Gustavo comes with us during the very first strech of the road, he lives that way and he’s pleased to do. We enter Plaza Garibaldi then Lazaro Càrdenas which is the cardus of the city. We’ll follow it until the highway to Querétaro. Oh yeah, here in Mexico the safest way to travel by bicycle is to take the highway. This is how it works: you get to the toll, you step down and push your ride on the sidewalk to cross. Then under the indifferent eyes (the rule “I don’t give a shit” is forceful everywhere) of police officers and soldiers garrisoning all the arteries you just have to get on your bike and pedal away. It’s the safest place to ride because there is a wide shoulder. On the normal roads they say you get often brushed. On the highways just the loudness of the trucks is a real problem. The trailers here are monsters, 40m long with two trailers. The engines are (over)sized on it. Their drainpipes do not respect any emission or loudness limits. With very folk outcomes…but noisy and smelling bad. Moreover downhill when they engine-brake their clatter is close to the one of a war helicopter.
The beginning of our ride is quiet, we are also filled with the motivations of the beginner…
I am amazed of my bike: flowing, comfortable…all what you want from a touring bike like Tenochtitlantzin. I must confess that I did not prove it with all the weight that I am going to carry, but all’s going the best way. My legs get warm, we’re going trough the first critical point: an underpass with a turn under some highway, then we pass by the big bus station of the north. It’s a first test. The uphill is rude but I know that there will be worse ones in a few kilometers from here. We’re almost getting to the toll and…under a bridge I see (thanks to my upper position and to my long sighted view) some bike travelers.
In the beginning I think to myself that it must be some other gringo loco and I foretaste the encounter and the group riding and some camping all toghether. As I get closer I can obviously see them better. The bikes mount Xtracycle extentions, a lenghtening device allowing more charge on the bike. It’s the Ginger Ninjas! I recognize Land, who slept in Casa Biciteka one whole week while he was working on the dynamo system of their bicycles. There’s also Tron from Bici-osos. The other two people are Dante and a biker (motorists often don’t understand their uslessness…) whose name I forgot already. They are going to Cuautitlàn Izcalli for a concert. The rest of the band left on friday, while Dante and Land (who I nicknamed “el gringo del domingo” as he arrived at Casa Biciteka to ask for shelter one sunday) were getting done the last two bikes with dynamo systems. We quit the freeway to pedal uphill a little bit. I don’t even shift gear, I pedal on the medium front gear and the big sprocket getting to the top without a problem. I stand on the pedals and all the short climbings are behind quickly.
In Cuautitlàn the heat wave is strong, we meet the other 7 or 8 ninjas in front of the amphitheatre where they are going to play. Their show is real fun, the atmosphere is a kind of hippie-happy-cyclist. Also known as “Pleasant Revolution” each one of them has got some improbable self-given name. I can’t remember any but Land and Laughter but all of them are really nice people and their music-pedalpowered project is an enviable action and a wonderful lifestyle! They travel with their bikes playing around since years. Wonderful!
PUBLIC POWERED SHOW
The soundcheck is done and we go to eat and chill, I try to slip into the showers but the officer who should serve and protect us (like the rest of the population) don’t allows me to enter. She says that we must use the toilets outiside the site, fee-paying. I bet she’s got a deal! Whatever, one hour after I shower myself. In your face officer! And what a relief!
Ginger Ninjas power their amplifiers with a set of dynamos on the bikes. The public pedals to genarate the electricity flow. Spectacular, as Dante says. And it’s just one small bit of the magic of the bicycle. With the 5 people of the band travel 3 or 4 more people. They are two technicians, some friends and the argentinian director of the documentary movie “The Ginger Ninjas ride Mexico”.
Their show has got a wonderful vibration, their rock is quite hippish, I mean they send a lot of good vibes (such songs like “I show you my light” are the emblem) involving the audience more and more. Alessandro starts getting wild with his photocamera. Land and Dante manage the pedal power resources keeping onothere eye on the voltmeter and telling when to increase or decrease power on the pedals.
As I wrote in their guestbook it was my destiny to meet them one day. I missed them in Europe, when Adam told me they were around. I did not see their show in Cuernavaca either, beacuase I had a big sunburn and diarrea just before……then the destiny put them on my way, the day of the departure. Messing my plans intentionally. I gladly accepted the suggestion. Alessandro immediately agreed about changing our plans and stay with them in Cuautitlàn today.
Bravo! They show in a simple way how all what the whiner motorists cannot do with their oil-powered tunacans. Cyclists can do it alot better!! Having fun, free from traffic jams, doing it open air, improving one’s body and ecologic footprint. And not giving up the Rock ‘n Roll!
After the show Alma, Jorge and other members of Bici Verdes drive us to the Casa del Bicionero, where they host us two tonight.
LA CASA DEL BICIONERO
To return them the favour we cook pasta for everybody with some spicy tomato sauce. At the shop they have no more than 400g of the same kind of pasta, so we decide to mix up and it’s a success! There is just one fire so we use as the second one to cook the sauce the zenstove made of a couple of beercans. All of our new friends try my bike and I am very proud of them because nobody fells off. In fact just a couple of guys actually ever fell off it already. Bicis Verdes stay with us chatting and I play a couple of my bikesongs for them.
We go to bed at 10pm, but I wake up several times to go to the toilet during the night. I guess I am nervous about the real takeoff day of tomorrow. We will have to cross the chain of mountains which stands around Mexico city. We breakfast pasta and “chia” and go. I am very slow at preparing myself and the bike while Alessandro gets ready in a blink of an eye. We start riding at 7.15am…and it’s pretty cold out there! Well it’s quite normal as we are at about 2400m over the sea level. The few people in the streets stare at us, what a strange sunday morning vision we are! We stop just a few times and we meet a couple of sunday sporty cyclists on the road. They have very nice bikes and one of them tells me that he would exchange his bike with me. It’s a very nice Pinarello but I can’t and I would not! The same guy tells us that at the km 107 we will be at the top so we decide to stop around the km 80 at a gas station to eat. We swallow anything we can, get some fresh drinks and we go. I manually put on the smallest front gear (my too-short-bottombracket does not allow me to do it the normal way) and we go. It’s less heavy than I thought. And there are some roadworks so the half of the road is closed and we use it as bike path. The truckers keep waving and honking at us, I am some freak and Alessandro brings on his backpack an image of the Guadalupe virgin, our protector. The 107th km comes quite fast and as soon as we find one we stop at a restaurant to eat. I get a huge fruit salad and he eats a “asesina”, a big steack with…beans and chili. We are in Mexico that’s it!
We pedal two more hours, the valley is slightly descending and the clouds protects us somehow from the sun at 2pm. We just stop one hour under a tree to chat and rest a bit, at around 4pm. We have 90km left to get to Querétaro, where we planned to stay a day or two in the local bike kitchen. The last 30 kilometers of the day are on a slightly descending flat but I get to be tired, while Alessandro looks to be able to go on for long. We get to the toll, just before a truck crushed in the middle of the highway after having a flat tire. A really common accident here. I guess that the truck drivers prefer to get drunk rather than to check their tires. Pieces of his tire were laying on the road some hundreds meters before the accident. In front of the relict a bouch of young boys cross the highway in front of me to come and see my bike. I would have feel responsible if one of them got under a car. Here the highway is less of a “sacred” place. It’s a common thing with other thematics about Mexico. There is no repression of the behavings of the population. The main results are two: nobody rebels against the authority (who does not exist) and everyone is somehow responsible for himself.
At the toll we play the same scene with police and army, then we start asking where we could camp and we stop to eat a “Barbacoa de borrego”.
It’s the same that people eat in Sardinia. You dig a hole in the ground. You hide some very hot rocks in it. Then you cover them with maguey leaves. Over the leaves you put the meat covered with other leaves and then you close the hoven with ground. The cooking lasts a lot of hours. The outcome is delicious but very expansive. The meal for two costs us 250$(pesos) but it’s worth the price once in a lifetime to do things like that. In the meanwhile we try to understand where could we find a priest who gives us a roof. The village is called Paso de Mata and a small valley divides it from the highway. We get on the top of the hill, in the center of the village, on the square of the church on time for the mess. I push Alessandro with his Guadalupe virgin backpack and I keep an eye on the bikes.
Nobody could tell the name of the padre, whose name is indeed Martin. He (almost) welcomes us easily, while his parishoners spontaneously give us milk, pancakes and softdrinks (of a doubtful colour and I guess healthiness) that we don’t drink. We sleep very deeply because of the long day we had, we decide to put the alarm a little later tomorrow. 6h30 will be good enough to ride the 60km left to Querétaro!
coucou couzine !!
Contente pour toi que tout se passe bien ! les photos font rêver ma peau blanchâtre , les récits de cols de la mort ont un peu moins rêver mes frêles cuisses …
c’est chouette de suivre vos aventures ! encore ! encore !
bisette
Virginie
Where you are brave? I not see you on the map!
Big kisses