My friend Greg has been biking through Mexico since December, and blogging about it the whole way over at Home Is Where You Hang Your Helmet. This photo, which I yanked from his recent post on baja, is overlooking the ocean. In the desert. All. By. Himself.
His most romantic adventure yet happened in his last post, The “Road” to Mazatlan. Here’s an excerpt, and I highly recommend you keep reading on his blog. (I should note here that Greg is quite literate, but typing on foreign keyboards, being very hard of seeing, and casting off the world has made his grammar and spelling…slip. It’s forgivable.) Take it away, Greg:
“Waking to first light again, refreshed and un-molested, the road took me in-land a bit through dense-as-walls mangroves and endless lagoons. My destination was a village called Mexcaltutan which, in addition to be the potential ancestral home of the Aztec, is also on an ilsand only accessable by motor boat. Imagine how great that is, then multiply it by two. I stuffed Tiernanoak in the bow, and thuroughly enjoyed the 15 minute water-collectivo through the lagoon. On the island, I had shrimp tamales (as good as they sound, times two) chatted with some lovely children who got me to unwittingly say ´penis´a number of times, much to their glee (little delights), and stocked up on water and cookies. While getting the water, I got the usual advice about the next town over from the shop lady–In the next town, they aren’t very generous. They’re all thugs. They eat their young, etc.– only this time there was the added detail that the next town was at the limits of civilization. I thought nothing of it, ignoring these things as usual, until the road started to flicker, and went out. Pretty soon, I was on the roughest dirt road of my life (rocks the size of baseballs. It was like a dirt road in a chevy commercial, the kind the prove a point about powerful engines and what it’s like to be from a Red State). Then the road just stopped. Now, on my map, there is one continuous line up the coast, but that doesn’t seem to be represented on the ground. I decided to deal with it in the morning.”
Oh, how I want to travel again. It’s been since October in Israel, and before that since two summers ago in Croatia. Phooey.
Tags: ideas about happiness