Biking West 2015 ‐ Teotitlan de Flores Magon

2015-11-26

tl;dr: I dropped out of the mountains with almost no breaks and ended up in Teotitlan de Flores Magon.

What a horrible night. The music continued with competition from other towns. The place I set my tent up isn't as flat as I thought. Dogs barked across the two valleys all night long. And it did end up raining. Also, it seems that some of the water sources I sampled from yesterday may not have been as pure as the driven snow. I'm confident that I didn't drink straight-up polluted water, but there are probably microbes here that my body has just never been exposed to. I'm glad I bought more baby wipes.

Because I didn't sleep well, and because I woke up in a literal cloud, I waited until sunrise before hitting the road. I still had a few kilometers of up-hill travel, then the road turned down-hill for a ways, and then I had another ten kilometers of up-hill.

Why can't I breath? Oh, I'm at 2300 meters.

I topped out at a small store with a police checkpoint. I stayed there for a good while drinking instant coffee and chatting with the police via Google Translate. I think it was a bad translation, but they were part of the "wing order". At one point I'm pretty sure they were offering me hallucinogenic mushrooms.

From that point it was all downhill for some 30 kilometers. My poor brakes. The pass was cold, windy and shrouded in clouds, but as soon as I dropped off to the west the air cleared and became dryer. The palms were replaced by pine trees. At lower elevations cactus were numerous. I wanted to take a picture, but every time I saw a good specimen I was on an especially steep decline and I couldn't get my brakes to just stop me. I need to look into that.

When I reached Teotitlan de Flores Magon (a bit of a mouth full), I decided I was too tired to continue. I was also still a bit sick from whatever water I had consumed. I found a hotel on the highway, but it looked pretty bad. I've learned that you just need to look around, so I followed the main street into town and found a nice hotel on the main drag for only $220 pesos a night (that's about $14 dollars). The girl working the desk didn't have change for $500 pesos, and that turned into an ordeal as she tried to explain it to me. There isn't hot water, but that's never a guarantee.

Across the street from the hotel are two competing bus lines to Oaxaca. Both hire ladies to stand out front and yell, "Oaxaca!" continuously all day long. They literally start at 5 AM and go to dark.

Have you ever tried to buy a bolt, nut and a few washers from a Mexican hardware store without speaking Spanish? It's challenging. You can't just browse a hardware store here. One of my panniers lost a bolt, so I needed to find a replacement. Eventually I got what I needed. It cost all of 2 pesos. I felt so bad for how much of his time I had wasted that I gave the man 7.

After that, I had no ambition left to try to order food, so I went next door and found a sign that said, "Jumbo's Pizza." Pizza in Mexico never has sauce on it. At first I thought it was just one store or another, but I'm now sure it's a thing. The sauce comes in packets that you can apply as you like.

Oh, happy Thanksgiving!