro differences in the (duh) microclimate visually translate as we ride by.

Oh - and the local salt! Sold by the white burlap bag. Wish I could send everyone a bag of central mexi sea salt… It is delicious. 

Shout out to Hotel Maria Isabel in San Juan - to the owner and her son… we suck. Or more appropriately, we don’t know our numbers. We rolled into town and found your lovely hotel and your welcoming son to greet us (probably 13 and during the school year he lives in Dallas and during the summers he comes back to San Juan to help with the family business - nice kid). While he goes and gets his ma we sneak a quick picture of their living room (see Google maps), then the lady of the house comes out, greetings, etc. We thought she told us it would be $1400 pesos for room with AC, $400 without, and $200 to camp. We check out the campsite (which was meh to ick - not her fault but it is so thick with bugs and it’s so humid we don’t know how it is possible to be this humid and not raining) and then sneak across the street to another hotel. They tell us a room is $600 a night and we take it. When we finally get around to googling the price the Hotel Maria Isabel senora had quoted us because we were thinking we were wrong and… well we felt like jerks. We were so wrong! You quoted us $500!  Especially after we entered your lobby and wanted to support your political and religious beliefs (see pic). So to you Hotel Maria Isabel - lo siento! 

Quiet and early night. Ernie is playing guitar. 

I ask Ernie for closing thoughts and he says, “the fish was very good.”

July 22
We probably drove the most beautiful road in mainland Mexico today. Ocean, jungle, cliffs, rocks, beaches, lots of changes in elevation via lots of twists and turns…. no development, no billboards. Stunning. Ernie and I didn’t talk much at all for about 100 km, in part I think because we were taking it all in. There is no picture that could capture its beauty, and no pullouts that would have allowed such a thing, so I’ll just post the google map windy bits. 

Great animals today. One highlight was a big red crab (~6” carapace) walking across the highway (claws out, as if that would help with the oncoming car). And this was at probably 700 feet up! What was little crabby doing?!?  So silly. And iguanas! Some dead, but lots of them alive. And 2 feet long. Great striped tails. Heaps of smaller lizards too, dung beetles, some skunks (all dead sadly).  This giant roadrunner bird thing - we have to research and ID it, but we have seen a half dozen so far - very impressive. And other birds to research - the colors are their giveaway once we have enough wifi signal to research them. 

And so many mariposas. Stupid amount of mariposas. It is like this part of Mexico is a snow globe of mariposas. I watched them dance around Ernie all day. I don’t know if it is seasonal or what… but how people don’t just come here to watch all the butterflies! They are outstanding. 

Ideally the day would have ended around 2-3 when we finished that amazing stretch of Hwy 200, but tourist-hotel-camping-stuff is getting fewer and farther between, so we had another 75 km or so to go before the next town of Lazaro Cardenas. There are still quite a few RV parks around this part of Mexico, but so far experience had taught us that advertised RV (only) parks either don’t allow tents or don’t have any shade, which is straight up unhealthy for us PacNW gringos. We studied the map and thought we had a plan for navigating through this city, and ultimately we only got slightly lost and wound up at a cheesy tourist hotel... We hate being at hotels and we would rather be camping…. well, ok, I personally would like to have three conditions met if we camp: 1) bikes have safe place, 2) percent humidity is lower than human body temp, 3) ambient temperature is lower than human body temp. Ernie could probably sacrifice at least two of those...

I finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance last night. It has everything I would ideally like in a book. Motorcycles, road trips, a connection with Montana and the American West. The author is even an academic and has a few pretty awesome diatribes about teaching and research in higher education. A big theme is quality, and I often found myself nodding at his critiques of what is and isn’t quality. I got all the way through it, and ultimately - I didn’t like it. And since my Missoula days I remember “the cool kids” telling me how much I’ll love this book. I don’t. It is pretentious. And woo woo. And he rambles. And the whole Chautauqua thing… And I’m pretty sure he is bipolar - which is fine and all - but don’t expect me to find his bipolar ramblings deep and explanatory of the way things have and ought to be. In a sense it is two books in one (which makes sense if he is in fact bipolar). One book is the travel story of he and his son from Minnesota to California, and the other is his “back in time” reflections and yammerings of his time as philosophy graduate student and/or his time at the mental institution where he worked through whatever major question plagued his life. The authors name is Robert, but he refers to his younger self as Phaedrus (evidence of said pretentiousness). I really did enjoy his writing style about the road trip. I could visualize every part. I thought that part of the book was fantastic, and very real and personable. I could connect. But the woo woo part… maybe I’m just not smart enough or interested enough. Ernie is reading it now - I look forward to having a mini-book club about it with him. 

One inspiring part I can share is a passage early on that describes traveling via moto. So for those who may not have any sense for why we are doing what we are doing the way we are doing it, he captures it well...
“You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observe and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”

(Pause)

“Ernie, do you have a thought you would like me to include?”
“The fish I had yesterday was very, very good.”

July 23.
Jesus Cristo. Dios Mios. We can do everything right and still have it all come out wrong. It is too long of a story to write it all out as I wish I had the energy for… as there would be some kick ass adjectives…

1 - we book a hotel in Zihuatenajo (Z) based solely on location, as again, we are done with the stress of navigating the bikes in tourist towns

2- we have a nice ride from Lazaro Cardenas to Z… still lots of mariposas but not much for view, crops, smells, etc. A few iguanas to keep us company. We also now know the great bird we are seeing is some subspecies of chachalaca (bird we had to ID from a day or two ago). So great!

3 - we arrive in Z at 1 pm and successfully navigate to where expedia.com map said our hotel should be.  Clearly, there is no hotel anywhere…

4- to avoid the madness we see signs for the airport - lets just go to airport and catch a cab that is returning after dropping off travelers and pay him to have us follow to the hotel

5- we (stupidly) tell cab driver whole story and show him our map where hotel should be but isn’t. He says he knows where this hotel is now. How much to take us there? 200 pesos (~$10). 

6- he takes us there. Hotel is on a crazy crazy sloped hill. Oh my gob the slanted streets and insane slopes here that just merge with traffic… makes San Fan look like the midwest. 

7- E deals with bikes as I deal with hotel. Both are difficult (E has to unpack the bikes to park them properly without them tipping over, and I have to have a broken spanish conversation with two desk peeps).  Long story short, this is NOT our hotel, we are far away from our hotel, but desk peeps feel bad for sweating broken spanish gringo and help us. Shout out to Arena Suites. [email protected].  Highly recommend - looked like an amazingly beautiful place (albeit out of our budget).  By now its about 2 pm. 

8 - they draw us a map to get out of this part of town and to our hotel. We contemplate just not going to hotel but we’ve given our credit card info to Expedia, and we paid extra to be on our highway for ease of getting out of town tomorrow… i.e., we felt we already paid an idiot tax and didn’t want to pay it all for nothing. 

9 - we follow map. Map leads us up this INSANE HILL OH MY GOD. There is no keeping the bikes upright at these intersections. We abort. We get lost. We both almost drop the bikes. We sweat more than is possible without any food or water in our systems. 

10 - a super swell random Mexi dude tries really hard to convince us we can make the sketchy ass hill and turn. We still don’t think we can do it. We abort. We get lost. We both almost drop the bikes. This one part with this tour bus and then the bus backing up… dios mios. 

11 - We get out of there. Chinga!

12 - we pass swell random Mexi dude and he’s still parked at the top of the sketchy hill.  We honk as we ride by and he laughs. It is now about 3. 

13 - We think we find our hotel, but it is spelt a little differently… We ring and ring and ring the bell. Chinga! We ask. One lady says “yep, thats it” Another says “nope”. We are sweating more than possible without any food or water in our systems. Tara is sniffling to herself… “I did everything I could think of to do to make this a reasonable experience…”

14 - We walk (as there is no more getting on the bikes - i hate the bike at this point). Talk to super cute chica with a parrot. She has a hotel. She tells me where our hotel is. I believe her. I decide we are going to our original hotel and telling them “hi and bye - we are going to stay with nice parrot chica”. We do that and of course the man running the hotel is soooo nice and friendly and supportive. He wants to hear all about our adventure. We visit as long as we can knowing our kevlar pants will turn into chastity belts if we dont’ get them off soon. So shout out to Villa de Arco. If you can get there, they are really nice people. Back to chica parrot where we had our fastest bike unload yet. Its about 4:30. So three and a half hours to get to Z and find our hotel. 

15 - We used our first pool today. It drizzled on us as we let it go, talked it out, and became a better couple. 

16 - head to la playa for comida. Despite the tourismo and the music and crowds, dinner was excellent. Mahi mahi and beef kabobs. Lots of great people watching. We are the only gringos outside of one California dude selling CD’s. Gracias Zihua!

Other notes of the day:
Free breakfast at the hotel. An old man in suspenders, an open fly, and an I heart NY tshirt requested a change in the TV station. Cue Fox Family - some coverage of Justin Beiber (sp?) and his concert in Madison Square Garden. There were ~20 people in the hotel breakfast area - all glued to the Beebs?  Beibs? Biebs? Whatever - 12 year old hair boy band boy. There were fingers bopping to beats. All while eating toast and bananas and Mexi corn flakes and cheap hotel coffee. Surreal. 

Got more shout outs today than any other day so far. Random cars passing or traveling the other way - seeing us with our motos and gear and giving a honk and a peace sign or a hello or a smile. I know I don’t need it to keep going, but I like it. 

Zihuatenjo has come a long way since Andy and Red worked on their boat on this beach. I would have liked to have seen this place decades ago. 

Next stop is hopefully our last big tourist town for a long time - Acapulco (which we have no interest in “doing”). I just booked us a $32 hotel that is supposedly east of town (so we can have our drama before the next day) and right on the highway for easy access. I hope that it is there. I hope that it is on the map as the map says. I hope that it is as shitty as it is in my dreams. I hope

July 18
We are so very tired. And now we know why it is so lush. Storm #1 (of 2) hit about 2-3 am. Yet again we were the two naked gringos in camp dealing with their tent, but this time digging for the rainfly in a surreal downpour. At least one inch in one hour, maybe two inches in two hours. We were so far beyond unprepared… Everything that wasn’t in a moto case got totally soaked. Most of it dried out in the hot morning sun, but that meant we stayed in camp longer than we wanted. When all was as dry as it could be and it finally came time to put on our moto gear, the worst to put on was definitely the boots… They felt like the warm rain itself. Mmmm… warm wet boots for the next 6-8 hours… Let the foot funk begin. 

With our late departure we were hoping to take a “shortcut” from San Blas to Hwy 200, but about 30 km into that plan, that plan proved a bad idea. They were working on the road, and, well… those that could figure a way around and/or barrel over it could go through to the other side. And those that couldn’t either parked and siesta-ed (which at least three big trucks were doing) or turned around (like we did). So 50-75 km we went back to Tepic, then 150 km to Puerto Vallarta (PV). We had no interest in “doing” Puerto Vallarta, it was simply a known location that had Google-able places to camp. In our research however we discovered that PV is one of the new and open gay and lesbian communities in Mexico, which I think is really great and want to support. But we decided we are just a little “done” with tourist towns after last week.  Anyway, getting here - that 150 km stretch from Tepic… it was the first time we had been on motos and wanted the windy road to stop. Lots of traffic, lots of crazy drivers. Narrow winding road. Lots of speed bumps (the big ones you need to go super slow on or you risk cracking your skid plate). It was exactly the kind of road/day that made our parents worry about taking this trip. And it made us very, very tired. In fact looking back… last night was no sleep from the rain storm, the night before was no sleep from the heat storm, and the night before that was no sleep on the ferry… we haven’t had a good night sleep in days. 

Mexicans sure do love their loud music. Any time, any purpose - blaring it. Ok. 

Animal highlight of the day: the giant black and red heliconious butterfly I chased around camp this morning while our things were drying in the sun. Gorgeous. Huge. The bugs are getting so good. 

Fast forward to Storm #2. Downtown Puerto Vallarta. Exhausted from the 4 hour 150 km ride (so four hours of about 30 mph and inhaling truck fumes). Stoked to get the campground and still hopeful we are ahead of the daily rain that will eventually come. (Side note: we’ve talked with some locals and from here on out it rains once a day then over. We knew this was coming in Guatemala, but not this far north. So as long as we aren’t setting up camp IN the rain, we should be good. We are prepared for better decisions now). So yeah, we are tired and excited and navigating the frontage road system (which, go us. That is non-trivial on a moto). POOF. La lluvia (the rain). 

And so came our next lesson about the frontage roads… While convenient for avoiding u-turns and actually accessing the places you want or think are close by, they are lower (as in lower elevation) than the main road. And a bit more rough. More potholes and manholes and gopher holes and whatever holes. More garbage, more buses, more pedestrians, etc. But if you want to easily access the services off the highway, you gotta stay on it. And now add the rain. The hard rain. Ernie called it “driving rain” today. Our little frontage road quickly filled to what I would call a mote or a pond, and before long I was watching Ernie’s tires disappear into the street. There was a half a block where I could feel that the water was up to my ankles. Hadn’t ever thought about motorcycling through a pond… Then buses would drive by us on the left and the wave of water felt like a tsunami. Ernie guesses there was 10” of rain on the road (and remember, he doesn’t exaggerate). There was no seeing the road under the water. Might we have dove into a pothole at any moment? Sure! There was no clear view of the watery road from behind our waterfall visors. Could. Not. See. I was so freaked out I skipped the panic part and went right to self-calming mode by singing. I sang (very poorly) all the way until we could both see a big “S”. “S” is for Sheraton. The End. 

July 19
The plan as we bumbled to the hotel and to bed was to be rested from the hotel and get up and make the ~200 km drive to our next campground. At 10:45 we got a knock on the hotel door - one of those fake-housekeeping-get-up-and-get-out-of-here-knocks.  Oops. It is about four hours from when we should have been up and moving. We talk… There is no way we are getting to our next stop before dark, we refuse to ride in dark if it can be avoided, if we need to find a  new stop we need wifi and new plans… Our bug bites and gnarly feet are finally unswollen…  Probably best just stay in the Sheraton another day. We actually had to talk through our guilt about it. It was too nice of a hotel for us. And it was easily one of the best showers we have ever taken… The words I am thinking of to describe it are not appropriate for this public blog. So Ernie goes to the front desk to get us another night, and no bueno. No more rooms (which is still hard to believe - there are at least a dozen floors to that hotel and it is off season). We make coffee, Ernie gobbled up his breakfast, and we head to the free Wifi lobby. Right, that was our one stop last night post- arrival and before bed - we walked to a big grocery store and got stuff for E to have a breakfast and fresh ingredients for a dinner of Tacos al Ernesto(bagged beans, fresh tortillas, avocado, crushed salsa verde chips) and baked goods for breakfast. Frustrating slow wifi session, we learn there isn’t much before our planned destination as the highway diverts inland so much/not touristy there, and its getting late in the day. The concierge remembered us from yesterday and gave us a two hour late checkout. YES. We decide to get out of central PV and find a cheap hotel as far south of town as we can. www.expedia.com.mx. Check. Talk to random guy in the lobby who knows PV. Check. He said he was married with kids but we think he was gay. He mentioned “Pepe’s Tacos”. We load the bikes and chat about that random guy in lobby. Check. Ernie has a hypothesis that because PV is a rising gay community, the food might actually be good. Not to be totally stereotypical (but to be totally stereotypical), we decide there is validity in the idea that a booming gay community would not tolerate crappy food. Hmmm… We convince ourselves of this and decide we shall head to Pepe’s. It is only five or six blocks away, and the first thing we notice is the sign posting their hours. They are open from 1 pm to 6 am. Yep, you read that right. 1 in the afternoon until 6 in the morning. Hypothesis about the gays gains additional support. Then we notice the pastor twirling out front. Then we notice the adorable man, probably Pepe himself at 80 (but looks 50) working in “the kitchen”.  We are sucked in and feliz. Six pastor tacos. YUM. That will last us through tomorrow. 

It is ~2 pm by this point, and we are ready to head out of town. Our new hotel is only 15 km away. Yet this ends up taking ~2 hours. Not joking. Cobblestone streets, one way streets, streets with elevation, streets with no signs. The map looked so easy!!! The path we took to get from the Sheraton to highway 200…. good grief. Getting around the Mexican town on two wheels is non-trivial. We understand why the moto’s here are all mini. 50-100 cc. Agile like swallows and finches. Our heavy beasts on these bumps and dips! It is all making us much better riders. Our final stop was a pharmacia somewhere up some hill… we stop there only because she actually had a sign about what her casita was and there was something flat out front we could park the bikes on. We ask the owner and she gives us the sketchiest directions yet. We trust her and keep following the road she tells us. Important side note: so much trust is required on this trip… trust in the bikes, trust in our gear, trust in the roads, trust in the people that point and wave and say “si - sigue” (yes, follow). It is hard to trust this much…

And yes, seemingly 1000 meters higher and later then when our adventure began, poof! There is Hwy 200. Easy cruise to our “hotel”. Hotel Mar Sereno is… old. Quirky. Quiet. There are probably 100 rooms total, 20 functioning rooms, and 3 occupied rooms (us and two Mexican families on vacation). It is ~$40 a night.  It was the bomb at some point, but the way things get weathered here who knows. Our guess is the 1940’s or 50’s…. Some floors and rooms are so run down. Everything is not clean but not dirty. We almost feel like it could all crumble into the ocean at any minute. Right now we are on the deck and we are up high enough on the cliff side that the pelicans are eye-level. And flying right in front of our little patio. Ernie says the pelicans are 20 feet away. 

The real surprise and gem of the place is the ocean pool. There is a pool with freshwater, but then below that (a total of 197 steps below us) is an ocean pool (see Google pics). Built with such care and imagination! And luckily, we were there are high tide was coming in. More water, more fish. The fish were so great! The pool wasn’t large and there was no coral or otherwise colorful substrate. It was entirely a feeding hole, and lots of fish ere coming in to feed on the red and brown algae during high tide. Feeding frenzy! Low diversity rating but high behavior rating. Aggression, feeding. Most excellent. Another million sally lightfoot crabs. And my first spiny lobster! It was dead sadly, but fresh dead, so its body still revealed every color of the rainbow. Red, pink, yellow, green, blue, white, orange - all visible on this little buddy. He looked so beautiful underwater. Outside of him, the two highlights were watching and interacting with the moray eel and the cornetfish. Emphasis on “interaction”.  Truly and interaction! It was all very enjoyable and by far our most unique and bizarre ocean experience. I have a hypothesis that Ernie and I are probably two of ten people to have actually walked down and snorkeled in those pools in the past few years. The bottom of the pool was riddled with tiles that have fallen from the hotel above. Visit soon as it might all be gone in the next tropical storm. 

Tara is still in awe at the roads she has done on two wheels. 

Alarm is set. We will continue on tomorrow. Ready to arrive in camp before the afternoon rain. We got this. 

“Ernie, what would you like to say about yesterday and/or today?”
“In a short distance from a town like Puerto Vallarta where there is a lot of outside money coming in, there is a place like this that exists. Or the little town that we drove through today (Tara insert: to the south to look for gas) - it was not touristy at all - and so close to Puerto Vallarta. We are so lucky to get to see those things. I also liked it that there are only two other rooms filled here and there are ~20 people at the pool right now. From a sensory perception point of view I’m also very appreciative of the fact that I can barely hear right now.” (Ernie has water in his ears from our hours of snorkeling :)

July 20
Sorry for so much writing without posting. The Sheraton wanted us to pay for internet (which we didn’t) and last night was so spotty that I got frustrated just trying to post a few pics so I gave up and just went back to our room. Ernie was watching the television - Mexican Public Broadcasting. It was the only chanel the TV got. Was nerdy goofy.

Today = successful. We got up and out early - on the road by 9. (Side note - we are now two hours ahead of Portland time, so we are trying to adjust to new time and that sun rises at 7 am and sets around 8-9). Hwy 200 South-West of Puerto Vallarta isn’t nearly the mess that it is North-East. There were a fraction a number of the cars and the towns were a bit sleepier.  Fewer mangos, more cows, and drier and cooler and more inland pine-like habitat (which was appreciated). There was some construction, which we expected, but we are such pro’s now that main-road-Mexico construction was a piece of cake. Ha! Seriously… the side road of sand and gravel would have stressed us (ok me) out tremendously a few weeks ago, but after riding through roads where we couldn’t see or couldnt go down without walkign the bikes - that packed sand-gravel mix was a piece of cake! We (ok me) concentrated rather than panicked. It took a bit out of our day, but all was safe at all times. There is probably much more construction to come, so we are planning on lowering our km per day expectations.

Pretty much rode for four hours straight. Our one 20 minute stop was at a pullout that, post-parked, turned out to be a police station. Bonus! There was a police officer outside watering the agave’s with a bucket. They all stared as we got off, sat in the gravel, and ate peanuts and drank water. After about 10 minutes one of the officers came over and engaged - offered us use of the bano (bathroom). He was very kind. A few police vehicles came and went and we were the point of focus for all of them. 

By 1 pm or so we reached our planned destination - Playa de Iguanas. It is tucked inside a little bay that is also home to Manzanilla to the south (which we think will be very touristy and wanted to avoid). At peak season (Feb-March) I bet this place is rippin. But for now it is super sleepy and there are all of 20-25 groups in a place that holds much much more. We got a “palapa” (palm thatched roof cover thing) right on the beach. What you can’t see in the pic we post is that there are RV’s on either side of us. We actually picked this spot on purpose… that way when they go to bed at night we can be naked in this heat and don’t have to walk all the way to the banos to pee. 

Most exciting thing about Playa de Iguana = there are actually iguanas! Wow! Two feet long and climb the palm trees like there is nothing to it. Striped tails. Equally gorgeous and prehistoric. I don’t think they masturbate like the marine iguanas of the Galapagos, but I shall keep my eyes open. 

The ethology of Mexico has been spectacular. And Ernie has such a great eye - he has pointed out at least half the stuff we have seen. I am so happy we run at the same pace when it comes to watching animal behaviors. Even when we are hot and miserable and heading to somewhere comfortable, if we see a cool critter doing something interesting, we stop and watch :)

After starting to set up camp and both the bikes fell down from sinking in the sand (ha!) we did some troublshooting and experimenting about our gear and the rain and how can we quickly do this or that. All with a strong breeze and no bugs. Most excellent!  I truly hope it rains this afternoon or evening so we can see how we did and how to adjust for next time. Post-troubleshooting we walked to a Mini Super (a.k.a. mini-market) and buy them out of their last 12-pack-ish batch of beer that is a mix-match of Corona Light, Corona, and Estrella (none of these are good beers).  Sadly, they were out of everything in the mini-super for “Tacos al Ernesto” except tortillas, and the only noodle bowls they had at the mini-super were shrimp flavored…. We reluctantly bought them for $.60 each. We’ll see if and how we participate in those noodles. We have a bag of Doritos as backup. 

I must be happy. I just saw a hermit crab and thought “even the hermit crabs are cute here”.

Ernie still had lots of trouble hearing today… It is like it is too humid for the water in his ears to evaporate. Hopefully it clears up soon as it is affecting his ability to interact with other people (on the bike it is OK because he can turn our microphone volume up to a billion and hear me even if I’m whispering). He is taking a nap right now. 

Thank you to everyone interacting with us! Ultimately I write all of this for ourselves… so that when we are old and forgetful we can remember this adventure. But it is fun to share with those we love and might enjoy it :)