Asheville to Argentina

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In the last week we’ve ridden from eastern central Mexico and the state of Hidalgo, down through the low-lying coast of Tabasco. Yesterday, in the middle of miles of empty jungle, we passed under a towering arch and entered the Yucatan. Along the way we visited Olmec and Mayan ruins, swam in clear mountain streams and rode palm groves fronting empty beaches. As we’ve moved south and east everything has changed, but a few underlying themes have persisted.

One constant are “topes”. Tope is Mexican for “speed bump”, and the Mexicans love their speed bumps. They put them everywhere. Entering a town? Yup, speed bumps. Leaving? They have them there too. They’ll have road signs to indicate “tope a 100 m”. Sometimes there’re there, sometimes not. The scary thing is they also put them unmarked in the middle of rural highways. I’ll be riding 70 mph down a road in the middle of nowhere and the next thing I know, I’m airborne. Shannon thinks its all good fun, but I keep waiting for the next thing to break off the bike.

The locals are a resourceful lot and they know that most people have to slow down for the topes, so this where they set up shop, and this is where things change but stay the same. Going through town, at every tope we’re accosted by people selling things in the middle of the street. Some with pineapples, some with flat breads, some with crispy looking things. At one town we’re offered oranges, and at the next it’s shrimp. Each town has the thing they sell, and each is different. To put a meal together of say bread, cheese and fruit, we have to pass through three different towns. We even passed through one area where people brought their crippled family member to side of the road, gave them an umbrella for shade, took up position on top of a tope and shook a can when we slowed down. Even these were grouped like the town specialized in family members with special needs. Sad and garish.

On the motorcycle its hard to buy any of the wares, but I have had the chance to try some unique road-side offerings. In Tajin I bought an orange from a woman for about a penny. She had cut the outside of the peel away, leaving the white part, and after I bought it she cut it in half and sprinkled chile and salt on each half. It was delicious! Since then I’ve also bought mango prepared the same way. I’m bringing that idea home.

As we’ve moved south there’s also been a change in the people. Coming down from the lush jungles around Xlitla and Paplantla the people have gotten shorter and broader. I’m told this due to their being more ethnic mestizo. The states of Tabasco and Campeche have the highest density of indigenous people and the worst poverty. It was here that the Zapitista revolution was born and the Mexican government still only exerts minimal sway. We’ve passed through quite a few military checkpoints in these two states and we usually get flagged in. They really just want to see the bikes and we’re asked a lot of questions about how big they are, how much they cost and where we’ve ridden from. Because my Spanish is a little better than Shannons, they end up talking with me and I have to show passport and license. Shannons never asked for these documents but instead has to show his bike.

The only time on the trip that I’ve felt the least bit threatened or uncomfortable was in Tabasco. We had gone to a town called La Venta to see the “Cabesas Gigatica” or the Giant Heads, ancient Olmec relics. From there our plan was to follow a highway out to the beach and along the gulf to Campeche. A few miles on the beach side of La Venta we came into Sanchez Magallanes. There were very few motorbikes in town and even fewer cars in the street and it was here that the yellow three-wheeled bike made its first appearance. This is a kind of bike with the drive wheel in back and two wheels on either side of a cart in front. The backside of the cart has a bench and the front is open. These are used for everything from work vehicles, carrying firewood and fruit, to taxis. Some have striped awnings over the driver and his fare, and some are strung with curtains on the sides the cart. These aren’t a fun alternative to a regular car, they’re the vehicle of last resort for a very poor population.

It was in Sanchez Magallanes, on a spit of land three blocks wide between the gulf and the estuary that I was struck by the depth of the poverty and despair. These people had been abandoned by hope and opportunity and they had nothing – unpainted block houses with thatch roofs, a few chickens and kids sitting in glass-less window frames. I just wanted to roll through this place. In the muddy dirt of a tight residential street Shannon and I stopped to talk about our most recent wrong turn when two teenagers riding double on a scooter pulled up. They had passed me earlier and I had noticed that the scooter was loud as hell. After the usual “Where you from? How big are your bikes?” We started joking around and talking about all the mods the kid had made to his scooter. He’d made his own muffler, hence the loud “Harley” sound, he’d added green ground effect lights in front and back and had flames on his grips. He’d even painted his name on his tank. Bikers the world over are just the same – even when they can only afford a scooter. They’re very proud of their mods and love to show them off. I let Eric, the passenger on the scooter, get on my bike for a picture (its very heavy and he dropped it, but its been fortified to take much worse) We all laughed and gave him a hard time about it anyway. But I made sure not to laugh too hard…

What I realized as we stood in the street was that I’d been being prejudiced. I had felt scared and threatened without having had a single interaction to base my fear on. These people were so poor and so different that I had assumed they would take from me with a thought. Instead, Jared, Eric, Shannon and I all shared common ground across languages, cultures, education and economics. I had felt fearful and threatened out of ignorance and we were separated more by the circumstances of birth than by anything else. That said, I was still relieved to get the hell out of there. Especially since our little group was growing as kids kept arriving.

Further down this empty beachfront highway, we came to a place where the road disappeared in a ten-foot drop onto the beach. It just ended. No warning, nothing. To the right there was a little track going into the woods and an old man, a boy and a woman sitting next to a rope strung between two coconut palms. For a small “cuoto” or toll we could ride their road about four kilometers until the paved road started again. The boy also said there were a few more families charging cuotos along the way.

The toll road went from packed sand to coconut husks to palm fronds. It occasionally went back up to the old paved highway, but the highway had been reclaimed by the dunes and we had to ride over sand drifts 3 of four feet high. It wound through what amounted to peoples yards. We passed thatch huts with women hanging laundry and kids playing with dogs and chickens. We would wave and get one of two reactions. Either they would light up and wave back, or we’d get the stink-eye. No middle ground for the trespassing space men.

Once on the other side of the wash-out block houses started to reappear and things grew less primitive as we put miles behind us. We spent the night in the beach town of Pariso and from there we followed the coast to the little fishing village of Champoton and from there to the famous ruins of Uxmal. (pronounced oosh-mal)

These ruins are extensive and we hired a guide to give us some insight. He was full of useful tidbits like “When the Spanish arrived, the Maya thought they chattered like monkeys and made no sense. The Maya word for this is Uxmal and that is why the site was named Uxmal by the Spanish”. A littler later in our walk the guide explained to us that “Uxmal is the Maya word for ‘poem written in stone’ and it is from this that the city derives its name”. We visited the Governors Palace with our guide. The Palace is an elaborately carved building nearly as long as a city block and built like a three-layer cake with the Palace as the top layer. We were told that “the building had been built, then torn down and re-built three times. The Maya word for built three times is Uxmal and this is why the site is called such that it is.” The stories were nice and I enjoyed his sing-song chatter, so who am I to get riled when the truth was abandoned for dramatic effect?

We visited some small towns in the Ruta de Puuk, or hill country of the Yucatan, each with a Cathedral, many of which were built with stones torn from Maya temples, some actually on top of the old temples themselves.  But now we head to Beliez. I’m going to miss these shy, friendly people.