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.
I love the way you describe things. I feel like I’m there with you experiencing it all. Keep the posts coming Eli. I’m really enjoying following your journey. I hope you’re completely over the bug you had. Sounds like a nasty one! I once climbed a mountain in Peru (up to 15,000 feet) feeling like I was one breath away from vomiting the whole time. I don’t know if I had a bug, or if it was altitude sickness, but I survived by chewing coca leaves constantly since I couldn’t keep any food down. I wanted to turn back, but my girlfriend urged me on, and so I pushed through. On the other side of the mountain, about 4,000 feet down the hill, I started to feel normal again. Feeling “normal” never felt so wonderful.
I wonder if you are right about how people look strangely because of a resemblance to all those images of Jesus. That could make them feel ambivalent. Could the second coming really arrive in the form of a lone biker in tight black shorts and an orange shirt? Not, perhaps, exactly what they were expecting.
I currently live in Mexico. Thirty years ago in Boulder, Colorado, my first reaction to seeing guys in lycra was wtf?, a Mexican worker would be even more so. I bicycle extensively, btw, but you guys in lycra look pretty funny. Also, Oaxaca is one of the Indigenes, that is native States, so are much less likely to have seen American cyclists. As you have observed, bicycling in not the best way to get to know the locals.
Well, badfrog, yes and no. Although many folks’s first reaction is to stare at me as if I had three arms — which I can totally understand and forgive, even as it powerfully crushes my soul — I have actually found bike touring to be an exceptionally good way to meet the locals (as well as you ever can while still changing towns every day, of course). It provides a perfect conversation piece wherever I stop, and it forces me to stop in many towns way off of any beaten tourist path. And even out in the boonies, at least a handful of people per day recognize what I’m doing and cheer me on with an enthusiasm I never saw at all in the USA.
As for the lycra, yeah, that’s everyone’s first reaction. But “looking pretty funny” is the price I pay to not have lemon-size blood blisters in unmentionable places. Tough call.