April 14th, 2004

We had made an early stop and woke up on the beach before the sun. Dozens of people are running down the previously deserted sand. They seem to float in the hazy morning light. They are fisherman, collecting bait for the day with nets that they throw out into the water. I see a grown man come running out of the water with his arms full of tiny fish, giggling like a kid. We pound two papayas and move out. There are light clouds and the day is mercifully temperate. The road follows the beach all morning, snuggled against big black cliffs. We see some big surf from our bike seats. An abandoned palapa is spotted from the road and we pull through a little town along sandy tracks to make our lunch. The palapa has an old chair and seems to have been used a few times at least as a toilet, so after lunch we head to a nearby restaurant to hammockify ourselves and drink sodas. In the afternoon we meet a couple New Zealanders who are tandem biking towards the north. They’ve come from Argentina in only five months on an expedition to raise money for an organization that fights against cruelty to animals. We stop and talk about our respective trips for a little while. They are behind schedule so before long we must part. Find them at www.pedalpanamerica.org. We are impressed at their dedication to the cause. This is also a lesson to us on how different an attitude can be and we realize once again that we prefer our rhythm and our voyage that is more a way of life than a sports madness, although we do like to bike a lot. That night we camp in a mango orchard, coconut palms intersperse the mango trees, providing shade. We wonder how many cranial fractures are incurred per year by falling coconut.

April 15th, 2004

I’m sick this morning, victim to repetitive cramp cramps that I jokingly call “contractions” between spasms. The baby is due in a few hours yet and I manage to ride. A little down the road we meet Mila and Marcus who are on a world tour by bike or something similar. See them at www.weltweiseversuchung.de About 2 hours later all five of us are having lunch in a market in the town of Tecpan. We brought all our bikes into the crowded space of the market into the land of pure chaos. We must be able to watch over them while we eat. My contractions continue so we decide to get a hotel room. We bike around as a party of five in some serious craziness of traffic, directions, puddles, more directions, and contractions. Nothing works out. It seems that our German friends were meant to take off, because after they do we find a nice cheap room. We had immensely enjoyed sharing our life stories with them over lunch. We also like their way of traveling with an open mind, another lesson for our re-analyzation of our way of doing this thing we do.

We proceed to stay inside for the better part of three days. Johanne also has this sickness, but worse, and screams with the contractions. I phone my uncle on the third day to tell him that we’ll be arriving in Mexico city a bit later than we’d said. He tells me we’ve got intestinal infections and that the Mexican word for our contractions is “retortijones”. Tired but somewhat better we resume the road for Acapulco. We stop in a small town for lunch and to top off our twenty liters. A group of about 15 men who are spending their Sunday outside the general store drinking beer and talking, see our guitar and invite us to join the fun. Casey plays some songs and one of the guys plays some local classics, he has a really nice voice and belts it out good.

We head off and after passing the river of Coyuca with a bunch of trucks driving in the shallow water and people partying we have some tortas (subs) for dinner. Outside of town we see a sign saying “Se recibe esconbro”. Without knowing what this means we pull off the road and find a nice grassy spot to camp and evaluate our digestion. An enormous white cow grazes nearby and we collapse, happy that Acapulco is only 30kms away and looking forward to some time off the road.

The next morning we head off really early, thinking to get to my uncle Alberto’s house before noon. Acapulco turns out to be really big and full of aggressive drivers. After making our way through grueling downtown traffic in increasing heat and the crazy gringo touristy excessiveness of gigantic resort-hotels we stop halfway up an endless hill that rises above the city beside a closed restaurant. We’re all konked out and Johanne who can never sleep at siesta is dead to the world for a good hour. Late afternoon we make it to my uncle’s. He welcomes us into his humble abode with open arms and offers us dinner, a much-needed shower, and a spot to crash.

April 20th, 2004

After sleeping in for as much as we can, we stop by Alberto and Hilda’s lunch restaurant for breakfast. They drive us out to the highway with Casey leading the way by bike. We hitch hike for a good three hours under a sun made of lead. Finally some guys pick us up. Nothing is a problem for them! Not the fact that we don’t fit in their car, nor the fact that our bags and Casey’s bike need to be seriously persuaded to stay in the trunk by force of bungee. We make like sardines in the back seat and prepare for six hours of travel. Arriving in Mexico we are hurting and happy. We go to take the subway to my cousin Samanta’s house. The metro officials make us take Casey’s bike apart and wrap it in something (we use his tent fly). He needs to make the thirty-minute trip with this awkward package on his head. Luckily by doing this he is avoiding any “danger” that his bike might cause to fellow passengers.