Our legs are good now - it´s the bikes that are the problem

Current Location: San Marcos, Guerrero, Mexico
Distance cycled to date: 7442 km
Number of tarantulas spotted to date: 7
Number of times we´ve watched a snake explode on the highway: 1 (quite the pop!)

Since our "magic" rest day, we´ve started to pound out the kilometres. We feel like in the old Baja days again, just churning out 100 km days like they´re nothing. It´s a good feeling. We left Jalisco state, and entered Colima, which has the resort city of Manzanillo. After climbing the hills of Jalisco, we welcomed the flat, wide-shouldered highways of Colima. We flew through the state, spending only one night there. (Camping on a beach? Camping in the ditch? That´s all we know these days.) We entered Michoacan, which we found to be the exact opposite of Colima. As soon as we crossed the state line the road became nearly half the size, with no shoulder, and the hills began. And they kept coming. Up and down, up and down. Some incredibly steep hills that would just go and go. And then these incredibly steep downhills where you felt as if you were riding a jackhammer because the pavement was so bumpy and broken. But, we were feeling good about biking again, and things seemed alright.

However, you can never get too cocky when you´re cycle touring - on a day when we were on pace to easily cycle 120 or 130 kms, we started down a downhill and suddenly my rack started to feel funny. The balance was off, and there was a funny grinding sound. Maybe funny isn´t the right word - a bad grinding sound. It turned out that the bolt holding my rear rack in place had snapped off, leaving most of the bolt inside the bike, and leaving the rack free to fall into my rear cassette, grinding against the gears. It wasn´t a good situation. It was the first serious problem we´ve run into, and weren´t exactly sure what to do. Luckily, the day before I was leaving our lunch spot across from a military checkpoint, and I noticed a hose-clamp just sitting on the road. I quickly stopped and snatched it up, thinking that you never know when something like that could come in handy for a repair. The next day it came in handy for a repair. It held things together, somewhat, and we went back into Coleta de Campos, a small town we had just cycled through to see if maybe a mechanic could help us out.

They tried, but couldn´t do it. So, we checked to make sure the hose-clamp was holding things, and started on our way, hoping to find a bicycle shop in Lazaro Cardenas, a decent sized city about 100 km away. We got going again, with me wearing my drybag as a backpack to keep as much weight off the rack as possible, and made our way south. Not more than 10 km later, as we climbed another hill, Jeff called out to me to stop. We pulled over in a roadside pullout, and saw that his rear shifter cable had snapped. (I think he just wanted a little sympathy too). This had happened to my bike about 2000 km ago, so at least we had an idea of how to fix it. We dug through all our bags to find the neccesary tools and spare cable, and got to work. About an hour and a half later we were finally fixed and re-packed, and ready to go. Again.

The next day we luckily stumbled upon our bike shop in the city, and after the mechanic first suggested that we just keep the hose-clamp because it seemed to be holding fine, we were a little worried. The mechanic called over his dad (it was a father-son operation) and he took a look, shaking his head and muttering. Finally after much debate, they pulled out a power drill. This made us even more worried. If the threading inside the bike frame got damaged we couldn´t mount this rack, or a new one on there, no matter what hardware came with it. But, he seemed to understand that, and got to work, drilling and drilling. At first it looked like that piece of metal just wouldn´t come out of there, but our mechanic wouldn´t give up, and as he knelt there on the sidewalk in front of his shop, the piece of bolt finally came out. Yay.

It was a huge relief - it might not seem like much, but we had no idea what we would do if we couldn´t get that metal out of there. We couldn´t mount the rack, and we couldn´t carry our bags. So we were extremely happy. The fact that we were charged $3 for this repair wasn´t too bad either. Afterwards, we got some family photos with the bike shop owners and ourselves, and they wished us well on our journey. I don´t know if we could have been more thankful.

Since then we´ve been powering through the countryside, entering the state of Guerrero. We´re starting to see a lot of piles of garbage outside towns (and sometimes inside towns), often burning and with pigs grazing over the piles. There are little fires all over the place, in the ditches and peoples yards. It´s strange - we don´t quite understand why, but nobody seems too concerned. We´ve never seen one started, or put out. There just seems to be eternal fires of garbage going on here. Pigs and chickens and goats seem to run free as well. Last night we camped on an empty lot that some fisherman had their nets on during the day - we asked if we could camp there and they said sure. After getting in our tent, we could look out and see pigs and dogs rummaging around the sand digging up tiny fish left behind, and could hear the rooster from next door doing his trademark cock-a-doodle-doo. (No matter where we camp, we wake up to hear a rooster crowing. Also - they don´t just do it at sunrise. They start waaay before sunrise. Who knew that they taught us so many lies in kindergarten?)

Yesterday we went through Acapulco, which is actually a pretty cool city. It stretches for what seems like forever, up on cliffs that they make you climb. We had the steepest, longest climb out of the city, taking us nearly an hour to go a kilometre or two. It was so hot - neither of us have ever sweat that much. Whenever we stopped for a break going up the hill, our clothes were completely soaked- we could wring them out. It looked like we just went for a swim with our biking clothes on. We finally reached the top though, and then went back down to sea level in about 2 minutes, having trouble keeping our bikes under 60 km/h as we braked the whole way down.

This is our ninth day of cycling in a row, and so far we don´t feel the need to stop (or shower? So far so good). We´ll see how the next week goes as we continue through Mexico (this country seems like it will never end) and make our way closer to Chiapas, and to Guetemala. We´re still throwing around different plans for border crossings - we might end up going around on the Yucatan and down through Belize - but who knows? As for now, we´ll get back on our bikes and hopefully still be able to keep up a decent streak of 100 km days. Until next time...