Still in San Pedro by Lake Atitlan.  I have 2 days of Spanish class left.  Number of miles in the last week - 0.  It feels good to be off the bike for a bit.  That plus being in a beautiful place helps.  And this beautiful place is a town held together mostly by walking paths makes it even better.

Little has happened since the last post, but I keep remembering all these details I miss after every post.  Mostly, I seem to fail to write about all the funky people we meet along the way, so here's props out to a few of them:

Raymondo at the border, the first person we met in Mexico, who tried to help us get through customs and immigration.  We didn´t need the help but he was kind of funny and was interesting to talk to while Dick and Eric were inside the building.  We didn't trust him enough to watch the bikes unsupervised but he would have probably have been fine.

Steve and Greg from Boulder who were mountain biking in the Creel area.  We ran into them in Batopilas when their crazy friends caught up to them after mountain biking in from the coast.  After riding the bike the same route out to the coast, I simply cannot imagine how they managed this - very impressive.  We must have had an impact ourselves, Steve sent me a photo of his new F650 that he bought practically the moment he got back to Colorado.  Greg had a bid on a R1100GS.  Hope he's a strong rider if he's going to ride that monster down through Copper Canyon.  We heard a tale recently of someone driving their big GS off the side of the Batopilas switchbacks.  His friend came around the corner to find him standing on the side of the road, "uhhh...dude, where´s your bike?"  20 meters down.

Fritz in Batopilas.  This guy is nuts.  From Germany, lives in Batopilas.  Not someone you can describe, just seek him out in Batopilas and buy him a beer.

Yolanda at Tres Amigos in Creel.  A real sweetheart, and can set you up with any adventure you need in the area.

We met David and Kathy in El Fuerte.  I heard them say the police had hassled them so I asked what problem the police had with a respectible looking couple like them.  The police didn´t like all the guns they brought.  They had permits, hey they run hunting expeditions, what would the police expect?  (texpeditions.com)  They called us whimps for not taking the back road out of Batopilas.  Fritz would have also.  We've heard other tales of people dumping their bikes on that road since - we made the right decision.  Which reminds me, Cebo and friends from Puebla, Mex that we met in El Divisidero on 2 F650GS's and a KTM um 950?  They had dumped those bikes on that road.

Who else did we run into???  Oh yeah, that conspiract theorist guy in Mazatlan.  Fortunately he didn't plague us for long.

We met a few cool people in Oaxaca.  First Michael, who is riding a big KTM to Tierra del Fuego.  He is moving a little faster than us, and might skip a couple countries, but we caught back up to him here at San Pedro and may be ahead of him for the next couple weeks while he goes to check out Tikal.  He sent us road and border crossing info that made getting here a breeze.  We look forward to him outpacing us again.  Then we met Steven, who's been living abroad for like, forever since leaving New York in what was it, the late 60's or early 70's?  He's led a most interesting existence.  I think he's been in Mexico a year and has adopted a dog, Jimmy, after Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix.  He introduced us to Barry and Jen who are living in Oaxaca for a month after doing a lot of travelling down here.  And of course we met up with Chris and Chris as mentioned in another post.  I think they are travelling back to the Bay Area soon and will be doing some serious snowboarding at Kirkwood this winter, something I´m already missing and they've only been open for 3 days!  Yes, I was watching opening day on the web cam.

Since Oaxaca we started moving pretty quickly and haven't really met too many new people.  We seem to be on "hola" terms with most of the town here, but pretty much everybody says hello or good day to everybody else in this town.

Oh yeah!  I was just going to wrap it up when I remembered the talking bushes.  In Palenque, we walked a couple miles in to the ruins, passing by some small farms and cow pastures.  Every few hundred meters we'd hear a nearby bush say something in a low voice, and turn to see someone standing there with a big mushroom in his hand, and he'd repeat, "mushroom, amigo?"  I don't think those were any ordinary mushrooms.

Okay, now maybe that's it.  I feel all caught up on the people report.  I´ve given the place reports, and will have more when we start moving again.  On Thursday morning we head to Antigua for a couple nights, then the El Salvadore border.  We expect to be through there in 2-3 days - small country.  Then we are going to try to blast through Honduras and Nicaragua.  If we can we'd like to get the bikes shipped to South America just before the Christmas rush.  If not then we will just have to deal with sitting on a nice beach in Costa Rica for the holidays, if that's what it takes.

Monday December 5, 2005 - 02:16pm (PST)