Breakdown in San Miguel

San Miguel to Mexico City, Mexico
5,379 km

After the New Years I spent a couple more days in San Miguel de Allende. Then, when I was packed and ready to leave, I couldn’t because my motorbike wouldn’t start. The battery was dead and, after a quick revision, I discovered that the battery was completely dry. It was a new battery so I took it to a motorcycle shop and had them refill it and put it on a slow charge. They didn’t have one in my size so if this didn’t work it would be eight days to get another from the capital. Eight days to send a motorcycle battery 300 kilometers from Mexico City – crazy, right? Fortunately, the battery took and held its charge. But my problems weren’t over. Now she would start but when next I set out she performed miserably and the engine kept cutting out. It was early in the morning so I found a motorcycle shop in San Miguel and waited in the parking lot until they opened. When the shop opened we wheeled the bike inside and a young mechanic listened to the engine and felt the exhaust pipe and, finding that it was not warming properly, he determined that the front piston was not working. He discussed the situation with the manager and they decided that the piston would have to be replaced. I was quoted a price and a timeline.

Obviously, I was suspicious that a mechanic, no matter how good or experienced – and this kid was neither – could determine that a piston needed to be replaced based on how quickly the exhaust pipe warmed. I decided to call a motorcycle shop in Mexico City that the Yamaha main offices had recommended. The shop owner asked some questions and was noncommittal but suspicious about a motorcycle needing a piston replaced after only 10,000 miles. He offered to drive the truck to San Miguel and haul me and the bike back to the shop in Mexico City for 1000 pesos, about $80. I accepted.

During the drive, Guillermo (Memo) and I slowly became friendly and by the late evening we were at the shop in Mexico City. The mechanics were in the process of closing up but everything stopped and they gathered around the gringo with the sick motorcycle, amazed that I had come this far on this bike – I didn’t yet know what they meant by ‘this bike’. Memo started the engine and felt that the pipe did not heat propely but then he tested the compression in the cylinders and found that both were the same and within the proper limits. In one, thirty-second diagnostic he had disproven the need to replace the piston.

Over the next few days, Memo and another mechanic, Eduardo, whom they call Tocayo, which is what you call someone that has the same name as you only no one else at the shop is named Eduardo, took apart the carburetors, cleaned them and replaced seals, they adjusted the engine valves and conducted a the rest of a full tune-up. At the end no obvious culprit for the severe performance problems had been identified but at least now she was running well and strong and I thanked them all and went on my way.

Christmas in Morelia and New Years in San Miguel

Comala to San Miguel, Mexico
5,371 km

From Comala I rode northeast on a good highway through forested hill country south of the Laguna de Chapala to the small town of Mazamitla where I stayed for two nights. The town is built on the slope of a hill and its streets are narrow and some are very steep. They are made of smooth, round, irregular rocks with no mortar between, which is the style in many Mexican towns. For this reason and for the steep slopes people drive ATVs through the city streets. The central plaza and the church that stands adjacent to it were lovely in the twilight, as lovely as they are in any town in Mexico, and here, also, the air breathed cool and clean into my lungs and it smelled strongly of the pine trees that cover these hills. In the evening I walked among the pine forested hills above the town where the locals have built cabins that they rent or sell as weekend retreats.

From Mazamitla I rode to Zacapú, which is of little note except that it is between Mazamitla and Morelia. The winds were strong during the day, making a great dancing undulation of the trees and the bushes along the highway, and slowing my progress so that I did not reach Morelia as I had planned. I reached Morelia first thing in the morning of the next day, which was a breezy, sunny Christmas Eve day. I walked around during the day and in the evening I drank hot chocolate at a café across from the Plaza de Armas. Some people attended mass at the cathedral and others enjoyed the evening in the plaza with their families and I enjoyed watching them. I noticed that there was an pleasant calm across the city. The next day – Christmas Day – I slept in and then walked around the city and then I returned to the hotel to take a nap. The city is beautiful for its Spanish colonial architecture. In the evening I walked among the plazas and pedestrian streets, which were aglow from the strings of white Christmas lights that hung along the walls and along the archways. There were many people out but I didn’t talk to anyone, except for a group of bikers wearing Harley-Davidson jackets because the evening was cool and because they liked the look.

The next morning I breakfasted at a restaurant across from the Plaza de Armas and the cathedral and drank hot coffee until the sun rose above the closer of the two towers of the cathedral. The city was completely still, although the holiday was over and it was now a work day. In the midmorning I rode to Guanajuato, which a city in the nook of a valley and, impossibly, it is even more beautiful than Morelia. Around every bend is a fountain or a statue or a plaza or a garden or a combination of these, and everywhere there are the facades of wonderfully preserved colonial buildings. The streets are a tangle of narrow, curving, cobblestone alleys and below the city center there are dark subterranean passageways with stone walls and vaulted ceilings that seem as though they were once used for something sinister but are now used as a parking lot.

That night I stayed in a dormitory room at a hostel and I immediately regretted the decision. The sheets were dirty and there was someone snoring and, worst of all, all the lockers were filled. I secured my gear to my motorcycle but my toiletries I kept atop my boots beside my bed and it was my toiletries bag that was stolen during the night. I awoke very early to find the bag gone and the snoring man gone and that was too much of a coincidence but there was nothing to be done and I grieved the loss of my Sonicare toothbrush.

That morning I was grumpy and the best thing to fight the mean reds or the cold blues or a bad case of the grumps is to go for a motorcycle ride. So I rode along a road that follows the ridge around the valley and saw the city from every side as the early morning sun cast long, deep shadows. Leaving the city, I followed another harrowingly corkscrew canyon road. After Dolores Hidalgo the highway straightened and my speed increased but I was in no hurry because San Miguel de Allende is not far away. In San Miguel I found Erssel’s house, which is in a quiet neighborhood about 20 minutes walk from the central plaza. I met Erssel through couchsurfing.org, which is a project that connects travelers with hosts and something I had been persuaded to try by a group of devotees that I met in Zacatecas.

San Miguel de Allende is another charming little city, small enough to be intimate but big enough to keep your interest. It is a city of about 100,000 and half of these are foreigners – most are retired North Americans. Erssel is one of them. He lives in a large house with high, vaulted ceilings of red brick. His friends are an endearing ragtag group and his neighbors, Jeff and Arnie, are a pair of likable roughnecks. Jeff is talkative and crass and a hard pill to swallow and Arnie is mellow and laidback – he was a professional wrestler years ago before it became a phenomenon. Now they build water features on homes and golf courses.

On New Years Eve we went to the central plaza and we stood before the church where a group of mariachis played traditional songs that come from the state of Veracruz. When the New Year arrived we danced and whistled and some people kissed and we all clapped and held small firecrackers above our heads that shot off sparks the color of dry Champaign.

Canyon Roads, a Lake, and a Magical Village

Jalpa to Comala, Mexico 4,409 km

There are more canyon lands between Jalpa and Guadalajara. By now the tired, old misconception that Mexico is a country of long, dry, flat, barren lands – like our own Texas only more so – has been thrown out and I understand that the topography of Mexico is a great deal more complex than that. To say that the landscape is turbulent is an oversimplification at best.

But by now I am becoming quite accustomed to riding canyon roads – the whipping turns, the hard leaning, the accelerating and decelerating. There is a thrill in the not knowing what you will find beyond the present bend and the not overly caring because you know that you have your hands plenty full with just handling the present turn. I ride along, happily reconciled to the uncertainty, wishing that I could be just this accepting of it as it appears in all aspects of my life. Then I remember my former boss, Clayton Williams, who is now a big shot with the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, because he used to say that learning to deal with ambiguity is a sign of maturity. It’s a fine thing to say, I think.

These are canyon lands, not highlands, and in Mexico altitude decides everything. So, unlike in the mountain country of the north, here, among the rocky, barren ridges of the canyons lands, it is not cold. Even, actually, it is warm, but this warmth is precarious at best. It is thin as tissue paper and stretched too tight so that when a wind rises it tears and the cold rushes through the torn places. So it is a delicate thing, this warmth, and it seems that to acknowledge it with anything above a whisper and it might disappear. So I do not speak of it, only I make a gesture: I lower the zipper of my riding jacket and I raise the visor of my crash helmet. I do this to enjoy the sun on my face and the warm breeze on my neck. But the gods see everything and they are quick to interpret arrogance in our actions and they are ever quick to punish arrogance. So, no sooner have I lowered the zipper and raised the visor and the bright sun disappears behind one, lone, self-important cloud – the only one in the sky.

I raise the zipper and lower the visor and shiver voluntarily to quicken the blood in its warming course through my veins. I look up at the sun behind the cloud and I shake my head in disappointment. I want to say that it’s ironic but it’s not ironic. It’s not ironic in the same way those things in the Alanis Morissette song are not ironic, they’re just bad luck, and this too is bad luck, nothing more. But the sun behind the cloud reminds me of a story I once heard and I like it so I’ll recount it here:

Once there was a stonecutter who wanted to be more powerful than he was. One day as he toiled at his work he looked up at the sun as he wiped the sweat from his brow. ‘The sun gives life and warmth and burns my back as I work,’ he mused aloud. ‘If I could be the sun then would I be most powerful.’

It was a restless Universe that heard him or maybe it was a mischievous deity but, whoever it was, the stonecutter’s request was heard and it was answered and he became the sun. After this, many days went by during which the stonecutter traveled the heavens in his daily course, giving light to the land and warmth and burning the backs of hardworking men, and he was pleased. Until one day a storm cloud crossed his path and covered his face. Angry and bewildered he said, ‘I must be the storm cloud, which may go where it pleases, ravages the land, and extinguishes the very light of the sun.’

So he became the storm cloud and for many days he spread himself across the heavens and brought rain and darkness and destruction to the land. Until one day he came upon a great boulder that was unyielding before his blows. Almost insensible in his rage and his impotence he said, ‘I must become the boulder, which is immovable and unyielding.’

So he became the boulder and much time past during which he stood tall and majestic – a symbol of dominance over the forests and the creatures of the land, and he was pleased. Until one day a stonecutter came and chiseled him into powder.

By early afternoon I am in Guadalajara. It is warm here because the sun has emerged from behind the cloud and the choking exhaust of a hundred thousand idling motors heats the heavy air so that you see wavy distortions everywhere. Several times I cut the engine while waiting at traffic lights. It goes like this: while your light is green the cars trying to move perpendicular are stuck in the intersection and then, when they move past and the intersection is cleared, the light changes and the cars going in your direction make a quick dash and fill the intersection so that the cars going in the perpendicular direction cannot move during their green light. This continues all throughout the afternoon as street vendors walk among the idling motorcars, selling water and snacks and newspapers and cards for recharging the credit on mobile telephones and coloring books and toys for children and a million other random and bizarre things, and all the while the shrieks of impatient claxons ring out in a discordant cacophony.

It is late afternoon before I am away from Guadalajara and I arrive at Chapala near sunset. Here there is a long boardwalk and a narrow beach along the shore of the lake. There are sailboats docked and some are sailing and there are people in kayaks and sitting on the beach and sitting on benches kissing and children flying kites in the strong, warm wind coming off the water. I buy a beer and I sit on a bench facing the lake. I drink the beer and close my eyes to the warm wind and breathe in deeply the clean air from the lake and exhale deeply the bad air from the city streets. I watch the sun set and the dusk becomes twilight.

In the morning I meet a group of retired Americans and I join them for breakfast. They are real old-timers and their droll banter sounds like it comes out of an old movie or radio show. They tell jokes and talk about their veteran’s benefits and the way things used to be and about their ‘girls’. Someone mentions that his girl is coming from a nearby town to stay during Christmas and that she expected him to buy her a present. He doesn’t know what to buy her. Someone has a suggestion: ‘You should tie a red bow around your dick and tell her “Feliz Navidad.”’

That morning the breeze comes cool off the lake. I ride south, detouring onto a secondary highway that meanders through rugged hills. The tarmac is mostly destroyed here and the going is slow – potholes and fissures are difficult to avoid when you are already leaning hard and fast into a turn. In the afternoon I arrive in Colima and I find a hotel. In the night at have drinks on the patio of a restaurant and watch a group of dancers have a milonga in the plaza. The next morning I go to the small town of Comala. It is a few kilometers away down a lovely highway that is flanked on both sides by green bushes and wildflowers.

Comala is the setting of my favorite Mexican novel, Pedro Páramo, which also has the distinction of being the only Mexican novel I have read. It has that same mysterious, fantastical quality that you find in the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquéz and sometimes in those of Isabel Allende. The small town is bright and lovely and nothing like the morose village of broken spirits from the novel. But Juan Rulfo wrote the novel in the 1950s, which was another time, and long before the Mexican tourism bureau came up with the idea of designating particular towns as ‘Pueblos Mágicos’ to bolster tourism. It felt cliché but I bought copy of the short novel and I sat at a table on the patio of a café and I read the novel while I ate breakfast beside the central plaza where there is a statue and a plaque dedicated to the author.

A Night at the Cock Fights

Zacatecas to Jalpa, Mexico
3,832 km

After the night at the disco I slept in (until 8:00) and then I rode over to the Yamaha dealership in Zacatecas because for a while now I had been detecting a failure of the motorcycle at high speeds and hard climbs when she was exerting all or almost all of her 535 ccs. So I went to the service department and explained the situation to the two mechanics. Juan Federico Gomez de Ana Quezada was the head mechanic and Faramundo Aurelio Ortega was his assistant (both names have been changed). Both thin men, they nevertheless struck me a bit like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb the way they stood over the motorcycle rubbing their beardless chins, wearing rather blank expressions on their faces, and asking me if the motorcycle has fuel injectors and me dumbstruck, nervous now about where I had brought my motorcycle, and pointing out the clearly visible carburetors above and between the two cylinder heads. They listened to the motor and Juan Federico listened through a hose to isolate the sounds. They agreed that the rear exhaust valve sounded loose and so they opened the covering and spent what seemed like ages loosening and then measuring and then tightening and then measuring again and, the measurement not right, them loosening and then starting all over again. After a couple hours the superficial adjustment to the valve was done and I paid them 150 pesos, or $15, off the books, saying ‘Thank you for your time and expertise” and then riding off still feeling that the motorcycle was sluggish but deciding that, in consideration, the money was well spent because she was no worse off than before.

About 50 kilometers south of Zacatecas I stopped at the hilltop ruins of La Quemada whose crumbling walls and columns and pyramid are the same parched color of the desert plain that stretches in every direction around it. Across this plain the color of the brush and vegetation changes where the buried remains of pre-Colombian clay roads pass beneath and extend out in several directions. They say – that is, the ‘they’ who say all general and imprecise things that then go repeated until what was originally maybe a guess or a conjecture has become hard fact like the various explanations for why the moon looks bigger at the horizon and how come it always seems that the lane you are driving in is the slower one – anyway, they say that La Quemada was once a city of 60,000 to 70,000 and that it is the mythical Chicomostoc, the place of seven caves, although only six have been found so far.

In Jalpa, which is a small city about equidistant between Zacatecas and Guadalajara along the major highway that connects the two, I found a hotel and stayed for the night. I didn’t want to go out because I was tired from the night before but I was in a new place and there were new things to see. So I walked along the main street toward the central plaza, the zócalo is what it’s called in Mexico, and as I walked I noticed that, through two large open doors, there was an area with a small enclosure surrounded by bleachers. When I asked the woman at the door what it was, she said, “Gallos” and I asked, ‘At what time?” and she said, “A las 9.” So I continued on to the zócalo and I bought a Michelada, which is a beer drink that includes ice, salt, some type of mystery sauce, chili sauce, powdered chili around the outside of the cup, and, of course, a slice of lime. It was awful, outright horrendous, I thought, and I consider myself rather a good democrat when it comes to alcohol in various colors and flavors but I couldn’t force down more than three sips before I had to throw out the entire pint. I ate dinner at a food stand in the zócalo and then at 9 o’clock I went to the cock fights.

I took a seat in the front row because I figured that if you are going to try a new thing then you should do it all the way or not at all. There were eight ‘breeders’ that each brought four cocks and so there would be 16 fights that night. During the preparations, which is quite a lengthy process, one cock is tagged with green on his leg and the other with red. Then they are weighed and then each corner picks out a steel talon and these are measured and observed by a judge. The talons are then fixed to the leg by a band that is wrapped around tightly many times. Next the toes are pulled at and cracked, to loosen them, I suppose. Then a third cock is brought in and both are held and it is allowed to peck furiously at each of the two combatants in turn, loosing large tufts of feathers, this to anger them, I suppose. The whole while men hurry around the ring shouting, ‘Rojo!’ or ‘Verde!’ and try to entice you to place a bet and women go about selling tickets for the between rounds raffle and another woman takes and delivers drink orders.

When finally the combat begins you are exasperated by the waiting, but then, immediately, you are surprised by how fierce it is and how bloody it gets if one or the other cock gets lucky and its great steel talon finds a soft home in its adversary’s belly. The fight lasts a matter of seconds and it ends suddenly when one cock lies on the ground defeated, usually alive but almost always bleeding and panting and the life quickly departing, and the other, the victor, standing over the defeated, refusing to finish him either because he fights only to save himself or because he is merciless in his triumph and he would drag his victim around the ring in a victory lap like Achilles did to Hector if it weren’t that he, too, the victor, is also wounded and mortally exhausted. This is when the breeders leap into the ring and each retrieves his champion and carries him quickly out and behind a curtain. I don’t know what happens to the cocks next, if the defeated is killed or if they are both killed or if something else happens before the killing finally comes. I know only that both cocks have left the dirt ring covered with their feathers and sometimes with bits of flesh and often with a deep puddle of blood. I know, too, that it is exciting as all violence is exciting but that it lacks finesse: it is crude and artless. It is not a corrida, a bullfight, which is not a sport but the playing out of a tragedy, the tragedy of the bull’s death. It is instead all fury and no skill, no story, and so no triumph in victory or bitterness in defeat, only it is a bloody combat between two mindless brutes where one will win and the other will lose and both will break themselves in the trying and then both will be killed eventually.

I stayed only for the first few fights and then I was tired by it and also a little disgusted. It was dark and quiet now on the main street, which is only one lane in either direction. The storefronts were all closed and the food and drink vendors had gone home because everyone not attending the cock fights was back in their houses. I walked back to the hotel and in my room, looking in the mirror while I soaped my hands to wash up, I saw on my face and my clothes that the blood from the fights splatters.

The Disco in the Mine

Guachochi to Zacatecas, Mexico
3,654 km

From Guachochi you take the Chihuahua Highway 23 south and east to Hidalgo del Parral, a city along the major highway that connects Chihuahua to Guadalajara in the south. For a time the forested canyonlands continue but soon the slopes become gradual and the thick pine forest disperses and the land becomes dry everywhere. Soon you are riding through rolling yellow plains, the canyons ever further in the distance but never completely out of sight. Now you realize you have come back to the desert: harsh and pitiless, subtle and grand and unconquerable, someplace you can visit but not settle. God must love deserts, you think.

Here it is warm and the breeze becomes a formidable crosswind. Yes, it is desert but the jagged canyonlands were never far off and now they have returned, only this time dry and barren. The last 40 kilometers to Hidalgo del Parral are difficult ones because the highway here is bad from neglect and overuse. The tarmac is broken and rough. At least if there were potholes that would be something to avoid. So you rumble on, teeth clattering, spine jolting, front forks and rear shocks absorbing what little they can.

From Hidalgo del Parral it is a long 300 kilometers along a straight desert highway to Gomez Palacio. Even now in the winter it is hot and dry and very windy. There is no hurry in a desert. Maybe because it is so hot or so dry or maybe because it seems so endless in every direction. But you can ride all day as fast as your screaming engine will carry you and feel as though you have only advanced at a crawl. That is the way it is here.

In Gomez Palacio I completed two weeks on the road. It was an important psychological barrier because, previously when people would ask where I was going, I would say “to Panama” and then add “but let’s see if I make it past two weeks.” Two weeks came and went and I continued riding south. I was holding up because a body can get used to almost anything and grow stronger. The motorcycle was holding up because the riding was smooth here and there were no extremes but she wasn’t getting stronger. The riding went fast along the desert highway, always moving south, occasionally passing a small town, all the while the weather growing colder as you gradually ascended back into elevation.

Zacatecas is a beautiful colonial city nestled within a wide valley. It was once a mining town whose bounty of silver long fed the decadence of the Spanish crown. Here there is a cathedral and many churches; there are monuments of politicians and war heroes and buildings from the colonial days whose beautiful stone facades have been well preserved. There is a teleférico, which is a cable car that runs from midway up one hillside to the top of the other across the full spread of the old city. In the western of these two hillsides there is a once prosperous silver mine that ceased to produce and was shut down. Now it is a tourist attraction and at the end of one mine shaft they built a discotec.

In the evening I went to La Mina Club, which is the disco in the mine. After you pay your entrance fee they seat you on a small train and take you several hundred meters down the mine shaft. When you exit the train they escort you into the bar room, which is adjacent to and smaller than the dance hall. Here they seat you one at a time according to the number in your party. The walls are bare rock and dome-shaped except for the support beams that run every which way, reinforcing the structure and anchoring the large television screens and sound system.

I ordered a Bacardi on the rocks. Soon the dancehall became full and the music got louder. Now people were dancing. I ordered another Bacardi. I drank it and I tried to reason with myself to go out there. I prodded myself. I tried to shame and cajole. You didn’t come here to stand around! Nothing worked; I was unmoved. It seemed that I didn’t have the sand to go out and dance on my own. Finally, disappointed, I said: You’re riding a motorcycle alone through Mexico. The bad highways, the banditos, and the drug traffickers. All the countless dangers. Every day you wake up thinking about how today might be your last. You’ve accepted this and you’ve come this far and here you are in a place where no one knows your name or will ever see you again and you haven’t got the gravel to get out there and dance to just one song!

So I finished my drink and I went onto the dance floor. I danced to one song and then to another and I met people and I had fun. I felt about as awkward as I have ever felt when I first dancing but it got better and I felt braver than in any other moment during the trip.