I have finally extracted myself from Oax­aca. I’m pretty glad to be back on the road. One thing I found in Oax­aca that makes me happy (but most of you won’t under­stand) is VI for win­dows. That means I can write this using VI!! VI, those of you not in the know ask, what is vi? It’s a Unix text edi­tor. Any­body remem­ber Word Per­fect back in the day when you didn’t have a mouse. It’s kind of like that, but more prim­i­tive. What I like about it is that it’s fast, fast, fast, and I know it bet­ter than any text edi­tor I know of. As a Sys­tem Admin­is­tra­tor, it’s very impor­tant to know as it’s on every sys­tem ever made, and it’ll always work, unless some­thing is really, really wrong. If there any any emacs peo­ple out there, I say — get a life. To Sum­ma­rize.. I’m a geek.

I left Oax­aca later than planned. The par­tially Eng­lish speak­ing daugh­ter wanted to go to break­fast, and I’m a sucker for speak­ing Eng­lish lately. I needed to do a few errands too, such as go to the bank, etc. It was just about 1 p.m. before I left. Ini­tially I wanted to make San Cristo­bal de las Casa Sun­day night, but in ret­ro­spect, it’s a pretty far jour­ney, too much for one day, even a long day.

The roads, as you head south of Mex­ico City get worse, as do rail con­nec­tions (I’ve been read­ing up.) South­ern Mex­ico is the bas­tard stepchild of Mex­ico. It never had a ton of wealth to exploit (oil may change that), and Mex­ico has tended to look towards the US, it’s largest trad­ing part­ner, rather than Cen­tral Amer­ica. It’s this his­tory of neglect that lead to the upris­ing in Chi­a­pas, includ­ing San Cristo­bal (where I write this.) There are other fac­tors too, such as 45 peo­ple mas­sa­cred by anti-zapatista para­mil­i­tary groups in 1997, mainly women and chil­dren. These are what Ronald Rea­gan called free­dom fighter in Nicaragua, and broke the law, sell­ing arms to Iran to finance. But to his credit, he never did get a blow job from an intern.

OK, off my soap­box. For now. Leav­ing Oax­aca. Right. OK, the road out of Oax­aca was OK, but only OK. Oax­aca, like most of Mex­ico, sits in moun­tains. Leav­ing was a windy, curvy, slow jour­ney. Once you got out of the moun­tains, and closer to the coast, the road becomes flat and straight. You also get into the coastal cli­mate — palm trees and flat ground. It’s hot and humid, but since I’m going 70, it’s hard to notice. I decide to spend the night in Salina Cruz, which appears to be a coastal town, and it’s right about halfway on my journey.

I find the town eas­ily enough, and find the first hotel, but they don’t have park­ing for mi moto, so I go to another place. The sec­ond place doesn’t have park­ing, but I ask if I can park in the lobby. I talk to the girl behind the counter for a few min­utes, and fig­ure out that I can, but between 10 and 11 p.m. Sounds fair to me. The room was 230 pesos, or about $20/US. Air Con­di­tion­ing was extra $10/US, but since I’ve been cool for the last cou­ple of weeks, I fig­ured now wasn’t the time to splurge. Need to get used to the heat.

After every­thing is in the room and I’m changed, I head out to eat, since I’ve had nei­ther food nor drink since early this morn­ing, and I’m starv­ing. I _head_ (head — remem­ber that for later) to a seem­ingly pop­u­lar road­side food stand. These are every­where, and I’ve eaten at a ton of them. I look to see if they are cook­ing the food while I’m there, and that there is a bit of a crowd. In halt­ing Span­ish I ask for three tacos. What kind, I think they ask. Tripe was the first one, so I say in pro­fi­cient enough Span­ish “no tripe.” On the next ques­tion I go, sure. I don’t know the name for what I’m eat­ing, but from the con­sis­tency and taste, I can tell I’ve had it before. I’m sit­ting there enjoy­ing my mys­tery meal, when I look over, and on the grill that my food was cooked, was the par­tially chopped up head of a pig. I was two tacos into my three tacos when I real­ized I was eat­ing the parts of a pig head. Now, I’ve eaten a few things in my life that have given me cause to reflect on what I’m eat­ing. Three to be exact — blood sausage in Ire­land, fried rocky moun­tain oys­ters at the Tes­ti­cle Fes­ti­val in Mon­tana, and now this. I fin­ished what was put before me each time, but it was hard fight­ing my gag reflex.

I was still kind of hun­gry, so on the way to my room, I stopped at a small bak­ery and got a slice of cake. Pan Comido is a slang term for “piece of cake” or so I was told. I made the girl behind the counter smile with my Pan Comido joke. I con­sider that a pretty big suc­cess. Usu­ally I’m get­ting laughed at — it may have been the high­light of the day.

The room was nice enough, and the mat­tress was great. This place also had cable, which was nice (cable usu­ally has some Eng­lish some­where. Once it was What Not To Wear — the British/original ver­sion.) Tonight, it was a Steven Segal movie — Exit Wounds. It even had a plot twist I didn’t see com­ing, which was a pleas­ant sur­prise. Other than that, it was a pretty bad movie, down to the con­ver­sa­tion with the rouge cop, telling him he’s out of con­trol. The best part of the hotel room was the bath­room. The toi­let was right next to the shower, and there was no shower cur­tain. I can assure you that some­one killed two birds with one stone this morning.

When 10:30 rolled around, I went down­stairs to put my bike in the lobby. There was a six — eight inch step I had to go up to get to the lobby. The guy that owns the place wanted us to lift it, and push it. I was OK with it, but skep­ti­cal until he got two other peo­ple to help us. Then it was a piece of cake. My bike likes being indoors. It makes it feel special.

After get­ting up reluc­tantly — it was a pleas­ant sleep — I head out the door at 9 a.m., which a nice and early start to the day. It was a long day of dri­ving. Ini­tially, I was on pretty good high­ways (Sali­nas Cruz has a PeMex oil refin­ery, and had five large oil tankers out in the water), but that ended pretty quickly — 30 miles or so. The rest of the jour­ney var­ied from great, new roads, to crappy roads in need of work. Sali­nas Cruz is on the ocean, so it’s pretty flat. Even­tu­ally, you hit moun­tains and head up again. Where the road is hug­ging the coast, it’s flat, but not real fast, as it tends to be pretty heav­ily pop­u­lated, and grass, etc. grows up to the road on both sides. Once you head up into the moun­tains, it’s 30 — 40 MPH the rest of the way. There was a stretch of about 30 min­utes where I was in first and sec­ond gear most of the way. Hard to get any­where going that slow. Fun though.

Even­tu­ally you come to Tuxla Gui­ter­rez, which is a pretty darned big city. I wished I could have spent some time there. It seemed pros­per­ous, but a too big for my taste. Going out of T.G., there are a cou­ple of toll roads, one tak­ing you to Mex­ico (as Mex­ico City is uni­ver­sally called) and the other tak­ing you to San Cristo­bal. I’m curi­ous what route the road to Mex­ico takes, and how much it is. It’s not on my map, as many other roads aren’t. The road I took was top San Cristo­bal. In the dis­tance you can see the some­thing cut into the side of the moun­tain above T.G., but I didn’t imag­ine it was the road. It was. It starts as a toll road, but then stops short (as I’ve seen hap­pen a few times.) The toll road, as usual, was fan­tas­tic. It climbed a LONG ways. I prob­a­bly climbed for 25 min­utes before I saw my first down­hill stretch. That’s got to be a design flaw. If you get a large truck going down that hill, it’ll never stop. Any­way — that toll road was a pretty aggres­sive uphill stretch until it ended. Then you get onto a two lane road where you stay in sec­ond and third gear for most of the way.

It started look­ing like rain, so I saw a pic­turesque place to pull over and dropped my bike again. As with last time, I was stopped. I started mov­ing to the left and the bike started going that way, I put my foot down, and my foot slid out from under me, and the bike was down in the mid­dle of the road. I’ve dropped my bike more on this trip (4750 miles) than in the pre­vi­ous years I’ve owned it (21600 miles.) Hop­ing off, and cussing, as it went down, I was glad to be on a des­o­late stretch of road. I took off my hel­met, gloves and jacket and tried to decide what to do. The offi­cial way to pick a bike like this up is to lock the steer­ing wheel to one side, put your butt on the seat and walk it upright. That didn’t (and hasn’t) worked for so many rea­sons. Fore­most is that I’m too tall. When I get low enough to get my butt to where the seat is, I’ve got no lever­age. Sec­ondly, it’s too wet — my feet slip. So I did what I did last time — put my arms under the seat and pre­tend it’s a tack­ling dummy. It’s worked every time I’ve tried it, but I do expect some­one to find me in the mid­dle of the road some­day unable to move because I’ve snapped my spine. Any­way, this time I did do a lit­tle bit of dam­age — I broke my right turn sig­nal. I used a lit­tle super glue on the amber lens, putting it back in one piece, and used my clear duct tape to put the amber lens back in the holder. I think it makes my bike look more manly. I was able to do this before another car came upon me. Whew!! I took a cou­ple of pic­tures of the beau­ti­ful coun­try­side (which don’t do it jus­tice) and suited back up.

Look­ing my bike over, I noticed it’s about time to get new tires for my motor­cy­cle. This made me ner­vous, as I was on pretty wet, crazy curvy, and gen­er­ally bad roads. You are only one tar strip away from going down. These tires should be good for 6-8K miles, and I’m right between there. I think I’ll try and get tires in Costa Rica or maybe Panama, if either has a BMW, or other large motor­cy­cle dealer.

A lit­tle later on, I stop for gas (7 some­thing pesos for a liter — any­body know what that is a gal­lon?) and this lit­tle boy comes up to me and he shakes my hand. It was another one of those few inci­dents where some­one love my motor­cy­cle. Oddly, I’ve seen more of it in Chi­a­pas than I have since Juarez. I wished I had the fore­sight to let him sit on the bike or some­thing. At least I know to not let him run around with scis­sors in his mouth.

Back on the road, it’s windy and curvy, and I’m wor­ried about my tires. The scenery though, it’s amaz­ing. It feels like I’m in a dif­fer­ent coun­try. The peo­ple are darker and smaller — not that they weren’t dark and small in the state of Oax­aca. The peo­ple dress dif­fer­ently — more vibrant col­ors, and I’ve seen a lot of women car­ry­ing wood on their backs using their head (hard to describe.) The land these peo­ple live in is harsh — it must be what it was like when the Span­ish came. Corn grow­ing on hill­sides that I can’t imag­ine any­one climb­ing, houses on those same crazy steep hills. It’s like step­ping back into time.

Even­tu­ally, I get to San Cristo­bal de las Casa. It’s very high up, I think 6500 feet, or 1000 ft higher than Den­ver. Once again, I’m in the moun­tains. It’s a nice town, but, well, I’m get­ting kind of burnt out on Span­ish Colo­nial towns. Find­ing my way, is once again, dif­fi­cult. I find a hotel rec­om­mended in my Rough Guide, and they have park­ing!!! Score. Come to find out, park­ing means a garage that is just about big enough for my bike — I almost didn’t fit through the door, but it’s still parking.

My room is up the side of the hill — it’s a three minute climb. That’s when I remem­bered that I’m so high up — I’m pretty winded when I get here, as is the women show­ing me my room. Then again, she’s about four feet tall, so it’s got to be that much harder tak­ing each step. It’s a “nice” room, espe­cially for the $11.82/US I paid. I’ve got some sort of kitchen, a fire­place, hot water (agua cal­liente), and a pretty decent bed. Oh, and park­ing. Granted, the toi­let doesn’t actu­ally have a seat. I don’t mean lid — I mean seat. I’m hop­ing din­ner tonight was healthy. The door to the bath­room has eight panes of glass. I guess pri­vacy isn’t that impor­tant here, eh? San Cristo­bal is pretty cool — it’s August 30th, and I wished I’d had a jacket on when I was out. As a result, I’ve got all the win­dows closed. It will be my first mos­quito free night in a long time, and it should be quiet too. The hotel itself is gor­geous. There plants grow­ing every­where, and flow­ers, more plants. If this was in Gua­na­ju­ato, I’d prob­a­bly book a room for my Mother and Meryln today.

Tomor­row, I’m head­ing to Palenque, which are sup­posed to be the great­est ruins in Mex­ico. I want to be there when they open (pho­tog­ra­phers curse), so I’m going to stay in the town of Palenque, which is about three hours away from San Cristo­bal. After the ruins, which take a whole day, I’m head­ing to Guatemala. I think I’ll need to come back to San Cristo­bal, but if I can, I want to head to the bor­der. Some­one told me you should only fig­ure on doing one thing a day when trav­el­ing, be it mail­ing a pack­age, chang­ing tires or cross­ing the bor­der. So I want to ded­i­cate a whole day to cross­ing the bor­der, and maybe get­ting away from the bor­der towns, since they are sup­posed to suck.