An imaginary farcical bike trip

On a particularly hot and long ride, Jen and I amused ourselves by coming up with a list of things that would make a slap-stick Yucatan bicycle trip from hell. 

It began because we crossed over a particularly long stretch of toppes. Toppes are speed bumps, and here they are fierce. They are in all towns, and probably the only way to insure that drivers will actually slow down when passing through downtown. Toppes come as steep logs of asphalt across the road, as off-set lines of raised circles, or as big raised up-and-over ramps (of sorts). 

On bicycles, we have to wrench down on our brakes, slow to an almost Falling Over Speed, and carefully ply over. Bags jiggle, hardware clanks, tires bang in the landing. Toppes are wicked when you're gazing at some enticing brightly colored house and weren't watching where you were headed. Bam! 

Anyway. So we're bopping up and over, up and over, up and over, and I go, "hey Jen! Imagine if every stretch of road had this many toppes on it." 

And thus we began the list of things that would make a Farcical Yucatan Bicycle Trip From Hell. 

1. The roads have toppes every ten feet 

2. Restaurants serve only bad white toast and sauces that are too hot

3. The hotel rooms contain 100 mosquitos

4. Everyone you talk to is drunk 

5. The heat of the day begins at 6am 

6. Your _entire_ body is covered in heat rash

7. The cenotes are full of Russian tourists

8. The tiendas sell nothing but Coca-Cola

9. You get two flat tires everyday

10. The dogs bark the entire night

11. Your hand-washed clothes never dry 

12. The roosters start crowing at 2am
13. You have to poop 17 times a day
14. Every single street dog chases you
15. You're too big to fit in the public bathroom stalls (actually, more often then not, when I stand in a stall I am giraffing a full head and neck above the stall wall) 

Thankfully, however, the cars give us generous space complete with encouraging waves and yip-yip honks, and unless we're in the tiniest podunk towns the food has been good.

In fact, we've been here two weeks to the day, and it's been an amazing trip. Beaches, ruins, salsa picante, colonial cities, cenotes, friendly people, Carnival. 

And as of today, we've ridden over 500 miles. 

Carnival!

Carnival in Mexico is days of celebration before Lent begins. And it happens everywhere. As far as I can tell, Carnival embodies all things bright, sparkly, family-inclusive, and loud. 

The past chunk of days we have been weaving our way from Izamal, through Santa Elena, Hopulchén, to the grand colonial city of Campeche. And most of these towns have had stirrings of Carnival (a troupe of children rehearsing exuberantly for a dance performance at night in the park in Izamal, for example) and last night in Campeche we witnessed the full-on grandeur of the celebration. 

In Hopulchén a couple nights ago, we followed a train of glittery and fake-eyelashedy children being led by guiding parents to an outdoor stage. Rows of wooden chairs were set up and families crowded onto them. Snacks were sold and consumed, street dogs milled about, and there was an air of feather-boa expectancy. We joined the throng, two gringas in this small town community experience, totally out of place, like if in the USA two horses walked into a movie theatre and sat down among everyone. 

We had no idea when the dance performance would start, and we sat for an hour and twenty minutes while lights swirled around, music played, and screens displayed reggaeton music videos. It seemed like any minute something would happen, but it was lots of those minutes till something did. Latino time! Love it. Slow down, priorities are about other things than timeliness around here. Priorities like making sure your daughter has her hair bow straight and that grandma has a good seat in her wheelchair. And unlike kids in the USA who can't seem to sit still and wait, the kids in this Mexican audience sat placidly next to their parents without whining or wiggling. 

Finally when the performance commenced, little children as kings and queens slowly paraded up and down the stage, crowns were produced, and then group after group of fancifully dressed little dancers emerged. Their costumes were amazingly intricate, neon colors, sequins, and feathers, and the dancing was delightfully uncoordinated and unpolished. All these beloved children and their proud parents. 

The crowds at the children's parade in Campeche

In Campeche yesterday afternoon, there was the Carnival children's parade. Hundreds of themed groups of children were dressed matching, led along by a shepherding adult. Groups of little jaguars in face paint and spotted costumes. Native Indians with headdresses.

These children seem like adult play things almost, all dressed up and kept in a semblance of formation by their shepherd. Six little ones straddled tiny horses, attached to poles up their middles, and above them suspended a tent: a mobile merry-go-round, somehow kept in configuration. A tiny orchestra with 6-year olds holding pretend instruments, pulled on a float. Farmers in white pants and hats. Gorillas. Pirates. Gas pumps and cars (seriously). 

These little people moved along the parade route, stared at and adored by the crowd, in various stages of bewilderment/boredom/excitement/obligation/nose picking. 

Gas station and cars configuration

Why have just a fountain when you can have it brightly lit and coordinated to the beat of music. This show played enticingly in a park inside the walled city of Campeche.

We have been doing well Following The Crowds. And last night we followed them, in addition to the blasting breadcrumbs of loud music coming from across Campeche. Maluma, a huge name Colombian musical heart-throb, was giving an extraordinarily glammy and pounding reggaeton concert. 

Jen and I joined the Outside The Fence crowd, and stood for free in a Home Depot parking lot and took in the scene. The music was so incredibly loud that even in the parking lot, 300-400 meters away, I could feel the pulse of subwoofer in my chest. The lights from the show shot out from the stadium and swirled in the night sky, as if we were in a computer-generated simulation. I could see Maluma's perfectly structured face expanded on one of the many screens, a lock of hair falling sexily just-so as he sang a love song. Oooers. The crowd screamed--not just yelling and clapping but unbridled screaming--and the smell of spicy tacos wafted through the parking lot. 

What an experience. Not listed in a tour book. No postcard could encapsulate. Even though I'm a hipless white person, I've danced happily and awkwardly to enough Latino music that even *I* recognized some of Maluma's songs. It was pretty ecstatic to witness this live. 

The Home Depot parking lot outside the stadium

The Case of the Vanishing Bicycle Chicas

"Muy temprano!" we had told our hotel people, about the time we were going to leave in the morning, so that the gate might be opened for us. 

But apparently "very early" was not specific enough of a communication. What we meant was "5:45am".

And when we woke at that dark and, blessedly, cool hour, we were locked within. All hotels here (all houses and stores even) have a tall gate in addition to regular locked front doors. Motorbikes and cars and hotel guests and whatever else are herded behind that gate and all closed up for the night. 

And this morning we were like thoroughbreds ready to run, eager to take advantage of the cool early morning. Usually riding at First Light is early enough, but why not push it back just a little till Last Dark? Each minute biked in early morning is one less minute biked in a sweltering oven (and those minutes are actually much longer time periods somehow). 

And the mornings are truly magical. The whispy filmy grey dewy start, the moon in it's phase above us, dim mood lighting, birds singing their joyous cacophony. There are no cars. We can buzz along with that delicious feeling of a big empty day stretched before us, just like the road. These early miles are entirely different than the end of day miles. 

Which is all to say, we were very attached to that early start. There was only a bit of decision making between Jen and me then, about how to get what we wanted. 

Neither of us are particularly weak in the Upper Body Department. Our bikes may be heavy steel touring bikes, but we were confident in what we could do. 

So maybe you can guess what happened next. 

I carried a chair over. Stuck a foot between the bars of the gate, lifted a leg up. Grabbed what happened to be the nose on the face of a cement Mayan statue, leveled myself on the upper ledge, and jumped over. Four bike bags and various water bottles were handed across. A small terrible dog barked at us from a nearby balcony. Then Jen lifted her bicycle up over her head, front wheel across, I grabbed it, sprockety mess passed across, "I've got it's weight now!" I confirmed, and back wheel across. I held the bicycle up over my head and then carefully hefted it down. This overhead press exercise was repeated with my bicycle, then Jen climbed adroitly over herself. 

We high-fived and felt very proud of ourselves and laughed in the sweet dark coolness there, imagining what the hotel keepers would think when they finally came to open the gate for us. They'd find our room key left in the door, a random chair moved near the gate, and no trace of bicycle chicas. 

Inchoate 5:45 am light, with hint of headlamp 

Topography and Duality

This morning our road stretched ahead and towards a giant tall looming thing. 

S: "What's that? Do you see that?" 

J: "Is that a cloud? Is that a HILL?"

S: "It can't be a cloud. I see things on it!"

J: "Are we going to go OVER it?" 

And in this way, we encountered our first proper topography of this whole trip. Till now, the Yucatan has been a flat tortilla of a ride. 

A few moments later:

S: "I feel like I'm biking through mud."

J: "Ach! Me too." 

Later:

"Will we get a Downhill?" asked Jen with relish. "Downhills are rare here!" I responded, "rare like Cold, and Food Without Meat In Itq." 

I sang a song as I biked into the cool topographical morning: (to the tune from Oklahoma)

"Oh what a beautiful morning, 

Oh what a beautiful day, 

I've got an emptied out feeling, 

Everything's going right through..."

Thankfully I've gone a whole week and a half untouched by the Traveler's D. till now, so it's only fair.

We biked ourselves to the UNESCO site of Uxmal, happy to not pay the parking fee, but did pay the steepest ticket fee of them all so far (about $10....which feels steep around here until I remembered when I visited the MoMA in NYC and shelled out $25 for a ticket). Uxmal is one of the most intricate of all the ruins, with a huge pyramid, and geometric patterns gracing the walls. "Imagine building this," said Jen, "you spend hours and hours chipping away at a stone design, and say it falls off when you put it up and you have to make it again." 

Usually ruins are enticing to me for exploring the nooks, climbing the heinously steep stone stairs, walking the shaded paths between structures, pondering history. 

Instead, given my gut and the resulting exhaustion, I sat still. And it was the most engaging sitting, because there was so much to look at, all the carvings and shapes and symmetry and rock. 

And there's a wide flat grassy lawn, culminating in some trees. And you sit on your rock and feel very tired and look at this, and rising above out of the trees is something you can't take your eyes of off, as if it were an alien spaceship landing. A great intricate stone pyramid, all layers and levels. Just there. In mystical amazing ancient majesty.  

I overheard a guide explaining the complex decorations on one of the many intricate walls, a set of inverted pyramids and two-headed snakes. To the Mayans, the two-heads represented Duality. I overheard this and was like, hm, another cool forgettable fact. But then I thought more about that, Duality. The existence of opposed truths. Blistering heat and refreshing cold. Suffering and bliss. Hunger and fullness. Sickness and health. And this concept of Duality, and seeing it represented there as carved stone, gained so much meaning for me for this way of travelling. When you're in one state can you see the other, when you're feeling tired and ill can you believe in the recovery to come? Sometimes I struggle with this, and in that way comes the magnitude of Duality. 

Mystical and majestic at Uxmal

Two-headed snake of Duality

[I did write this post yesterday, but due to lack of helpful wifi, I am posting it now. And I can report: that a really great way to get over Traveler's D.--after you're all settled down after the blow-out--is to eat a huge bowl of chicken soup and ride a bike] 

Everything was yellow

How do I believe I'm not in a fairy tale? 

We stayed in the city of Izamal last night. All the buildings are turmeric yellow. It is all cobbled streets, colonial architecture. Curving narrow streets lined with yellow walls. Horses wear hats and pull brightly colored carriages across the cobbles. There is a magnificent stone pyramid built by the Mayans, which you can climb on. Funny little bike carts sell ice cream and corn on the cob. Young boys fly kites. Festive music wafts in the breeze. 

And it was amazing, because the tourists here were almost all Mexican people, so it felt undiscovered and especially precious. But mostly just yellow, a feast of yellow. 

Sun and Shade

"I'm eating a pecan pie!" I said to Jen, on the empty roadside, with happy recognition. I love buying food and not necessarily knowing what it is when traveling, and that had been the case with this little anonymous and enticing number from a panaderia. A pecan pie was a wonderful thing to be consuming on a 96 kilometer day.

The past two nights we had been in the colonial city of Valladolid, and we were biking to Izamal today. Pedaling into Valladolid, the cobble streets, the rows of bright pink and teal and orange colonial houses, the dignified stone cathedral, I felt for that place the instant attraction of an infatuation. So much commerce, not just key chains and tourist shot glasses, a healthy mix of ice cream and tortillerias, a few lucky tourists and mostly locals. Can you fall in love with a city?

In Valladolid we split an Airbnb space with Lady Elise and Amante Raphael, feeling proudly frugal at $7/person/night. An eccentrically decorated back garden (complete with a blow-up Santa, palm trees, and flashing Christmas lights) butted up against a sweet outdoor kitchen, and we cooked beans, i made popcorn, and had wine and laughter as our strange little family of four.

Indeed, we are traveling as a party now. A bike gang. Sharing citronella, all of our food, mapping ideas. Having Raphael's Spanish is a treat, and I am still crazy about Lady Elise, so I am happy about this arrangement until the time comes to take our separate routes.

In Valladolid (say "Vaya-doh-leed") we jumped from the mossy rocks into the heavenly waters of the cenote _in_ the center of the city (a cool dip like this, with stalactites, overheated sluggish bodies made magic, makes me believe I can do anything with my day, when just minutes before I'd been feeling torpid and totally unambitious from the blistering heat). I visited the Convent de San Bernardino de Siena, a huge and historic stone church and living quarters for their monks. I sat in the shade and gazed at an iguana for some time there, noticing the scales on his tail and spikes along his spine. That goes as a successful Rest Day for me, in the tropics, to sit and relax and study an iguana.

The magic of Valladolid culminated in a live cumbia band in the town square Sunday night. Elise and Jen and I were decades younger than most everyone else, and a sweet group of ladies beckoned us into their happy dancing circle. "More hips, more hips!" they directed us, becoming our dance teachers. I felt so much joy of life then, dancing to that music, in a warm night, participating in something so deeply of this place.

During the day, down the street from our Airbnb was set up a big tent and colored flags: an open-air catholic church. The bells rang for 9am Sunday service at 9:05ish and then singing and waiting in line to pay respects to a saint statue went on for hours. Sunday was a special holiday for this saint, and hawkers moved through the people selling white candles. "How does anyone have time for anything other than going to all the church services?" wondered Jen; later that night, we could still hear the singing. I even recognized a few refrains from my momentary catholic girlhood, and sang along.

After the wearying and de-sensitizing highway riding along the coast, we have been on deliciously quiet rural roads since coming inland. Roads have been flat, and the weather deluge-free. The cooking temperature climbs from medium high to high between 10 and 11am, the sun merciless above us.

On today's ride, the landscape changed from low thickened trees and shrubs where the road was a delicious shaded tunnel, to sparse dry plants unwilling to offer shade. The road was a flat strip though an oven. Around 11am I got out my medical thermometer (always carried to test for fevers), and I turned it on just to see if it would register. It beeped at 98.2. Whew, not quite yet a fever.

Moving through heat like this does amazing things to a body. I come here to seek heat and sun and when intense like this, I am a flaming hypocrite, seeking shade and feeling overwhelmed by it. It is a flattening and deeply draining experience to be this hot. But we had a tail wind. And I'd laid on the cold stone walkway in a tiny park in a tiny town. And stuck my head under a park faucet, the grizzled men on the park benches watching me with unimpressed curiosity.

We had woke at 5am to leave in the cool time of Cyclist Twilight, and feeling chilled for the first 30 kilometers was indeed delightful. The waning gibbous moon ahead of us, like the star for the traveling Kings. Pleasure and struggle mixed together. Traveling by bicycle in a place like this is a high-amplitude curve of deep lows and high highs. And I would want a "vacation" no other way.

Guppies, bats, and my BMW: a "rest" day

Yesterday, in Tulum, we took a rest day. Although I didn't rest so much as move from beautiful place to beautiful place. The day started at the ruins of Tulum, this ancient Mayan fortress standing proud over the teal waters of the Caribbean Sea. Getting there right at the opening hour, before the smash of tourist groups, was the key to a surprisingly special experience. It was just us and the one group of organized Germans at that hour.

The limestone hunks, the looming walls, the palm trees, the ocean crashing, iguanas basking, birds singing exotic songs. It was magnificently peaceful. Both stunning and lulling. I don't come to ancient ruins to learn that they were built in 1345 or that the ball court is here next to the palace or that the Mayans traded with other Mayans in Campeche, but instead I just come to BE in them, to feel their presence and gaze and bask.

I wandered around these stone structures, 500+ years old, and interestingly, was thinking about pipe organ music. Of all things. Some pieces that I play that were written in 1564, 1614. How large this Earth is, imagining that stoic music in a frigid cathedral in Europe somewhere, a different way of life entirely than this crashing Caribbean surf. And how in playing that music, or sitting gazing at this stone pillar, I can touch into something much more timeless than myself.

And to be amongst the ruins, without other people, I can feel more the stone and the sea, more of my focus resting on those aspects, rather than the selfie sticks and the beautiful Latina women who smell like vanilla cake who came later with the tour buses.

In the afternoon, Buddy Jen and I joined forces with Architecture Annie for an adventure to a cenote (limestone cave swimming hole). Annie, like Lady Elise, is another of my passionate, perceptive, strong female friends, who I love dearly. And, completely separate from our trip, she JUST HAPPENS to be here herself. Which is just so much delicious serendipity. For all the conversing over cocktails in Ithaca or Buffalo that Annie and I have done about our travels, about our dreams, it was glorious to be Doing The Real Thing With Her. We made a line of three smiling sun women biking the road out of town to the Gran Cenote.

We climbed some stairs below ground level, to a platform over the pool in the cave. Stalactites and stalagmites, drooping ferns and vines, the water shimmering and reflecting onto the mottled ceiling of the cave. How can I even describe what it is like to swim in this beautifully clear water, taking in the inner topography of a cave? Coils and squeezes and elongated lumps and crags and corners and contours. And there are bats! And there are turtles!

We three swam out of the bright sunlight and under one of the long dim overpasses of the cave. We could touch and rest on this big underwater limestone lump. "We're standing on a dinosaur poop," Jen observed brightly, "it has the plops on top".

We shared a rented snorkel set amongst us, and when I put it on and peeked under I had to immediately shoot up again, "there is SO MUCH down there!" Annie said I was like a puppy seeing snow for the first time.

The guppies! I used to have guppies in my little (big? 30gal) homeschooler fish tank growing up. When you look down at them from above the cenote surface they are these little unremarkable fish, but then when you join them with your mask and snorkel, at eye level, these fish bodies are huge and suspended in front of your face. They care not that you are there, gaping at them.

A little turtle swims past with quick dismissive swipes of alternating flippers. You take a breath and go for a deep dive until your ears throb with pain. The world is suddenly deadened into silence under the water, there is an enormous world under there, almost freakishly intricate, all this is huge and real and not seen from the surface. Then you plunge upward out of it in a crash and a grateful breath.

That evening I rode the languid curvy paved bike path to the beach. Being in Tulum with all these other tourists and their rented clanking beach cruisers, I can't help but feel a little smug like That Guy who's driving a BMW around a bunch of Corollas. It's a lot of money and dismantling and re-mantling to haul this beloved machine of mine along with me, but boy do I love it. I cringe seeing the bright pink blooms of soft rectangle sunburn on a pudgy back, knees in armpits on a lugger bike.

We had ladies night that night, these three amazing disparate women from my different chapters all together. That magic is more than I can encapsulate.

I finished the night with Lady Elise, sharing a veritable dinner platter of ceviche between us at an off-the-beaten-path local spot, just us two, like old times. A little over-lit sidewalk plastic table, Miss Next Door Shop over me taking down her shoe display for the night, the full moon above us, the fish and shrimp soft and giving and flavorful.

I cannot believe how wonderful it is to get to BE here. Feeling very blessed and enchanted.

Jen feeling the joy of a paved bike path 

The ruins of Tulum on the Caribbean sea 

I sat and gazed at this scene in solitude, feeling fortunate before the hoards descended

A line of smiling biking women

The shimmery water and mottled cave wall in the cenote