I made it through Baja California. I took these pictures all from campsites, except the one of me riding. That was taken from the road. The stretch from Mulegé to Ensenada was mostly desert, with a small oasis town in the middle. That's the one with the palm tree and the river.
From Mulegé I spent ten days straight riding through the deserts and salt flats here. Every day I had a nasty headwind that started usually around 8:00am and finished around midnight. It seemed like no matter which direction I turned, the wind was blowing in my face. Even during a climb where the road snaked around and I was actually heading southeast, the wind somehow managed to eddy and cyclone around in the mountain's elbow and slam me in the face. I woke up before dawn every day, just so I could get the two hours' riding before 8 when things were calm, and I would think, "maybe they won't blow today," but everyd day I was slammed.
So I am happy to be here in Ensenada, a day's ride from the border. I am a wreck. I nearly cried yesterday on my way in (maybe I did) thinking that once I cross the border, I'm really on my way home. No more tortas, no more elotes, no more licuados, no more pesos, no more Spanish. At some moments I'm excited to be seeing familiar faces and people that I love, and the next moments I have an empty stomach, feel weak, and am terrified of returning to the United States. It's hard thinking that my Spanish is as good as it will ever be, and I hope this is not the case. I guess that's up to me.
In Ensenada I have tried to do for the last times the things I have really enjoyed in Mexico. I got a haircut and a shave this afternoon. I've now had five haircuts in the past two years at real barbershops, and every time I get a cut I get a shave. It all started in Azerbaijan, and it has become somewhat of a thing to do in a foreign city with not much else to do. Generally they've been the same. In Azerbaijan the guy refused payment until I insisted. In China I was offered hooch and cigarettes to share with the barber after he had finished. The haircut I got today lasted about an hour and a half and included two sessions of about five minutes each where the barber put a hot towel to my face, covering my entire face up to the tip of my nose. She also put two treatments of shaving cream on, after having washed off the first with the hot towel. I bought a wallet, a tire, and gas for my stove, these all being cheaper here than in the US. I've had four orders of tacos and two tortas in the last 12 hours, which is about twice as I normally eat. I just can't bare to pass a fine looking taco stand and leave it untouched. I might be back, but then I might not. Mexico seems so close, but then again everything seems close when you're there. I remember Jaco and I discussing whether or not we should hurry into China because they were closing the border. This meant that we would miss out on the three weeks in Kyrgyzstan we had planned. We ultimately did go straight to China, and in the end we decided that Kyrgyzstan wasn't that difficult to get to. This was around the same time that we would look at globes and remark that we were exactly 180° around the world from Berkeley, or basically as far away as we could possibly be.
I haven't read this over, and I'm not going to. As I said, I'm a wreck, sorry for the lack of photos, my camera ran out of batteries about three days from Ensenada. This is a shame, because for the first time this trip someone actually asked me to take a picture of him. His name was Roberto Alvarez, and he writes songs and sells mole oaxaqueña and carnitas about 30km south of Ensenada on the side of the road. He used to live in the US, in California, going to high-end seafood restaurants and teaching their staff how to cook seafood. That is until he got sick of being treated like a second class citizen (actually, his word was slave) and came back to Mexico. We played music together for an hour. This is Mexico on a bicycle, and I highly recommend it.
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