guerro negro

i think baja has definately been the hardest part of the trip so far. we´ve been bicycling through this insane desert and a lot of the time when we stop in these little pueblos there is no running water, let alone a shower. i´m not sure how this happened, but i think i´m starting to get dread locks. i´m not sure what i´m going to do about it. here´s a picture of my new hair.
I guess when i thought about baja, i figured it´d be like the end of the shawshank redemption where their hanging out at the beach, but instead we´ve just been cycling through the world´s most ecologically diverse desert. i´m kind of freaking out about water and one day i carried 10 litres with me.

There are some really bizare looking plants out here. one of them is called "cirios" and it´s a kind of tree that looks like this crazy stalk with black things coming out of it that ends in a fan shaped group of yellow flowers. appearently these plants can live to be 300 years old and grow up to 18´. There are also tons of cardon cactus that are really huge. i´ve been talking to the locals and they all say they can be hundreds of years old.

it´s so, so hot out here. erik has a thermometer and the other day it was like 110. it´s funny because when i was looking into what tires to buy for the trip, everyone seemed to really like these german tires called schwalbe except for this one guy who said he was biking through the desert at 115 degrees and the tires melted. i remember reading that and thinking, "well he´s totally crazy, who´d bike through the desert in 115 degree heat." Here´s a picture of peter and erik dying by the side of the highway.
So we spend all day sweating in the heat and dust, and then don´t get to shower afterwards. the other day we were in this little town called cataviña and i was talking to this guy outside of this roadside store, and i was asking him if there was anywhere in town we could get a shower. he was all, "Follow me. we all bath over here in this dip in the road. the water´s really nice." i wasn´t totally sure what he was talking about, but erik, peter and i all follow him down the road, and it ends up being this spring that they´ve attatched a hose to, and put up inside this cement thing. it was so, so awesome. we´re all laughing cuz the situation is so bizzare, but it was so, so nice to get clean. This is a picture of erik in the "shower".
In addition to the extreme heat and lack of water, we´ve all been getting sick. Big pete got some heat exhaustion thing were his pulse shot up to 93 and he had to go to the hospital, and pretty much everyone except young peter and clyde has the runs. we´re all taking cipro, but i´m sort of wondering what we´re going to do for the next couple of months. you can´t just keep taking anibiotics, and today i asked in the pharmacey if they carried cipro and they just had imodium and pepto bismal. we´ll see how it goes i guess. but it´s not like we´re eating recklessly.
-Jessie