Thanks to Çocuk Bayramı this weekend was extra long.  Tuesday was the holiday, and I ditched school on Monday.  Instead of two one-day excursions, I took two two-day excursions.

The first excursion was another fun snow climb.  Although I’ve climbed a couple mountains in Antalya (Alabelen, Tunç), Kızlar Sivrisi seemed more like a real mountaineering experience complete with a long drive, below-freezing night at camp, a 4am start, a rocky crux section, and a short fantastic summit ridge.  At 3070m it’s the highest summit in western Turkey.

Our plan was to climb one of the steep north face routes on Kızlar Sivrisi.  It was a 2-3 hour drive around the mountains from Antalya to Elmalı, and then we headed off onto village roads.  It had rained quite a bit the day before in Antalya so we weren’t surprised to be turned back by the mud shortly after leaving the last village.  A tractor could have made it, but the villagers have caught on to this problem for the mountaineers and wanted 250tl for the 24km roundtrip.  This is not unreasonable if you have 10 or more people, but for the five of us it was steep.

We drove around to another access point, and after securing permission in Elmalı were allowed to enter this “forest research” area.  We had a great campsite at about 2000m, and I quickly fell asleep after getting in my sleeping bag at about 8:30!

The following day was long and sunny.  I put on sunscreen twice, but still managed to burn my forehead, under my nose, and a bit around my mouth.  We were on the summit about seven hours after leaving camp, but it could be a done a couple hours faster by a fit group.  I was impressed with the views at the summit and now see why it’s worth driving the 2.5 hours to access Kızlar rather than just climb another route on Tunç.

Terry wrote an article about our Kızlar Sivrisi ascent in Today’s Zaman. Hopefully that link’s still good.

For the second half of the four-day weekend Ferda and I went to Side, a popular tourist town about 80km east of Antalya.  Side’s old city is set on a small peninsula.  The narrow streets, old buildings, and tourist restaurants and hotels reminded me of Antalya’s Kaleiçi.  The ruins are a bit better preserved than what’s in the center of Antalya.  There’s even a 15,000-person theatre and a small good museum housed in the former hamam.  If you avoid the summer heat and crowds, it could be a fun place to spend a weekend.

My second attempt at Tunç was with Cemalettin, Ahmet, and Mehmet (a.k.a. Komutan, due to his military service).  Ahmet and Mehmet are such ridiculously common names, it’s funny.  I’ve met countless Ahmets and Mehmets in Turkey so that if I don’t remember a guy’s name, one of those is a reasonable guess.  The Dick and Jane of Turkish are Ali and Ayşa, but I’m not sure if I’ve met a single Ali or Ayşa.  However, the same thing goes for Dick and Jane in the US, doesn’t it?

During my previous attempt on Tunç we were thwarted by ice on the road so that we couldn’t even get to the trailhead.  Also on this trip the driving part turned out to be the crux.  On the 2000m auto descent back to Antalya, the brakes failed.  The road is steep and curvy and has no guardrail.  I was certainly scared.  Cemalettin kept his cool and stopped the vehicle with the hand brake.  However, that wasn’t before bouncing along on the rocky shoulder for a bit which caused a flat tire.  I was impressed that Cemalettin had a spare tire (with air even!), but a working jack would have also come in handy.  A generous couple stopped, we borrowed their jack, and we were rolling again (the brakes had cooled by then, and Cemalettin mostly used second gear for the rest of the descent to keep us from going too fast).

But wait, the climb!  We started from the upper section of Fesliskan Yaylası and climbed the standard north face route on Tunç.  There are other more interesting routes, but as I’m learning, Ahmet likes to repeat routes that he’s already done.  Komutan had never used crampons or an ice axe before so the standard route was a good choice for him.  Cemalettin gave him some lessons as we slowly ascended.

Komutan is a happy man and didn’t stop smiling the entire trip.  He was probably the oldest of the group and in excellent shape.  His wife died eight years ago from breast cancer, and he thinks about her every day.  Well, at least I think he said that.  I had a bit of a hard time following his Turkish, but he was always smiling at me and offering me advice about life.

The route was straightforward, the weather was superb, and we could look down on Antalya and the Mediterranean Sea from the summit.

The following day I got out for a bike ride with one of the first people I met in Antalya, Halil, a medical student at Akdeniz Üniversitesi.  Once again I rode Güver Uçurumu, but this time we did it in the opposite direction.  I managed to find the way without getting too lost.  I might like this direction better because the rough rocky descent to Doyran Köyü isn’t a bad climb and the paved climb with lots of traffic goes by very quickly as a descent.

As soon as we got to the Denizli Road we turned onto another dirt road and went out to some nice canyon overlooks that I had never seen before.  And then I figured out where Turks go on the weekend — the area was absolutely full of people picnicing!  It was fun to see.  We continued past the crowds and ran into some friends of Halil’s from the university who had come out the day before on their bicycles and camped next to cliffs with a stunning view.  What a super spot, and it’s great to see Turks getting out for a weekend like that.

The area around Antalya is packed with archaeological sites.  Termessos and Sagalassos are both Pisidian cities, whatever that means.  I don’t really know anything about the archaeology here so I think I can get away with just calling this stuff “Roman”.  The collection of Roman statues and such at the main museum in Antalya (simply called Antalya Müzesi) is impressive.

I went to Termessos with Gül.  We took a Kortuteli-bound dolmuş to the turnoff from the main road and then an expensive taxi steeply up the last 10km to the site.  The setting of the ancient city is impressive.  We spent quite a few hours walking around the large site.  One could think of it as a National Park in the nature sense (it is in fact a National Park…) with the added bonus of a bunch of old buildings and walls.

The theatre is probably the most impressive remaining building.  The show would have to be pretty good to keep your eyes from wandering to the dramatic scenery.

We walked up to the highest point in the park, but it was too cloudy to get good views of the snowy mountains that I had climbed a week before.  On this not-so-high summit we ate our lunch and were even given some chocolate by some Turkish-speaking Russians who live in Antalya.  From them I learned that it was Easter!  Thus, the chocolate.

A week later I travelled with one of Antalya’s walking groups, ANDOST, to Sagalassos.  It was my first time with ANDOST, and I went by myself.  There were 25 people on the trip, and I had met five of them before (a teacher at my school, a friend from a different walking group, and three people who I had met with a mutual friend at a café in Kaleiçi).  There were also two other foreigners on the trip — a German who has lived 20 years in Turkey and speaks excellent Turkish and an American who regrets that her Turkish mother didn’t speak to her in Turkish when she was growing up in Texas.

As at Termessos the site setting at Sagalassos was more impressive than the ruins.  You probably have to be somewhat of an expert to appreciate the old buildings, but going for the views alone is worth it.  The walk through the mountains (at both sites) was the highlight on the day.

Going with these Turkish walking groups is always a bit of a cultural experience as well.  There’s usually someone who knows something about the site so we learn some cultural history, but it is the insights into contemporary Turkish culture that still fascinate me.  On this day the minibus had a route through Antalya and picked up people along the way (as opposed to leaving from a single central location).  Once we had everyone (which would have taken at least half an hour if you were coming from the first stop in Güzeloba), we drove about 15 minutes and stopped for a ~20-minute tea and börek breakfast.  Uh, we all could have slept in another 20 minutes, no?

Back on the road (which was a fairly long trip, perhaps two hours), the leader spoke almost continuously on the bus about various aspects of walking — what to eat, what to wear, how to exercise during the week to prepare for these weekend excursions.  I understood enough to know that my non-waterproof shoes and my cotton shirt were not acceptable for the day’s excursion!  He even told us what we could talk about — nature, hiking, and stuff; and more specifically what was forbidden to talk about — work, politics, and religion.

I broke the latter rule with the woman who I sat next to on the bus.  We live somewhat near each other, and I was explaining where my house was.  Near the mosque?, she asked.  No, in the other direction, but close enough that the ezan (call to prayer) wakes me up in the morning sometimes.  Then I learned: when she was looking for a house, she specifically looked for locations that weren’t near any mosques!  Haha, I wondered — is the proximity to a mosque inversely proportional to property values in Antalya??!!  A GIS project…

A couple weekends ago, however, I did get out of the city.  On Saturday I went with two friends and climbed on some of the quickly melting snow.  We summited Alabelen.  Alabelen is certainly not the biggest or most prominent mountain that you can see from Antalya.  As a matter of fact, from most of the city you can’t see Alabelen at all because the foreground peaks (mostly Geyiksivrisi) block the view.  Tunç is the big, snow-covered peak that provides such a beautiful, snow-covered backdrop to the city in the winter months.

Here’s Tunç from the summit of Alabelen:

Terry, Cemalettin, and I set off from Antalya around 6:30am to climb Tunç.  We drove up to Feslikan Yaylası, a typical Turkish yayla in that no one’s there in the winter.  We had planned to drive passed the yayla to get close to the base of Tunç.  However, ice on the road stopped our vehicle progress.  We parked and proceeded on foot.  The weather was rather cold and windy and given how far we still were from Tunç, we made the decision to climb Alabelen instead.  Or rather, I should say that Terry and Cemalettin made the decision.  It was my first time there, and I didn’t know how long or far anything was.

It turns out that a snow climb on Alabelen is a bit like climbing Skywalker Couloir on South Arapaho from Boulder — you don’t have to get up very early, and you can be back in the city for a late lunch if you don’t dilly-dally too much.  Skywalker is steeper and shorter than the climb we did on Alabelen.  It was a Saturday in spring with a cold enough night for perfect crampon conditions, and we were the only ones there.  This is so typical in Turkey.  There are super mountains with fairly easy access, but very few people venture from the main roads.

It was a fun climb and felt great to be out on the snow with an ice axe again for the first time since I was in the Kaçkar last July.

The following day was another good excursion, this time to Yanartaş, a slightly more popular outing from Antalya.  Our first stop, however, was Çıralı beach, which in spite of great weather we had just about to ourselves.  Again, wondering what Turks are doing on the weekends…

This time I went with four school teachers — Levent, İbrahim, Gül, and Ebru.  Ebru sort of acted as our unofficial guide explaining some of the history of the ancient sites we visited and making sure that we had enough wine in our backpacks.

It was a casual day which was great after the slightly early start and slightly tiring day the day before.  (Yes, this easy living in Antalya is making me soft.)  From Çıralı we visited the ancient city at Olimpos.  I had been there once before but didn’t see much of the ruins.  This time we saw a bit more, but I think there’s still a lot more to see there.  I’ll have to go back.  It’s really not all that far from Antalya.

Our main lunch stop was at Yanartaş where natural gas escapes from cracks in the rocks and creates eternal flames.  I believe this is because a dragon was killed there in Greek mythology.  Even though Ebru spoke very clear Turkish, I still understood less than half of what she said during her historical explanations.  If she covered the geologic explanation of the natural gas source, I missed that entirely.

We barbecued sucuk (something between chorizo and a hot dog), drank wine, listened to Levent on the guitar, and enjoyed the warmest day of the year (up till then).

And a few more snow photos:

I’ve spent a bunch of time wandering around Antalya looking for a place to stay for a month or so.  One day I met Charley, a British cyclist, who’s been on the road 2-3 years now.  We got on the topic of slow cycle tourists, and he couldn’t help but mention Laurens who “spent nine months cycling through Turkey.”  Hmmm, what am I supposed to think about that?  I spent nine months in Turkey last year, and now I’m planning a little four-month tour for later this year…

Charley had spent some time with Laurens in Iran, and I was excited to hear some news about Laurens who I met in Antalya last year.  To make the small world story even better, the next day I was catching up on Will’s blog, a cyclist who I met in Erzurum last summer.  He’s met up with Laurens, and they’re part of a small group that will be cycling the Pamirs together shortly.  It’s a small, small world!

On my second Friday night in Antalya I went to an expats trivia night at the Shaker Pub in Kaleiçi.  It was my first time at one of these expat functions even though I first heard of them over a year ago.  There are heaps of expats living in Antalya, but this is an English-language group so it’s perhaps not surprising that I met more people from the US that night than I did in four months in Antalya last year.  A majority were English teachers.

Of course I sought out the cyclists as well.  One was Rose who cycled from Britain to Antalya with her partner, Jim.  Later I checked out their website and was surprised to see that they had cycled with Rhiannon, another cyclist who I met in Antalya last year.  A little more blog research, and I learned:

• Rhiannon and Jim are siblings.
• They liked Montenegro’s Bokokotorski zaliv (Bay of Kotor), something I described as “one of the most spectacular flat bicycle rides I’ve ever done”.
• In The Hague they stayed with Dick and Els, two Dutch cyclists who I hosted at my house in Boulder many years ago.

What a small world (again), and then I remembered that Rhiannon had asked me about cycle route advice through the Balkans.  I found that e-mail and read that the strongest piece of advice I had was not to miss Bay of Kotor.  Maybe they listened?!

Rose wasn’t the only cyclist I met at the trivia night.  Suhaib from Erbil (Iraq) was on my team.  He was in Antalya for a short holiday and asked me about bike rental options in the city.  He wanted a bike for three days, he said, to cycle from Antalya to Kaş.  Wow, I thought, that must be a tough three-day ride.  Even sticking to the most direct route, the paved coastal road, it must be 200km with some big climbs.

Suhaib and I decided to do a one-day ride from Antalya together.  I had thought about a casual ride but decided on Güver Uçurumu.  It’s a great ride, probably not for beginners, but no problem for someone who bikes from Antalya to Kaş in three days.  Well, haha, maybe you can see where this is heading, I mean, besides the beautiful canyon.  I estimated 4-5 hours.  10 hours after leaving we were back in Kaleiçi!

Suhaib’s idea to bike from Antalya to Kaş was just that — an idea, a dream perhaps.  When we got to the turnoff from the highway, I gave him the option of turning around and warned that it would be a long ride to follow the dirt road through the canyon at the pace we were keeping.  He wanted to continue.  In the interest of full disclosure, I must say that I did tell Suhaib that we were just starting the best part of the ride.

I’m pretty sure he had a good time.  I’m not sure that he’d do it again.  I hope he hasn’t given up cycling for good.

Shortly before the dirt road turnoff, we stopped and chatted with Cem, asking him to take a couple photos of us.  He spoke very good English, a bit of a surprise for a roadside fruit seller.  Well, he was surprised to meet an American and an Iraqi travelling together.  Aren’t you supposed to be fighting or something?

Haha, we laughed, and we explained how we had met a few days earlier in Antalya.  Ah, Turkey, the bridge of peace between Iraq and the USA, he said, and he insisted on giving each of us some fruit saying, “bananas for peace!”

These guys:

didn’t even try to suppress their laughter when they pointed out the descent.  They had asked a typical Mexican question: “what do you do when you get a flat tire?”  “Well, uh, normally, I carry some patches and a pump, but, well, you see, I left my friend in San Cristóbal, and he had the pump.”  “The track’s rough, good luck,” they laughed.  No problem, I have patches, I thought.  I didn’t bother saying it out loud, however.  I’d heard enough laughter.

I lucked out with the flats (none), and of course a single speed is far more comfortable on the descents than on the climbs.  The rear derailleur became useless just before the biggest climbs into San Cristóbal.  I was confident it would suffice to Tuxtla Gutiérrez.

But, first, Acala.  Here my goal was to find Pepe’s parents who I hadn’t seen in over 20 years.  In 1990 I studied in Guadalajara with Pepe, from Chiapas.  He was from a village on the Río Grijalva SE of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, namely Acala.  When the semester ended, we took the bus from Guadalajara and spent Christmas with his family.  Over the years we lost contact, and I figured the easiest way to get back in touch was searching them out in Acala.

As I rode into the main square, I passed a house nearby and thought, “hey, that could be the house!”  There weren’t many two-story houses in the village so that was a big clue, but still, it surprised me later to learn that I really did recognize the house after so many years.  At the main square I met an old man who knew the family and knew that Pepe’s parents had both died.  He introduced me to a woman who not only gave me Pepe’s phone number (still in Guadalajara), but even remembered me from my last visit to Acala!  Later, I stopped by the house and met Pepe’s younger sister’s daughter and husband.  Wow, she was a little kid when I was here last!

Of course, it was sad to learn that Pepe’s parents had died before I got to see them again, but now I’m back in contact with Pepe and have a great excuse to return to Guadalajara after more than 20 years.

That’ll have to wait for the next trip to Mexico, however.  From Tuxtla Gutiérrez I took the bus to Mexico City and had about two days there before I flew back to Turkey.  Taking the bus with my loaded bike was easy.  I didn’t even have to remove the bags from the bike, and they didn’t charge anything for excess baggage.  Wow, it doesn’t get any easier than that.

My last days in Mexico were spent visiting murals — first (for the second time ), the ones at Ciudad Universitaria (yet another Mexican UNESCO World Heritage Site!) and then at the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP) near Plaza Santo Domingo.

One of the conversation topics that I had come back to repeated times during my visit in Mexico was the continued poor quality of Mexico’s school system.  Every president for the last 20 years has promised to take on the powerful teacher’s union (SNTE) so the announcement that Elba Esther Gordillo, SNTE’s 25-year-long boss, was going to jail was rather a surprise to me.  Surely there must be quite the buzz about this news in SEP.  Well, as a visitor, even shortly after the announcement, I noticed nothing.

The murals and the building itself amazed me.  There must be 120 Diego Rivera mural panels set around a couple grand courtyards.  Entrance is free, guided tours too, though I got there too late in the day for the tour.  I’ll have to go back.

By the way tours are available at Ciudad Universitaria also.  They start near La Rectoría which unfortunately was toward the end of my self-guided tour.

Thanks, Isaac, for a super stay in Mexico City.  Saludos a tu mamá, por favor.  Nos vemos.

It was a fast 32 hours to get from Mexico City to Antalya.  My luggage took the same flights I did, and no one asked me about the 4.2 liters of tequila in my luggage.

Here’s my cycle route in Mexico:

and here are a few more photos from the bike trip. Jack took these so there are more of me than usual.

Runner-up, by the way, was Turkey’s Black Sea Mountains!  Oh yes, I’ll definitely have to get back there!  They warned, however, that you might want a guide as even in the hotels English isn’t spoken.

Wait, back to Chiapas.

Joe from Huimanguillo guided us out of Tabasco and onto a hilly dirt road for the start of our tour through Chiapas.  After a pancake-flat four weeks in Yucatán, Campeche, and Tabasco, we knew to expect hills in Chiapas.  One of the reasons that Jack and I chose to cycle from Mérida to San Cristóbal de Las Casas was because of the tremendous diversity of this route in a fairly short distance.  There’s a variety of people and food, but it was the change from easy flat riding to tough hill climbs that we noticed first in Chiapas.  We started with steep, short hills, and we ended up with long, steep mountains.  The day before we finished our tour, from Mitontic we pedalled up an unexpected 1000m climb, topping out at about 2700m.  Yep, these are real mountains.  The cool pine forests seemed a long ways from the steamy jungle just down the road.

Chiapas has a few large indigenous groups, but in the area where we rode it was all Tzotzil.  Like in Yucatán these are descendants of the Maya.  The Tzotzil Mayan language is, however, a distinct language from the Yucatec Mayan.  They aren’t mutually intelligible according to the few people I asked.

The Tzotziles aren’t keen on outsiders, and that probably made for the difficult part of travelling in Chiapas.  People usually answered our questions (albeit minimally), perhaps a couple times I was ignored, but except for the drunks no one approached us to find out what we were up to.  It wasn’t the friendly warm welcome like in so many other parts of Mexico.

In Las Ollas we asked a Tzotzil man who had worked in the US if we could camp in his yard.  Although he didn’t say no, he seemed quite reluctant to say yes.  We pushed on.  In another spot off a dirt road with very little traffic I asked a passing pickup driver about camping there.  He didn’t say yes, but his only warning was about the cold night.  We camped there without incident and surprised some women who walked by in the morning taking their kids to school.

One of the best and most comfortable conversations was with a family of coffee growers on the outskirts of San Cayetano.  Although they said “tons” when I asked them how many beans they harvested annually, this was truly small-scale family coffee growing.  This family grew nothing else, using money from the coffee to buy even staples like corn.  In front of their house they had a shaded area where they started new plants and kept them about three years before transferring them to the shaded hillside fields.  The family dries the beans and removes the husks (or shell or whatever it is) with a gasoline-powered machine that’s not much bigger than a blender.  They then sell the beans, and they’re further processed (roasted, ground) at a factory in Tuxtla Gutiérrez.  This whole coffee growing region seemed quite small.  Even in the next valley over at what seemed to be the same aspect and elevation, they weren’t growing coffee.

Fat Tuesday in Pichucalco

Twice we decided to stay in hotels because of safety concerns being out at night in remote areas, once in Cárdenas, once in Pichucalco.  Both times we happened upon carnival celebrations that of course we would have missed had we been ensconced in our tents in the forest.  Cárdenas had a small parade with music, fairly typical stuff.  Pichucalco, however, had an unusual Fat Tuesday celebration.  About ten people dressed entirely in black with tall black conical hats paraded through town.  The costumes looked like KKK costumes that I’ve seen in movies, only these were black instead of white.  Some individuals carried torches while a small group carried a large wooden box that looked like it could be a coffin.  Instead it was full of explosives — firecrackers and some fireworks.  A bit later, while Jack and I were sitting at the side of the main square eating tacos (yes, always eating, it seems), this box was ignited in front of the church.  Boom, boom, boom.  Noise, fire, lights, flames and burning material flying through the air in all directions.  It was a great example of typical Mexican disorganization with no apparent concern for public safety, yet no one was hurt.

They didn’t have torritos, but their explosion seemed every bit as dangerous.  If you’ve never seen a torrito, that’s something to experience.  These are the men laden with fireworks, sparks flying in every direction as they run through crowds during festivals.  Also, isn’t it somewhere in Mexico where they have a running of the bulls like in Pamplona, the difference being that in Mexico the bulls run in both directions??!!  Yes, I’ll miss this place.

Like Outside Magazine said, Chiapas did seem like an off-the-beaten-track tourist destination until we got to San Cristóbal de Las Casas.  It’s a high hippy hangout filled with colonial churches and surrounded by mountains.  Travellers are attracted by the colonial center, colorful outfits, cheap prices, and year-round pleasant weather.  Shoeless hippies toting credit cards walk down trendy pedestrian streets next to Mexican tourists and natives hawking colorful artesanías.  There’s plenty of people watching to be done in San Cristóbal.

Jack and I took a day trip on the bikes to the nearby villages of San Juan Chamula and Zinacantán.  The highlight was the ordinary-looking (from the outside) church in San Juan Chamula.  Inside was empty of chairs or any place to sit (except the floor).  There were a few tables absolutely stuffed full of burning candles.  The floor was covered with long green pine needles.  Worshippers cleared away the needles from a small area to perform their ceremonies which consisted of burning lots of candles, chanting, and drinking some soft drinks.  A day or two later at a museum of traditional Mayan medicine, I read a list of the exact number, size, and color of candles that you need to cure a whole host of diseases and even other wishes like promoting harmony within your family or ensuring a good harvest.

Jack and I finished our tour together in San Cristóbal de Las Casas.  From there he took a bus back to Mérida and is back in Colorado by now.  We picked a restaurant with a mariachi band for our celebratory lunch.  It turned out to be Jorge’s birthday.  When I went over to wish him a happy birthday, he ended up buying each of us a tequila.  When we went to say goodbye at the end of our meal, it was two more tequilas each.  By this time he had had lots of tequilas and kept repeating how great it was that people like us come to visit his city.  Thanks, Jorge!

P.S. How often do you get to eat fried pig skin and pickled pig skin in the same meal?

Actually Tabasco had a bit of everything — water, floods, and mosquitoes, alligators in the city, modern-looking Mayan ruins, and decapitations, kidnappings, and assaults at night.  In ten days only one person pulled a knife on us.  Don’t worry, we made it to Chiapas.  What I’ll remember most about Tabasco, however, is the wonderful hospitality from our couchsurfing hosts: Fabian in Villahermosa, Alex and his mother in Comalcalco, and Luís Alejandro and his family and friends in Huimanguillo.

But first the water.  In 2007 80% of Tabasco flooded. It seems like an incredible statistic… until you’ve been here in the dry season. “Dry” is certainly a relative word. In this dry season one cold front brought about 5cm of rain.  “Cold” is also a relative word.  The temperature at night, as reported in the paper: “plunged to 16°C.”

It is completely flat, and there is water everywhere.  I was amazed that so many trees can grow in standing water.  We cycled through long stretches of mangrove swamps but also fields with cows and grass, and yet everything’s under water.  A kayaker’s paradise perhaps.

In fact during our short stay in Villahermosa Fabian took us out kayaking in La Laguna de Las Illusiones, the incredibly large, multi-fingered lake in the middle of Tabasco’s capital.  We saw iguanas on shore and got very close to large alligators in the water.  Jack once spent a whole week sea-kayaking in Florida and said he never got so close to alligators as we did right in the middle of an 800,000-person city!

From Villahermosa we pedalled a couple short days to Comalcalco where Alex and his mother treated us like royalty.  Certainly they made sure we didn’t go hungry: Tabascan tamales (different in that they often mix something else into the masa (e.g. beans or chipilín, an herb)), cecina (thinly-sliced salted beef), ribs.  I’m starting to wonder if I’m doing enough cycling to deserve so much food!  Both Alex and his mother are keen travellers.  He’s off to China and SE Asia in April, and she’s trying to get in a trip to the Monarch Butterflies in Michoacán before they flutter off north shortly.

During our rest day we visited two of Comalcalco’s most famous sites, the eponymous Mayan city and a small-scale chocolate production factory, Hacienda Jesús María.  The Mayan ruins at Comalcalco are unusual in that they’re made of brick instead of stone.  Unlike in Yucatán and Guatemala there are no stones in Tabasco so the Mayans made bricks from clay to build their temples.  Since the bricks look quite similar to the ones we use today, the pyramids seem more like recent reconstructions.  At the chocolate hacienda I learned about cacao and cocoa and how they make white, dark, semisweet chocolate and everything in between.

As varied as Tabasco is, the most variety we had in hospitality experiences was with Luis in Huimanguillo — a late night party at Wendy’s house, a fantastic bike tour with Joe, and conversations covering a wide range of topics — php, mysql, and web development with Luis, Mayan cosmology with Luis’ father, and linguistics with Andrés.  Andrés speaks excellent English and has studied Japanese.  We had fun comparing Japanese and Turkish which, until recently, linguists considered to be in the same language group.  Later I reflected on how over the course of our 1-2 hour conversation we switched seamlessly between English and Spanish.  It’s not obvious to me what triggered the changes in language.  Fun.

When Jack and I had left Comalcalco (yes, this narrative is going backward), Alex’s brother, Rodrigo, warned us about security concerns on the route we had chosen.  This was the first we had heard about the problems in the region around Cárdenas and didn’t take it too seriously.  On the road that day every single time Jack and I stopped people gave us similar warnings.  Like Rodrigo they recommended getting on the main highway instead of the back roads and to be especially careful at night.  Rodrigo had warned of drunks who get aggressive as the afternoon wears on.  It took our first such encounter (this was not the knife-threatening incident, btw; that was a number of days earlier at a cheap bar in Villahermosa) to get us to make a bee line for the national highway and a decision to spend the night in a hotel in Cárdenas.

When Jack and I arrived in Huimanguillo a day later, these security concerns were fresh on our minds.  We asked Luis’ father, Luis El Doctor, his opinion, and he told us, yes, there was daily violence in Cárdenas and its surroundings.  Surely, however, “daily” must be an exaggeration, we suspected.  However, as I read firsthand, violence was reported every day in the papers.  Beheadings seemed to be a favourite of the photographers (how do you photograph a kidnapping anyway?) and were often featured on a full page spread next to a barely-dressed woman with fake boobs.

In one of our conversations el doctor used a word that I learned in Medellín in the early 90s (when that city had one of the highest murder rates in the world) and have hardly heard or used since: sicario.  It means hired assassin or hit-man.  Hmm, vocabulary review in Tabasco?  On a brighter note (?), most people indicated that the violence was limited to those involved in the drug trade, but still, it wasn’t the kind of thing that gave you a warm, fuzzy feeling.

Our exit from Tabasco was stunning.  Luis introduced to his friend Joe, a fellow cyclist, kayaker, and adventurer.  He took us on a great route, across the huge river (500m wide) from Huimanguillo, across a smaller river marking the state border, and into the short, steep hills that are just a taste of what’s to come in Chiapas.

Gracias a todos.  ¡¡¡Tabasco fue super!!!

The Mennonites run the agribusiness.  Putting together a few different stories, I can surmise that the Campeche State government invited the Mennonites here from Chihuahua a couple generations ago.  There’s land, they said; water too.  And why not?  Mexico imports food, and Mennonites do a surprisingly good job with the harsh, dry, high land in Chihuahua.  They’re an insular group, but when members decide to leave the culture/religion, they’re welcomed into the nearby communities as Mexicans, according to the tamale makers I talked to in Hopelchén.

The straight line on the map didn’t affect the Mayans so much apparently.  We still passed archaeology sites, visited a couple, and were particularly impressed with Edzná, the biggest Mayan tourist draw in the State of Campeche.  The ball court was the smallest I’ve seen, and the five-story building was rather impressive.

The highlight of my visit to Campeche was the Gulf Coast, in particular the colonial capital, yet another Mexican UNESCO World Heritage Site!  The perfectly-restored, pastel-painted buildings go on and on, block after block, in an area that used to be entirely surrounded by a defensive wall.  This is Pirates of the Caribbean country, and Campeche was the city that suffered more than any other from piracy.  It’s defensive wall, however, was considered the most successful in the Americas as the city was never attacked again after the wall’s completion in 1710.

We followed the coast for a number of days after our rest stop in the capital.  Even with a depressing number of private property signs blocking access to the beach, we still found quite a few places to enjoy some sun and sand and most importantly a dip in the cool water.

The closer we got to Tabasco the more it seemed to rain.  A preview of what’s to come?

At the third shop we visited I bought a bike, front rack, and lights.  They put it all together for me, and I was on my way.  Back at Irving’s house (another couchsurfing host), I could quickly see that the rear rack needed to be back further so I could fit bags without my feet hitting them — a typical problem and one reason why the Long Haul Trucker has extra long chainstays.

The following day we found Milton who spent years working in the US and now manages a small welding shop in Mérida.  Once the workers finished lunch, they got on it and hacked together a fix that’s still working for me.

We could have spent another day exploring Mérida, but Jack’s coming back, and I was anxious to leave.  I hadn’t been bike touring since I finished up in Bayburt in October.  Mérida had some interesting colonial buildings, but after Mexico City, Puebla, Morelia, and Zacatecas, I was ready for some villages and nature.

We pedalled out of the big city and right into a Mayan wonderland.  Yucatán is flat so it doesn’t have the views, but it has everything else.  In the villages everyone speaks Mayan.  A couple times (in San Antonio Yaxché, e.g.) the best Spanish speaker would translate my Spanish so the others could understand.  In another village, San Simón, all the little kids spoke Mayan, and a woman explained to us that once they start school they’ll start learning Spanish.

Many woman wore beautiful white dresses with colorful embroidery (huípiles), and the men wore typical Mayan pleated shirts, guayaberas.  The villages consistently had free wifi in the central plaza.  Bikes weren’t allowed in the plaza, and since that’s how most people get around, they’d be lined up all the way around the plaza.  What a world we live in where the Native Americans still speak their language, wear their traditional clothes, and bike to the center of town to connect their smart phones to the rest of the world.

As if this cultural experience wasn’t enough, we were treated to two days of limestone sinkholes as we meandered through the zona de cenotes.  We only spent two days, but you could easily spend a month just checking out cenotes in Yucatán.  As folks like to say, every cenote is different.  Of the six or so we visited, three really stood out.

We camped next to one, Suhen Cenote — a big, circular hole — a “textbook cenote,” Jack called it.  Indeed it was — complete with a 30 second show of bats flying circles around the rim of the cenote during their dramatic evening departure to spend the night eating bugs.

The following day we came to a 75m deep cave-like cenote, Cenote Tanimax, with a steeply overhanging wall with bomber limestone handholds.  We each managed to pull off a couple moves on the steepest climbing either of us had ever done before falling into the clear cool water.

To access another cenote, near Sabacché, we squeezed through a small hole to reach the staircase that led down to unbelievably blue water.  We swam and had the place completely to ourselves.

Mayan villages, cenotes, but perhaps the state’s biggest tourist draw are the Mayan ruins.  Chichén Itzá is probably the most famous.  Both Jack and I had visited before, and it wasn’t on our route anyway.  This time we went to Uxmal which is every bit as spectacular as Chichén Itzá, Palenque, or Tikal.

The tallest building is the Casa de Adivino, something I’ve seen on Yucatán tourist brochures.  Also spectacular was the 100m long Palacio del Gobierno with fairly well-preserved carvings all along its long walls.  In the evening we went to the sound and light show centered on the large central plaza in Uxmal, Cuadrángulo de las Monjas.  We learned about Chac, the rain god, and this diety’s importance at Uxmal, situated in an area that doesn’t quite get enough reliable rainfall.  Interestingly, in the entire State of Yucatán there are no rivers.

Up next, Campeche…