Hyper 796 with CCW tank and dual sport tyres .

Appreciate this thread, it's inciting wanderlust. What a beautiful part of the world.

Quote from: koko64 on October 31, 2016, 02:16:54 PM
Appreciate this thread, it's inciting wanderlust. What a beautiful part of the world.

Yeah, Australia is an attractive place to me (though not yet been), but the lack of attachment to other lands is a real minus.  Something nice about being able to simply ride to all the terrain and cultures that the Americas have.

I might/could be able to procure a 250efi adv bike . . . Dunno yet

Raining here, so I'm getting a chance to go through pics and play a little catch-up.

The recently completed toll road from Durango to Mazatlan offers nice views and a very beautiful modern bridge, called the Baluarte Bridge.  (Click here for a pic and description.)  You don't want to take this.  You want to take the free road, the old road.  It is called La Espinoza del Diabolo, the Spine of the Devil, and with good reason.  For 300km (200mi) it snakes around the Sierra Madres, dropping 2000m (6000ft) near the coast to reach sea level.




This is typical road movement:




These are the typical views:






The road is cut out of rock in a lot of places, leaving colorful rock faces:




Riding along, you cross the Tropic of Cancer:




The drop-offs can be nasty.  Here is a memorial to presumably someone that drove off:




There are sections that, I can say without hyperbole, were a solid 5+ minutes of riding through chicanes and hairpins without a single straight line.  It can be exhausting.  Add to that the fact that large sections of the rode have lengthwise striations that make the bike wobbly, and you can see why I didn't break any speed records.

Once you cross over into the state of Sinaloa the pine forests turn into humid jungle and the heat rises as you descend.  By the time you reach the coast, you wonder why you left the highlands.  But the ride was worth it!

The Espinoza del Diablo brings you to sea level and into Mazatlan, a beach town of roughly half a million that's main attraction is that it is where the ferry to Cabo arrives.  The stretch along the beach is built up to attract gringos and vacationing Mexicans, complete with oversized margaritas and chain restaurants.  Not my thing so I heading south to San Blas.


San Blas is a sleepy beach town with a long and deep playa that makes for picturesque but brutal sunsets, as the san fleas are relentless at dusk.  The thing to do is snap your photo and then go find some tacos or cheves inland to avoid the little buggers.  Without exaggeration, in 20 minutes near the beach I received probably 4 dozen bites on my ankles and knees that would itch for days.




The town is old and underdeveloped, but not impoverished.  A new and pristine church stands next to the old one in the center square.  I prefer the old one.  Likewise, most buildings in town showed the effect of salt air and occasional flooding that provided a colorful patina to their exteriors.  In a small park next to the beach was a decapitated commercial airliner.  I couldn't get a clear answer as to how and why it was there, but one lady told me that it is supposed to be converted into a kind of library or bookstore, complete with tables and chairs and serving coffee and tea.  Cool idea, but I'll believe it when I see it.













I decided to camp instead of finding a hotel, as athere was pristine RV park near the beach.  There I met an electrician from Minnesota that retired there a decade or so ago.  Nice guy.  No other guests so I had the pick of spots.  From the looks of the place, you'd think it was a minor eden in the quiet solitude of a Mexican beach town.  Well, not exactly...

Travel Tip #823: How to Remove a Colony of Ants from Your Shoei Hornet DS Helmet

If you are roused in the middle of the night by the loud thump of a falling coconut, you may reconsider your decision to park your bike under a palm tree.  This is a natural reaction: falling coconuts can crack a human skull; no doubt they can split open a plastic gas tank or sever a clutch lever or other vital bike part.  At dawn, when you wake you may uncover your bike in preparation to roll it into a coconut-free zone and in doing so discover that a colony of ants has taken up residence in your helmet.  You’ll no doubt begin swiping away at the superorganism without any thought as if they are the biting kind of ants.   You then will realize that the dozens of ants you’ve already swept away are now crawling on your arms and ankles, and you haven’t felt a sting, so you can be confident they aren’t aggressive.  Good.  At this point you will want to learn the word "myrmecophobia"; you'll be needing it from now on.  Now, while you contemplate how to end this nightmarish vision of a hundred crawly things circling in and out of every hole on an effigy of your head, explore the following options:


1) Buy a pack of cigarettes. Smoke a half dozen over the course of the day, strategically exhaling each mouthful of CO2 into the helmet’s ventilation holes, smoking the little buggers out.  This method has the upside that, with over a dozen of unlit cigarettes remaining in your possession, you can share with locals and build street cred.  The downside is that smoking a half dozen cigarettes on a hot and humid day is nauseating.

2) Submerge the helmet in a pool of water. The difficulty here is finding a pool of relatively benign water. You may be 50m from all the water the Pacific has to offer, but the residual scent of a Delaware marina in immediate proximity to your nostrils will deter this instinct. The spigots at the campground could provide a cleaner, albeit imperfect option, but you are still left with the task of finding a bucket large enough that you can fully submerge the helmet.

3) Purchase a good quantity of rubbing alcohol and pour it into the various ventilations holes of the helmet.  Ignore the pharmacist's expression when you ask to buy all the bottles they have for sale.  This method has the advantage of disinfecting the helmet, not only the ant carcasses but also the sweaty funk accumulated from months of riding in hot weather.  However, the pouring technique allows the little buggers to run around and avoid whatever path your murder juice is flowing down.  They didn't survive the Cretaceousâ€"Paleogene extinction event 65 million years ago for nothing.


If all of these options are available to you, the following combination will likely work best.  Use the spigot to pour water into the helmet holes and swirl it around.  About 5-6 ants will come out of their hiding spots.  Flick them off and continue swirling.  Repeat throughout the helmet until there are no signs of life.  Let dry.  Once dry, pour a bottle of rubbing alcohol through the various holes.  Swirl.  Watch 3-4 stumble out intoxicated.  Flick them off.  Continue swirling.  Let dry.  Repeat the above again with water, then alcohol, until no evidence of life exists.

Congratulations, you have just completed an act of mass insecticide.  Now you are only left to deal with the crippling fear of a host of those buggers coming out of the deep corners of your helmet while you ride down a narrow jungle highway at 70 mph.  Safe travels!

Having fun?

It was like a Wes Craven scene. They were pouring out by the hundreds. Big suckers, too, not those little ones.

After the ant incident, I headed to Sayulita, a beautiful beach town about an hour south of San Blas.  It is a quintessential surf town, with a mix of hippies, surfers, transients, locals, foreigners, backpackers, artists, musicians, and retirees.  The town center is a tight group of about a dozen or so streets filled with bars, restaurants, and artisan shops.  The beach butts up against village and everything is within a 5 minute walk.






Wildlife is a as abundant as dreadlocks and tattoos are in Sayulita.  There is a sanctuary for sea turtles and every weekend they release dozens of newly hatched into the ocean after sunset.  Only about 1 in 20,000 will survive until adulthood, but those that do return from all over the planet to this very beach in order to lay their eggs.  Watching them crawl helplessly through the coarse sand with those oversized fore flippers was a hoot.  Waves would come in and wash a half dozen away in one sweep, their delicate bodies tumbling in the surf like rag dolls in a washing machine:







There is a tree in Sayulita called the iguana tree for reasons that self evident.  The iguanas as so used to human presence that they will crawl right down and grab a banana from you if you have one to offer.  Unfortunately, no pics.  But I did see this beautiful blue heron flying over the shore at dusk.  During the days herons stand in the shallow surf and fish for their meals.  They are used to humans and so you can get pretty close before they scurry away.  They really are elegant.

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Oh, and for the record no ants surprised me on my ride there, so the alcohol worked.   

After four days at the beach it was time to head inland.  My only set plan on this trip are to make it to Guanajuato for Dia de Muertos so I had to head east to stay on schedule.  Tequila was my first stop: a another beautiful colonial town, but in this case there's a large industry related to the delicious derivatives of the blue agave plant.  There are dozens of distilleries in the area, many in the city itself and each with tours.  Tequila tastings are offered by various stops and bars around the main square.  With the exception of the large tequila buses (some of which are shaped like bottles), Tequila really doesn't have a tacky fell in spite of its libation-centric focus.  It feels like any other small colonial Mexican town.  There is a nice waterfall accessible via a 20-minute hike past the north edge of town.  Though the view of the falls were not great the day I was there (and unfortunately, the water had a toxic odor), the hike was filled with a swarm of butterflies of every color fluttering in the grass and mud.  The views of the agave fields, with their glacous hue, set against the patches of gold wildflower, was something to behold.

















Public Service Announcement: How Tequila Is Made
15 minutes SW of Tequila is the Herradura factory, which offers an excellent tour.  For those that are curious or just love tequila, here are the highlights:

- There are over 200 types of agave plants.  Tequila is only made from blue agave.  Mezcal is made from varies other agaves.

- Tequila must be bottled in the plant where it was made.  Not all plants are in tequila, but only certain regions (kinda like counties) are designated places where tequila can be made and officially called "tequila".

- A bottle that says 100% tequila may have a mix of agave and other sugars (even corn syrup).  But a bottle that says "100% agave" or "100% blue agave" or even "100% pure agave" is made entirely from the agave plant.  This is the good stuff.  To avoid the cheap stuff make sure your bottles say 100% agave.

- It takes ~8 years for a plant to mature, so if an deep frost or other natural disaster comes and kills the plants, it creates a plant shortage that will take up to 8 years to rebound.  This happened in the nineties and lead to an industry wide tequila shortage and price spike.  Herradura now keeps a factory full of undistilled tequila to protect against this.

- The agave plant has a pineapple at its core.  A worker takes something similar to a spade and jabs off the leaves to expose the pineapple.  The verb for this is "jimar", and so the person that does it is called a "jimador".  This is where the brand name Jimador comes from.

- The pineapples are then cooked in brick and clay ovens, which releases both a honey and a juice.  The honey is collected and will eventually be the agave syrup you can buy in supermarkets.  The juice is used to make tequila.

- To me, the fermentation part of the tour was the most interesting part: modern technologies allow 1 day of fermentation, but Herradura needs 3 days because it uses "open fermentation".  This means that they don't actively introduce yeast into the juice.  Rather, the vats are in a covered building with open walls so that air from the outside can freely pass through.  The air carries natural yeast form the environment.  After years of research and experimentation, Herradura has settled on a variety of tree species that are planted outside the building, including guava, papaya, various citrus trees, and others.  The yeast from these trees is carried by the air into the building and enter the vats where they perform fermentation.  The yeast brings the subtle flavors from the fruit trees into the tequila.

- After fermentation, the alcohol is distilled.  Once distilled it is tequila; blanco is your basic tequila and is not aged.  However, aged tequila is now very popular.  Interesting fact: tequila was not aged until the 1960s, so the old school Mexicans tend to prefer old school tequila, i.e. blanco.  In the 1960s a few producers started aging in oak barrels to get anejo.  In the 1970s, Herradura was the first company to slightly age tequila to get reposado.  Now that the company is owned by Jack Daniels, it uses old Jack Daniels barrels for its aging.

- By law, tequila must be between 35% and 55% alcohol.  Outside that range it can't be called tequila.  Convention is: reposado is aged 2-12 months; anejo is aged 1-3 years.  Herradura actually ages it blanco for 45 days and calls it "plata".  I normally prefer reposado tequilas, but I likes their plata the best of their three main styles.

- One final note: they have been making tequila on the property for 125 years and although the building is state of the art (including a biomass boiler), the original production facility is preserved as a sort of museum.  In the 1920s, Mexican communists were on an anti-catholic witch hunt.  The factory had a tunnel that allowed catholics to hide from authorities.  The last picture below is of the staircase that leads down to that tunnel.  The family flooded the chamber at the bottom with water so as to trick authorities, saying that it was an old source of water for production that is no longer in use.  But past the small water chamber was a 1km dry tunnel that lead out past the house and provided safety for catholics.

Thanks for that. Educational!

From Tequila I headed east to reach Guanajuato and San Miguel Allende for the Day of the Dead celebrations.  On route, though, I had to stop in Guadalajara for some new shoes (or rather, a new rear shoe) and then Leon just to break of the travel time.  As a side note, the Suzuki dealer in Guadalajara is the first and only dealer I've been to that has given me good service.  In fact, excellent service.   




Guadalajara is the third largest city in Mexico but really doesn't look all that nice (Leon was nicer).  Some museums and old churches, and an absolutely huge market that sold everything from cowboy saddles to vintage Nintendo games, but really not a place I planned to stay long.   I did, however, have one goal: see some lucha libre...

LUCHA LIBRE IN GUADALAJARA

The first thing you need to know is that getting seats in the front rows is a mistake.  The real action is behind you.  I was saved from this error by my local host, who made sure we get the cheap seats because Tuesday night Lucha Libre matches at Guadalajara's Arena Coliseo are not about wrestling.  They are an absurd and calamitous burlesque and nothing is sacred.





The wrestling is fake of course, a form of performance fighting where violence is mimed and the spectacle of tasseled musclemen and top rope flips is all just misdirection.  Power slams are followed by extensive and elaborate peacocking, wherein the victim can recover and the cycle repeat itself.  It is showmanship as a form of sport that any fan of pro wrestling north of the border will recognize.

But unlike American wrestling, the farce extends beyond the ring and out into the stands, where the Republic’s four centuries of class conflict is played out by a willing audience.  There are two levels of tickets: upper or lower section, the price difference a de minimis 40 pesos (roughly $2 USD).  Ticket choice is driven less by pecuniary concerns than by personal identification: the upper section takes on the anima of the poor, the urban, the proletariat; the lower is for the rich, the güeros, the ruling class.  These roles, whether fitting or not, are embraced by the fans, who've gone so far as to have shirts made proudly claiming their abject status:





During ingress, the upper section crowds around above the entrance hall and taunt the men and women entering beneath.  No one is spared and no gibe too crude.  The presence of children does nothing to soften the language.  This is where, with the help of locals, you can learn that donut is slang for vagina, that chingar is a Mexican colloquialism for “make the beast with two backs”, and that no insult has any worth unless it is spiced up with a puta or two.  As the matches begin, the upper and lower sections go at each other with vulgar chants and ruthless insults, the action in the ring a mere set piece, like a tv left on at a bar.  Calls of Putos los de abajo! (The ones below are whores!) are met with Putas los pobres! (The poor are whores!).  Individual shouts of Chingas a su madre! fill the time between chants.  But just as in the ring, it is all farce, a parity of anger absent of any aggression or resentment.  A particularly foul comment is met with a chuckle or, if landing on a skilled target, a quick repartee.  Smiles and laughter abound on both sides of the chainlink fence.





Even Mexico’s machismo culture is mocked relentlessly.   Female wrestlers are called out to show their dicks.  Men standing too close to each other are harangued to make out.  One of the night’s headliner, Maximo Sexy, sports a neon pink mohawk, a miniskirt draped over his singlet, a sequined shirt saying KISS ME, and gold lame shoes.  He is femininity, his opponents then fighting to prove their masculinity.  When victorious, Maximo appeals to the crowd who then chant “Be-so! Be-so!” at which point he attempts to lay a kiss on his dazed victim who melees desperately to avoid emasculation.  This plays out to the delight of the audience, who seem unconcerned that the wrestling has since transformed into a Satyr play.  And when he eventually subdues his victim and lays a long wet one on him, the crowd erupts.





Amid all this nihilism there are moments of real tenderness, too.  An aging and portly wrestler named Blue Panther, his body showing the wear of nearly four decades in the sport, receives the warmest welcome and the most heartfelt support when he almost defeats the current belt holder, a chiseled upstart draped in tattoos and long black hair named Dragon Rojo.  Both los pobres and los de abajo cheer passionately for him and seem genuinely invested in his victory, booing fiercely in unison when Dragon pulls a late reversal that pins the Panther.  They then throw coins at the ring in disgust at the apparent fix.  Nothing is sacred.

Your writing and photos are excellent!

Have you considered turning this into a book when it's all said and done?

If not, you might want to.