Muscles and Churrascos

We did make it to Quetzaltenango, to which from this point on I'll refer to as Xela, because it's the same place and Xela is about 75% easier to write. Xela is the Mayan name.

Broken, we made it. After Cobán, we climbed and climbed some more to a town called San Cristóbal, whence our map indicated that the road turned to dirt. With this knowledge, seared by anxiety into our brains for days, we took our time in San Cristóbal. Lucky we did, because we ate the best churrascos to date in San Cristóbal Verpaz. Churrascos, for those who do not know, are a Guatemalan street food sensation. They are some of the best street food on offer worldwide. Yes, worldwide. Better than tacos. Even Amaury, my Mexican comrade, agrees. So, you may be wondering, what is this sensation? Well, to begin with, you don't find churrascos, they find you. They're mobile, fast and usually pedal-powered. Finding and eating churrascos is a convergence of the right place and the right time. Say it's 11am in San Cristóbal Verapaz and you're hungry. You go to the main square, and lo and behold, a churrasco has appeared before your eyes. You approach and ask the churrasco man, "Whatcha got?" and he replies, "churrascos". You tell yourself, "fantastic" as you try and collect your emotions and you ask the price. This is the greatest variation in churrascos, and in San Cristóbal at the right place at the right time, the answer is 10 quetzales, which is about $1.25. So you order one for yourself and one for your friend as you sip your included coffee and sit in the shade and wait for the thin strips of marinated beef to grill. The churrasco lady who is accompanying the churrasco man refills your coffee and confirms your worst fears about the dirt road. Then the churrasco arrives on its styrofoam throne. Surrounding it are its princes guacamole and sour cream, with lady rice and squire beans not far away. Waiting not far away are the peasants, the humble and numerous tortillas, which are grilled after the meat over the same coals to lend a smoky meaty character. Then you mix it all up and cram it all into tortilla after tortilla and drink cup after cup of coffee and imagine it all turning into muscle as you destroy yourself gaining the limitless altitude that is the experience of riding a bicycle through Guatemala.

After lying around a bit after our churrascos in San Cristóbal we left in pursuit of eagles on the dirt road. Indeed, right in the middle of town, our road turned into nasty, dusty dirt with rocks the size of grapefruits sprinkled liberally all over the surface. Luckily, there was hardly any traffic and the road wasn't so dusty. I didn't have to put on my surgical mask which I bought in China as part of Jaco's and my disguises to pass as Chinese bike tourers into Tibetan roads, which were off limits to foreigners. Check it out at www.supercontinental.blogspot.com. We climbed and climbed, until suddenly, gloriously, we came to a pass. Imagine, a pass! We could look out over the valley and see the roads we would descend into the abyss, from which we would undoubtedly spend the next week climbing. But for the moment, we were at the top of a pass, all potential energy and churrasco ready to explode in a feast of downhill we had been waiting days to enjoy. To our left was a pile of trash with vultures circling and eating, despite the fact that it was either on fire or smoldering. Below us was the valley, green and lush. Above us was of course, nothing but blue sky. To our right was the most gigantic landslide I've ever seen, complete with a sign posted by the government explaining that they didn't work on the road because every rainy season there's a landslide and it's a bit futile. Enter on your own account and risk, it said. It seemed like the landslide lasted for about a kilometer, and after that turned back into the already nasty dirt road. We checked our brakes and our wheels, and forged ahead into the disaster.

To be honest, on a bicycle it wasn't much worse than the dirt road. In a car however, the road narrowed and there were bigger boulders that posed a great risk to wider vehicles than ours. Once we cleared the landslide there was a slight incline again, then we descended for another couple hours. At one point, Amaury's tire blew because his rims got so hot from braking that they melted the rubber on the tube. While fixing the flat we met another tourer, Flavian, who was riding a foldable bike with really small wheels. He was going up the other side, and was a cheerful lad. It was a massive surprise to see another person, not to mention cyclist on this road. He told us that indeed, once we hit the valley, there would be a lot more climbing.

To no one's surprise, there was. After hitting the valley in a town called Chixoy, we climbed on good roads for another two days before finally descending again into Sacapulas. When we awoke in Sacapulas, Amaury's knees were showing obvious symptoms of climbing fully loaded for two days, and we elected to take a bus the rest of the way to Xela. I'm not sure which is crazier, traveling by bike or by bus in Guatemala, but I think it's by bus. Willingly putting yourself in a Guatemalan bus on Guatemalan roads is really insane. The drivers seem like they've taken some sort of stimulant cocktail, then get into the driver's seat of old American schoolbuses, turn on weird dance music, accelerate and smash everyone inside into the walls on every turn. They spout black CO smoke and honk compulsively. When we disembarked in Xela, the bus was still moving as they threw us our bags and bikes from the roof of the bus. Amid honks and smoke the bus turned the corner at the terminal, and the co-pilot screamed the name of the next town they were heading to at people on the sides of the road, hoping to gain new customers for the return journey.

In Xela, we've been staying with the gracious Ana, whom we met on warmshowers.com (which I think is a hilarious name for a website). Funny mental images aside, warmshowers is a great website that connects people traveling by bike with people who are willing to host them. Ana hosted us for just under a week. She took us to her cabin at Atítlan (another outrageously beautiful volcanic lake), to hot springs, and even found a doctor to see me on Christmas day to look at my throat (I had laryngitis, but I'm all better now). It was boundless hospitality, inspiring in every way.

We're still here in Xela pleasantly waiting for Alex. I buy the newspaper in the morning and read it with cafe con leche and breakfast at a churrasco place near the police station. We're the only non-cops in the place, which has no name and no advertizing. It was pointed out to us by a policeman, who, it turns out, know where to get good cheap churrascos no matter where they are.

Trying to Make Sense of these Mountains

We're in Cobán after a great battle with the mountains of Guatemala.
Titans have raged at lesser monsters.

We left Mexico in high spirits after renting a car and driving inland to see distant Calakmul, a ruin as epic as its name. It's now completely junglefied, and the central plaza is full of massive trees and the monkeys who swing and jump from tree to tree. There is at first one massive temple you can see, but when you climb it you see from the top that there are two more temples, each one more of a mammoth than the one that came before. And from the top of these three behemoths giants play a game of catch with lightning bolts, but they're shy so once you get past the tree line they scamper away into the sea of forest that is the border of Mexico and Guatemala.

Then we crossed into Belize, where they speak English and we camped in fields of sugar cane. Belize was a total dump except for great tamales and beer that was fantastic both in quality and selection. I recommend Belikin Stout for anyone who is unfortunate enough to be in a place where you can buy the stuff. You'll probably get 15 mosquito bites just trying to open it. Also, the bars are called "cool spots", which I thought was cool.

So after getting ripped off some more we loaded our bikes onto the roof of a van and got in that van and rode it into Guatemala to a town called Flores. Flores is actually an island in a volcanic lake in the jungle, and was pretty cool. Everywhere you looked, there was water, and islands on volcanic lakes are generally cool. The point of going to Flores was to go to Tikal.

Tikal is another Mayan city, capital in fact, that was constantly at war with the friendly citizens of Calakmul. According to an information sign at Tikal, the Tikalites were more successful in combat because they had a superior military tactic where they would surround enemy villages and attack with spears from all sides. Sounds pretty scary to me. We tried to get there at sunrise because there are around seven temples that are all lined up and when the sun rises - especially near the solstices - it rises directly over all the temples. This sounded like a good reason to get there for sunrise, but the bus didn't leave early enough, so we woke up painfully early and got there an hour or so after sunrise. Classic for this group. It was a fine sight regardless, and we were fortunate enough to see Tikal without a crowd. We saw monkeys and these weird animals that walk around sniffing the ground the whole time with their tails pointing straight in the air.

Then we split. Since Tulum, I've been riding with my good friend Alex Boon and his friend Amaury, who is from Querétaro, north of Mexico City. Amaury is riding from Los Angeles to Argentina and beyond, with no end date or end place in sight. Alex left us in Flores to get back to Cancún where he has a flight to catch back to Florida. So since Flores it has been Amaury and me on our way to Quetzaltenango, Guatemala's second largest city which is on the other side of the country. Guatemala is small, so we gave ourselves five days to get there. It looks like it'll be closer to ten.

Guatemala's hills are like no others I have seen. To live in them is one thing, to build roads in them another, but to ride a bicycle through them is really dumb. Generally, in the mountainous regions I have ridden through such as the Rocky Mountains, the Alps, or the Himalayas, a road leading up and over a mountain will follow a valley, then a river, then leave the river for the pass, getting steeper with each step. In Guatemala, there are no valleys, no ridges, not even passes. There are only roads that go up. Everytime you're sure you hit a pass, you keep climbing. Nothing seems logical. My arms are more tired and sore than my legs. Not even the switchbacks make sense. The whole point of switchbacks is to make the grade less steep, and there will be a spurt of absolute Steepness in the apex of the turn, then the road eases up to the next. Here though, you hit a switchback and then the road gets even steeper! It's madness! This is why we're here in Cobán after two days like this. We don't want to blow out my knees or get tendinitis. When we leave Cobán the road will turn to dirt and we will gain another 1000m (3300 feet).

All I can say is that once we do arrive in Quetzaltengango, we will feast like emperors, and toast the Mayan pantheon to a good effort at mountains.

From the New World

In a few months Chinese builders will have erected the tallest building in the world, and they haven't even started yet. They're planning a pace of five floors a day for three months.

There I was in Shanghai. I unloaded after a relatively easy couple flights where my bags got lost but no worries, mate, China Eastern air and the liars at the Singapore airport found them. I met my cousin Max for the first batch of countless dumplings, and the city swallowed me. Shanghai is huge, gray, cold, and damp. I´m not sure what I was expecting, but I think something more like bright and cheery Hong Kong with its hills and its bay and its free campsites. Shanghai has a river, but the only way to cross it outside of the ultra-crowded Shanghai metro is on a fairy ride tunnel like a Chinese It's a Small World that costs more than I wanted to inquire. After a few days with Max and my friend the audacious and well-mannered Kathryn Grant at whose house I was so generously welcomed (big thanks Kathryn!), I adjusted and went straight to the top of the former tallest building in the world, which was really goddam big. Its elevators hit something like 60kph, and within a few nervous ear blasting seconds you're at the top, looking DOWN at skyscrapers. It was surreal, certainly called for more dumplings. It was a joy to return to China, which remains one of if not my favorite countries to visit; and it was a strange, fully globalized interlude between Melbourne and Mexico.

Then I got on the airplane and days later landed in Mexico. I got to work unpacking my bike in Cancún's straitjacket humidity. My friend Alex materialized. He has been working in Mexico for six months, and riding his bike around the country.

Mezcal and tacos.

I put my bike back together and off we were, riding away from the airport, tropics pouring buckets of rain. There were vague echoes of arriving in Perth about a year ago, unpacking my bike after arriving from Hong Kong and riding to the house I would eventually call mine in Fremantle. This time was much better though. For starters, my plan is much more exciting. Arriving in Fremantle carried uncertainty. The only truth was that I needed a job fast. I wasn´t sure what I was going to do in Australia, but I knew I had to work if I wanted to do anything at all. Makes sense, right? This time though, I don't need to work at all! I did that, and I'm going home. So far the route home has been slow going, mainly due to Mayan ruins and other distractions.

The highlight of these so far has been climbing to the top of the Gran Pirámide at Cobá. Cobá is located what I would consider deep in the junble, and it's a fairly huge site. It's most impressive item(other than this really cool blue and yellow bird I saw) is this Gran Pirámide, or, Really Big Pyramid of Glory and Magic. You can climb the hell out of this one, step by step until you get above the tree line and are on a level only eagles could dream to achieve. Then you are on the top.

Part of the spectacle of these ultra-touristed pyramids are the other tourists there. When I got to the top there were wheezing Russians, Hungarians with binoculars looking at telephone poles, Americans lying prostrate in the sun clutching at their chests hoping they can rip their lungs out and throw them in ritual sacrifice down the stairs, and there was a dude doing yoga handstands off the top steps that made me really nervous. Everyone thought was this was the most entertaining man in Mexico. Lots of people asked to take pictures with him, which disturbed his routine. He obliged, and continued though not so good naturedly. He got really mad when he was in the middle of taking a self portrait of himself clutching his one ankle while he extended his other as high as he could behind him while staring at the massive drop in front of him, and a tourist sat down on the ledge he was on between him and his camera, interrupting his portrait. He got down, scoffed loudly, and explained he was taking a picture. The guilty party laughed and moved to a much better place, in the shade.

So here we are. It's Alexander J Boon and me, a little late for discovery but with aspirations of enchiladas and avocados. We've got time and language skills, and we're heading to Belize tomorrow. I thought Albania had eagles, but Mexico is the undisputed capital of eagles. And with their grace, we will soar on their wings. And maybe catch a blue whale or two in Baja.