August 15, 2015

I’m spoiled. For the last 30 plus years I’ve worked on motorcycles on lifts. I didn’t have to bend over, squat down, or sit on the ground. For the last several years I worked on my own bikes on a lift in an air conditioned shop that you could eat off the floor. Sure, at the race track I had to work from the ground. But roadracing, it was usually on clean concrete, with a work mat on the ground. This trip will definitely put me back in my place…on the ground, in the dirt, mud, whatever. I hope it is several months at least before I start muttering “I’m too old for this”. We’ll see. Between the humidity, the heat, and the rain where I’m headed, it might not take that long.

I left Juchitan with oil, oil filter and tools, but no place to drain my used oil. As I rode toward San Cristobal de las Casas, I started looking for just the right guy on the side of the road. I had passed a lot of “Vulkas” or vulcanizadores — the guys that fix flats — but they are fairly specialized, and I needed someone with a drain pan.

As I started climbing back into the mountains, I saw what I was looking for on the left. A small house, with a makeshift garage on the side, and a large floor jack in the dirt driveway. A man and his son were standing out in front of a pickup truck. I spun around and pulled up.

“Por favor, yo necesito cambio de aceite por mi moto. Yo hay aceite, filtro, y instrumentos. No tengo un lugar por mi aceite usado. Puedo cambio de aceite aqui?” (I need to change my oil in my motorcycle. I have the oil, filter, and tools. I don’t have a place for my used oil. Can I change it here?) I had been practicing this in my head. A bit garbled, not perfect, but it worked. The guy walked back into the garage and produced a two liter plastic bottle with the top cut off. He offered to let me change my oil there in his driveway, and even offered to help, although I intended to pay him for the privilege of leaving my old oil there. And when he broke out the rusty set of SAE sockets (no metric), I quickly declined help and pulled my tool roll out. I felt a little guilty when I pulled out the titanium 14mm wrench, but he didn’t say anything.

So there, in his dirt driveway, I laid down and pulled my blazing hot drain plug.

Twenty minutes later, I had fresh oil in the bike, his two kids had 2RideTheGlobe stickers, and I had paid him 100 pesos (about six bucks). It was a bargain for me, all things considered.

Continuing east, I took a detour at Ocozocoautla de Espinosa and up a 5 mile long dirt and gravel road that ended at Sima de las Cotorras, or Chasm of the Parrots. This is a large sinkhole, over 500 feet across and over 450 feet deep. The bottom is filled with beautiful green trees and parakeets (Parrots, parakeets, whatever. They’re parakeets, regardless of the name.) And loud.

Sima de las Cotarras. Big hole, lots of birds.

Looking down into the sima.

Like most of the attractions I’ve visited (think Hierve de Agua), Sima de las Cotorras had grand plans. They built a rappelling platform where you could drop down ropes into the bottom of the hole. Not sure how you got back out. The difficulty getting to this place (it’s not the paved entrance to Disneyland, with trams to take you to the gate), along with the bad U.S. press about Mexico, hasn’t helped their tourism industry.

The mountains rose up in front of me and the road began to get steeper. The clouds were rolling in, and the road disappeared into the clouds. With lush green everywhere, and a steep road ascending into the clouds, it truly looked like the highway to heaven.

The rain started just as I passed through a military checkpoint. I stopped to zip up the vents on my jacket and pants, and just in time: the downpour began, and lasted for close to an hour. It let up just as I pulled into San Cristobal de las Casas, but the cobblestone streets were wet and somewhat muddy, and with the knobbies on my bike it was like riding on ice. I gingerly crept up the streets toward my destination for the night: Rossco Backpackers Hostel. Due to the rain, I didn’t take many photos today.