ilegales

As Americans in Mexico we recognize that we are national representatives in an ongoing cultural exchange. An equal exchange means give and take, open mindedness, empathy, and sympathy where shared experiences are possible. In pursuit of such equality, we have been in Mexico illegally this entire time. As I write this, we are still here illegally. Also I crashed Tim and myself again and the hotel room smells like gasoline on account of Kali's fuel being everywhere it shouldn't be and literally nowhere it should be (like, the O.G. definition of "literally"). But wait, I'm jumping ahead.

EXPATS

We left Guerrero Negro (the place with Tim's whale friend) on whatever day that was, headed across the peninsula to the town of Mulege which sits at the mouth of (maybe) the only river in Baja. Or maybe there are tons of rivers. I'm not a scientist. It was another nice ride. Dry again, not too much wind, and very few cars. The most remarkable tidbit from this drive started with a call on my intercom. One beep - that means Tim tapping in from six inches behind me. These intercoms are finnicky though and with 80gb of music set to shuffle you never quite know what's a call from a comrade and what's just another skit from an early Aughts hip-hop album. After a few seconds an abrupt "Alex..." told me it was my passenger but not much else. A few seconds later the "pull over..." that followed revealed little more. The inexplicable black magic of mirrors showed me the rest, namely a beard of brown vomit flowing from the bottom of Tim's helmet onto the road, his arm, the backpack, etc. etc. Food? Tequila? Quien sabe? Viva Mexico!

Joe found a chart online that lists the distances between each town along the transpeninsular highway and we've corroborated the distances with google maps. We've been planning our stops according to the careful calculations of how long those distances should take us given the posted speed limits. We make few stops and average 50-75% higher than the speed limits (people still pass us) and we still take at least an hour longer than our estimates. We have no real explanation, but a few minutes after passing the "43km to Mulege" sign we passed a "47km to Mulege" sign, so who the hell knows. The river through Mulege makes the region an oasis, so the landscape is much more lush. We stopped in San Ignacio on the way in hopes of seeing a pre-fab metal church said to have been designed by GustaVe Eiffel of Eiffel Tower fame. The church was designed to be a model for French missions and won a first-place award in the same World Expo in Paris that featured the more famous eponymous iron phallus. San Ignacio was the cutest town we had seen thus far and did have a nice mission, but not the right one. Side note: there is a lovely older local woman in San Ignacio looking for a mid-50s American man with a pension plan. She'll make you burritos. DISCLAIMER: grandchildren... And the burritos won't taste good unless you're ravenous.

After lunch we remounted the beasts and proceeded down the road to Santa Rosalia, where the historical metal Christ box actually exists. The approach to the town is picturesque for anyone not too swamp-your-pants frightened to unclench from whatever artficial safety handles they found in a blind panic and look out over the sea. The descent from the hills to the waterfront known as "Devil's Staircase" is an extreme network of switchbacks so steep and exposed you'll thoughtlessly abandon your natural instinct for survival in favor of paralyzing idiotic wonder. Santa Rosalia is an old French copper-mining town with an Old West vibe, and it had an unremarkable looking church. We saw it, I took a picture for my mom, and we bizzounced. An unreliable number of kilometers later we reached Mulege. We blindly followed some roads until they ended, and then we kept going. It didn't take long for the road to end and the Sea of Cortez to start. Not the kind of dead end you regret. A few hundred meters down the return trip we stopped at a bar to relieve them of some beers and some answers. We also ran into some expats. The leader of the unpleasantry was wearing a legit Soviet military hat. Pretty typical lifelong asshole really - the kind whose kindness is actually just an ingredient of his assholeness. Conversation never lags with them, though, and that makes brief encounters palatable, especially so far from home. The oyster shooters he bought us were tasty. He exhausted his Spanish lexicon with the word "cuatro" and resorted to a suggestive nod while ordering, to which the waitress responded by fetching the English-speaking bartender. On the way out of the bar Kali finally joined the dropped-bike club. Welcome! There aren't many wrong turns to make in a town so small and we easily found the hotel recommended by our countrymen, but not before baiting another expat. Our new friend Al was on his way home with supplies for tanning the rattlesnake hide he harvested from the day's catch when he saw us cruise by looking murderous as sin and followed us into the hotel lot. We talked for a while and he invited us over to burn some wood and drink some beers. We gave him the classic Seattle Sidestep and moved the convo along before checking in as the only guests in the hotel. It had a nice courtyard and a hotel and we finally had separate rooms so Tim and I could get some intimacy time. Within minutes a woman on an all black bike with a riding onesie rolled in threatening to challenge our most-bad-ass-bikers-in-town status HAHAHAHAyeahright. Seriously though, Risa made us look like bitches. More tattooed, more experienced, traveling sola, and a pink glittered seat. She's from San Francisco and will hopefully show up in the blog again during our trip home.

We got a late start the next morning (which I'll stop saying at this point because that's how every morning is) so Risa left without joining us on our overpriced hike. The hike was worth doing but could have been done better. We saw 10,000 year old cave paintings, swam for two seconds in suffocating water, and learned some interesting local history. The only part of the story that keeps resurfacing (pun intended... wait for it...) is that of the "second harvest." The Baja Peninsula is a desert, which posed resource scarcities for the local tribes. Sometimes they went a week without eating. Food was so scarce and their defecation zones so designated that it was often easier to remember where an old pile of booboo was than a new pile of food. Second harvest. You get the idea. That night we did visit Al, and we were all a bit humbled. Despite knowing that Al is a fellow Northwest native (Portland) some of us cast him off as another inconsiderate entitled American. His house was a large covered patio full of character. His RV is parked "inside" as a guest room and his bedroom wall was tastefully patterned by paint sponges designed from the local cave paintings. His property has been straight murked multiple times by floods, the highest of which covered his pad with 16 feet of water, and my impression was that each reiteration was better than the last. I also gathered that he makes a concerted and successful effort to maintain the aesthetic influence of his dearly departed. We had a nice night and at least a couple of us left feeling sheepish.

MAS PAZ MAS PROBLEMAS

Mulege to the port town of La Paz aw our longest ride yet. It started out with some contention as we passed the Bay of Conception. Al told us it was a nice place to camp and that while passing it we would regret not doing so. Well, yeah, fine, YOU WERE RIGHT AL. We argued for a while but kept driving. I won't name the unhappy party but I will say that it's the same 28-year old male cousin of mine who maintains the most positive attitude about everywhere we go. Things settled down the way they usually do when we stop talking to each other for hours and by the time I crashed us in a sandy detour in front of dozens of backed up travelers Tim was feeling frisky enough to make 40 ounces of cerveza look like a half spritz of Binaca. I forgot to mention in the last post that after the first crash it was Tim who got the bike started again when Joe and I were clueless. Same fix this time. Spirits soaring, we got swindled shortly after at a lunch stop and made it to La Paz for sunset. Crack attack. The good kind of crack attack.

We sit now at the Hotel Pekin, a Chinese themed hotel on the main boardwalk. We're all pretty comfortable here, which is good, because we have to be here for a while. Both Al and our Soviet sartorialist told us, without much concern really, that we had been traveling illegally. When we crossed the border at Tijuana we were ushered right through. Nobody asked for our passports, nobody said a word. We read that we needed documentation for our vehicles at the very least but that the free state of Baja might have different requirements. Once we realized that really was the entire border process we were sitting in the parking lot of the northernmost Walmart parking lot in all of Mexico (I hope). We had also read that because Baja is in many ways its own country we could probably export the bikes at the fery terminal here in La Paz. What we knew nothing about was the tourist card we need, which is basically a travel visa without the stamp. So not only do we have to run all around town paying people and writing formal letters in Spanish, but we won't get a stamp out of it. The ferry we wanted to the mainland leaves on Sunday but there is no guarantee that we'll get our immigration interview by then so we may have to wait until Tuesday, assuming they okay everything. Frankly though, the threat of legal repercussions ain't nun to a boss so Kali spiced things up with a mechanical snafu. Her bike has something called a petcock, which is basically a valve that lets gas flow from the tank to the carburetor (which then regulates gas flow to the engine (or not, I don't fucking know)). The petcock is annoying because you basically have to turn it on when you want to drive and off when you don't and there is no indicator or anything to tell you which setting it's on. It was on all night, which lets the gas flow freely. With no combustion to burn that gas up, it just fills the engine. Once the engine is flooded, it pours onto the ground until the gas level passes below the petcock, which is the reserve level. The only reason I have time to write all of this is because Joe and Kali are disassembling and drying out her bike, changing the oil (which was mixed with gas), and watching some old Chinese man smoke opium out of a three foot wooden pipe. Tomorrow we'll see what we can do about an immigration interview. Since we are here until Sunday night at the earliest, the next post should have some things to say about trying to snorkel with whale sharks and the quality of opium at Chinese hotels in Mexico.

 BERG'S EYE VIEW

-IgotsunburnedIhateeverything.
-Joe was all "SUMTHUN BIT MUUHHY" Forrest Gump style and now has something I won't describe happening on his hand.
-The people of Baja are amazing. Drivers are friendly, police are helpful, and vendors give us food as long as we pay double.
-The iPad does not format blog posts in any translatable way. No, I do not type these out without spaces between paragraphs.
-We're finding some kind of groove I think, the curious destiny of all people who really want to be friends. Dissent was inevitable but nothing a little communication can't fix. Despite our alien status, the seizure-inducing VACANCY sign on the Tecate case, and the stereotypical gender dynamics of the current bike repair sitch, everyone is doing just fine.
-Waffles bring people together.