last day in Mexico and the border

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Rugged up for the first time in a while...v strange after sweating it for so long.
So, where were we? back to the 22/7 looking for Barra de Cruz, the famous point break...only 100 something ks from that last beach...can't remember, stayed there for 3 days tho'...Tony at his new bar El Burro Barracho was good host, dinky little hotel...surf scene..right on the beach..oh yeah Puerto Escondido, yI think I,ve written it up, tres pretty and in the early stages of development, sure to be unrecognisable in another few years, sorta close for americanos and canadians to fly in......so, on the road, good to be back in the saddle after a couple of days off.....down the highway, lovely curvery again...light and dark shadows under tree lined roads winding down the coast, stroe effect of the light is a bit off-putting at times..., occasional teaser glimpses again of bays, beaches, I caught a look at what look like fish farms in an inlet, often the topes are in the shade of trees, very treach....some are positively lethal, designed by Eivel Kneivels ramp builder... they would give us real air if hit at full speed!!....came onto a couple with no warning...danger Will Robinson...., and striations in the bitumen that affect the riding, looks like someone ran a comb along the bitumen in sweeping swathes....to stop and look at any section it would probably look straight but at 100 plus they make it hard to follow your line...then stretches of smooth bitumen curves, almost hypnotic in its regularity, just cruising in 4th and fifth gears, no need of brakes just using the throttle to back off, then power on, just mega!..up and down, round and round, and bugger all traffic!....
Thousands of butterflies out this day...something about being over the road that gets them horny coz so many of them are going into mating rituals....flapping and fornicating then whack...into the visor at 130 ...some would argue not a bad way to go....I'm pondering the consequences, thinking about that theory of the butterfly flapping its wings in brazil and the cyclone in paris or whatever...we are cutting such a swathe thru butterflydom that there's gotta be some serious shit going down somewhere....or will I have to pay for it somewhere...but there's not much to be done about it and I do really, try to dodge them when I can!
We get to near where we heard the turnoff is, or supposed to be, take a few wrong turns, feels like the middle of nowhere but then spot the marching War-of-the-Worlds high voltage power lines charging off over the hills....discover a mega tourista development but sorta tasteful with about 10 kms of wide divided road, centre median beautiful garden, ride-on mower guys, whipper snippers, immaculate...big money development, huge new power station and water treatment plants, hotel complexes etc etc but by-and-large deserted....and well out of our reach to even go and check them out...and of course they control all the access to their beach!!...from the next vantage point we looked back and they have built this place around an abso perfecto little bay, muy bonito...local touro info shop gives us the good oil so we find the turn off...Barra de Cruz, winding concrete road for a couple of ks then unmade, a little village sprawled across the road, dusty but friendly, few people hanging about, wind our way thru, v little commercial activity but most places seem to be adding rooms etc...
throughout Mexico there are lots of unfinished buildings that you can't tell if they are on the way up or the way down...in the middle of nowhere huge factory/warehouse type buildings, half built...whats going on?...and along the way, in the middle of fruit tree plantations, ruins of houses or half built new ones?....and in every town, buildings with strands of reo sticking up from the roof line like waiting for some future second floor development...there's a suggestion that you don't pay some sort of land tax until the building is finished so they're often left like this...??...anyway, we come to the gate to the beach, pay 10 pesos each and get let in...a coupla ks and we stop at the top of a rise that then runs steeply down to a beach....there it is...the famous point break and a v sweet looking beach/bay...half a dozen classic surfer vehicles parked at the bottom..., couple of big ford wagons, toyota 4 wds, camper vans, a palapa on the each, uprights are natural branches with v forks that support the cross members, posts about 10 feet centres 3 or 4 rows by about 15 long, thatched roof like all good palapas and one corner section with thatched walls, inside a wood fired little kitchen and a sorta shop with ice box of softdrinks, beers etc...no power and a real basic scene!....lot of the people mhave their hamacas slung ...obviously the design is perfect ength for diagonal hamaca hanging...hope they are all in synch, looks like if they all hung one way we'd have a palapalanche...and the whole structure is going to fly away pretty soon in a storm, but just as easy to rebuild...cool...and about 20 or so surfers, guys and girls...mexicans, Oz, french, austrians, germans, americans...and us three..at least 2 of us right into it all...I feel like the 5th wheel...or 3rd wheel....but its pleasant enough, swimmable a bit, and certainly a very good feel to the place, very relaxed, friendly, isolated, back to nauture basic but what more could you want?.... then, out come the laptops, digi cameras, slide shows, unbelievable!...welcome to the 21st century.....balanced out by surreal driftwood, altho' isn't it always a bit that way?..but some of these pieces are gems, extremely dense rainforest timber pieces heavy as ebony, wish I could sling a couple in the bags!
So, after swim, surf, photos...back to town to find a donga, nothing much on offer but we finally, fortunately and flukely geta couple of beds in a cinderblock square room by the beach gate, only 2 beds so Ted finds a bed next door, and its all v basic, and I mean basic!...on the only shelf there's an old defunct ghetto blaster, appropriately named for this hovel...hey, but its our ghetto!, I'm sure it will be fine....just watch out going around the back to the baño after dark!!..., v primitive and what I'd been expecting as average accom for the trip....
walk up thru the dusty streets in the coolth of evening, past the thouroughbreed horse I'd seen on the beach, knarly little bloke had just a bridle and a loop of strapping around its girth, he springs up and loops his legs into the strap, this horse is pretty big, and stroppy, but he's clearly in control, getting it to go backwards, sideways, incredible control and he's absolutely one with the horse, this strapping arangement looks pretty dodgey but he obviously knows what he's doing, anyway, we see it in the yard tied up to the clothes line to keep its head up...all part of the training I guess, and more farmyard street scenes, dogs are friendly and well fed, a show-quality rooster and a turkey with its bar-room-scene-from-starwars1-face of melting rainbow lard ...we find the one restaurant, Sheelahs ...v pleasant, have a couple of beers and another dose of fish...cutlets this time fantastico, the food all down the coast has been speccy, this lot came from a fish we saw the fisherman carrying home across the beach earlier, giant something, over his shoulder and must have weighed 25 kilos...fresh as...mmmm
So, sticky night and off without a wash after Ted's whipped down for the essential morning shots of the surf....
Nexto...
after an hour or so on the curvery again we opt for the tollway to get a few kms up....its eay, safe and we belt along at 130 - 140 with almost no other traffic about...off to the side rich farmland, corn and other crops, really healthy looking cattle. they have a whole new fence line with posts concreted in and 4 strands of barbed wire to keep the animals off the road....many of the farmers use this as their access tho' so there are farm trucks parked off to the side.....then I spot a huge bull with an inversely proportional skinny leash outside of the fence...I mean on OUR side...he's sniffing the air, obviously picked up on that cute little heiffer on the other side of the freeway....aaarrrggghhh...if he decides to go....
Onwards evr onwards...and then we get to the windy bit....and I mean windy....at plus 400 kgs we are blown across the road...lucky its like 3 laes wide...this is incredible, almost painful, and surely fcuking scary, riding on the angle fighting the wind, then a few trees off to the side block it and we swing back the other way...up ahead a lumbering B-double overloaded with rocks!...this puppy must weigh 60 tonnes if its an ounce!...and he's weaving all over the road from the wind!!...the tollways are a bit exy too...we pay the same as a car!!...outrage...obviously not a strong bike lobby here....anyway, we come to another pay point and fork over the 10 bucks or so ...about 10 kms down the road and it ends!!...just a couple of boards and 100 metres of gravel showing where its going to be....bugger!.....back up to the exit and find a town....appropriately its called something that I translate as Windy City...no kidding...
back to it...this is getting to be a long day but we figure we may as well get as close to the border as poss......cruising on the regular highway, trucks and cars to pass, more bloody topes and vibradores in every small town...whoooah, off to the left the hills, well, mountains, rise up to the sky, tops disappearing in clouds...and the clouds are building up, gigantic thunderheads growling over these enormous and sharp mountain peaks...so, of course, a couple of ks further on the storms boils over and down into the flatland ...we run into the mother of all downpours, can't see shit, cars slowing and stopping, water streaming over the visor, and into it!..peering thru', dodging cars...holy guacamole......
Then clear and dry out in about 5 minutes as its still about a million degrees, altho' not as hot as some of our days.....must be getting closer to the border...actually 100 kms or so, but at the next servo we stop at little kids run out and swamp us with some bread-biscuit stuff...something about borders that attract touts of all sorts....
Then on, getting tireder and we're tracking thru endless bananana plantations, lots of people waiting by the side of the road for lifts, families on bikes precariously on the edge of the road, cars and trucks pulling out of the trees....so we just cruise it...come to the next city...man! people yelling and whistling at us, offering god-knows-what...but we've been prepared...don't talk to the touts, don't stop...we stop to gas up ready for tomorrow...border day....then push on for the ast 50 kms or so to Hidalgo, right on the border,...get in before dark and see its been a 750 km day...felt like it too!...some buggerising around then found about the only hotel in town...and it has a lock-up yard for the bikes...sweet.
ave a bit of a wander round the town at night, pretty quiet for Sat night!...near the zocala, the centre of the town's action is a chemist shop...what?...lit up like xmas, huge 20 metre tower with lights all over, lights all round the shop front....and doof-doof music you can hear all over the city...so bizarre....can't really describe how strange this is!!.....I went up to the counter to see if they had eectroliytes ....shouting my request at top voice...I mean, this music was LOUD....she goes off to the ack, I presume she's gonna turn it down a bit...no way, she just changes the track!!.......
Few locals lounging around...getting deaf!!...open-back hummer full of militery men cruising the street...oh yeah, quel irony!...earier in the day I saw a bunch of Federales pulling guys out of a truck and into their wagon...illegal immos..from Guatemala!!...just like the americanos over the border from Tijuana...
Up early, smoothie from the smoothie in the corner store and we front the frontera...almost deserted...get the Mexit stamp...ten get stung 10 bucks to take the bridge across no-person's land ...passport stuff easy, friendly, efficient...no crowds of touts that we'd been warned about...then to the vehicle section, coupla local guys helping us...they have official tout adges so seem cool...give over the bike aperwork, then we have to get the photocopies!!...these guys take us downtown, its Sunday so everything closed...soo close, now disaster...but no, they wake up a guy who has a copier, make them and back, pay the $, get the papers, oh, but you need a copy for the Policia!!...no problema, our mate scoots off and gets them done...too easy!!....and we're free in beautiful downtown Tecan Ucan...another dusty, slummy border town...crikey I'm defaming a lot of places that probably have golden treasures , antastic artistic, cultural and culkinary glories and I'm writing them off unseen....still and all, I reckon I'm pretty right with most of them!
Off on the road, seems different but hard to pick exactly what, brightly coloured busses zooming along, or maye its just the deregulated exhaust systems making them sound a lot more furious than they are...no, they really are belting along, passing manouvers a stock car driver would be proud of.....
Bigger trees than before and we're soon rising up into the mountains heading inland....rugged countryside, all green and some near vertical slopes ploughed and planted, don't know how!..looks like a shower of rain and it would all wash away....getting steeper, fantastic valleys, gorges...nowhere near the scale of the Mexican stuff but this is at least appreciable whereas a lot of the Mexican scenery was just incomprehensible in its scale!! This is almost Swiss mountain stuff, green slopes, deep valleys with rivers flowing , housing a bit differente, like little leggo blocks randomly plonked over the hills where a town is centred...then around the corner...way above the clouds a perfectly triangular peak of the volcano...whoooa.....that is a whopper!!on a bit more we get to Quetzaltenango....our mouthful of a pronunciation destination, but decide to push on to the lake....this little town, actually a fair sized city seems to be designed to trap the passing traveller, winding ñarrow, one-way, cobblestoned streets, twisting and turning, completely lost...ask a guy directions, head out on the road...it soon peters out, turns into a motocross track, enduro rallys held here!...getting rougher, narrower, potholeder, we're loster, confuseder, tireder...then again...the big, black thunderhead rolls down from the mountain...hey, we could always stay the night here, hehehe...pretty little town...hightail it back to the centro.....flashes off lightning and the clap of thunder right overhead...faaarrrccckkkk...scoot around and finally find a hotel after numerous laps of the blocks......
Funny how nearly every town/city seems so incomprehensibly confusing when you first ride in...can't find anything, then after settling in and having a walk around...everything's there!..hotels, restaurants..hey even a interneto just 4 doors up from the hotel!!...but it shuts at 7pm and its now 6.50pm....bummer dudes and dudettes..but this is probably enough of a marathon for you for the start of the week...hasta...

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