Ready to Hit The Road

A lunch of plantains and a tamale: 50 cents. Fee to immediately redeposit, somewhat worse for the wear, in a public toilet: 75 cents in three easy installments of 25 cents each. Still being able to cycle the 13 hills between here and Almirante: priceless.


Try that with a Ferrari! Drill a hole in the gas tank, fill 'er up, and see how far you get. This body never ceases to amaze me.

My bicycle is pretty sweet too. It is among the most beautiful and efficient of man's machines, capable of efficiency better than 95%. I cannot describe the pleasure of having the flow of my blood so closely coupled to forward velocity. The bike feels flawless, and the road flies by.


I don't really intend this to be simply a travelogue, but I imagine that many reading this might, like me before I started this trip, have no concept what it's like to ride a bike across a continent. So maybe for the first couple entries I'll just tell it like it is.

Here is what I've got: a modified rigid mountain bike with racks and four waterproof panniers, sleeping bag and tent, four shirts of varying warmth, a pair of pants and some warm tights, cycling shorts, warm things for head, hands, and feet, a sheet that Bethany sewed into a sleeping sack for me, a mosquito proof head-dress that my mom made for me, a small set of tools and spare parts for my bike, some gismos like a radio, a camera, and the mini-laptop I'm typing this on, a few books for reading and Spanish, a little bit of food, lots of water, and a mixture of 1 part salt to 8 parts sugar that I made to put in my water when I bonk.

Here is what I do: I turn the pedals until I bonk, and enjoy the scenery. When I stop, I either eat, sleep, read, write, or practice my Spanish with an unwary passerby.


Bonking is when you suddenly hit a wall and could be outrun by a sloth. You're dehydrated and your blood sugar plummets. At least that's what I assume it is, because that's what it feels like. Unfortunately I do it almost every day. But salt, sugar, and water fixes it.

We've already had some beautiful cycling, under a continuous deluge for the first several days. We started with a big climb out of the San Jose valley, followed by a two hour downhill through the virgin rainforest of Costa Rica's Parque National Baulio Carrilo, where we passed no fewer than 30 waterfalls, cataracts, and rivers. We continued to the flooded coastal plains where people watched us from their second story balconies, looking a bit confused by the knee deep water in their living rooms and kitchens, but not overly disturbed. From there we crossed the Panamanian border and into the Changuinola region, home of the Chiquita banana, I am told. This is not hard to believe, considering the endless fields of banana trees, irrigated with ditches full of water. Each and every cluster of bananas hangs from its tree individually wrapped with blue plastic cloth embedded with pesticides to keep the bananas blemish free for the American and Canadian markets.

When we're tired, we sleep. We either find a porch to lay our mats on, set up our tents, or pay four or five dollars to sleep in a hotel. Mostly this has been fine, but on a trip like this you'd be nuts not to expect the occasional complication.


One night, nearing dusk, and fearing more rain during the night, we happened across a truly beautiful sight. A house under construction, with a foundation and roof, but no walls. A perfect campsite! We pulled up to the neighboring house on our bikes, hoping to get approval to sleep there. A woman carrying her young child came to meet us and we did our best to communicate in Spanish. She made it clear that she did not know the owners of the partially finished house, but hesitantly invited us to sleep in her own back yard. This was not what we had hoped for, especially since it was a muddy slop after the rains, but we didn't want to be rude. We thanked her and set up our tents, feeling a little uncertain about the whole thing.

A neighbor had began to play a Spanish Guitar, and we were settling in for a dinner of crackers, cheese, and yogurt, thinking this might turn out pretty well after all, when just after dark had fallen our fears materialized bodily in the form of a huge Mack dump truck. It pulled slowly into the drive and grumbled, blinding us in it's headlights. Trying to remain optimistic, I waited for the woman to meet her husband at the door of the truck and explain, then got up to greet him myself. When I got within earshot, my hope was lost. The man was yelling angrily at his silent and sullen wife, asking her repeatedly how she could have allowed two dirty gringos to sleep in his back yard without his permission. Then he turned his rant on me, speaking much too fast for me to understand anything. What was clear was that we did not have his permission, and he wanted us to leave.

Rob and I stood there looking at each other helplessly as he continued, wondering what we could possibly do now that it was already dark and our camp was set. There was no way to find somewhere else to go. When the man had spent his energy, Rob explained carefully that we were very sorry for the trouble we had caused, and that we only needed a place to sleep, nothing more. We could be gone by dawn in the morning. The man huffed and puffed some more, and we explained some more, and several uncomfortable minutes of silence passed before he finally agreed that, as long as we were gone early, and though it was against his better judgement, we could stay. We thanked him profusely, then scurried to our tents to hide before he could change his mind.

We couldn't sleep for quite a while, feeling generally uncomfortable, and hearing him berate his wife long into the night through the open windows of their house. True to our word, we left at dawn, asking for nothing and leaving no trace, hoping to save the poor woman more abuse.


It's already been an interesting trip, but in truth we haven't really gotten going yet. I've only been on the bike for a few full days, and with a average daily goal of about 120 km, I've yet to do a day bigger than 80. This is due in part to the scheduling of my Spanish school, which has not worked out as planned, and to several days of redeposited meals. This problem I am addressing now with a few drops of Clorox in each bottle of water. Whether or not it's due to the bleach I can't say, but I am healthy now, and ready to hit the road for real.


I'm very happy with the progress I've made in Spanish, one of my major goals for this trip. I took some lessons from Brenda in Albuquerque before I left, an intensive week at a school in Costa Rica where I stayed with a fantastic and monolingual host family, and a week here on a Caribbean island in Panama. I've got a pretty good basis in grammar now, and hope to pick up lots of practice and vocabulary along the way.


Spanish school (and hopefully meal redeposition) now behind me, only one hurdle remains between here and many thousands of miles of open road: the Darien Gap. This is a section of jungle between Panama and Columbia where the Pan-American Highway has a chunk missing. Travel through on foot is reportedly difficult, and with a bike it could be not only severely uncomfortable, but pretty hard on the mechanics of the bike as well. And that's not to mention the questionable security in the region, along with the animals, insects, and parasites. There are options by air or sea to Cartagena, both extremely unpalatable on a transcontinental BIKE ride, but we have not yet made a final decision on how to make the crossing.


When all is said and done, however we get there, Cartagena, Columbia will mark the start of the open road for me. With school and logistical troubles behind, we'll open it up and start really moving at last!