Tex/Mex border to Guanajuato
It´s almost performance art how many wrong turns we make at the border. Wrong line on the US side so have to U-turn through intimidating "Severe Tire Damage" spikes and past bemused soldiers. Then on the other side of the bridge, optimistically in the "Nothing to Declare" line results in a border guard drawing a map to get through the Mexican town/warzone back to through the checkpoint to No-Man´s Land and we still have to tip one cheery guy $2 to open a special fence. That gets us to Kafka´s darkest architectural nightmare, Migración y Aduana. An epic queue dance ensues as we are passed from one window to another. One window, which we become very familiar with is the copy window where our various documents, once scrutinised are cheerily photocopied for 10 pesos a go. They don´t like my UK proof of ownership and it is weird that Brits only have a receipt, in my case written up on my laptop, to prove a vehicle is theirs. I am instructed to call a Tax Office back on the US side which the increasingly cheery copy girl happily charges me a dollar a minute for. Apparently I can get some kind of temporary title for the bike if I go there and pay some extortionate amount for it. Going there, however, means joining the despairing masses in a hellish queue back across the bridge that we can see gridlocked out of the window. There goes the whole day in potential wild-goose chase then. In a final desperate bid - and this is a rough birth for my Spanish - I try waving a last US import document in their faces and throw in a mixture of poker-face and sad-doggy-eyes. It works! Just 3 more round trips to the Banjercito cashier, the copy window Mr Aduana-bad-teeth-droopy-eye and a diploma first-class in cutting the line. A mere 3 hours and we are cruising into Nuevo Laredo. Well more like scurrying through like frightened minnows - these border towns have an evil rep for car-jacking, and on a bike you can´t roll up the windows.
A few heavily armed checkpoints along the way and we reach Monterrey, stop to check the map and within 2 minutes a car pulls up and a guy jumps out beaming. He dispenses with the traditional kidnapping formalities and helpfully gives us directions to Portrero Chico. As we skirt the skirts of this city of 5 million souls, a sort of well-heeled Cambodia is brought to mind. The make-do-and-mend in every object I can see. One pickup has the whole rear cut off, forming a sort of rustic Smart Car. Faces peer past clumps of crystal splinters masquerading as windshields. Dog-eat-Dog for Right-of-Way.
Bless that GPS. Today at least. We find ourselves at a sort of post-apocalyptic Butlins. Empty pools and roaming cats. The silence is a warm bath.
Portrero Chico is a climber´s Mecca in the shade of a Moominland mountain that no camera could capture. As night falls the absurd peaks are covered in a falling curtain of mist. We sit on the stoop and watch the credits roll.
Next day I make calls to get a new rear tyre in Mexico City. My Spanish is a disaster and Skype isn´t helping. We walk into the pueblo and find the Mexican version of Argos. No less than 6 people sell me a phone. Saleswoman passes us to Clerk to write a chit and take us to Cashier who gives us receipt to give to Dogsbody who gets phone from a backroom who leads us to Activaton Lady. Hers is the most demanding position and it takes her a full 30 minutes of tapping buttons, sending for a second battery and printing of contracts to finally present me with my $10 mobile. We eat at a sort of garage-cum-drive thru and when we stop to buy beer at a deposito two large trucks full of heavily armed soldiers glide past in the gloom.
We ride for silver mining ghost town Real de Catorce. Mostly we want to find some of that elusive sun stuff. We rug up in the drizzle and promptly get stuck in a 30 min traffic jam on the Monterrey orbital. Kids walk among the cars asking for food. Then we climb into increasingly heavy fog and a slippery road. No fun but after Saltillo is behind us the clouds part and we are racing across grand sierra valleys to Concepción del Oro. It´s not all the grand name suggests and after some tasty frijoles by the roadworks we hit a real road.
Straight out of "My Own Private Idaho" and lined with millions of yukkas each a lunatic sculpture. A little cemetery marooned by the way catches our eye.
Then the turn-off to Real de Catorce arrives with the light statring to fade. On two wheels the slippery cobbled surface is unsettling and appears to lead nowhere but we make the tunnel by dusk. It´s sort of chewed out of the hillside and you expected to see pickaxes clawing at silver veins along the way but then we are spat out into the town and we soon plump for the most expensive hotel (850 pesos gets you boutique here) in town after a tiring 230 miles.
We hire horses to ride to El Quemado - sacred peyote hunting ground of the Huicholes Indians. The saddle is painful, the drops to the side are dizzying and the horses know full-well they are in control but we settle in and pass through ruins with an Arabic arch - from Roman times, our guide, José, says (!?) and then out into cactus-strewn hillsides.
We walk the final 20 mins up and this is when I really appreciate that we are close to 3000 metres up. I stop every 20 yards to wring oxygen out of the thin air. As a sort of party trick a friend of José gets a cigarette from me near the top and giggles as mine goes out after almost every puff. I pause for thought at the Huichole shrine, a set of concentric pebble circles with little offerings in the middle that brings to mind the Ovoo shrines in Mongolia.
Two Huicholes are crouched in a stone hut at the summit making bead bracelets by an altar and in amongst its´goat skulls and textile offerings a little stuffed winnie-the-poo smiles out at me. We reward our sore backsides with delicious gorditas at a stall in Plaza Hidalgo and wander the pretty church with its retablos to Francis of Assisi, each one a sort of child´s drawing of an accident or illness that Frank sorted. Then the mint with its´ century old photos of brass bands, work crews and stiff wedding poses. Then the old cock-fight ring
and walks along the steep cobbles set in geometric shapes.
Then burritos and bed.
After emails back home to photoshop my documents into a more pleasing shape for Guatemalan customs, we saddle up and cruise the cool tunnel and gingerly back down the cobbles to the scorching road.
Pollo a la Mexicana at a dusty roadside restarant with an absurdly large display of toy frogs and Grandma wishes us Feliz Navidad. The GPS dumps us in the most sketchy road imaginable in the ripped backsides of San Luis Potosi and I´m glad of those dirt tyres to get us back on course. I swear those were gunshots while I fumbled with the map but Em says they were fireworks...
Our hotel is right next to Plaza des Armas in the centre and the owner says we can park in the entrance way. A bit of wood and a few revs and we´re up the 3 steps and looking like a rather fine but dusty ornament to their lobby. In the plaza there is a very cool sound and light show projected on the church and we wander and watch a clown and a trainee fire-juggler (ouch) over Taco Rojos and Enchiladas Potosinas at a street stall.
A quick stop into the church on Plaza San Francisco to see its´stunning crystal ship "chandelier" hanging in front of the altar and a shoe-shiner works overtime on our roaddust.
Then a good ride that takes us through the chaotic ramble of a small town and on through the yukkas past a rusting basketball court a good 50 miles from the nearest sign of humanity and up into mountains and plunging descents. Guanajuato greets us with its´confusing 3D map of many tunnels bitten raw from the rock. Intersections in steep tunnels, one so slick with tunnel-drippings that I nearly lose the front wheel. I get Emma to walk that bit. After ages trying to park in this most car-unfriendly of cities we end up tying up around a tree on the sidewalk in front of our hostel and hope the police don´t mind. The town is stunning once we´re past that nonsense.
Winding tiny hillside streets where the houses nearly touch each other and compete for the title of most primary-coloured and a studenty, cultured feel. We beer in a cafe on a Venetian-style bridge and then settle in for more in Plazuela San Fernando and watch the lights come on.
The alcohol helps us sleep through the wee-small hour parties that assail from all directions back at the hostel.
A lazy day is spent wandering the sunny streets, climbing not so lazily up to views over the jumble of pantone houses and admiring Diego Rivera´s pictures in the house of his birth.
It´s almost performance art how many wrong turns we make at the border. Wrong line on the US side so have to U-turn through intimidating "Severe Tire Damage" spikes and past bemused soldiers. Then on the other side of the bridge, optimistically in the "Nothing to Declare" line results in a border guard drawing a map to get through the Mexican town/warzone back to through the checkpoint to No-Man´s Land and we still have to tip one cheery guy $2 to open a special fence. That gets us to Kafka´s darkest architectural nightmare, Migración y Aduana. An epic queue dance ensues as we are passed from one window to another. One window, which we become very familiar with is the copy window where our various documents, once scrutinised are cheerily photocopied for 10 pesos a go. They don´t like my UK proof of ownership and it is weird that Brits only have a receipt, in my case written up on my laptop, to prove a vehicle is theirs. I am instructed to call a Tax Office back on the US side which the increasingly cheery copy girl happily charges me a dollar a minute for. Apparently I can get some kind of temporary title for the bike if I go there and pay some extortionate amount for it. Going there, however, means joining the despairing masses in a hellish queue back across the bridge that we can see gridlocked out of the window. There goes the whole day in potential wild-goose chase then. In a final desperate bid - and this is a rough birth for my Spanish - I try waving a last US import document in their faces and throw in a mixture of poker-face and sad-doggy-eyes. It works! Just 3 more round trips to the Banjercito cashier, the copy window Mr Aduana-bad-teeth-droopy-eye and a diploma first-class in cutting the line. A mere 3 hours and we are cruising into Nuevo Laredo. Well more like scurrying through like frightened minnows - these border towns have an evil rep for car-jacking, and on a bike you can´t roll up the windows.
A few heavily armed checkpoints along the way and we reach Monterrey, stop to check the map and within 2 minutes a car pulls up and a guy jumps out beaming. He dispenses with the traditional kidnapping formalities and helpfully gives us directions to Portrero Chico. As we skirt the skirts of this city of 5 million souls, a sort of well-heeled Cambodia is brought to mind. The make-do-and-mend in every object I can see. One pickup has the whole rear cut off, forming a sort of rustic Smart Car. Faces peer past clumps of crystal splinters masquerading as windshields. Dog-eat-Dog for Right-of-Way.
Bless that GPS. Today at least. We find ourselves at a sort of post-apocalyptic Butlins. Empty pools and roaming cats. The silence is a warm bath.
Next day I make calls to get a new rear tyre in Mexico City. My Spanish is a disaster and Skype isn´t helping. We walk into the pueblo and find the Mexican version of Argos. No less than 6 people sell me a phone. Saleswoman passes us to Clerk to write a chit and take us to Cashier who gives us receipt to give to Dogsbody who gets phone from a backroom who leads us to Activaton Lady. Hers is the most demanding position and it takes her a full 30 minutes of tapping buttons, sending for a second battery and printing of contracts to finally present me with my $10 mobile. We eat at a sort of garage-cum-drive thru and when we stop to buy beer at a deposito two large trucks full of heavily armed soldiers glide past in the gloom.
We ride for silver mining ghost town Real de Catorce. Mostly we want to find some of that elusive sun stuff. We rug up in the drizzle and promptly get stuck in a 30 min traffic jam on the Monterrey orbital. Kids walk among the cars asking for food. Then we climb into increasingly heavy fog and a slippery road. No fun but after Saltillo is behind us the clouds part and we are racing across grand sierra valleys to Concepción del Oro. It´s not all the grand name suggests and after some tasty frijoles by the roadworks we hit a real road.
We hire horses to ride to El Quemado - sacred peyote hunting ground of the Huicholes Indians. The saddle is painful, the drops to the side are dizzying and the horses know full-well they are in control but we settle in and pass through ruins with an Arabic arch - from Roman times, our guide, José, says (!?) and then out into cactus-strewn hillsides.
After emails back home to photoshop my documents into a more pleasing shape for Guatemalan customs, we saddle up and cruise the cool tunnel and gingerly back down the cobbles to the scorching road.
Our hotel is right next to Plaza des Armas in the centre and the owner says we can park in the entrance way. A bit of wood and a few revs and we´re up the 3 steps and looking like a rather fine but dusty ornament to their lobby. In the plaza there is a very cool sound and light show projected on the church and we wander and watch a clown and a trainee fire-juggler (ouch) over Taco Rojos and Enchiladas Potosinas at a street stall.
A quick stop into the church on Plaza San Francisco to see its´stunning crystal ship "chandelier" hanging in front of the altar and a shoe-shiner works overtime on our roaddust.
A lazy day is spent wandering the sunny streets, climbing not so lazily up to views over the jumble of pantone houses and admiring Diego Rivera´s pictures in the house of his birth.
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