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Page 4: Mexico

Carnival:

It’s carnival time and La Paz is said to be one of the best in Mexico. The bloody Maries are going and we’re preparing for the bus ride which is rumored to leave around 1:00PM. Its 12:30 at the bus stop which is just a dusty street across from a central park. We have a jug of bloodies in hand for the ride. The street where the bus stops is not great, a white stone wall 8 feet high and Baja dirt. We’re waiting and waiting. Across the street people are hanging out...3:00PM comes, bloodies are gone and still no bus? Hey, part of adventure travel is the unknown, and the art of it is to make the best of it. A local bar, ‘Shut Up Franks’ has a 2 for 1 happy hour starting at 3:00PM, No Problem.

Bus stop:

Still one more day of carnival to go so we’re at the bus stop before 8:00AM. Mexico makes the best grenadine in the world, and with fresh squeezed orange juice is what a sunrise is meant to taste like. A jug in hand, we have the full adventure traveler spirit in us. 9:00AM, 10:00AM, 11, 12. 12:30 the bus shows up and we…are…. primed!

The bus arrives in La Paz just as things start opening up. Fun time.

http://cavebiker.smugmug.com/photos/16522099-L.jpg

This woman cracks a confetti egg ever Heidi’s head then over mine. The mood here is wild.

Broken down in Mexico:

A week ago, we lost clutch fluid in the jeep. No problem, I added fluid and find the clutch fluid bleed valve rusted shut. Not good, I don’t want to break the thing in Mexico!

I have added fluid every day now for the last week but today we have to cancel the trip to the beach. Clutch fluid may be cheap but now I can’t even make it out to the street without loosing all of it, no fun. While traveling long term in Mexico or any foreign country it’s sometimes good to get to know the local people around you. Mari, the day person at the hotel has a cousin that brings her kids to the pool some days. Her husband Christian pulls up in a jeep wrangler and I find out he’s a mechanic. There are a lot of auto mechanics here in the Baja, I’m sure partly out of pure need. Just an hour ago Christian drives our jeep to a shop at his house, not easy without a clutch, I followed in his truck. He jacks it up and we both crawl under, same conclusion, blown slave cylinder. I can tell even when I don’t 100% understand the language when someone is confident in a task. Christian is replacing the slave cylinder and the hydraulic lines. He drives me home. With fingers crossed we’re back at the hotel, cocktails in hand and likin life. We keep saying to our self’s “What if this happened in the middle of nowhere?” then we toast! ?

Jeep:
Another normal day starting off in Todos Santos except our jeep still isn’t back. Cristian, our mechanic said it would be 3 or 4 days but now its day 5 and we’re getting anxious. First thing when Mari gets to work today she says to me (this is what I pick up) “Cristian …yeep … listo …mas tarde …oye …. ” “Cristian Jeep ready later today” Fire Up, minutes later he pulls up in the jeep. He’s just out testing it and wants me to check it out. Sweeet, it feels like a new clutch. He tells me that after he got it all back together the first time he finds there was no clutch, so he did another road trip to La Paz to get a total clutch kit. It’s all done, he just needs to torque everything and do a last check, smiling.

I’m off on the two mile hike to Cristian’s house where my jeep will be ready. His sister has a house just like this behind his with a court yard in between. Mari’s house is just up the hill. Cristian does all his work along side his house. He recently bought a lot up the road on a hill for $1,800 and is going to have a new house with several car stalls for his business.

Cristian is not there so they invite me to wait and offer me coffee, sweet. No English spoken here. My mind kicks into some kind of super heightened state and I pull out Spanish words left and right and manage to pick out some words of theirs. We all had fun looking at the photo’s in the digital camera.

Cristian pulls up and shows me all the stuff he did, the jeep was spotless inside and out. We drive the jeep over to look at his new lot, he yells out the window at his girlfriend along the way. I love Mexico.

Hidden Sand Beach:

Heading out on another hike in an attempt to find some hidden bay that is rumored to have a idyllic sand beach, and the only way in is along some animal trails along the cliffs near shore. No one here has ever heard of it or has seen it but I’ve read about it somewhere. This sounds scary to Heidi but we have been checking out the possible paths to get to this place when we do our local beach walk. We think we see a path starting in the crotch of this hill.

Looks pretty steep. I decide to attempt it another day, alone.

Francisco our grounds keeper brought a homemade pizza for Mari and Us to share, how nice!

What kind of world do I live in? :

We’re hanging out at the hotel and I’m getting ready to walk over to pick up the jeep when I heard someone say to Francisco “Heidi Tom”. I pop up and see an adventure type motorcycle. Instantly I suspect this could be an AdvRider.com dude. John from Oregon read my report on-line and decided to jump on down with some other AdvRiders and do the Baja, How Cool!

John is electric! He said his only riding mode is from sun up to sun down, he knows no other way. He talked about the great ride he had coming down hwy 1 on the west cost all the way and how his bike loves to go fast. He hit the LA freeways at about 5:00AM on a Sunday and talked about all the hot rods, sport cars and everything fast cruising along, he said for sure they all came out just to go fast on the empty freeways. John just wanted to stop and meet us and say thanks for posting the inspirational trip reports. How nice is that! Then he asks me what kind of beer I like and goes buys us a 6 pack! What kind of world do I live in?

We hang around by the pool talking. John and his wife did an around the word trip some time ago and have some amazing adventure stories that got Heidi and I super fired up. We could have listened for hours but he had to go to meet back up with the other AdvRiders back in La Paz.

No 4WD:

The next day we drive out to the beach to watch the sunset. Driving toward the beach I pull off and onto a trail and stick it into 4WD, and I havre nothing, no 4 wheel drive. We park it and walk the rest of the way to the sea. Awesome waves but not much of a sunset today.

Ok, I know about my jeeps 4WD system and it doesn’t have anything to do with the clutch, but I’m still bumming out. I just got a new 4WD vacuum motor put in before this trip so it has to be a vacuum leak. I hear a hissing sound under the hood, even Heidi says she can hear it. The next day I follow all the vacuum lines and connections. After at least an hour I try pulling a vacuum tube out of its coupler and blowing into it. Zero resistance and I could hear it blowing out somewhere. I blew, I felt, I blew, I listened. The blowing sound is coming from a foot or so from my face but I cannot feel it. I start grabbing tubes and pulling, a vacuum tube crammed behind the rocker cover and the firewall pulls right apart! I Am Likin Life! No kidding, I take off jogging to the nearest auto parts store about six blocks away and show the guy the broken vacuum tube and say ‘?Tiene?’, he cuts me a piece of tube three times longer of much stronger tube material, $1.80 and I got 4WD again. !!!

There is something special about repairing and modifying your own wheels and taking a long trip with it. You can form a bond, a kind of love affair. I knew it could happen with a person and a motorcycle but I never thought it would happen with a cage.

Solo hike:

Off to see this trail to this hidden bay with a sand beach, it just sounds good and I want to get Heidi there. The first assent is steep but the trail is good. The view is great, fishing boats and the lighthouse in the middle.

Heidi had a dream the night before of me falling off on the other side of this unknown cliff and to the rocks below. She says the photo looks just like her dream. Big eyes, Wow! This was not the bay, no sand so onward around the next headland.

We’ve had a ton of rain here, it lasted for about two weeks. OK National Geographic here we go, I remember seeing an episode about desert blooming and now I’m in it.

Enough artistico, I better goof off. .

The final leg down. Heidi will hopefully do this section tomorrow. I never got over the final ridge to find this hidden sand beach. Three times needing to turn around and go back and start over because the trail disappears. It is rock hopping stunts I should probably not be doing. It is fun, tomorrow a different approach.

Shy girl turns vicious killer:

Heidi and I walk to Puente Lobos to climb the bluff overlooking the Pacific. On the way out of town we hook up with our four dog friends again and they are all fired up to do the hike. We do not want to climb the bluff with the dogs because it is real steep at first and Heidi is worried for their safety. We decide to just walk the beach thinking it may be a first for these city dogs.

They loved the beach.

The dog we call ‘Shy Girl’ because she always walks just behind us and will never (except once) let us get close enough to pet her is eyeing up all the birds. There are tons of pelicans hanging on the beach at Puente Lobos waiting for the fisherman to start cleaning fish.

Shy girl takes off on a sprint straight at a huge pelican, tackles it and wrestles it down. I feel like we are watching a ‘Wild Kingdom’ episode of a cheetah tackling a gazelle. Of course, the three dogs are right behind and all jump in on the fun, biting and pulling on the pelican. Now it looks like a pack of wild hyenas killing its prey, four dogs pulling in different directions at the huge bird fighting for its life. Not a pretty sight. Heidi took off in the other direction looking as if she is in shock! Hollering, “I told you not to bring the city dogs to the beach!!”

On the way home everything is back to normal.

Puente Lobos Bluffs:

The next day we drive down to the beach to get around having our dog friends come with us. I find an assent up the bluff that isn’t as steep. We have to time the swell and climb the rocks next to the water.