Bike travel has many strengths and weaknesses. One strength is that you have to stop in many places that aren’t mentioned in any tourist book; you see everything you didn’t know was there to see at all, and arguably you know the country more authentically. One downside is that it’s prohibitively hard to visit anything that’s very far off your route. So I cheated this once and caught a plane to Tikal.

It’s truly enough a jungle that I’ve been riding through since I dropped down out of the dry hills of Oaxaca, but the other side of Guatemala is jungle of an deeper kind. The air in there is as blood-warm and about as thick, full of the sweat of plants and the white noise of insects. The ruins seem to barely float in the middle of this vast green ocean, at least 30km from the nearest living town; though once the core of a huge city, the place sat abandoned for a thousand years while the jungle washed over it all like a tide, weathering into nonexistence anything not made of megalithic stone, more slowly devouring everything that was. Before the excavations, all these looming temples were laden with moss and trees, prying the bricks apart with their roots.

Maybe that’s why I found it conspicuously hard to imagine what these spaces would have been like when they were still part of a living empire. At Monte Alban you look down on the city of Oaxaca just as the original rulers must once have done; at Tikal every structure is separated from the others by a ten minute walk through pure jungle. You see nothing of ‘Man in there; just hot sun through big green leaves, funny wild pygmy goats, loud birds that look like a flying penguins, the sinuous roots of giant trees. Nothing about that jungle admits that it must once have been a huge flat space full of human life and construction, the Manhattan of its time and place.

What does remain is incredible to behold. The temples are tall and steep enough that all the good ones are roped off, or scaleable only by wooden stairs, on account of tourists falling imaginably to their deaths. Just as at Monte Alban, the steps are weirdly gigantic, making me wonder constantly whether the original Maya might actually have been a race of extraordinarilly tall people. They were about the perfect size for me to walk right up — but, then again, I still had to duck to half my height to enter any passageway. There must have been some secret knack for ascending these buildings, now forgotten for a millennium.

The tallest of the jungle grows to about ten feet below the height of Temple IV; from the steps at the top, the crown jewel of the complex, you can look out over the entire ocean of canopy and see forever — and from somewhere a long way out in that luminous green tide you can hear the howler monkeys, like some deep Satanic groan welled up from the inferno.

“¡Pura subida!” two boys in a rusty pickup yelled, grinning at my craziness, when I told them where I was headed. I didn’t know for sure what it meant at the time, but it wasn’t hard to guess it right. That day, between the towns of San Pablo and San Marcos, I crawled into the sky by way of 40 kilometers of non-stop, merciless, unrelenting uphill. There was not one flat meter, not one coasting moment. I was in my granny gear from morning to late afternoon with salty sweat pooling in my eyebrows and raining off my arms, glittering in the jungle sun. As if Mexico were  heavier, as if gravity had been stronger there and the erosive forces more intense, or as if the height of mountains were controlled by nationalistic sentiments or cultural flavor, I crossed the border straight into a world of pure slope. Most every place I have seen in this country has been on the edge of some cliff, overlooking an abyss of blue sky and churning white clouds.

Today me and three other guys decided to seek out the hot springs that sit high up on one of the neighboring volcanic peaks. The bus ride to the town at the foot of that mountain was an adrenaline-splashed roller coaster in its own right — but the way up to the spring itself was less like riding in the back of a pickup truck than like clinging to the wing of a small aircraft that is executing stunt maneuvers high above a landscape so verdant and vertical that it looks like some imaginary planet. Surely not the Earth I thought I knew.

In three days of riding I’ve only managed to dig myself 120 km into Guatemala, but aside from the punishing ascents it’s been beautiful. The landscape inspires awe at every turn, and the people seem much friendlier here than they were through most of Oaxaca and Chiapas. I am as weird to them as ever, but they seem slightly more amused by it and slightly less disturbed. My Spanish seems to work much better here too. People speak loudly and clearly — perhaps because they must always be talking up and down such steep cliffsides.

Other differences:

Photo courtesy Floor den Haas

• The banana has switched gender from female to male. It is now El Banano. What it was ever doing being female, I don’t know.
• The churches are seldom anything as grand and elaborate as their kin to the north — sometimes they’re just concrete bunkers — but on Sunday they ring with music and singing.
• The buses here are repurposed American school buses, but they’re all painted with the wildest and most beautiful color schemes: feather patterns in red/orange/green, flames lining the windows, big chrome side panels. They are glorious.

Two more hard days’ ride followed Oaxaca, snaking wildly through a considerable pile of dry mountains and chilly shadows, making me wonder whether cactus land would ever end. There was no memorable downslope out of those hills. At some point I just looked up and suddenly eveything was flat and green, and the air was thick. I tried to clean my sunglasses and my breath wouldn’t eaporate from the lenses. In every cheap hotel the bed came with only one thin sheet, and the front desk people gave me the stink eye if I asked whether there was hot water in the shower. Such a thing was unthinkable.

The dialect changed again as much as the air and the land. People have become unintelligable all over again, but mostly they understand me less than ever. The informal second person has vanished without a trace, no matter how friendly the conversation. Also, bystanders are less into whistling really loud to get my attention, and more into just shouting “¡Gringo! ¡Gringo!”  My sense is that this is not intended to be offensive, but I don’t care to respond to it either. As an American maybe I have trouble grasping the idea of a “mildly” perjorative racial epithet.

The highway followed parallel to the coast the whole way here, but was religious about never going within 10 kilometers of it. From Tonala I decided I missed the ocean enough to spend that extra distance, but the shore I reached was only a narrow rock ledge, and the water out to the horizon was inky brown-black, opaque, and breathing sour fumes into the streets of a small town where there was nowhere to stay anyway. I won’t see the Pacific again until El Salvador should I get that far.

The sparse trees lining the road grew up into a verdant jungle as I went East along the Chiapas coast, full of the chatter of loud birds and the white noise of thousands of insects. Everything is blistering hot and glowing green, greener even than the place I come from, sometimes greener than I knew a color could be.

I feel the same way now as I did in San Diego: like for all the distance I’ve come already, it will only become real on the other side of the border I’ll finally cross tomorrow. I am immensely curious to know what Guatemala is like, and I have little idea. And if I don’t like it, I can get all the way through it in a week on the force of my curiosity about the next country. But as always, we’ll see.

There’s a city of pyramids at the flattened peak of a mountain above Oaxaca, where a ruling class of holy astronomers once looked down from the top of the world and exerted their control over a society unlike anything that exists today, largely unknowable to us. These old naked stones were once bright with color, charged with meaning and power, laden with gold-adorned people who could kill with a word. This was the seat of a civilization for a thousand years.

A thousand odd years later, we mere common folk scrape our flip flops across the palaces and tombs of divine kings, and wonder:

In one more millennium, what like this will be the left over from us?

There were no apparent clocks in the big square, no countdown chanted by the gathered crowd, no sharp line between years. Within some range of midnight the pace and intensity of high-explosive firecrackers increased, shaking the ground under us and setting our ears ringing. People scattered laughing as the hand-grenade-sized things rolled among our feet and detonated, flinging warm paper shrapnel at our ankles — and then the cans of white foam were collectively unleashed, filling the night air with surreal snow. People wandered around completely covered, nebulously disfigured, like the casualties of some strange new type of warfare. I was glad I made it here for the occasion.

The road to Oaxaca was hard, beset by pestillences: first in the form of flat tires, sometimes eight punctures in a single day. Whatever malevolent force was responsible left no trace of itself at all, and the holes were so small that I often couldn’t find them even by submerging the entire tube in water and looking for bubbles. It could only be trashed.

Then in 2011′s last week, for equally unknowable reasons, I embarked upon the traveler’s time-honored rite of passage, constrained for three days to a cheap rural hotel room while my internal organs descended into a protracted and gruesome civil war. On the fourth day it made me sicker to think of staying there than of pedaling onward, and that day became like a weird retelling of the movie Speed; I found that as long as I was in motion I was okay, but if I ever slowed down or stopped I felt the swelling of a boundless inner violence.

As a bike tourer, especially one who believes in lycra, you fairly quickly get used to people staring at you — but somewhere between Cuernavaca and here, it became something more. People working near the road stop whatever they’re doing and track me from the moment I appear to the moment I’m out of sight, and it is not a blank stare. They stare as if I have just delivered a piece of terrible news — something that doesn’t concern them too directly, but which is nonetheless so unexpected that they have no idea how to respond. “That cousin you barely knew was just killed in a bloody car accident.” In the smaller towns people stare this way even when I am off my bike and wearing normal clothes. Sometimes I wonder whether it’s because I increasingly resemble, more than anyone else there, the vision of a Scottish-looking Jesus that blankets this country.

For every coldness there is still friendliness. I stopped somewhere at a roadside junk food store and chatted almost decently with a half dozen guys getting ripped on tequila in the early afternoon. They poured me a couple of shots into a plastic cup and laughed at how the sun had bleached all my body hair platinum blonde. They seemed to say they envied the color of my skin. I told them I envied theirs and tried to assure them that my pasty, radiation-burned cancer factory of a complexion was no good at all. For what it was worth.

Morale has been low this week, but something always comes along to stir up the embers. Last night over numerous beers and Cuban food, a newly made friend said (to the best of my understanding and paraphrasing): “When you die — and, I mean, not soon I hope, but some day — when you die, what will you take with you? That backpack? The sunglasses? Money? No. The memory. The experience. You must keep going.” A cousin to my own thoughts.

Apparently I have been very high up lately. After Guadalajara I kept making the mistake of thinking this country had to flatten out eventually. Four days later, pedaling out of Morelia, I noticed that the sky spent all day turning suspiciously deeper and deeper shades of blue. The sunlight got hotter while the shadows turned frigid. My ears kept popping on the downhill. I stayed last night in Toluca, about 8,000 feet up, and must have crossed the 10k line this afternoon on my way here.

The altitude has made everything surreally familiar. For days the land felt like it could have walked out of Washington state. Deciduous trees mixed with needled evergeens, big plains of dry grass, forested mountains with the same geometries of erosion as the ones I know so well.

When I finally crossed today’s high point, I shot downward for miles on roads just like the ones around Mt. Rainier. Finally some rooftops and back yards flew up to meet me and I rejoiced, thinking I was here… but from the narrow streets I looked out at where the horizon should have been, into a light blue abyss like a hazy ocean, and realized it was the sprawl of Cuernavaca still thousands of feet below. It occurred to me that in some ways an uphill is better than a downhill; when you climb you have control. Today’s last leg was like dropping from orbit. There weren’t even switchbacks. All I could do was blink the water out of my wind-peeled eye sockets, ignore the smell of my brake pads melting against rims too hot to touch, and inwardly hold onto my ass as the rushing air turned tangibly ever thicker and thicker around me.

How can I say this? It seems as if written information is not reliable here. All written information. I feel bad to level such a sweeping critique, but lately I’m having to adapt to it. A store has five separate OPEN signs hanging in its windows, but it’s closed until next week. Four consecutive hotels have giant banners outside advertising a cost per night, but their cheapest room is three times that price. The distance signs on the highway to Guadalajara were sometimes off by thirty kilometers or more, sometimes counting by random increments in the wrong direction; the city just kept getting farther and farther away as I approached. What can you do? Learn to roll with it, never let it give you bile, accept that you can only get the truth from a human being. It’s not so wrong once you think of it that way.

In general I’ve found this travel to be humbling. Not only because I am small and at the mercy of my surroundings, but because I don’t feel like I need to judge anyone here. In my own city and country, as a citizen, it was my duty to shout at horrible drivers, as surely as voting. So as to contribute to the discourse. To enforce the social contract as it pertains to turn signals. But because I am not a citizen here, if someone steps on my toes, I feel liberated from judgment, free to do nothing, as I never have before.

Yesterday in this beautiful and enchanting city, I was awed to discover a writhing vortex of consumerism the likes of which I have never in my life beheld. The market is built in the concrete and brick style of Pike Place Market, but it’s the size and shape of Key Arena, and its interior space is a multi-tiered claustrophobic labyrinth of thousands of closet-sized stalls, each one as packed with stuff as seems geometrically possible. Each one contains a sales person buried up to their neck in the shoes or jeans or plastic toys or gadgets or bootlegged DVDs. The corridors between them are three feet wide and only a few inches taller than my head. Haystacks of leather goods. Glittering oceans of makeup. Mountains of meat and entrails. It was sort of terrible and insane, but it all delighted me too. Here was the manifested destruction of the world as surely as any Wal Mart, yet it was not faceless and sterile, but deeply human.

Later I was riding a bus to nowhere when a man climbed aboard with a speaker system strapped to his chest. He stood at the front of the bus through five straight stops, blasting Looney Tunes theme music and shouting at us about how we needed to buy a portable DVD player like the one he held before us. No one so much as looked at him, but his resolve was unshakeable. I began to see how I was mistaken if I thought that Mexico is just echoing America’s globalized style. In many respects, Mexico is more truly American than America.

It’s perpetually sunny and 80 degrees out, but the trees here are all shedding brown leaves, and people are walking around in wool coats. It gives me a surreal twinge of homesickness as I try to well up some celebratory impulse for my first hundred days on this road.

You may reach a point in any given day at which you are too totally beaten to go on. You may look at your map and know the name of the next town, but you know you couldn’t pedal one more meter toward it if you tried. It’s impossible. Your every cell tells you this. … So you sleep. Ideally in a safe and cozy place, but if necessary in a place where headlights strafe your eyelids and stray dogs come down from the mountains in the night to sniff your face and gaze into your tired soul. … Then you wake up, and hop on, and reach the place that was impossible to reach. Every day you do what was viscerally unthinkable only the day before. It is as intoxicating as all the endorphins: the luxury of feeling, in the higher moments, as if everything in life could be this way. And then sometime you finally haul yourself up a rise with only blue sky over the other side, and you fly downward for miles, losing more altitude than you knew you ever had, until you have no idea what could be left for you to be going down into; the earth just seems to unfold around you with surreal geometry, every valley opening up to reveal another valley, like something out of a fever dream.

Here’s my current inventory, totaling roughly 65 pounds (30 kg) by my reckoning. These are boring mundane details, yet potentially interesting in that they make up the entirety of my earthly possessions for the duration of the voyage. Some overkill may be apparent.  Read more »

It’s now been three months since I left Seattle and a month since I crossed into Mexico, and more than three thousand miles of pavement have passed under my feet. For five days I’ve been enthralled to find out the mainland is a whole other thing. Every breath is unwieldy with humidity. Every town is a real place, full of people, laden with soul, rooted deep with history. And everything is green. Vast and flowing mountains upon verdant mountains of delicious living green.

The sides of the roads are full of wild lizards, the shattered remains of armadillos like pieces of pottery, an endless succession of butterflies the size of hands, no two wearing the same colors. On the Baja penninsula a small town is ten single-serving bags of potato chips in a cinderblock shed; here it’s thousands of people who have whole lives that have nothing to do with selling junk food to tourists; living in hundreds of buildings centered around a church that is always impressive, always the tallest thing anywhere in sight.

The forested hills of Nayarit are all baking in the sunlight and wreathed in the smoke of slash and burn. Out here I can go through two gallons of water per day without ever peeing; hour by hour I watch my arms, permanently greased with sweat, slowly accumulate a visible crust of dry human salt. Every 10 km an overpass comes along with a shadow I can fit inside. Standing still there for a moment, rapidly stuffing my face with a sodium source, I enjoy the unique pleasures of heat-drunkenness; how it makes it inexplicably hilarious and hypnotic to wiggle your fingers in front of your face.

Something is always burning somewhere. Once I paused under an overpass and looked ahead to where the road disappeared into a ball of tan smoke and little tufts of dancing fire. Cars and trucks faded in and out of existence as they passed. So I knitted my brows in apprehension, tied my bandanna over my nose, and ran the 50-yard gauntlet of combusting foliage, opening my eyes only for short moments, never breathing. My sunburns glowed with new pain while the mileposts stood melting languidly in the heat. Then I emerged again, my salty skin lightly dusted with ash — wondering whether all that burning grass smelled like tequila, or whether tequila always tasted to me like burning shrubs and I’d just never thought about it like that.

One day, down to my last few fingers of water and pretty well sun-baked, I rolled into the town of Rosamorada. There was only one hotel in town, a hundred pesos per night, right by the main square. Unbeknownst to me, this was the night of the festival for La Patrona. I went out after dark in search of tortas and found a stage setting up to play live music, lots of trampolines, carts dispensing thousands of tiny plastic toys and carnival food. I got myself a fried banana and sat down on a bench to eat it. A young boy walked by, staring at me. I said hola. Soon another boy appeared, and then another… until within minutes there was a crowd of roughly a dozen 12-to-15-year-olds gathered around, standing over me, staring with large eyes. They stayed there for perhaps an hour, in which I felt both excited and extremely awkward. They asked me questions — about where I’d come from and by what means, about my bike, about me. They asked to know what “Halo” means, then what “Grand Theft Auto” means. They wanted to know the English words for “death” and “penis”. They were patient with my Spanish and didn’t mind repeating themselves. But I don’t really understand what made me so interesting; they had all seen many gringos before. A trio of long-term bike travelers had passed through the town only a few months ago. Some of the boys had even been to Seattle.

And therein lies the biggest social revelation of this journey so far. I wrote before that crossing the border into Mexico had the seeming, in my sense of the American mass consciousness, like falling out the bottom of the world. Like mirrored sunglasses facing North, the clear image only came to me from this side. The boys had visited Seattle. In another town, someone else told me about his many friends working and living in Pasco, WA. Someone else offered me a free ride in his truck all the way back to Omak. Someone else showed me photos of his parents’ house in L.A. Someone else hasn’t seen her children in the USA in eleven years. People have flagged me down in the street to ask whether I was Estadounidense, to list the places they’d been, to smile at me with what seemed like a kind of appreciation, sometimes almost a twinge of admiration, about which I felt a little weird — people who wanted to go to the USA and people who had lived there for many years and never wanted to go back. Everywhere I’m seeing how this continent is not two separate universes at all. Everything North and South is so profoundly intertwined that the heavily armored frontier seems increasingly arbitrary, seems more and more like just a scam designed to extort visa money.

A couple of days ago in Tepic (a city ringed by steep green peaks where you feel as if you’re at the top of the world) I was able to chat almost decently in Spanish with someone who had her own hopes of traveling across this country and beyond. We talked about how much there is to see here. “It’s a big country,” I said. She said “It used to be bigger.” We both laughed. The best kind of laughter. The kind that is tinged with awful truth.

That lost look that crosses my features in the video is the moment in which it dawns on me that I was silly if I expected some kind of world beyond Wal Mart. In this time in history, you can never truly be more than a few miles from The United States. Little colonies seed every land mass — in the form of soda pop, bluejeans, the resounding ghost of Michael Jackson, and the odd ten-year expat who still stubbornly refuses to ever learn the local language. But there are little incongruities, like the mall cops with assault shotguns — and diving a little further beneath the surface or off the main streets, you see the Mexico that is doing its own thing with no regard for the Pop from the North, or which at least transforms it by degrees into something beautiful and different.

Sometimes when I see that Mexico, I have a revelation not about it but about my homeland. It dawned on me that Americans honk their horns exclusively to emulate profanity. It roughly translates to: “Because you forced me to brake just now, you are a terrible person and I hope you die in a fire.” But here in La Paz, though there are many bold traffic maneuvers and many chances for the hate-honk, I have almost never witnessed it. Here people honk to say hello and make polite requests of the traffic around them. They use it in combination with waving and smiling to prove that the honk was not in anger. They all seem to grasp the essential human truth that in this world we are always in somebody’s way, just as somebody else is always in ours, and it’s no big deal. (Can we please appropriate this or something?)

The for sale signs here say “se vende”. It translates more directly to “it is sold”. But, as I understand it, a still rawer translation would be “it sells itself”. And one day I saw a wanted poster in a police station, with the title “Se Busca” — or “He searches for himself”. I wondered if that was why he looked so upset in the photo.

I’m told it usually rains here only once a year, only during a hurricane, but it came down for a few tranquil hours the other morning. The dry ground seems almost totally impermeable and the whole main drag was four inches submerged long after the rain stopped, spewing over everything in the traffic — but in its placid moments, when the sun broke free, it was like riding through a huge blue sky.

Tomorrow I finally cross the sea. I hope my thoughts will be less scattered once I get rolling again on the mainland.

While I still have access to an actual computer, I updated the header images with photos from the road. (The old ones were from my first trip down the coast in 2006.) Here are the uncropped versions:

You will be reassured to know that my cranium is as grand and shiny as ever. Pardon the wind in the mic etc. etc.

The road that brought me to this city from Loreto was the longest, straightest, flattest road I have ever put tires on. The heat makes it disappear into a shimmering mirage not very far ahead, so that it can appear that you´re always riding into a gooey hole in the curvature of the earth, through which the blue sky peeks — but you never get there, never veer a degree, never rise or fall. I owe some sanity to the lack of headwind and the company of my Swiss friends Peter and Franziska who I was lucky enough to catch up to before we entered the expanse.

Somehow I had projected that it would take me almost twice as long as this to reach the end of the penninsula, what feels like the first real milestone of the whole adventure. I didn´t anticipate that there´d be no people in Baja — or that, when there are no people, there´s no particular reason to stop pedalling. So in order to still be in Puerto Vallarta when my parents get there to visit me, I have about ten days to kill somewhere, and I´ve decided to do it here in La Paz. Meanwhile I´m cramming as much Spanish instruction as I can and staying in a pretty awesome homestay.

Language is a truly catastrophic problem. Now, I know no small amount of Spanish. I had four years in school and more before I left to get the rust off. In theory — in a class, or with people speaking unusually slowly and loudly — I can hold a relatively complex conversation, conjugate in six tenses, explain the premise of Altered Carbon, whatever. But a student in a classroom will always be innocent of the exquisite terror of being utterly incapable of decent communication with anyone within a hundred mile radius; of saying something correctly (so you thought) but only getting a nervous squint in response; of knowing that somebody just told you exactly what you need to know, but all you got was a senseless pozole of syllables. It feels like drowning. (It probably even sounds like drowning whenever I try and fail to roll my R´s.) Unfortunately I have some doubt that it can be helped in my case, since every few weeks of this voyage might take me into a totally different accent and dialect, and I never stay anywhere long enough to chew much fat with anyone. A bicycle tour maybe isn´t the best way to get fluent.

I made the right amount of noise before I left about how beds, indoor plumbing, climate control and microbrewed ales are all things we should never hesitate to eschew if they hold us back from going out and witnessing the grandeur of creation — but of course I stopped missing any of those things long ago. But my people. My closeness to my kith is everything I still miss, and everything that is not necessarily worth eschewing. So I carry with me a teeny tiny bottle of scotch. It is the ceremonial scotch for when I´ve gone as far as I´m going and, the fat lady having thus sung, I turn back toward the homeland. It gains an eerie magnetism with each passing kilometer. Still, for the time being, it´s held back from my face by the sheer curiosity of wondering just what in the heck might be seen from the top of the next hill, and the next after that. I´m curious to see what´s on the other side of the Sea of Cortez when I take the ferry across in ten days. I know I´ll be closer to Guatemala before I´ll be able to feel like I can trust the impulse to stop this madness. Go back to where I can talk to anyone. We´ll see.

I´ll see if I can describe La Paz for you when I´ve gotten to know it better. Or at least get some photos up. My beard is thick enough now that I have no mouth when I purse my lips.

This is the city of salt. Through empty gaps between the buildings on the main drag there peeks an endless and level landscape of sterile earth, dusted with white and streaked by sparse pools. The ocean is still too far away to see but you can make out the harvest from orbit. I’m glad I spent some time here, gorging myself at the panaderia, soaking up the presence of other human beings even if I can only very badly interact with any of them.

Sometimes Baja reminds me of Burning Man. A huge flat world of searing light and swirling motes of fine dust, where all the buildings feel like they weren’t here last week and could be gone the next. Things are colorful and shiny here that wouldn’t be in the States.

There are dogs everywhere. Vast numbers of dogs. I can’t tell where the domestic ones leave off and the wild packs begin. They circle me as I ride and follow me barking into intersections where I hope they don’t get hit.

Tomorrow I go back into the void and maybe sleep again among the cactuses.

Between El Rosario and here is three hard days of riding through absolutely nothing. You can break camp at dawn, pedal all day without a pause, and still not make it to the next vague human settlement before dusk. Nothing but the arrow-straight road, the absurdly high sidewind, and an infinite expanse of plants that all want to draw blood. It feels like a place that the tendrils of humanity have repeatedly tried and failed to colonize. There are old abandoned buildings. New abandoned buildings. Buildings that weren’t even fully built when they were abandoned, their unfleshed rebar left to rust into the ground.

It’s been chilly the whole time, and the few people there are have become as cold as the weather. They don’t smile or say hola back. Nobody barely made eye contact with me for the entire stretch. The loncherias served me like I was some kind of vengeful ghost; ignoring me as much as possible, selling me delicious food with a look of distracted dread, as if only to appease me and get me gone as soon as possible. There’s something going on out there that I’m not privy to. Maybe some toxic byproduct of tourism.

Guerrero Negro is an actual town, and people here are friendly again, but I’m not looking forward to going back into the desert. The isolation out there is soul crushing as shit.

Last night there was nothing to do but roll way off the highway and camp out alone among the cactuses. When the evening wind died with the last light, it was as silent as death and nothing moved at all in the dusty moonlight. Once or twice some indistinct sound echoed from miles away, and I could not help but lie awake thinking of the chupacabra.

Within a few hours of my entry into this country, my first impressions had already swelled to a mental bulk that I can´t well compress down to a size I can write here in the time I have to write it now. Maybe they´ll boil down over time. Here´s what I can summon in the moment.

I´ve been realizing that, in the mass consciousness of the USA, going to Mexico is like falling out the bottom of the world. It can feel that way at times; the trash that blows around in the dusty wind has the seeming of stuff that slipped between the cracks, like what collects under bleachers. For me, going to Mexico has so far been more like reaching the byte overflow level of Pac-Man: it´s the same game as before, but suddenly everything makes much less sense. Switching from miles to kilometers, from dollars to pesos, I still feel like I´m riding 120 miles every day and paying fifty bucks for a cheeseburger.

The greatest difficulties are language and water — two things which are curiously alike.

The book says you can make due here without knowing any Spanish. The book is written for RV drivers and tourist bubble people. I sure as hell wouldn´t want to be here if I knew any less than I do; enough to get police clearance to camp in public parks, enough to explain what the hell I think I´m doing when I pass through military checkpoints, enough to ask where the ATM is without knowing the phrase for “ATM”. Sometimes I feel like some kind of young Harry Potter, trying to cast spells I haven´t nearly mastered. I´m waving some mental wand and saying “Donde puedo acampar!” and hoping it miraculously saves me. It seems like some people have no idea what I´m saying and others think I´m totally fluent, which makes it that much worse trying to understand them. It all makes me feel like I have some kind of brain damage.

The people in general have been as warm as the weather. They honk to urge me on and say keep on truckin. They wave and give me little power fists. (The peace sign is still a good thing here, right?) Small children stare at me. I smile, they smile, and all is right with the world.

The landscape is sometimes as you might imagine it. Sometimes it can be Martian. Mountains upon mountains of red dirt, scoured dry by the blistering sun, things visibly carved out by water when there´s no water in sight for hundreds of kilometers. Endless flat plains where the slightest trace of shade is rare and beautiful.

Between Tijuana and Ensanada, you keep seeing these improbable skyscrapers looming in the distant dusty haze, indistinct. One after another they roll by, orders of magnitude taller than anything else I´ve seen in the entire country, and they all turn out to be isolated luxury condos with tiny slit windows, as if they´re designed to repel and/or dispense machine gun fire. Their billboards are all in English, with white models.

More when I can.

From the South-facing beaches here on Coronado Island, you can see Mexico as some indistinct blobs of hillsides, just some darker patches in the side of the hot blue sky. It’s only a 17 mile ride to the border crossing from here, and I figure I’ll take that ride on Sunday. It seemed right to sit out a few days first, scabbing over California’s cuts and filling up on its potable tap water, before I dive into what could be a different sort of world — but on my second day of rest I’m already deeply restless. I am something as long as I stay in motion; when I stop I’m just a homeless person. Deeper than that sentiment is an impulse to move forward that is stronger than any I’ve had up ’til now. After all, everything between Seattle and San Francisco was something I’d ridden before. Everything since then has felt like only a countdown to right now. It will only really begin for me in Tijuana.

On this road I’ve met several people who were quick to appraise me as inadequately terrified of Mexico. One or two of them had even been to Mexico themselves. … This is not to say that I don’t take these things seriously. While it’s true that most of those worried looks ran no deeper than what they’d seen in network news, combined with probably not grasping how dangerous it can be to ride a bicycle here in the United States — and while it’s true that many people have taken and are now taking this exact same trip, and they blog, and they report nothing much but grand and happy times — it’s also true that, South of this point, I may roll among dangers that at the very least will be of a whole different variety from those I’m familiar with. It’s true that I too have seen the network news. It’s true that I wear a dog tag with my name and point of origin, so that my body would find its way back to where it started if I were to die in a distant place.

There’s a lot I want to say to all the worried people, and to the people who try and fail to instill their own terror in me. It’s hard to know where to begin — because I don’t want to make light of their concerns, but also because I want to address my response even more broadly. I want to tell the world that fear only exists when a person’s awareness of danger overextends his rational consideration of it. I want to say that nothing human is alien to me. But more than anything else I want to share my sense that the inevitability of death is something so enormously fundamental to everything we are, that the only fear we should ever have is that we might fail to live in the first place — and this is the fear that boils in my soul, day and night, and I never want it to stop. But I may need some years to figure out the wording.

I don’t know where or when I’ll have the signal strength to post another entry or update the map, but I will when I can. Allons-y!

Yesterday, waking up North of Malibu, I thought: today I will get the finger. Maybe several times. It seemed inevitable. The next state park was on the other side of over 100 miles and the entire coastline of the sprawliest place on the planet, one of the most hopelessly car-centric realms ever devised, the city that inspired both the Decemberists and Death Cab For Cutie to devote entire songs purely to its horribleness. So I stuck those songs in my head, shined up my St. Christopher, ate up my oatmeal, and rolled forth for the outer limits of the dreaded city of angels.

And sure enough, when the beach paths ended and there was nothing to do but bushwhack into the real streets, there were no bike lanes or shoulders, and the vast hordes of steel and glass monsters could only surge and swerve around me or form lines in my rear view mirror until some sufficient gap in the parking lane let me out long enough for them all to thunder past, and even on a Monday mid-afternoon the traffic was endless and there was no escape. There I was, an orange goldfish in a river of sharks. But something miraculous happened — something that could never happen in any place where people read The Seattle Times: nobody was a jackass to me. They swerved by consistently careful margins. I never got the finger or a single honk of rancor. When one man honked to give me a thumbs up, I felt that I had truly received a blessed omen.

There were stretches, too, where the beauty of the place was irrepressible. Following the white canal, full of the conflicted sky, along a complex of towering petrochemical machines. The Los Angeles of Bladerunner. Then fields of small houses, peeling and aching with their own memory and feeling. The freight ships and weird square islands disappearing into infinity off the coast. Tan sands under gray stratus. People the border crossed. Men with shoulder-length blonde hair. It was all a giant smoking frenzy, but what I saw from merely skirting it in the course of one day felt posessed of its own secret symmetry, all rightly doing its own thing.

The sun turned neon red and settled down into a nest of haze among the freight ships a while after I breached Orange County, and I put on my blinding headlight and pressed on into the dusk and night, staying in high gear. My legs by now are well-hardened against hundred mile days, but my lungs felt like I’d dug them a few inches deeper. My metabolism was reeling from the sucker punch. I went grocery shopping just before making camp. There was some confusion about combo meal deals and I accidentally left with what seemed at the time like an unholy mountain of fried chicken, but in the sandy darkness of the state park I reduced it all to bones with animalistic abandon, like a hyena.

This has nothing to do with my journey to the end of the world, except insofar as it represents the final culmination of the era of my life that I am drawing to a close: after roughly five and a half years of furious, espresso-addled writing and revision, my debut novel is today loosed upon the world. It’s called The Loiterers. It’s a semi-dystopian young adult novel, heavy and dark, with lots of drinking and swearing and death. You can learn more about it, read the prologue, and order a copy for yourself, HERE.