Dogs

You can't get dogs to pose like this.

Well, you can. But you have to be a dog trainer. 

Changing & Daring: Sierra Gorda Biosphere

Goodness, I don't even know where to start. What do I write about? I want to tell you everything, and there are so many stories that haven't been told yet, and so many photos that are up, but haven't been shown. So this will be somewhat linear. Kinda.

I think there was a sea change in this trip, and it occurred somewhere in the Cloud Forests. Maybe it was the fact that I was feeling a bit mean after so many thousands of kilometers of desert and cactus, but being up on the exhilarating, curvy mountain roads of the Cloud Forests started to change things. 

Sometimes you forget how special an adventure is, because it becomes so mundane--you know: mountain, valley, mountain, repeat; mountain, valley, mountain... don't forget to brush you teeth between mountains! And perhaps, this sea change started even before the Cloud Forests when we were sitting in San Miguel de Allende with Max and Judith, and someone mentioned being silly and foolish and young, and I responded, "Oh, we're young? I forgot." 

So we got ourselves into days of curvy roads; the first ascent and drop seemed charming, and Ben had been dying to see something other than straight lines. Four days later Ben had had his fill; we had finally left the Sierra Gorda Biosphere and the mountain roads to exit out on the plains north of Mexico City.

But before that? It was beautiful. Desert mountains into rainforest into pine trees that reminded both of us of the American Northwest, and that damp scent of plants and dirt made it feel like Connecticut in springtime. Plunging in and out of four environments felt like an act of resetting. It wasn't another silver mining town, and we were finally back on the road in a regular way, moving everyday. 

Mexico is the picture of pastoral. I grew up in New England thinking that all the little folk art paintings in local museums, of apple orchards and cows and pigs was what the word 'pastoral' meant. But here, this place is something out of 'Sound of Music,' but with Spanish dubbing (and minus the Nazis). 

We went to Las Pozas, an architectural monument to surrealism, constructed by poet, bastard son of an English king and eccentric millionaire Edward James. 

Visiting it was straight-up life changing. 

Situated on acres of jungle forest, next to a gorgeous waterfall

which falls down into 'wells' or pools of water, giving it its name, Las Pozas. You can swim there, just like you can climb up to the top of the four or five story (depending on who's counting) cement catwalk that has no railings (Thanks Mexican Government!)

 

(Sorry for the swearing in the video, guys.) 

Climbing and crossing the top bridge is incredibly scary. There was at least a 50 foot drop and it is the first thing you come across when you enter Las Pozas.

James built Las Pozas not just as an intellectual exercise in applying surrealist design tenets and symbolism into architecture, but he built it to be his residence, too. As you explore, you find more and more rooms that aren't directly exposed to the air and were once living quarters. They are locked off now, and in such a manic place, locked doors incite a desire to climb everywhich way to get in (which you can't, unless you are very daring). It is an adult cement playground, hidden in the woods. 

You know those '1000 Places To See Before You Die' books? If Las Pozas isn't in it, then the book isn't worth buying. Las Pozas will change your life--no number of Dali paintings or Escher drawings hung on museum walls could ever change you like Las Pozas. 

...

Several days (and several ridiculous situations later), we're in Mexico City. And everything is sunshine and rainbows, despite the sky being cloudy and smoggy half of the time. While in fear of jinxing it, it is as though we walk, or maybe even skip, through the streets and literally pick up friends, as though we are in some music video about friendship and love and happiness. 

That is Simon, up there. He is a Twitter friend. We met Ido later that night, a friend of our hosts Eran and Keran, at a short fiction reading:

(Not Ido, but a photo of the reading.)

and then were invited to see his Volkswagon Combi and meet his brother and mother. But the real kicker is when we sent out Couchsurfing requests this morning. Later that afternoon, we're eating tacos (with habeneros, which we didn't realize until too late, because we are silly gringos and still learning) and sitting on the curb surrounding a garden and all of a sudden a guy just walks up to us, "Ben... Benjamin? and uhm, Jen...?" Turns out that as strangers in a city of twenty million (yeah, that's 20,000,000) people, you can just randomly come across someone who knows you. Or, if you're Ben, you can find someone who will curl up next to you while you nap, even though they only met you two days ago:

Mexico City!

We're in Mexico City! And we're going to Frida Kahlo's house on my birthday! More soon!

<3xoxojen

The best of San Miguel de Allende and onwards.

Tomorrow we are riding east, by northeast through the Sierra Gorda biosphere where we are going to go camping with some fellow couchsurfers Ben and Buffy. Xilitla is our ultimate destination in this our last stab into the interior of Mexico. 

Mexico's rugged interior has been spectacular for motorcycle riding.
Only once did we find ourselves on a dead straight road between Monterrey and San luis Potosi.

I am expecting the riding to be excellent for the next couple of days. The Sierra Gorda biosphere is a nationally protected region comprised of one third of Querétaro state. It is host to three bio regions, epic mountains and spectacular valleys. At the northern tip is Xilitla and the surrealist landscape, Las Pozas, of James Edwards. I don't want to spoil it with some preview pictures so wait for us to get to Mexico City to update you on this adventure.

After Mexico City our route will head towards the Pacific Ocean. This will be the second time we visit the Pacific Ocean on this trip and will be a highlight of this epic journey. We will probably follow the coast down towards the border of Guatemala before heading back inland, and across to the Yucatan Peninsula. 

There are still loads of things to see in Mexico, plus we are only starting to really get into our Spanish speaking groove. Our importation permit on the motorcycle expires at the end of June, so I think we will probably stay in Mexico till then. It really depends on where we next pickup work. In Mexico City we will be chasing a couple of journalism leads, but that depends on how long we can find hosts. Couchsurfing has been great so far. We have one host lined up for the first week, and we are looking for a host for a possible second week if we can get a good lineup of interviews and article pitches for the English speaking publications. If you have any contacts we should know about in Mexico City please fill us in.

Here are the best photos of San Miguel de Allende:

The central garden,

La Parroquia,

Treats.

Benjamin

It took us two days to get to Guanajuato because we were held up in Aguascalientes. No, not that kind of hold up. 

The kind of holdup every motorcyclist loves to run into. A fellow motorcycle enthusiast that can't get enough of your story. Duro spotted us on the 6 lane autopista (freeway) running straight into Aguascalientes. We stopped and chatted for a couple of minutes about our trip, and his interest in taking smaller motorcycle trips, and we were hoping he could point us in a good direction for some lunch. It was about three in the afternoon and we were both starving. 

He then noticed that we were burning oil on the right side exhaust pipes. I tried to explain to him that I was constantly watching the oil, and that I knew what the problem was, and that I was in the midst of resolving the issue. Which is our cam chain tensioner not holding tension and leaking a fair bit of oil past the seal. Well, instead of pointing us to a good restaurant for lunch, (we finally made it to the Birria market that I was dreaming of before we left the next day.)

The back of a lamb on the table in front of us. 

Pretty good Birria cook. 

Side note, Birria is a specialty of Northern Mexico where lamb, mutton and goats are raised. The best place to get Birria is in Aguascalientes, so stop right here.

Eat and watch your bike at the Juarez Market.

Back to the story, We got the Birria information later that night when we meet up with Duro and his wife, and got a tour of the city. But, the first place Duro took us to was the infamous motorcycle garage of the Maestro Jorge Venegas Estrada.

We discussed the issue with my motor, and he offered up a quick solution. drill out the old bolt on the cam chain tensioner so we could thread in a stud bolt. This was a good option, but I knew if we made one mistake Jen and I would be stuck in Aguascalientes for much longer than we wished to visit this uber modern city. Mind the Birria market. I chose to talk my way out of the situation, and I learned a good lesson.

Even if the mechanic you are talking to about a problem wants to do the work for free, it doesn't mean it is always the best decision. 

So to fill you in on why we decided to pass on the offer, I have found a used cam chain tensioner on eBay for seven bucks. This includes the cam chain and the guides. Not a bad deal.

So we get the tour of the town that night by Duro. Auguascalientes is one of the highlights on the Mexico bull fighting circuit. Some of the best bulls in the country are breed here and killed here. We also got to see a Marilyn Monroe impersonator, sorry no photos I forgot the camera, she was standing over a grate in a section of town that had the cars passing underground. When a car would pass underneath her, the viewers would get a little glimpse as she posed innocently for the photos.

The next day I got up early, to check the condition of the bike, oil, and cam chain tensioner. I had to add a bit of oil, but that was expected. We then took off for a visit to the National Museum of death.

Click on our pictures for more great photos from the Death Museum.

So here we are in Guanajuato. I again have the engine out, and I am getting the broken bolt on our cam chain tensioner fixed temporarily as our new tensioner gets shipped to us.

I am going to replace our original one, because I also want to replace our head gasket, the oil seal around the cam chain tensioner bolt, and put in a master link on the cam chain. Plus in the care package with these parts from the states will be a new electric starter motor for the bike. Lets hope all goes well. 

 Benjamin

In Guanajuato, Motor is OUT!

So we made it to Guanajuato in one piece. We stayed over in Aguascalientes for a night, both for Ben to check out the Museo Nacional de la Muerte (National Museum of Death), from which we have some very interesting photos of the art there, 

but also because we literally got pulled over by a fellow motorcycle enthusiast, Duro, who runs the blog En Dos Ruedas, written in Spanish.

We stopped in Aguascalientes for three hours, putting us off track for our destination in Guanajuato that night, so we got a room, saw the museum and walked around downtown a bit. 

The three hours we spent at the motorcycle shop was pretty hilarious. It involved Ben waving his hands at Harley Davidson enthusiasts, saying, part in Spanish, part in English, "Please, please, no! Don't drill into the head!" For those who don't speak motorcyclese, the head basically equals the motor and drilling into it and leaving metal shavings is a terrible idea. 

We made some quick friends in Aguascalientes, and got a little nervous about the cam chain tensioner being loose--not only are we losing a lot of oil regularly, but the cam chain tensioner is sitting in the motor, shaking around. If it gets completely detached from the outside, it will bash into something important (i.e. the valves or the pistons or something like that) and then the ride is OVER. Capital O-V-E-R. So Ben took the motor out, again. And I helped, a little. Here are the photos:

This is Judiht's courtyard, and the view from our current bedroom. There's Apolo, the collie and the engine sitting out in the courtyard.

Muchas Gracias!!!

Thank you everyone for continuing to support us, our motorcycle, and our blog. Thank you for the financial donations that make my work on Bonnie possible and keep us on the road to adventure and new friends. Thank you for your comments, anecdotes, blogs, and twitter updates. We love sharing our stories and experiences with everyone we meet in our daily lives, and with all of our dedicated followers on the blog, through advrider.com, and on twitter.com. 

We have received some very generous donations since we left the states:

Christopher Hillard, your donation has helped us cover the costs of cleaning out our gas tank. 

Michael Saunders, we have finally found a good deal on an electric starter.

Steve Brawley and Marc Lanciaux, your incredible donations are going  towards a new front tire. I have been searching far and wide for a good deal, quality that will last, and tread that will keep us on the beaten path while allowing us visits off the beaten path. I have a supplier in Mexico City all lined up for the transaction.

 

Robert Owen,  thanks for the donation. It will help us get the motor back in the bike for good. I have found a used cam chain tensioner a used cam chain, and a new head gasket. 

Mark Hyatt, your donation has bought us a new cam chain master link.

I also want to say thank you to my family for helping us with shipping our care package of parts and tools to Mexico.

Viva Mexico!

Benjamin

 

Videos on the Road

Here are some baby videos taken while we were driving to Zacatecas

Oh no, Mr. Bill (Ben)!

Real de Catorce in words & images

Well, we still haven't even written about Real de Catorce and frankly, I already have enough stories to write a memoir. So I am going to do a bit of backblogging for y'all while I look at the photos of myself on our Picasa albums, where I am desperately in need of a haircut. If you know of some really great hairstylist en route, this 1970's-ten-year-old-boy haircut I've been sporting in various fashions is getting old, fast. Or, if you're a really hip person and great with a pair of shears, I am a really desperate person with a floppy mess of hair. (It wouldn't hurt to get Ben's hair cut, too.)

So, like most of our trip thus far, our route is inspired by others' suggestions. When we were in Humble, TX, Billy and Anna suggested to us that we should go visit Real de Catorce. On the first night we spent in Humble, the four of us went over our map and circled in red all the places they recommended. A month later, in Monterrey, MX we were staying with Gaby, where she too, recommended that we visit Real de Catorce. Ben, I think, remembered the initial recommendation, but it wasn't until after we left Real de Catorce that I actually put two and two together.

Real de Catorce's historic name, depending on the source is: Real de Alamos de la Purisima Concepción de los Catorce or Nuestra Señora de la Purisima Concepción de los Alamos de Catorce, which roughly translates to 'Royal Alamos of the Immaculate Conception of the Fourteen' or 'Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception of the Alamos of the Fourteen.' San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas and Real de Catorce are all old, colonial,  silver mining towns and they tend to have these romantic and blustery names. The town was founded in 1779 and produced silver until the Mexican Revolution, when it was shut down due to the dropping price of silver in the world market. 

The town has been until recently living on tourism--cowboys stand on all the corners and ask you, in Spanish, if you would like to take a ride up into the mountains on a horse. Almost every large (and small) house has been converted into a hotel-cum-restaurant-cum-souvenir store. We later found out that the charming pueblo of Real de Catorce is on the 'hippy drug trail' due to the peyote found in the surrounding area, ritualistically consumed annually by Huichol Indians and consumed the rest of the time by hippies worldwide, leading to concern that the Huichol tradition of peyote-induced spiritual trips may die out.

The demographic made sense, in retrospect, as every third person we passed on the streets was either wearing tie-dye, had dredlocked hair or was a tourist under the age of 25. Ho-hum. A lover of both the extreme authentic and the terrible imitation, I enjoyed wandering the streets of Real de Catorce as tourists took photos of people in their 'authentic' Mexican campesino clothes, unaware that the people in traditional dress were just as much outsiders to a town surviving on string of tourism as the tourists themselves. Everyone stares at everyone else in Real de Catorce, because everyone is both the spectator and the spectated in such a dynamic tourist town.  

Now, there are possible bids to reopen the Real de Catorce mines again. I've been reading up a bit on this, to give you a good opinion of what's going on out there regarding Real de Catorce. I couldn't say for sure whether this is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, but it is definitely A Thing. The beautiful churches in town, gaudy on the inside and more relic-like than the older and larger cathedrals in San Luis and Zacatecas, were built on this money. 

In fact, the entire desirable city was  built on this money, and if all this 'reopening of mines' stuff goes down democratically, this might be an incredible thing. In another two-hundred year cycle of newly opened mines and building and closing of mines and downturn and tourism upturn, Real de Catorce may be more or less integrally the same.

I've watched New Orleans go from a 'mostly-surviving on tourism' to an 'only surviving on tourism' town and you can see the matte black wall, about two inches past the pupils of the eyes' of people who only survive on tourism. It's not good. And for the tourist, it becomes a wheedling uncomfort of feeling like you constantly owe something to someone, like everyone is infuriated with you after you walk away without hiring their services. I suspect to some extent that this is what  is so attractive about the concept of 'eco-tourism,' because it makes consumption look and feel really good. (I swear, Ben is going to have to update soon with something upbeat before I go all communist on this blog.) 

...

So. Real de Catorce is beautiful. 

9,000 feet up, and you can stand in the town and watch the clouds pass above and below you, and they compress themselves to fit into the clefts between mountains. 

The masonry is incredible--in some places, three different layers have fallen off of decaying buildings and give you an idea of the makeshift reparations and the generations of people who've built this place all willy-nilly on the side of the mountains. 

With dozens of abandoned houses, people still find unused pieces on the hillside to build new buildings, usually half out of concrete blocks and the other half out of  rocks found nearby. 

(This is hair that needs the badly needed haircut.)

And the views?

...

One of the concerns with the reopening of mines is the undermining of the historic quality of towns like Real de Catorce. Real de Catorce is part of the Programa Pueblos Mágicos a program run by Mexico's Secretary of Tourism. I am unsure as to the benefits of degree of legal historical preservation by being designated a Magical Town. Real de Catorce was the first town we have visited on this list, and we visited a second, Jerez, last night. San Miguel de Allende, another magical town is also on our route, after Guanajuato. If you haven't watched the video of the trip into the tunnel, I suggest you look at it again. 

Real de Catorce has a romantic, blustery name because it is a otherworldly place that you get to through a tunnel in the earth with an unopenable altar to something that you can't really see.

Some Loving, Some Blog Hating & Nature Photos

One of the reasons that this blog didn't start up until Ben and I realized we were just disappointing our future selves by not documenting this trip, is because I have a really difficult time with negotiating my liberal arts degree of 'critical kindness' towards all things new, different or unique; and my desire to write out, document and share my love of small handmade and hand delivered stories to other human beings.

To casually display the fight against the existentialist struggle.

I told our host, Gaby, in Monterrey, that I was working in my head on my 'What I Am Going to Say About Mexico That is Honest, Not Stereotyping; Kind, But Critical.' This is part of that series of thoughts. 

Today, via my college email address, I received a bulk-letter from one of the administrative bigwigs at Tulane, my alma mater, telling students to use caution, and check the state.gov website for travel information about going to major Mexican tourist areas and the Mexican frontera. Drugs, death, violence, pickpockets and rape! Frankly, short of Tijuana, all of the cities listed on the website seemed charming compared to New Orleans, New York City, Chicago, and sure as heck better than Gary, Indiana. What are we (Americans) telling ourselves about the outside world? Are we writing these blurbs about our most dangerous cities, when all of those out-of-state college students just showed up in New Orleans for Mardi Gras this year?

...

Right now, Ben has the whole darned motorcycle apart, up the street (Carlos and Nasul's house is located on the hillside, and the immediate surrounding blocks are pedestrian stairwells only, paved with large stones held together by cement and loosely attached, somehow, to the mountain), so we haven't been driving anywhere for the last couple of days. 

Therefore, every few days we walk down to the markets and go to buy groceries. Zacatecas is an old town, and it is difficult to build modern day grocery stores into the city--there are no streets that run straight and buildings, stairwells too, tend to just pop out of nowhere, built on top of other buildings, buildings that are dug into the sides of the mountains surrounding the main valley of the city.

These markets tend to be mixed results for us--sometimes three days of delicious groceries or an incredible lunch comes for less than three dollars (or 45 pesos). Other times, we are ripped off--less than a pound of rice for 20 pesos, or a $1.33. This may not seem like a lot, and in a way, it isn't, either economically or emotionally. But in some ways, it is. We watch and listen, as we get ripped off by someone--we know whats going on and they know that we know. Everyone is clearly aware. What we're paying for is more than just some white rice, we're paying for years of bad blood between two countries, for a child's education, our stilted Spanish, for our blue eyes. In this is the critical kindness. I don't blame this individual for overcharging me, and I let him do it, willingly. It is easy enough to say no. But it doesn't help him if I say no, and it doesn't help me if I say yes. Overall, no one is winning in any of these situations. How do you call someone out on this without skirting around the obvious reasons that you are being ripped off? 

...

One night, my friend Anna and I were waiting for the streetcar in New Orleans. A woman came up to us and asked us for money for a cab. Her boyfriend had just beat her up and kicked her out of the car. We gave her everything we had short of the small fare for the streetcar back Uptown--did we want to be scammed and do the right thing or not give her money and possibly let this woman try to walk home by herself in the middle of the night?

...

It makes me really nervous to fall into the travel blog/travel writing hole of essentializing groups of people and blaming them for historic, political and social events outside of their reach, or summing them up into quaint exoticized moments in my life. These stories may seem negative, but they're really about the difficulty of walking a fine line between forgiving, comprehending, and criticizing. How do you humanize a person, a place or a country without generalizing or being unfair (in either a good or bad way)? How do you write a story about something without taking advantage of the person who made the story--the climb up the hill or the noteworthy news?

...

I spend a lot of time, looking at the florae and the terrain on our trips. A lot of the time on the motorcycle is spent between towns; it makes the metropolitan area from New York to Boston seem claustrophobic. It is hard to catch pictures of plants while we're moving, 

most of the on-motorcycle pictures tend to be of distant objects (ok, mountains). 

So I've been trying to take pictures of interesting plants more often,

so that I can show at least what some of the plants are like, the more "exotic" ones that catch my eye.  

I wish I could give names for these plants, but you'll just have to appreciate them for what they are. Included are some photos of the mountains I've loved, too. Just so you can start to feel the expansiveness of Mexico, the rolling desert plains and mountains we've been travelling through since we left the United States. 

We had to slow down for these sheep. I would say that half of the animals we've seen have not been penned in. But they tend to be a little smarter, the cows, the horses, the chickens, etc. and they realize that there is no food to be found on the road.

 

I actually was able to catch a picture of one of small dust whirlwinds that suck up the dry ground. Everytime we crest a mountain, there are dozens of these to be seen on the horizon:

Grapevines in the desert for Ryan: