jessiebikes

back into the real world

2007-05-24T09:38:00.000-07:00

i took my bike in to palo alto bike shop. they gave it a major tune up, and said it held up really well. all the guys at the shop are so nice. at one piont in my trip i called then freaking out cuz my chain had broke, and they gave me really good instructions (via telephone), on how to get things working again. thanks everyone at palo alto bike shop!
it's so funny being back. i've been working at this bike shop in san francisco called valencia cyclery. i'm learning how to put together bikes from their shipping boxes, and i also sell bikes to customers. so far i'm not that great at bike assembly, but i'm trying really hard, so i figure i should start improving eventally.
i'm still not used to being back in the US. everything seems insanenly expensive. and there is just so much stuff. i love going into super markets and seeing the crazy variety of food. all the cars everywhere, and public transport, and the buildings all look so new, and well constructed. sometimes i just get really overwhelmed, or like i almost feel like a tourist in my own country. things have also been really crazy just because i don't have anywhere to live and have been crashing at all my friends apartments, but starting in june, i have a one month sublet in the mission (near where i work), so that should give me some time to sort things out.
i think all in all, i'm really glad i did this bike trip. parts of it were really hard, but overall, it was pretty amazing. maybe one day i will bike the silk road from italy to beijing, china. any takers?

honey, i'm home....

2007-05-04T18:03:00.000-07:00

so... i am back at my parents house in palo alto, california. it feels really good to be back. also, i had no idea that sethy (the cat) was so overweight. all the cats in latin america are really small and thin, sethy is like the biggest cat i've ever seen. at first he didn't remember me, but once we exchanged a few meo's, he seemed to warm up a bit. i really missed those cats. and i also really missed my parents! so good to see them again. i think this is the longest time i've gone without seeing them. i thought it might feel really wierd to be back in the US, but actually i'm just really enjoying food shopping, and cooking, and reading magazines in english.

i spent the last couple of days in buenos aires. there is a really nice neighborhood in buenos aires called san telmo. originally it was where the upper class families of the city lived, but then there was a yellow fever outbreak and everyone moved to recoleta. now san telmo is the cool bohemian neighberhood. on sundays they have a giant antique fair in the central plaza, and all the locals and tourist pour into the neighboorhood to shop. street musicians play tengo and couples dance. there are guys putting on puppet shows with antique marionettes, and men of all ages dressed up like carlos gardell, one of argentinas most beloved tango singers, posing for pictures for cash.

of course i had to eat some more steak, while in buenos aires. i went out for lunch with a bunch of the travelers from my hostel. this is a picture of andres from autria serving me some really awesome lomo (tenderloin). everytime i eat steak in argentina i say that it's the best steak i've ever had. and i mean it too.

this is a photo of mark, from australia and maria from isreal. mark is serving maria the other steak we ordered, bife de chorizo (sirloin). so, i think we all ordered too much meat because at the end of our two hour lunch there was one bife de chorizo left over that none of us could eat. i decided to take it to go, and as andres and i were walking to the subway, we saw this street dog. i was all, "hey, let's give the steak to the street dog. i bet it would make his day." andres thought that it was crazy to waste a perfectly good steak on a dog, so we just broke off a corner of the steak and fed it to the dog. man, that dog was happy. and that wasn't a stupid dog either. he knew we had the rest of the steak right there, and starting jupping up and down in front of us and wagging his tail. so we decided to run, and then the street dog starting chasing us through the financial district. we decided to throw the whole steak at the dog in order to escape him. that dog ate the steak so fast, and then still ran after us! we eventually escaped into the subway station. ha ha...

that night i went out to dinner with these girls i'd met in mendoza, tamzin, tandi, and caitlin, and a friend of my parent's friend cathy named sandra (who is argentinian). i wasn't too hungry after that monster lunch, but did manage to drink a bunch of wine. wine is really good (and cheep) in argentina. we got a bottle from a small winery we's visited in mendoza for $6.

sandra took us on a walk down through puerto madera, which used to be the old port, but is now a trendy night spot. this is a photo of a famous bridge called puente de la mujer (woman's bridge, or a i guess literally bridge of the woman). anyways, it's a bridge designed for women. as we were walking across sandra said, "if this is really a bridge designed for women, they shouldn't have put these gaps between the planks. my high heeled shoes keep getting stuck." women in argentina are really beautiful and wear really nice clothes.

the next day maria (from isreal) and i went to meet sandra at her apartment and we walked to recoleta cementary where eva peron is burried. recoleta cementary is like a small town complete with streets and street signs, but instead of houses there are tombs for argentina's deceased elite. <most of the tombs are really elaborate. some look like greek temples, others like gothic churches. and every where you look are stray cats. i think sandra told me that they feed them at the cementary. it was a pretty cool place to wander around in. after that i got my taxi to the airport and did my best to pack up the bike and what not. it made me sad to say goodbye to everyone. it's funny when you've been travling for a long time, you make friends so quickly and then you have to say goodbye just as quickly.

i started to feel really crazy once i was on the airplane. i think i'd been so busy site-seeing and hanging out in buenos aires, that it hadn't really sunk in that i'd be back in the US so soon. i was watching the computer screen that shows have fast the plane is going, and i figured that every hour on the airplane was about 5 days of bike riding. when we were near quito, ecuador, i just kept thinking that it was insane that the plane could go that fast. like it just didn't feel right. i got to feeling so anxious, that i couldn't sleep the whole flight. then when we landed in the US, there was this stupid video playing in customs that said, "going through customs is as easy as 1, 2, 3!" and then they would tell you what was goig to happen in customs. at the end of this totally cheesy video, they say, "welcome to the united states", and i totally started crying, right in the middle of the customs line!
anyhows, it feels really good to be back in the US. hope everyone is good!
-jessie

Iguazú falls

2007-04-29T14:02:00.000-07:00

iguazú falls are so amazing! the falls are located on the north east corner of argentina bordering brazil and paraguay. all together there are about 270 falls, plummeting an average of 210 feet. while i was there 9 times the normal amount of water was surging through the falls, so many parts of the park were closed, which was kind of a bummer. catwalks are constructed both above and below the falls. so you are really upclose to the cliffs where the waterfalls begin. i cannot imagine what it must have been like to contruct these walkways above the falls. at a certain point the catwalk stops, but you can see some old support post from where it used to continue. i guess the last part got swept away in the current? not a very comforting thought. iguazú falls are probably some of the most beatiful scenery i've seen on this whole trip. from almost any angle the falls make these beautiful rainbows, and there are hundreds of different types of butterflies flying about. there were yellow butterflies, purple ones, red, green, orange, irredescent blue, back, and also ones that looked like dead leaves.
so just imagine these beautiful watefalls with tons of rainbows everywhere and a million butterflies of every size and color flying around. it was pretty incredible.

while i was there i decided to take a boat tour. in my guide book, it said that you can take a "safari" boat tour and get close to the watefall spray. at the bottom of this photo you can see one of these tourist boats. this boat trip was crazy! i think the captain tried to get us as wet as possible. like we totally could have stayed dry, no problem, but they brought us right underneath where the falls were coming down, and then decided to do all these tricks in the rapids, like driving in circles really fast so that one side of the boat was tipped way down into the water, and the other side was way up in the air. i should have known something was up when they gave us dry bags for our cameras. i wore jeans and sneakers and it took a couple hours before my pants were totally dry.

to make a long story short, i've been carrying a small packet of ashes of a woman named susie. Susie was a bicycle and pedestrian advocate and was killed in St Louis walking across a street in a crosswalk with a walk light by a bus driving who was looking over his shoulder. She was the director of the Bicycle Alliance of Washington and the first director of the Thunderhead Alliance. She believed in liveable communities and was working for the Methow Conservancy when she was killed. She had just begun her own business as a consultant on alternative transportation and the job in St louis was only her second.

More than 70 people have taken Susie's ashes around the world in the five years since her death. She has been on bike rides across the U.S. and Estonia, and on cruises to Mexixo, the Carribbean, and the Inland Passage to Alaska. In the last year her spirit has traveled to China, Pakistan, Australia. i put my packet of ashes in the bosseti falls at iguazú. so now, her mom can add the iguazú falls in argentina to the list.
just one more week till i come home to california. i can't wait to see everyone. love,
-jessie

san francisco

2007-04-26T05:39:00.000-07:00

i spent most of last week hanging out in san francisco de cordoba. when i was 18, did an exchange program through my community college where i spent three months living with a host family in san francisco. this photo is of my host mom and sister, cristina and minnie. it was so crazy to be back in san francisco 8 years later. Cristina was so, so happy to see me. i did a lot of cooking while i was there, and cristina remembered things i'd made for them like tacos and chocolate chip cookies. on saterday they invited a bunch of friends over, and minnie and i spent the afternoon making beans, salsa, and homeade flour tortillas (you can't buy tortillas in argentina). i was worried people would think the beans looked weird and wouldn't want to eat them, but the tacos were a big success. it was funny watching people eat tacos for the first time, because when i lived in california i'd eat tacos a couple times a week.
argentinians don't do easter egg hunts for easter, but they do make these elaborate chocolate easter eggs that people give as gifts. cristina (my host mom), won a giant egg in some type of raffle, and so we all ate a bunch of it after the tacos. this egg was insane. definately the largest chocolate egg i have ever seen. inside were more chocolate candies, and a weird looking doll that had a pillow glued to the back of it's head.

cristina and her sister are both teachers, so they had me make presentations about my trip in the local school. i did made a slide show from my photos, and made three presentations, which were like an hour long each. it made me really nervous to talk in spanish for so long. during the questions portion, the kids asked me about skateboarding in the united states, whether i had a boyfriend, and if i'd met any famous people. at first i couldn't remember meeting any famous people, but then i remembered that when i was 14 i met gwen stefani. everyone was impressed.
i am currently at a hostel in buenos aires, and tonight i have a 16 hour bus ride to iguazú. i'm leaving my bike here in the hostel, while i travel. it's funny, i thought i would really like traveling with out the bike, but really i just feel kind of tired, and like i don't really want to do any sightseeing. i'm really looking forward to coming back to CA. hope everyone is good!
-jessie

i'm done cycling

2007-04-14T12:38:00.000-07:00

so, i've decided to stop biking. i'm about half way down the length of argentina, and the distance between towns is starting to increase. i had about a day and a half stretch before hitting a town, and i got trapped in some really strong winds. things started out fine. i'd cycled up a dirt road over this mountain, and then as a started to descend down the other side, the wind started to pick up. by the time i was down into this river valley, i had tail winds of about 60 to 70 mph. the wind was pushing me along faster than i could pedal, and i actually had the breaks on because it was too scarey to be going that fast. you cannot imagine what a crazy experience it is to cycle with winds like this. imagine cycling with a person who has super human strength and they have their hand on your back pushing you forward. seriously it felt like i was cycling with the hand of god at my back. at one point i crossed a bridge that was about 15' over a small creek, and the wind was blowing so hard that water was flying through the air and hitting me in the face.
dust was blowing everywhere, and i kept having to close my eyes because they would start to burn from the flying dust. it's terrifying to be cycling on a pothole filled road, screaming along with crazy winds with your eyes closed. i figured it was going to take me a bit of time to set up the tent with winds as they were, so i stopped early and started looking for a place to camp. there's pretty much nothing around that you can take shelter behind, and i was having trouble finding a spot that wasn't covered with horrible spikey plants.
i finally found a spot that was mostly free of plants, and then ended up using the saw attatchment on my leatherman to saw down all these spikey plants so that they didn't poke any holes in the tent. setting up the tent was a huge challenge because everything wanted to blow away. i finally got it set up and put huge rocks down over all the tent stakes so they didn't get ripped out of the ground. at this point, a man and his son came along, they had been walking through the pampas collecting firewood, they told me that i should come and sleep in their house, which was just over the hill. i think probably this is one of my worst decisions ever, but i told them no thanks because it had been such a struggle to set up the tent, that i just couldn't imagine taking it down after all that work. a little while later the man and his son reappeared with a thermos of hot water for me and again asked me if i was sure i didn't want to spend the night in their house. that night was not a good camping experience to say the least! the wind was so strong, that the wall of the tent kept blowing in and hitting me in the head. even thought i had synched the rainfly down as tight as i could, all this dust kept blowing in through the mosquito netting. i kept waking up coughing because my face was covered in dust. it was pretty much impossible to sleep. i read for a while, but then the batteries in my flashlight died, so i just lay there praying for morning.
when winds are blowing that hard, every little task becomes a herculean effort. in the morning as i was packing up camp, i was pretty much talking out loud to myself saying stuff like, "ok, you're doing really good. now you're going to strap on the water bottles. ready? ok, hold the bike steady, now slip the water bottle under the strap, you are doing great!" the winds were blowing so hard, it was a challenge just to stand up. just as i was finishing up packing, the man and his son came back to see if i'd made it through the night. i waved goodbye to them and headed down the road, after about 50 feet, i was hit with a cross wind the sent me sailing across the road and ultimately landed on the gravel shoulder skidding along on the palms of my hands. i got up and looked back to see the man and his son watching me. i waved to them to let them know i was alright, but the palms of my hands were bleeding. i put on gloves after that. after about an hour of riding, i decided that it was just too insane, and i was going to hitchike out of there. i found a roadsign to stand behind to protect me from the wind.
there was pretty much no traffic, but after about two hours, this guy in a pickup came by and gave me a ride back to malargue, which is where i am now. the guy who gave me the ride (named juan), was super nice and took me out for coffee afterwards. it's funny because after he picked me up we'd been talking for a little bit, and i asked him if my face was covered in dirt, and he was like, "it's a little dirty." when i got to the coffee shop i went into the bathroom to wash up, and my face was totally covered in dirt, and there were tear streaks down my cheeks because at one point i'd gotten scared and started crying.
anyhows, i'm a little dissapointed that i wont be cycling farther south, but on the otherhand, i really can't deal with wind like that. they say that the wind stops. today there is no wind, but i don't want to get stuck out in the pampas again like that. when juan picked me up, i asked him how fast he thought the wind was going, and he said 130 kph, which is like 80 mph. crazy, huh? i have about three weeks until my flight home, so i figure i'll visit my host family from when i was in argentina before, and then do some sightseeing. hope everyone is good! love,
-jessie

mendoza (again)

2007-04-08T11:49:00.000-07:00

oh my god that family i stayed with in mendoza was so, unbelievably nice. i tried making them chocolate chip cookies, but only about half of them turned out. the first tray was ok, the then i didn't put the second tray in the oven straight, and all the cookies ran together into one giant cookie. then the third tray turned out really good, but then i accidentaly dropped the fourth tray on the floor. oops. you win some you lose some, right?

Sebastian, took me on a biking tour of mendoza. seriously i think mendoza is probably one of the nicest cities i-ve ever been in. all around mendoza are vinards and fancy wineries. the city has five plazas, and lot's of gourmet restaurants, and fancy clothing shops. the surrounding area is really dry and desert-like, but the original city planers developed a system to bring water into the city. sebastian told me that all the local rivers are diverted into these small canals called "sequias" that run parallel to the street and bring water to all the trees.

that night i went to the shopping center with carolina and some of her friends. guess what time the shopping center closes? one o'clock in the morning! can you believe it? argentinians love the night time. we all went bowling, and i discovered that i am a horrible, horrible bowler. all the guys kept making all these srtikes, and i hit gutter ball after gutter ball. my best score was only 71. it's funny because all the bowling stuff is in english. like if you want to play another game, the screen says, "press the blue key to play again". and the bowling shoes are in american sizes (i.e. 7,8,9) instead of south american sizes (i.e. 38,38,39).

this is a photo of a fancy hotel. in the morning when i left sebastian and carolina gave me all this food to take with me. cereal bars, powdered drink mixes, and i told them i like to eat hard boiled eggs and they cooked up a bunch for me for the road. as i was leaving town i saw i place to buy cashmere sweaters and went to get one for my mom. they guy who was working in the shop was so into my bike trip, that he tried to give me a bottle of wine to take with me. i really can't believe how nice people here are. ok, hope everyone is good. happy birthday mom! love,
-jessie

mendoza

2007-04-07T07:00:00.000-07:00

i am hanging out in mendoza with a family that gary, a friend of a friend of my parents got me in touch with. thanks gary! holy week is starting up, and last night i went to my first mass. i was a little wiped out, and so i had trouble paying attention to the priest, but all in all it was pretty cool. i don't know anyone who goes to church in the US, but catholacism seems a lot more important to peole in argentina.

all along the highway you can see little shrines erected for catholic saints or virgins, the most popular being "difunta correa". legend has it, that during some war, a women wandered through the desert with her child looking for her husband who had disapeared during the war. at some point she died of thirst, but her child continued to nurse (and her breast continued to give milk) even after she died.

there is a huge shrine for difunta correa near san juan (which is supposedly where she died). people come from all over argentina to ask difunta correa for miracles. then they build her these little houses that say things like, "thank you difunta correa for helping us buy our house." people are really intense about this shrine, and you can see them walking along the highway for miles before the shrine. some people walk for days to ask for miracles. i saw one guy crawling on his hands and knees up a flight of stairs to the shrine.

it's easy for me to understand how difunta correa died of thirst. in this photo the blue color is not the ocean. it's desert stretching on as far as the eye can see. vistas like this are not a happy sight for the touring cyclist because it means no food or water for a long time. the shrine for difunta correa was the first thing i saw after being in the desert for a while, and i was running really low on water. while camping, i didn't cook any dinner to conserve water, and so it was pretty great to go to a tourist restaurant and eat steak and drink tons of water. i still felt hungry after my meal, so i ordered a ham sandwhich for dessert.
a few days ago i spent some time in a national park called ischigualasto, which is another UNESCO world heritage site. in order to see the park, the ranger told me i'd have to find someone with extra room in their car. fotunately a whole tour bus of exchange students showed up, and so i got to ride around in the park with them and eat free snacks like cheese sandwhiches and candy. it was great. it was also so, so fun for me to speak in english. sometimes when i communicate in spanish i feel a little bit like tarzan trying to hold down a conversation. ischigualasto is considered to be a "paleontoligists' paradise". there are tons of dinosaur fossils that they have uncovered, and the park has a small museum where you can see some of the dinosaur skeletons. the rangers were so nice and let me camp behind the bathroom and use their internet for free. this would never have happened if i'd been in the US. anyhows.... today i'm going to check out mendoza, and then tomorrow keep heading south. hope everyone is good! love,
-jessie

La Rioja

2007-03-28T15:41:00.000-07:00

things have been intense since leaving cafayate. the next day i had a really tough climb with maybe 35 mph headwinds. at some point i realized i was not going to make it to a town before nightfall and started looking for a place to camp. since i was climbing up a mountain, flat ground was sparce. i ended up seeing what i thought was a house, and i knocked on the door to see if i could camp in their yard. no one answered. i figured the place was abandoned, and opened the door. inside was some kind of shrine to san antonio, and a perfect place to spend the night. i hope san antonio didn't mind!
the next day i biked into Tucuman and this guy invited me to spend the night at his and his mom's house. i think if i'd have known how poor they were, i might have said "no". it was a little crazy. also, the guy (alvaro) gave me his bed, so he, his mom, and his younger brother and sister all slept in one bed! the roads weren't paved in alvaro's neighborhood. i think he lived in the argentinian version of the ghetto part of town. lot's of people just hanging out in the street. their house was made out of cinderblocks with a corregated steel roof. the bathroom was shared with another family and was in their yard. at night they locked their gate, so alvaro's mom said if i had to pee at night i had to pee in a bucket. i made sure i didn't drink too much water that night. i showed his little brother and sister my camp stove and made them soup. they thought it was the coolest thing they had ever seen. alvaro was a janitor in the local hospital and went to work at 6:00am. they said i should definately leave in the morning with alvaro because if i walked around the neighborhood by byself someone would rob me. it doesn't get light until 7:00 so i ended up hanging out in this gas station for a while. know what's crazy? all the gas stations in argentina have expresso machines and serve really good pastries. it's pretty awesome.
about 50 miles south of tucumán, this jeep full of people stop and a guy jumps out of the car and asks me if i'd like to come to his family bbq. i say sure and end up at this families house eating insane, insane amounts of meat. it was so crazy because the whole family was
there, aunts, uncles, grandma's kids... everybody. and eveyone was talking to me at once and drinking all this wine and then some would would yell at everyone to be quiet and let me eat and then in a few seconds they'd all start up again. the grandma was the best. at one point she told everyone to be quiet, and made really intense eye contact with me and said, "tell me jessie, in 10 months of biking you haven't found anyone to share that tent of yours?" my face turned bright red and i was like, "no, no way!"

this is a photo of one of the aunts named mercedes with a bunch of the kids. i ended up spending the night at mercede´s house. it was pretty intense. we shared a bed, and she was really into astrology. apearently i am a "monkey" in chinese astrology. she had this whole book on the subject and read me all about the monkey. while this was going on, she was giving me some kind of moisterizing hand treatment that involved a special lotion and then i had to wear these plastic gloves over the lotion for like a half hour. i have very little interest in astrology in english, and then in spanish there are a lot of words i don't understand. at one point after reading about the monkey for like a half hour, mercedes went to get the dictionary. i was thinking, "good god, how much longer is this chapter about the monkey?" and so i tried to turn the pages of the book to find out, but i couldn't do anything with those plastic gloves on! i felt so trapped. i was really exhausted and was trying to figure out what to do, and i was thinking, "ok, if you were in this situation communicating in english, what would you say?" but i just started laughing because there's no way i would ever end up hanging out in my underwear, with plastic gloves on, sharing a bed with a middle aged lady who was into chinese astrology. anyways, when mercedes came back i just told her i was going to take the gloves off, wash my hands and go to sleep, and that i was sorry i was so tired.
the next day i was planning to stay in this town la merced, but they didn't have a hotel and i really needed a good night of sleep at this point. so, i headed into catamarca making it a 90 mile day. i stopped at this bike shop to see if they sold shimano 9 speed chains, and the woman working behind the counter invited me to spend the night at her house. Vilma said she had a big yard where i could put up my tent. i told her i liked her shirt, which said I (heart) AR, and was a take off on the I (heart) NY shirts. and so she gave me one. isn't that nice! Vilma and her family were so nice! i couldn't believe it. it was really great hanging out with them.
argentinians have a really different schedule then we do. they get up in the morning and go to work, but then after lunch they go home and spend the whole afternoon sleeping. then around 4 or 5 they go back to work, and then come home again at around 9:30 at night and eat dinner at like 10:00 or 11:00. by the time i got to bed at Vilma's it was midnight. i was so tired i crawled into the tent and passed out in all my clothes with out bothering to get into the sleeping bag.
last night i didn't make it to a town and ended up camping on some abandoned railroad tracks. i was feeling really tired and fell asleep in the tent even before the sun set. i still felt really exhausted this morning so i only biked like 30 miles to this town la rioja. i just need some chill time to relax i think. i really love meeting all these people, but it's also draining to hang out at the end of the day instead of sleeping. argentinians are definately the nicest friendliest people of my whole trip. it's really amazing. anyhows... i hope eveyone is good! love,
-jessie

cafayate

2007-03-22T14:43:00.000-07:00

i haven't been taking that many photos lately, so i don't have too much to post. but man, i'm loving being in argentina. you can drink the water here, the people are so, so friendly, and the scenery is really beautiful. sometimes i worry that i'm going to spend all my money and get fat though. literally i've been eating steak and icecream every day. i just can't help myself. everywhere you look are icecream shops and steak restaurants.
bolivia was really hard for me because i mostly camped. i didn't have any denatured alcohol so i couldn't use my stove. and most nights i would make myself raw hot dog and mayonase and ketchup sandwhiches in the vestibule of my tent. now i eat steak and icecream! when i was in salta, i bought some more denatured alcohol and some pasta and sauce, so now if i do camp, at least i can cook dinner.

i've been cycling along this river gorge. this place was called "garganta del diablo", which means throat of the devil. argentina is the first country i've been in, outside of the US and canada, where people have cars for personal use. in every other country the there were mostly just busses and semi-trucks on the road. all these drivers were pulled over here and there were hippies selling jewelry and other crafts to the toursits. there were all these kids climbing around on the rocks, but my favorite part of garganta del diable was this guy who was selling slices of quiche. i ate four pieces. they were great.
the argentine country side is really quiant. along the road are signs for people selling homeade wine and olive oil, or maybe cookies or empanadas. i've just been eating so well. i can't believe it. last night i stayed in this woman's house who rents rooms. i showed up during siesta time, and everything seemed shut, but her grandson let me in, and then woke up his grandma to show me the room. the woman's name was maria copa. she was so, so nice. the water for ths shower was heated by a wood stove, and all the washing was done by hand in an outside sink. there was a beatiful garden with roses and a pomogranate tree, and it was so warm there that the edges of the roses were burnt from the heat. it's hard to believe that winter will come soon. i pretty much just hung out in the garden and read till the sun went down. i stupidly didn't take any photos though. anyways.... hope everyone is doing good. love,
-jessie
p.s. cafayete is a big wine growing region, and today i biked past a bunch of wineries. no wine tasting for me though. i thus far have resisted the urge to drink and bike. ha ha...

salta

2007-03-20T10:44:00.000-07:00

yay, internet at a resonable speed! this is a photo of me in southern bolivia sitting on top of a plant called yareta. it looks like a giant head of brocoli, but actually belongs to the same family as carrots and parsley. everything is southern bolivia was crazy looking.
this is laguna colorado. the lake is red due to some kind of mineral deposits. all these birds in the forground are flamingoes. there were probably 60 mph winds sweeping across the lake while i was there.
on the last day of my tour, we stopped at this little pueblo for lunch. i didn't totally understand what they were talking about, but eventually i got that there was some type of special bolivian mummy that we could go see. so... these were not mummies. they were literally decomposing bodies layed out on a rock. it was so crazy! like i literally could have reached out and touched these bodies if i'd wanted to. i have no idea who the the "mummies" were or why they were on that rock.

this is the last photo i took before that hail storm got really bad.

and then this is a photo of those truck drivers who rescued me from the strom. i gave them post cards of california, and they totally loved them. it's funny, people in bolivia went crazy for those post cards. there was one day in this market, where i gave one to this kid, and then next thing i knew, i was surrounded my kids and adults with outstretched hands all wanting post cards.
this is a photo of one of the truck drivers with the quirquincho. pandemonium broke out shortly after i took this photo because the quirquincho got scared and had diarhea all over the restaurant table.

i am so, so happy to be in argentina. pretty much all i've been doing since i got here is eating steak and icecream. for the first three days, i literally went downhill all day. in the afternoon there was a pretty strong headwind, so i didn't go that fast, but three days of downhill was great! i think i dropped from maybe 12,000' to about 3,000'. as i've dropped in elevation, the scenery changes have been really dramatic.
i've been cycling along this river valley called the quebrada de humahuaca. it's a UNESCO world heritage site because people have lived in this valley for 12,000 years. lot's of archeological sites and cave-paintings and whatnot. the colored sediments in these rocks are from about 65 million years ago back when dinosaurs disapeared.

i'm totally out of the high country now, and it's been super tropical and warm. the air smells like flowers and i've seen so many butterflies. for me, it's really nice to be somewhere warm after all that cold weather and hail! yesterday i was coming to this town called calderon. i crossed a river and saw a pavillion with a large table full of people eating steak and drinking wine. i rode up and asked them if it was a restaurant, and they said it wasn't, but that i should join them for lunch.

oh my god they were so nice! i totally ate this huge lunch of steak and potatoes and salad and bread. they wouldn't let me pay for anything! they were from buenos aires and on vacation and they said they all had kids that were my age. today they are coming to salta and they said to give them a call because they want to take me fishing! after lunch they all started fighting about who's son i should meet when i get to buenos aires. i love argentina! this would never have happened in the US.
so... i've decided i'm going to keep biking south for another month, then take a bus to buenos aires when i'm finished. so should be home in the beginning of may. hope everyone is good! love,
-jessie

humahuaca

2007-03-17T15:19:00.000-07:00

i'm in argentina. yay! should be the last country of my trip unless i get a crazy idea to bike over to chile. it is so, so nice to be back on pavement. also, there is a lot of meat in argentina. last night i ordered "milanesa" in this restaurant, and i think i might have eaten close to a pound of steak. i'm not kidding. like it was about 8 times the amount of meat that usually comes out at meal times, and it was so big, that it hung over the edge of my plate, and then they had to bring me another plate with french fries and salad because there was no room on the meat plate. it was a piece of meat that was maybe 10 inches in diameter and about a quarter of an inch thick. they also gave me three bread roles with dinner, and i made three meat sandwhiches with them,and like it didn't even put a dent in the quantity of steak left on my plate. also, they brought out extra virgen olive oil and balsamic vinegar for the salad. i don't think i've had olive oil since the united states. being in argentina feels like being back in a first world country. goods are sold in stores instead of along side the road on blue tarps, and there are things for sale that aren't basic necessities. it's pretty exciting. internet is still rediculously slow, so no photos. but one day....
-jessie

tupiza

2007-03-14T07:51:00.001-07:00

slow, slow internet here and i can't upload photos. i'm getting so behind in photos. maybe in argentina the internet will be really fast and i can just do a total photo entry.
i've had a rough couple of days since leaving uyuni. i'm not sure why, but my map failed to show that there was a road between this town atocha and tupiza. when i got into atocha, i couldn't find the way out of town. the train went directly to tupiza, but my map didn't show the road, so i assumed i had to take a round about route through quechisla and cotogaita. i kept asking people were the road was, and they told me there wasn't a road, but i could just follow the river. i tried that. it was totally crazy. like i was just pushing my bike through mud. so i back tracked to the town, and finally figured out that there was a road to tupiza. this guy just told me to bike along the train tracks until i saw the highway. biking along the tracks was fine, except i was worried about a train coming. my plan was that i'd just toss the bike down the embankment and roll down after it if i heard a train. perhaps not the most awesome plan. below me i could see trucks and buses driving along the muddy banks of a mostly dry river. eventually there appeared a road along the tracks, and i started biking on it. after a couple hours i saw a truck coming the opposite direction. i asked them if i was on the road to tupiza. they said i wasn't. they offered to drive me back the way i'd come and take me to the junction were the tupiza road started. i wish whoever was in charge of roads in bolivia would put up some road signs.
the road to tupiza was really isolated, but super beautiful. i biked past clifs and strange rock formations that looked like mini-grand canyons except that they were white, pink, green and red. i saw a lot of llamas and some more vicuñas as well. the climbs were really, really hard. i guess i'm still not totally used to the altitue. i'd bike for a little bit. then have to stop, rest my forearms on the handlebars and lean over my bike hyperventilating until i'd catch my breath. climbing at over 12,000' is challenging! going downhill wasn't any easier because the grades were insanely steep, and then the roads were dirt so you had to keep your eyes on the road the whole time watching out for potholes, loose rocks, and creeks that crossed the road. at some point i came across and zinc mine and stopped to have a soda. as i started the next ascent, i noticed that it looked like it was going to rain. i made sure i had all my rain gear handy and kept climbing. by the time i got to the summit, it was raining, hailing and there was lightning crashing around me. there was no where to take shelter, and there were sheer drop-offs down to the the river valley below me. i figured the best thing to do would be to try and get down to a lower elevation. as i started the descent, the storm got a lot worse. pea-sized pieces of hail pelted my body, and the dirt road quickly turned to mud. i started to feel really cold. as i got nearer to the valley floor, the rain and hail got so bad, that i couldn't even see the surface of the road anymore. i was pretty much biking through a river of hailstones and water. it was a really steep grade, and i had the breaks on as hard as i could, but my bike still fishailed out behind me as i continued to descend the mountain. at one point there was this river of mud and water pouring out across the road. i debated taking my shoes off before crossing it, but decided time was of the essence and i needed to get out of the storm before i got hypothermic. i started to wade into the water, and the current knocked me off balance and started to drag the me and the bike towards the cliff edge of the road. i regained my balance, and thought, "i'm going to die out here." finally i got to the valley floor. i set up my tent ontop of about three to four inches of hailstones and water, and threw my sleeping bag and therma rest into the tent. i blew up the therma rest, threw off my wet clothes and climbed into the sleeping bag. i started to warm up, but was worried about the hailstones ripping through my rainfly. fortunately they didn't. i stayed huddled up like that until the storm stopped. then, i opned up the rainfly and watched the road to see if any cars would come by. there was pretty much no way i was doing any more cycling that day.
after about a half an hour, a jeep came by, but they had no room for me. then a while later i saw a truck coming, and they said they had room for the bike. i was sandwhiched in the cab between two guys chewing coca leaves. parts of the road had washed out, and i had to close my eyes as we drove over the hailstone covered road. the guys were carting around used metal like dead batteries and cans. we'd stop any time they saw a beer can along the side of the road. once we got out of the area where the storm had hit, there were cactus plants, and then the guys would also stop to pick cactus fruit. at one point they asked me if i knew what a "quirquincho" was. i told them i didn't. they said it was an animal that ate meat, and asked me if i wanted to see one. i said sure. they guy on the passenger side said, "now don't be afraid." and he reached underneath the seat and pulled out a burlap sack. inside was some kind of animal that looked a lot like an armadillo. they said they'd seen it by the side of the road and captured it to take back to la paz as a pet.
we got into tupiza as it was getting dark and stopped at a restaurant for dinner. i showed the guys my camera, and they said they wanted to bring the quirquincho into the restaurant to have it's picture taken. so... i now have a lot of pictures of a bunch of truckers holding a quirquincho inside a restaurant. i gave the truckers postcards of california, which they loved, and then bought their dinner. they didn't want me to buy the dinner i guess, and so they bought me a 2 liter bottle of coke as a way of saying thank you. i¡m not sure what i'm going to do with all that coke.
i'm taking a zero day here in tupize because i just feel really wiped out from yesterday. i feel a little bit bad about hitching that ride because it's the first time i've hitched the whole trip, but i was really freaking out and thought that i was going to die. i wonder if maybe i over-reacted because about 5 km down the road from where i'd pithed my tent, there was no more hail. so if i'd just kept biking i might have been ok. anyways... i'm here now and i'm ok, so that's the important thing, right?
-jessie

Uyuni

2007-03-10T16:11:00.000-08:00

arg! the internet is sooo slow here. it's like being back in the 90s. i have had the most awesome couple of days. i think in the last 5 days i've taken 300 pictures!biking to Uyuni was pretty intense because the highway is dirt. no pavement, and it's the rainy season. i've slogged my way through so much mud, but the scenery has been breathtaking. i think probably these last couple of days have been some of the most beautiful scenery of the whole trip. i'm trying to convince my parents that they should take their next bike vacation in bolivia. if you think you might want to bike in bolivia, but want someone to schelp all your gear for you, send me an email because i found a really great mountain biking tour agency in la paz.
sometimes i had to cross these rivers with my bike. it was so crazy! like while i was doing it i kept thinking, "this is totally insane. but so awesome!" whenever i'd see a river, i'd take my shoes off and strap them to the top of one of the rear saddlebags. then i'd start wheeling the bike into the water. if i was lucky, it'd be a rock bottom, which the bike could roll over. but sometimes it would be a silty bottom, and i'd be bearfoot, sinking into mud in freezing cold water, trying to drag a 60 lb bike behind me. it was nuts! but really fun.
blogger and the slow internet are a bad combo, so i'm not going to load any more photos, but maybe i'll try again later. i just went on this three day tour of Salar de Uyuni, which is the worlds largest salt flat. right now it's covered in water and it is so amazing! we went driving through it in this old toyota 4x4 jeep. it felt like we were driving through the sky because the water makes a perfect relfection. the next two days we drove around the altiplano and visited these crazy lakes filled with different salts and minerals. one lake was brick red, another emerald green. and many of the lakes had flamingoes in them. i totally felt like i'd just landed on another planet. next time i get to a good internet cafe, i'll just post a bunch of photos. tomorrow i'll probably head out of here and start making my way towards the argentina border. hope everyone is doing good. love,
-jessie
p.s. also... i saw human skeletons. we stopped at this small town for lunch, and they had some kind of altiplano version of mummies, and we hiked up this canyon and there they were. three human bodies decomposing on top of a rock. it was so crazy. like they were partially bone, and partially flesh.

oruro

2007-03-03T12:29:00.000-08:00

this is not snow. the ground is completely covered with pea-sized pieces of hail. at first it was just raining, but then it started to hail, and as the hail got larger, it really started to hurt when it hit. luckily there was a small town along side of the highway, and i was able to take shelter under the overhang of a building. there were three other stranded bike riders waiting out the storm, and i ended up sharing my clif bars with them and showing them postcards of california.

i had my parents send a bunch of postcards to me so that i would have something to give people i met along the way. it's been really fun showing them to people. ironically enough, the most popular postcard is one of a green hill with a heard of black and white cows grazing on it. bolivians are really interested in the cows because they look different from bolivian cows. one farmer asked me if they were my cows. ha ha... i told him that i lived in a city and so i didn't know too much about cows.

so i totally got whatever sickness alice and claudia had. it was raining and hailing again the other day, and i just didn't feel very good, so i stopped riding at noon and got a really crappy hotel room for about $1.25. i ended up getting really sick and laying in bed for a day and a half with a bad fever. fortunately, there was this little kitty that hung out with me all the time, and that made me feel a lot better. i think the kitty had some kind of eye infection though. anyways, feeling mostly better today. being sick is a bummer. hope everyone is good! stay healthy. love,
-jessie

la paz (again)

2007-02-27T06:23:00.000-08:00

Claudia and i had a really long bus trip from cusco, peru to la paz, bolivia. there is a direct route between the two cities, and then there is a more round about way that involves a stop off in copacaban, bolivia. the bus company totally lied to us and said we had a direct route. the trip was supposed to take 12 hours, but ended up being 16 hours. at one point the bus stopped and there were a bunch of indigenous villagers selling weavings and trinkets to the tourists. these kids were there with a baby alpaca and it's mama. i gave them 60 cents for claudia and i to pet the alpacas. the kids said the baby was only two weeks old and still nursing. the mama alpaca kept coming over and kissing the baby. we hung out and talked to the kids for a little bit. their family has three alpacas, and now four with the baby.

after copacabana, all but maybe 6 other passengers got off the bus. the sun set, and it got really cold. this photo is one i took while biking through this region, but during the bus ride we couldn't see anything because it was pitch black. check out the snow on top of the mountain range in the background. it was freezing cold, and claudia and i hudled together underneath scarfs and plastic rain ponchos to stay warm. at one point the road stopped, and we had to take a barge across lake titicaca. i had done this previously on my bike, but during daylight hours. apparently it is illegal to cross the lake at night, so the buss driver told us to pull the curtains shut, and walked around with a flashlight collecting one boliviano per person as a crossing fee. the barges are just planks of wood held together, and the whole thing rocked rather alarmingly as we crossed the lake. finally we made it to la paz around 11:00 at night. we both were freezing cold with numb feet, and claudia didn't feel very good.
in the morning claudia woke up and was sick, so i figure i'll just hang out here in la paz until she feels better cuz it sucks to be sick and alone in a strange city. i'm really anxious to get back on my bike though.this is a picture of the wall inside the shower at our hostel. those wires go directly to the shower head, and then there is a switch to flip on when you want hot water. if you look closely, you can see that underneath the plaster, the walls are still made of mud and grass just like in the countryside.

it feels funny to be back in la paz. i've been traveling for so long now, that to return somewhere that i've already been makes me feel like i'm back in familiar settings even though la paz is wildly different from any american city. anything you could ever want to buy is probaby sold on the street. there are women with stalls selling electronics, toilet paper, flower arangements, locks and tools, clothing, sunglasses, snacks, weird looking drinks with strange wrinkled fruit in the bottom. sometimes it will just be one woman sitting on the ground with a bag of limes or some empanadas. yesterday i bought a shaving razor from this indigenous woman seated on the sidewalk with a display of various brands of razors layed out on a piece of cloth.
the city is clogged with traffic. very few people own cars, but buses and taxis honk their way through the maddness chocking the street with smog and noise. small toyota vans called "omnibuses" are everywhere. there is a driver, and then also i guy yelling out the van's destination and price. sometimes i think it must be a family affair because i've seen kids as young as ten yelling out of the van's open door. it's all pretty crazy, but at the same time it almost feels normal to be because out of all the places i've been on this trip, i've spent the most time in la paz. anyhows... hope everyone is doing good. love,
-jessie

Machu Picchu

2007-02-23T15:00:00.000-08:00

I think Machu Picchu is probably one of the most amazing things i have ever seen. just the mountains themselves surrounding the city are amazing, and then to have this beautiful, mysterious, inca city situated in the middle of clouds and jagged mountain tops is really incredible. not much is know about machu picchu. it was probably constructed in the 1400s. archeologists say that it is not a typical inca city, and that most likely it was a vacation spot for inca nobility. they estimate that around 500 to 1000 people lived there at any one time. inca stonework is really impressive. the stone blocks fit together so tightly that you can't fit a knife blade between them. the incas didn't use the wheel, so all of these giant pieces of stone were hauled up the mountain side and then chisled into place. at the base and doorways of the buildings the incas put really big stones, but then up near the top it seemed like they just stuck a bunch of smaller rocks together with some kind of morter. i seriously cannot imagine the number of people it must have taken to move the larger stones into place. after walking around machu picchu for a little bit we went on a 40 minute hike up this mountain peak called huayna picchu. the incas built terraces and a moon temple at the top. it was a pretty steep hike, and when we got to the top, we climbed up to the tallest rock and just enjoyed the view for a little bit. it was so great to be up there with all my friends. there are a lot of llamas that graze on the grass in machu picchu and for some reason they love having their photos taken. i've never seen anything like this before, but as soon as i got out my camera, these llamas came right up to me. i think they must have liked all the attention. here are some really cute llama photos. i just like can't get over how cute the llamas and alpacas are. after lunch we went on a hike through the jungle. at one point there were llamas blocking the path and we had to push them on their butts to get them to move out of the way. the jungle surrounding machu picchu is really amazing. i saw a bunch of different kinds of orchids, some crazy moss and lichen, neon blue metalic beatles, and giant irridescent blue morpho butterflies. the next day we went ot Ollantaytambo, which is an indigenous village with some inca ruins. many of the houses in the village are built on old inca foundation, and the whole town is layed out in an inca grid system, which is supposed to be shaped like a corn cob. ollantaytambo has some cool ruins and we spent most of the day hiking around and climbing on ruins. it was really fun. tomorrow tameem and john fly back to the US, but alice and claudia and i are going to go to bolivia together. hope everyone is good. love,
-jessie

Cusco

2007-02-19T17:16:00.000-08:00

my friends from california are visiting right now, and it's been super fun. i've just been spending money and hanging out. this is a photo of claudia and i in an "expensive" japanese restaurant in the miraflores neighborhood of lima. it's fun to eat in classy restaruants in latin america because by american standards, they are not that expensive.

alice's brother jon found this great hostel in the historic district of lima. there were pet tortoises and they just wandered around the hotel all day. at one point i went into our room, and there was a tortoise hanging out under the bed. we only spent one day in lima, and went to the san francisco church and saw the catacombs. unfortunately we were not allowed to take photos. but they were pretty crazy looking, just piles of dried up bones and skulls scattered below the church.

on sunday we flew from lima to cusco, the jumping off point to machu picchu. originally, cusco was the headquarters for the inca empire. the city was built in the shape of a puma, and contained many religious and ceremonial site. after the spanish conquest, the majority of the inca structures, were converted to spanish churches. this is the santo domingo church, but if you look at the foundation, you can see that it is built on top of an inca temple.
at first glance cusco looks like a spanish colonial city, but then everywhere you look are remnants of incan architecture. the huge stones of this wall are inca, but then on top is a spanish colonial contruction. i kind of wish you could erase all the spanish buildings to see what cusco looked like originally.
tomorrow we are going to take the train to machu picchu. it's been so great seeing my friends from home, and i can't wait to check out machu picchu. hope everyone is good. love,
-jessie

La Paz

2007-02-14T10:40:00.000-08:00

I’ve been hanging out in La Paz, Bolivia for like 5 days now I think. It’s been really nice. Biking into town was a little stressful. I asked a few people, which way to go, and they all pointed towards a fairly busy freeway. As I flew downhill I noticed several “no biking” signs, but no police stopped me, and eventually I made it into the city. It’s funny, because there is no way I would ever bike along a freeway like that in the US, but when bike touring, you don’t really have much of a choice.
It also is a little disorienting to enter into such a large city after spending so much time in the middle of nowhere. the two "hotels" i stayed in before la paz had no running water. I decided to stay at this hostel called the Adventure Brew Hostel. It’s a giant backpacker hostel, where they have a micro brewery on the fourth floor, and you get a complementary beer every night in the hostel bar and an all you can eat pancake breakfast in the morning.
My fist night there, I was talking to this British guy john, and we went up to the bar to meet up with a friend of his. It ended up that his friend was this American girl named Ingrid, who is the daughter of a friend of a friend of my parents. confusing, no? My parent’s friend Cathy had sent us both emails to see if we could meet up, but I was in Peru (I think) and she was in Ecuador so we never met. What are the odds of us both ending up at the same hostel in Bolivia?

While out to dinner with british john and ingrid, i ran into the irish couple, John and Po, who i'd hung out with at lake titicaca. the next day british john, and irish john and po and i all went to this british pub to watch the irish - french rugby match at 11:00am. we ordered a "proper british fry up" for breakfast, which included deep fried toast, baked beens, stewed tomatoes, fried eggs, and bacon. and then since it was a rugby match we all got beer as well.
The rugby match was insane. i've never seen ruby before, and it is a brutal, brutal sport. english john assured me that rugby was a "gentleman's sport" despite the violence. everyone in the pub was either irish or british, and peole were just going crazy for the game. whenever the irish would score, the whole bar would errupt in applause, with people yelling, "yeah! that's right mates!" it was pretty awesome. po said that this was about a quarter of the volume of an irish pub during a rugby match.
this is a picture of a box of alpaca fetuses. La Paz has a witch doctor market. it's pretty creepy. i'm not sure what the witch doctors do with the alpaca fetuses, but maybe it's best not to know. there are stalls full of herbs, and trinkets and fake US dollar bills. i've seen alters with these things on them, but never before the alpaca fetuses.

Yesterday Po, john and i rode mountain bikes down the "most dangerous rode." the tour company took all these photos of us and burned me a cd, but i can't get the cd player to open on this computer. so, if you want to see what it looks like check out this site http://www.hotelscostarica.net/Stremnaya/carretera-mas-peligrosa/. the rode is safer now because they built a new one that is paved. the only people who use the most dangerous rode are tourists on mountain biking expeditions. it was a really beatiful ride. you start off high above la paz in the altiplano, and then plummet down this dirt and gravel rode into the amazon basin. it was freezing cold in the morning, and boiling hot in the afternoon.
tomorrow i am traveling back to peru via bus and airplane to meet up with my friends for a 10 day vacation from my cycling trip. we are going to cuzco and machu pechu, and then i'm not sure what else. hope everyone is good. love,
-jessie

juli

2007-02-05T12:28:00.000-08:00

my trip around lake titicaca was so, so fun. lake titicaca is a mangled spanish version of the the quechua name for the lake, which is "titijala". "titi" means puma, and "jala" means rock. it's funny that the spanish call it titicaca because caca means poo in spanish.

the first stop on the tour was the floating islands of uros. some people call them the floating tourist traps, but i still thought they were really cool. there are about 30 of these islands, and they are all man made, constructed entirely from the totoro reed. the indigenous communities that live there just keep layering down more reeds every couple of weeks. we all wandered around the islands and then got to ride in a totoro reed boat over to the main island. i think if i had to live on one of these islands, i'd probably go insane from boredom, but it was a fun place to visit.

next we had a three hour boat ride over to amantani island. i had so much fun on the boat ride. i don't get to hang out and speak english that much, and a bunch of us sat on the roof of the boat and just hung out an talked for the whole trip. there was a really cool couple from ireland, an american women, a guy from chile, a couple from argentina, two serbs, two italians, and a girl from japan.
amantani island
has about 4,000 families divided into 8 communities. the primary language is quechua, but many people also speak spanish as a second language. there were a lot of wheat, quinuoa, and corn fields on the island seperated by stone walls. footpaths meandered between the fields and houses scattered around the island, and all the women still wore their traditional clothing.
part of our tour involved a homestay with a local family. my family was so nice. the kids were super friendly and kept hugging me and holding my hands. it was really great. their house was made from adobe bricks with a corregated steel roof. in their garden they were growing corn, beans, and quinuoa, and for lunch, my host mom made quinuoa soup from the garden. it was delicious.
right now around lago titicaca, there is a huge festival going on called candelaria. our host families took us to the main plaza on amantani to participate in the festivities. hands down, this was the craziest party i have ever been to. my pictures really don't do the scene justice. so, this was a pretty little plaza, and there were 8 bands playing at the same time. sometimes the bands were only 10 feet apart, so that if you stood between them all you heard was noise. all the young people of amantani were dressed up in these wild outfits and doing some type of coordinated dancing to the music, such that each band had its own wild group of drunken teenagers dancing in front of it.
because it was so hot, when people poured beer into cups, they got a lot of foam. the young people would chug down these little cups of beer and then fling the foam on the ground before they continued to dance. you might be able to tell from this photo that there are two bands playing right ontop of each other. in the forground is a band all in blue, and then in the background, right next to them in another band all in white. the island was without electricity, so everything came to a stop around 7:30 when the sun went down. my host mom gave me a candle when we were back at the house.
the next day we went to visit taquile island. the men on taquile do a ton of knitting, and the knitted hats they wear donote their rank and marital status. a hat with a white tip meant that a man was single, a long colored hat meant he was married, and a short knit hat, with a felt hat ontop signified that a man was a community leader. the men carried special purses for coca leaves, and when they wanted to great someone, they gave them a handful of coca leaves. sort of like saying hello. we ate lunch there and then headed back to puno.

today i did a short day (50 miles)to the town of juli. this guy Blander ran into me near puno and rode the whole way to juli with me, then turned around and rode back to puno. so he will have ridden 100 miles today. crazy, huh? he's 19 years old and is training to be in the army cuz he likes shooting guns. it's funny cuz when you pay to do these tourist tours, it's a little awkward because you feel like a lot of your interacations with the local people are them trying to sell you stuff. but when you bike tour people just like hanging out with you.
so... i've decided that i want to slow down and do more tourist stuff and not worry about getting to tierra del fuego before winter. it was a real bumber in ecuador cuz there was a lot of fun stuff to do, but i didn't have time. i think now i'm just going to bike from tourist attraction to tourist attraction. should be more fun, and i'll get to see more than just the highway. i'm still going to be traveling south though. ok, hope everyone is good. love,
-jessie

Puno

2007-02-02T13:15:00.000-08:00

I am currently staying in a really nice hotel in Puno on the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca. i've had a rough couple of days cycling through the andes, and the hot water in the shower felt so, so good. it is so crazy how rapidly the scenery can change. it only took about 20 miles of cycling out of arequipa before the desert started to give way to pampas grass. in the distance i could see the snow covered peaks of Chanchani, Misti, and Pichupuchu volcanoes. i entered a national reserve called Salinas y Aguada Blanca. along the road were signs that said, "drive carefully vicuñas crossing" Vicuñas are a type of camelid related to alpacas. they are an endangered species, and have thus far resisted domestication. i was so excited that i was cycling through an area with vicuñas that even though i was going down hill with an insane tailwind, i had the brakes on so i could look everywhere to see if there were any vicuñas wandering around. finally i saw some, dropped my bike along the side of the road, and started walking out into the pampas to try and get a good photo. i thought they would be really skitish like deer, but they let me get this close before they all started running away. man they are so awesome looking!
the indigenous people living in these parts raise alpacas. during the day they are let out to graze in the pampas, and at night they are hurded into stone walled inclosers. in Arequipa you could order alpaca steaks in the restaurants, but alpacas are mostly raised for their wool. baby alpaca wool is really soft like cashmere. i think alpacas are so awesome. anytime i saw an alpaca farm, i totally stopped riding to take pictures. most of them didn't turn out that great cuz they keep moving around, but you can see this guy's face pretty good. they are pretty cute, huh?

Between Arequipa and Lake Titicaca there is not much in the way of civilization. i ended up camping in a dry river bed the first night, and then sleeping in an indigenous family's house the second night. when i was camping, i woke up at around 2:00am and thought, "god it's cold." then passed out again. in the morning everything was covered in a layer of thick frost, and there was ice in my water bottles. rolling up a frozen tent with your bare hands is totally horrible.
i think i was camping at around 12,00 feet, and then started climbing. i was feeling alright considering the cold, but then my head started to hurt. by 11:00am i figured i was suffering from altitude sickness. my head was pounding and i was totally dizzy and nausious. i kept feeling like i wanted to fall over and pass out. finally i reached this little town with a restaurant. i ordered a bowl of soup, and was talking to the family who ran the place about not feeling very good. they suggested i drink some coca leaf tea. i'd heard before that chewing coca leaves can help with altitude sickness so i figured i'd give it a try. i don't think it did anything though. my altitude sickness didn't go away, and i didn't even get a buzz like you do from coffee.
after lunch my headache got a lot worse. anytime i had to climb uphill i kind of wanted to cry. at some point i got to this town called Crucero Alto, and there was a sign that said the elevation was 4,528 meters, which is about 13,500 feet. all the houses were made of stone with thatch roofs. i was feeling so messed up i almost asked one of the families if i could put my tent up next to their house and pass out for a while. but then i figured i might feel better if i kept cycling down to a lower elevation.

i ended up cycling down to this lake, and spent the night in this village called Santa Lucía. there were no hotels there, and this family who had a restaurant told me i could sleep in their spare room. they made me dinner, and then asked me if i wanted some coca leaf tea. i said sure, figuring it might make me feel a little better. i don't think it did anything, and it certainly didn't keep me up because i passed out immediatly after dinner. this morning when i woke up, my headach was gone, so that's good.
tomorrow i am going on a two day excursion to visit the floating islands of uros, isla taquile, and isla amantani. both tauquile and imantani have ruins on them so it should be a cool trip. hope everyone is good! love,
-jessie,

2007-01-30T06:21:00.000-08:00

this is going to be a very special update today. for some reason blogger is in English in this hostel. so i might be able to use spell check. this is a photo of one of the Nazca line drawings called "the hands". the panamerican highway cuts right through the nazca plateau where all the drawing are, and at one point there was an observation tower you could climb up in order to see some of the drawing from the air. most tourists view the nazca lines from hired prop planes because they are too large to view from the ground. not much is known about the nazca line drawings. they are huge geoglyphs created by the Nazca culture between 200 BCE and 700 CE., the largest of which is nearly 900 feet.

i've been riding through the middle of nowhere lately. it's super desolate and i've ended up doing a bit of camping. the winds have also been totally insane. they come off the ocean from the south west, blowing sand into my ears, eyes, nose and mouth. at one point i rounded a corner and sand dunes where literally blowing onto the highway, such that one side of the highway was completely covered with sand. because the wind has been so strong, it's taken me all day to go 60 miles on mostly flat terrain. i'll start cycling around 6.00am and not finish until 5.30 or 6.00 at night. the other night when i looked at my face in the hotel mirror, the side facing the wind was completely covered with sand. because this part of Peru is so sparsely populated, the beaches are pristine sandy shores with crystal, clear, turquoise water. at one point i looked down and saw a giant grey fish. at first i thought it was a huge shark, but when i stopped pedaling to get a closer look, i realized it was a dolphin. there was about 7 of them, and they were so close to shore. i think they were doing dolphin surfing because they would ride the waves in until it got to the point where the sand was getting all churned up with the surf, and then swim out to deeper waters. they did this over and over. it was so cool to watch. i've never seen dolphins so close up before.
january 27th was my birthday. i am now 26 years old. it's funny because the night before i ended up camping between these two abandoned mud huts on a bluff over looking the ocean. as i woke up on my birthday i laughed because waking up alone in the Peruvian desert is such an unusual start to a birthday. i left my campsite and started biking as the sun was rising, and around 7.00am came across a small settlement with a seafood restaurant where i stopped to eat breakfast. i started talking to these two truck drivers and we all ended up eating breakfast together. when i told them it was my birthday they were so excited and went back into their truck to get a jug of Peruvian wine from chincha alta region. it wasn't a totally confidence inspiring thought to imagine these two truckers driving all night and then starting off the day with a jug wine, but i figured they'd be ahead of me on the highway from that point on. these guys were so, so nice, and bought my breakfast, and gave me a bottle of water, and a paperback version of the bible as birthday presents.
today i am taking a zero day in Arequipa, Peru's second largest city. Arequipa is known as "the white city" because many of the buildings in the historic center are made from sillar, a white volcanic rock from the nearby volcanoes. in 2000 UNESCO declared Arequipa a world heritage sight due to it's combination of christian and indigenous architectural design. the ornate pillars on this building interweave Incan symbols of royalty, such as the two headed eagle, with more traditional christian symbols such as saints and angels. today i think I'm going to go check out some museums and convents and then get my bike worked on a bit. they breaks aren't working that great. oh, also, i am riding inland now away from all the wind. Arequipa is up at 7,000 feet, and my next big city Puno, along lake Titicaca, is at 12,000 feet. so i have a lot of climbing to do. i've decided to bike through Bolivia for a little bit before heading to Argentina. ok, hope everyone is good! love,
-jessie

Chincha Alta

2007-01-21T15:53:00.000-08:00

i wasn't totally sure how i was going to leave lima and find the panamericana south, but then i ran into these group of old guy cyclists, and i asked
them how to get to the panamericana, and they were all, "well if you wait a minute you can just bike out of here with us." they were so awesome. their leader had a wistle he would blow to warn traffic that we were coming through. in the 20 miles that we biked together, they stopped three times for breaks, and ate all my crackers. ha ha.... charro and pedro are so, so nice. they have a beach house that's 60 miles south of lima, and told me that i could stay there with them. they drove, and i biked, and then about 15 miles before the beach, they caught up with me in their car, and pedro brought a bike, and he rode my bike for the last bit while i got to ride sans panniers. this is a photo of all of us after i've had several vodka drinks and some wine. ha ha... pedro, charro and i went shopping, and they bought me that pink shirt as an early birthday present. so nice, huh?
it's crazy the extrem contrasts in standards of living out here. the beach house was like in a gated community resort area, and then this is how people live just a little further south. the wind has been better lately, which makes everything easier. soon i will get to see "the world's tallest sand dune", and if i go off route, "the world's deapest canyon." ok, hope everyone is doing awesome.
-jessie

Lima

2007-01-18T08:02:00.000-08:00

I've been riding through the desert some more. and i'm pretty sure that the wind is ruining my life. you can tell by my hair and the plants behind me, that there is a lot of wind. and it is not going in the same direction i am going. the other day i was working really hard to go downhill, and i stopped pedaling just to see what would happen, and i stopped going forward on a downhill! that's how strong the wind is.

yesterday i rode into lima, which is a giant city of more the 7 million people. riding into big cities is hard on the touring bike, and there is pretty much no way around lima. the outskirts of lima are crazy. shanty towns piled ontop of one another, garbage heaped along the side of the rode with whole families picking through the debris, dogs sniffing out and eating rotten meat. the combination of exhaust and rotting garbage made breathing extremely uncomfortable. my navigational technique for large cities involves asking random people for directions, and then using a combination of pointing and pantomiming to get my point across.
as i'm biking throught the crazyness of downtown lima. this guy on a motorcycle pulls up along side of me end ends up inviting me to his house. he and his wife were both professional bike racers, and are currently training to run the new york marathon in under three hours! they are so, so nice. yesterday the husband Pedro took me to miraflores, the tourist district and we walked around and stopped at this fruit cart, and Pedro bought me imported plums from chile, and figs and this type of fruit called chirimoya. then we got gelato and i got dark chocolate with yellow and red rum rasins and toasted almonds. oh my god it was so awesome. and then we all went out for pizza and sangria, and pedro wouldn't let me pay for anthing. they are so nice!
this morning i told Pedro that my mom wanted to see a picture of all their cycling trophies. he had them all shoved under the stairs, and told the maid to take them all out and clean them bofore i took a photo. they really have a ton of trophies. it's pretty crazy, like first place in the whole country kind of cycling trophies. tomorrow i'll probalby head out and keep biking south. i totally screwed up on my estimate of when i thought i'd be here. alice and everyone is coming out to lima to visit me mid february, so i figure is should be about a week south of la paz, bolivia by then and can just fly back. my organizational skill are impressive as always. love,
-jessie

casma

2007-01-13T14:40:00.000-08:00

i`ve been biking through a really intense desert lately. it's flat, which is awesome, but i've been fighting the wind a lot. sometimes it's a head wind, sometimes it's a sideways wind, but as long as it's not a tailwind, it's a challenge. the scenery is pretty awesome though. i haven't been in a desert since baja, and this one looks much different. so... i've been biking by myself since new years, and it's going pretty well. my main so sorce of conversation seems to be meal times. this is somewhere north of trujillo. i was totally starving, and i'm trying to shove down as much food as possible, and this girl, just cannot contain herself. she thinks it's the craziest thing that i am from the US. she wants to know how to say all these words in english. pretty soon she's brought over all of her friends to hear me speak english. all i want to do is cram food in my face, but it's hard to ignore 8 really cute kids. for some reason they think "television" is the funniest word in english. i don't think they got that in the US we speak english and not spanish because they kept asking me how i knew so many english words. ha ha.... this is a really nice family i had lunch with the other day. the guy on the left talked with me for a really long time about puruvian politics and history and wrote down a bunch of places i should visit when my friends come and visit. by the by alice i'm really, really excited you are coming out! only a month!
i think they had elections here sometimes in 2006, and on all the adobe walls and buildings are advertisements for political candidates. i photographed this one because it says "fujimori". each political party and candidate has a symbol, it could be a drawing of a river, or the number two, or a star. then it will say "marca así" and i guess when you go to vote, you have to mark the symbol of the person you want to vote for. crazy, huh?
this is a photo of this ruin i went to see called Sechín in the casma valley. not much to look at i guess, but it's supposedly one of the largest constructions ever built in Prehispanic America. here´s some info my dad found on the internet. "Five plazas extend 1.4 km from the central mound, three with central sunken courts, one of which is about 80 m in diameter. The main mound is 44 m high by 300 m by 250 m., making it the largest single construction in the New World during the second millennium B.C. The mound was faced with granite blocks, some weighing over 2 tons. Sechín Alto's great size may represent a 1000 year span of building." this is one of the carvings at Sechín. for some reason a lot of the carvings looked like they could be prehistoric simpson's characters. my favorite part of the trip was the museum. there was this insane looking mummy, mouth agape, feet tied together.
i couldn't understand all the spanish, but they think that this was a forced sacrifice, and that she died by asfixiation, and that she was burried alive! probably shouldn't have taken a photo, but they didn't have a no photo sign up so......
i asked at my hotel how to get to sechín and the husband and wife who lived there haggled with like three different mototaxi guys before getting me one for $0.60. it was a 20 minute taxi ride, and we were way outside of town. at the museum, i payed the guy and he left, and then i realized i had no idea how i was getting back to the city, or where in the city my hotel was, or what the name of the hotel was. this couple were the only other people at sechín and i asked them if i could get a ride back to town in their mototaxi. they were super, super nice, and we stopped at this mountain and the woman told me this story about how everyone hears singing, and sometimes sees beautiful blond children there, but that if you go after dark, you'll never return. i wish we had legends like this in palo alto. maybe i'll make one up about antonios nuthouse. anyways, they were like, "where is your hotel", and i had to be like, "well.... i'm not sure, but i know it's near this park along the panamerican highway." after checking several parks, they found my hotel. then they totally wouldn't let me pay for the mototaxi ride. people in latin america are so, so nice. ok, hope everyone is awesome! love,
-jessie

blogger is lame again

2007-01-10T16:14:00.000-08:00

blogger is not working great again. i can't upload photos. i biked trough a crazy looking sand dune desert today. this internet cafe is blasting reggaeton. if you want to know more about reaggaeton you should read this wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggaeton. i love reggaeton, they play it everywhere. wikipedia is so awesome. i've been reading all about peru tonight. i had a really great zero day in chiclayo where i did nothing but hang out in my underwear in the hotel room eating croisants and brioch while watching cable television. i feel a little bad that i didn't check out any of the archeological sights nearby, but i really needed a rest. anyhows, could be in the internet cafe´s fault that nothing is working. hope everyone is awesome. i'm doing really good. love,
-jessie

olmos

2007-01-07T17:04:00.000-08:00

leaving ecuador and entering into peru, i cycled through a "dry tropical forest". these kapok trees are totally crazy looking. they are completely neon green all over, even their trunks. i was really enjoying the riding, which was mostly flat, but then i took a smaller road into chulucanas, and i had about 25 miles of dirt road at the end of an 80 mile day. it was definately challenging. what was cool though was i got to ride throught some really interesting small towns. i usually aviod taking pictures of people or their houses because i feel like it's sending a message that their poverty is a tourist attraction to me. people here in peru have constructed some really crazy looking houses out of nothing more than mud and sticks. this is a photo of the cemetary in one of these little towns. while i was taking this photo, there were probably like five people sitting outside their mud houses watching me. dry tropical forests only exist between really specific latitudes, so now i think i'm cycling through some kind of desert. last night in the hotel room there was a sign on the door that says they've been having a severe draught since 1998 and that out of the cities 9 wells, only one remains operational. there's not a lot out here, and today i stopped at the first place i saw for lunch. there were some old ladies in black sitting outside their mud hut, and some guys playing cards. the old ladies told me there was goat for lunch. after i ate my goat, i asked them if there was a bathroom. they took me back through the kitchen. it was a total nightmare. flies everywhere, animal carcases, insane cast iron cookware that looked as if it was from another century. i wanted to scream at the old lady and say, "you fed me food that came out of here? no wonder i am sick all the time!" at that point she grabbed this skinless animal leg hanging from the ceiling and cackled, "el cabrocito!" which mean "the little goat". with out getting into detail, the bathroom was so insane that i just ended up peeing by the side of the highway. i literally couldn't pee there.
as i got into town this evening, this woman beckoned me over from the side of the road. she was super excited to talk to me and i ended up hanging out with her and her extended family for a while. you can kind of see one of those mud houses behind us with political slogans painted on the side. her kids ended up taking me around the town to find a hotel. they were so awesome. also today a bus driver going in the opposite direction slowed down to hand me a mango out the bus window. it was a really good mango. love,
-jessie

macará

2007-01-05T15:29:00.000-08:00

tonights accomidations reach an all time budget low at $2 a room. this is a photo of the hotel bathroom. notice the large plastic trash can directly below the showerhead (in the place where one usually stands to shower). i tried to move the trash can, but it is filled with a mysterious dark colored liquid. since the tiolet doesn't flush on it's own, i assume that the plastic jug is supposed to be double duty gravity flusher, and shower water collector. i've slowly been winding my way out of the ecuadorian highlands, and it's been getting hotter and hotter! also, the terrain is much drier than it was before. the climate feels similar to baja. for some reason who ever constructed the road neglected to stabalize the hillsides and i've been riding over frequent landslides. it makes me a little nervous because as i look up, it seems that the mountain could come sliding down at any moment.
i am at the border between ecuador and peru. once i am in peru, there are only three countries left, peru, chile, and argentina. so far i've gone through alaska, canada, the US, mexico, guatemala, el salvador, honduras, nicaragua, costa rica, panama, and ecuador. 9 countries in total. three countries left makes the trip seem almost over.
-jessie

catacocha

2007-01-04T14:23:00.000-08:00

i am staying in this little town called catacocha about 60 miles to the west of loja. my hotel room was only $4, and the ladies who work there are so nice! they just cannot believe that today i rode my bike from Loja to Catacocha. i told them i was going for a walk around the town, and one of their husbands poked his head out from another room, and told me to walk up this hill for a "beatiful view of our lord jesus christ." i told him i needed to bring my camera for that, and he was like, "oh, yes! bring your camera! it is beautiful." i'm going to start posting some photos from earlier in ecuador because i didn't get a chance to post them before. this is Cayambe volcano as seen from the town of Ibarra. i never would have imagined that there are snow covered volcanoes at the equator. i literally haven't seen snow since northern canada. crazy, huh?
just north of Quito lies the equator. this is a photo of me with one foot in the northern hemisphere and one foot in the southern hemisphere. i'm not totally sure how exact that line is though because about 50´down the road was another sign and another monument that said "equator". i got my photo taken next to the bigger one. later on that day we stopped at this indigenous village for lunch. i don't know what tpye of meat that is (clyde thinks goat), but it was totally delicious. there were no utencils, and everyone there, including the local police man, was eating with their hands. we each got exactly one napkin.
this photo is of the outskirts of quito. i'm not sure what it is, but you can instanly recognize that you're not looking at a US city. i really liked quito. the new part of town is really clean and nice, and has a shopping mall that made me feel like i was back in the US. the historical center is really cool too and has a lot of beautiful colonial architecture. i needed to replace my chain, rear cassette, and middle chain ring, and asked this cyclist i saw to recomend a bike shop. i ended up at this place called The Bike Shop, and the owner Diego was super nice. they replaced everything on my bike for free, and Diego spoke perfect english. everyone who worked their was really awesome, and i ended up learning a lot about ecuadorian history, and cool places to visit in quito while i waited for my bike! Thank you to eveyone at The Bike Shop!
Tomorrow i will be at Macará, which is the border town to Peru. the cycling has been totally gorgeous, but there is not a lot out here. the other day i had run out of food and was totally starving. i had one last hill (mountain) to summit before the descent into Loja, and i was dreading doing it on an empty stomach. just as i started to climb, this car pulls up next to me filled to capacity with an ecuadorian family. this guy leans out of the passenger window and says, "how are you? where are you going? do you need any water?" i told him i was all set on water, but that i could definately use some food. he gives me a bag of christmas cookies, and then this grandma in the back seat passes up two weird looking pieces of fruit for him to give me. they were about the size of grape fruits with a peel that was dark grean to black in color. i asked them what they were, and they told me "tangerines". i've honestly never seen tangerines that looked like that before, but i don't i'll ever enjoy one more in my life. it was a total miracle that that car stopped when it did, and the cookies and crazy looking tangerines totally got me up the hill. anyways, hope everyone is doing good!
-jessie

Cuenca

2006-12-31T16:38:00.000-08:00

i think i am going to be a vegetarian again after this trip. there is a lot of really disgusting meat that i've been eating lately. when i translate for clyde in restaurants, i tell him there is "meat" on the menu, but then he wants to know what kind, so i tell him "steak" to let him know that it's from a cow, but then when the food comes out, he says, "this is not steak! this is scraps!"
when you see the "carnecarias", which translates to "meat store" it's easy to understand why i continue to be plagued by stomach/intestinal problems. lately i've been thinking about life post trip, and i'm really looking forward to not being sick all the time.

Since arriving in Ecuador we have been doing a lot of climbing. the scenery is breathtaking. all day long we struggle up and down volcanoes, which can be exhausting, but is also incredibly rewarding. the other day peter broke his "land speed record" at 51 mph.
Lonely Planet says that the panamerican highway to Cuenca wasn't paved until the 1960s, however there still remain many unpaved sections, some with grades as steep as 10%. going uphill was quite a challenge, then the fog moved in.
i don't think i could see more than 50 feet in front of me, and i worried that cars wouldn't see me at all. as we continues to climb higher, i realized we were actually climbing through a cloud not fog. eventually we climbed higher than the clouds could see them filling up the vally below us. as we rounded the corner, the view changed again, and most of the clouds were stuck on the other side of the volcano. i never get bored of looking at all the crazy scenery. it's so different than california. mountains of this magnitude just don't exist in the bay area.

Tonight is new years eve. Ecuadorians celebrate new years very differently than we do. it's almost like if halloween was celebrated by adults making politcal statements through public sculpture and performance art. i don't understand a lot of the messages as i know almost nothing about ecuadorian politics and my spanish isn't that great. this one shows bush hanging off of a helicopter, while ecuadorians try and sneak across the US/Mexico border while being shot at by border patrols. on the right is a boat with immigrants that says, "titanic" on the side. these scenes block off entire city streets, and then the people who create them send out a person to collect money from the cars that pass by. usually the money collectors are wearing crazy outfits like sheep skin body suits and gorilla masks, or they're dressed in drag booty dancing for all the traffic. it's pretty wild. anyhows, i hope everyone is having an awesome new years! love,
-jessie

ambato

2006-12-27T16:51:00.000-08:00

we are in ecuador. yay! ecuador is really awesome. there are volcanoes everywhere. arg. the new version of blogger sucks and photos are not uploading. blogger, you are lame. maybe i'll try and update later when blogger doesn't suck so hard. quito was cool except for coming in and out. on the way in i was attacek by dogs and they ate my shoes (they were hanging off a back pannier), and on the way out, a bus got to close to me and tapped by shoulder as it drove by. ok, miss everyone. love,
-jessie

sailing

2006-12-04T10:43:00.000-08:00

tomorrow we are leaving on a two and a half to three week sailboat trip to ecuador. so no updates for a while.... love,
-jessie

casco antiguo and panama viejo

2006-12-02T15:33:00.000-08:00

this is a picture of peter, erik, and i that clyde took. i think it's impossible to do a trip like this and stay normal looking. my hair just keep growing into a bigger, and bigger snarl ball ha ha... part of me wants to let it keep growing, but i think i should probably cut it off. today we went to panama viejo, which is the oldest city in all of the americas (i think). it was founded in the 1500s, but later abandoned because pirates attacked the city and most of it burnt down. they ended up moving the capital to what is currently refered to as casco antigua, the colonial neighborhood of panama city. we have seen several colonial cities so far, antigua guatemala, and then leon and granada in nicaragua, but casco antiguo was definately the most run down. parts of the neighborhood looked like shanty towns, and as we wandered around i began to feel like we were possibly entering into bad neighborhoods. whe stopped for lunch at an open air cafe, and got huge plates of food for $1.50. clyde didn't finish all of his rice, and this guy wearing greasy rags came in, walked over to our table, and grabbed clydes rice with his hands and ran out. it was pretty intense.
right now in panama the retired people are striking and they've blocked off a major road through the city. they want the government to give them an extra dollar a day to live on. it's really been messing up traffic, and yesterday we couldn't get a taxi to take us out of the downtown. they've been striking like this for two months i think. people say it's crazy that the government can put all this money into expanding the canal, but can't help out the elderly. know what's kinda funny? in spanish retired is "jubilacion", which sounds to me like "jubilation". ok, hope everyone is awesome! love,
-jessie

Panama Canal

2006-12-01T04:48:00.001-08:00

the other day we went to the miraflores locks on the panama canal, and it was so awesome! The panama canal is crazy! at certain places they have these "locks" that the ships have to pass through in order to rise up to a higher elevation. the ships enter the locks, the gates close behind them, and then they open up the front gate and the ship moves out. i didn't totally understand how this works but the locks raise and lowever the water level so that the ship can flow up to a lake in the middle of panama that is higher than sea level. these huge cargo ships come throught and it seems impossible that they don't scratch the sides of the canal. you can see the locks starting to open here. they say that the locks are 7 stories high. the little silver train next to the ship is helping to pull it through the locks.. the canal has a really good museum and a small theater where they show a short film about the history of the canal (i slept through the presentation). when the movie was over, they didn't turn the lights on or open the doors, and eventually people just started filing out on their own. it ended up that patch adams (that doctor that they made the robin williams movie about) was visiting the canal, and the whole staff was freaking out about the american clowns and television crews and what not. random, huh?
we are going to be hanging out in panama for a while i think because we are waiting for a ship that sails to ecuador. seems like a pain because flying will be quicker and cheaper, but peter really wants to go on a boat... i think i will try and be a good sport about this. we are sailing out of colon on tuesday. hope everyone is good!
-jessie

Panama Canal

2006-12-01T04:48:00.000-08:00

the other day we went to the miraflores locks on the panama canal, and it was so awesome! The panama canal is crazy! at certain places they have these "locks" that the ships have to pass through in order to rise up to a higher elevation. the ships enter the locks, the gates close behind them, and then they open up the front gate and the ship moves out. i didn't totally understand how this works but the locks raise and lowever the water level so that the ship can flow up to a lake in the middle of panama that is higher than sea level. href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/4931/3381/1600/475280/IMG_0819.jpg"> these huge cargo ships come throught and it seems impossible that they don't scratch the sides of the canal. you can see the locks starting to open here. they say that the locks are 7 stories high. the little silver train next to the ship is helping to pull it through the locks.. the canal has a really good museum and a small theater where they show a short film about the history of the canal (i slept through the presentation). when the movie was over, they didn't turn the lights on or open the doors, and eventually people just started filing out on their own. it ended up that patch adams (that doctor that they made the robin williams movie about) was visiting the canal, and the whole staff was freaking out about the american clowns and television crews and what not. random, huh?
we are going to be hanging out in panama for a while i think because we are waiting for a ship that sails to ecuador. seems like a pain because flying will be quicker and cheaper, but peter really wants to go on a boat... i think i will try and be a good sport about this. we are sailing out of colon on tuesday. hope everyone is good!
-jessie

Panama City

2006-11-29T04:14:00.000-08:00

busses in central america are really rad. they must get old yellow school busses from the US and then totally pimp them out. the tourists here call them "chicken busses" because you can see people carrying chickens on them. the paint jobs are totally wild. a lot of them have sort of fantasy scenes painted on them like bikini girls hanging out in glaciers with polar bears. some of them have new england farm house scenes painted on them, which in central america must seem equally exotic. this is a photo of one of the chicken busses mud flaps. check out the sweet bikini babes on this bad boy. the driver thought it was so cool that we were taking photos of his bus.
i think we went the wrong way through costa rica and missed a lot of cool stuff because we took the coast instead of the mountain route. the coast was flat, but it seemed like one giant american retirement community with huge gated communities everywhere. we met this german cyclist who said the coast was beautiful, but that there was 40 km of dirt road, but that is was "fine". this was the worst dirt road ever. it was like riding through mud for hours. i think we were only going 3 mph. everything was bouncing around, and a screw snapped in half on peter's rack. my bike got so muddy, that my drive train would just totally freeze up and i couldn't pedal forward. in a couple days erik flies home to vermont, but clyde has recoverd from dengue and flew into panama yesterday, so now we are a group of three again, minus erik plus clyde. hope everyone had a really nice thanksgiving. love,
-jessie

2006-11-21T17:03:00.000-08:00

i think costa rica will end up winning the award for crappiest roads overall. which is funny, becauase costa rica is the richest of all the central american countries. this is a photo of a bridge on a major highway. trafic can only go one direction at a time, so all the cars who are going the other way just have to wait for a while. this is a picture of where we-re staying tonight. very glamorous. today we met a japanese cyclist who has been biking for over a year and almost always camps. so in a way, this is high living.
costa rica is total "gringolandia". in a way it's nice because no one is yelling "gringo" at us anymore, but prices are also higher. a huge percentage of the country is protected as a biological reserve, which is pretty cool. erik's map says that costa rica is home to more bird species that all of north america combined. we haven't seen that many birds, but yesterday we saw a whole monkey family swinging through the trees. it was so awesome. i think i'm really into monkies. there was a dad, and a mom, and two babies, and sometimes the babies would ride on the mom's back. i tried taking pictures, but none of them came out that well. love,
-jessie

Liberia

2006-11-19T18:12:00.000-08:00

so we are in costa rica right now, but this is a picture of this island we hung out in yesterday. it is a volcano in the middle of lake nicaragua. pretty cool, huh? the tourist brouchers boast that it is the world-s only freshwater lake with two volcanoes in the middle. this is a picture of the bigger one. we took this ferry out to the island, and they totally walked our bikes onto the boat on this plank of wood. i kept thinking, "what if my bike falls in the lake...." but they were totally pros at walking the plank. lake nicaragua is huge. i think at one point FDR wanted to put the canal there, but it ended up in panama instead. appearently there was some kind of celebration on the island, and we ended up in the back of this pick up truck on the way to see a rodeo. it was a pretty ghetto rodeo, but i thought it was super cool anyways cuz i-ve never seen a rodeo before. the bulls weren-t particularly tough, and the guys just stayed on until the bull stopped bucking around, and then they-d hope off. all the young macho guys would crawl underneath the chainlink fence, and then when the riderless bull came charging around they-d climb up to the top so that the bull didn-t crush them. also, everyone in the "ring" was drinking tons of beer. some of the bulls were cows, and the anouncer called them, "vaca ferocisima", which means totally ferocious cow. we-ve passed a lot of cows on this trip, but i-m not sure i-d catagorize any of them as totally ferocious.
Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the americas, and when we crossed the border from honduras to nicaragua, this is what the road looked like. then the next day it rained, and it got even worse. this is a picture of erik avoideding potholes near a semi. the road was so bad that we were going faster than the semi trucks. after a while, the road surface got better. this computer loads photos really well, so i-m just going to post some more.

Leon

2006-11-15T17:16:00.000-08:00

so we crossed over into honduras for a day, and now we are in nicaragua. lately it feels like we are just biking through the middle of nowhere. there is nothing out here. i don't recognize the plants, even the vultures look different. today it poured, and poured, and poured, and i remember staring at this dead dog laying in a puddle of water, and an old man careening around the road on this make shift bicyle and just thinking how insane all of this is.
i think there must be less and less tourists in these parts of central america because all day long we hear chants of "gringo! gringo! gringo!" a lot of the houses are made out of mud, and there will be kids in the yard watching the road and as soon as they see us, they start up with the "gringo" chant. i can't tell if it's derogetory or not. yesterday erik, peter and i stopped at this gas station and all these people were just staring so hard at us. i kept making jokes that we should start taking off all of our clothes to see if it would make them blink. oh my god, i'm in this in internet cafe, and they're playing that song that goes, "if you go to san francisco, be sure to put a flower in your hair." i'm not going back to san francisco for a long time.
once we get to panama city, erik is going to go back to vermont. i think he and his girlfriend miss each other a lot, and he is running out of money and getting tired. also, we all got in a fight with gary, and he hopped on a bus to costa rica. so soon it will just be peter and i. how weird is that. i'm really sad that erik is leaving. everyday i talk about him leaving a lot so that i can get used to the idea. i say things like, "when you get back you can wear nice clothes all the time." or like, "hey when you're in vermont it wont be hot all the time and any time you get hungry you can find something to eat. that will be awesome." the internet here is super, super slow and i'm having trouble uploading photos. so that's it for this post. love,
-jessie
p.s. i think my stupid fever is finally gone, and i'm back on the ciphro.
p.p.s. today when i was finding us a hotel, i left my bike with erik and peter, and when i came out they were talking to this guy about the trip, and then this women selling food on the side of the road started yelling at us, "he's a theif! he's going to steal your bike!" and the guy didn't even blink or anthing and peter and erik had no idea what the lady was saying because they don't speak much spanish, and i had to be like, "we have to go now." it really weirded me out.

San Lorenzo

2006-11-13T15:55:00.000-08:00

so the other day i fell over. actually i think i have fallen over quite a bit as evidenced by all the other scars on my leg. i think between the scars, tan lines, and the fact that the tweezers i brought along for my eyebrows have made their way into my patch kit, that this trip is helping me to look super hot. the other day erik and i were biking along, and i was just super hungry. so we stopped in this little town to buy sodas and chips. we were definately the first gringos to ever go into this pueblo. the whole place like freaked out. when erik rode by, this baby literally burst into tears. he scard the baby because he looked so weird. no one in el salvador is as white as erik, and no one has a beard. first all these kids came out, then their older siblings, then the mom with the scared baby. it was totally crazy. i bet we had 15-20 people watching us eat chips and drink generic cola. they kept saying things like, "oh, the old guy doesn't understand anything." and eventually i was all, "look, he's not that old. he's only thirty. he just has a really big beard." i think erik is getting tired of people pointing and staring at him all the time. i still think it's funny when kids yell, "santa clause!" when he rides by. tonight we are in san lorenzo, honduras. i feel really bad. i have diarhea again, and i think i have a fever. my whole body is really achy. i keep taking ibuprophen and aleve, but i'm not feeling good at all. it's really hard for me to bike like this because all i want to do is be laying down and resting, and it´s so, so hot. like the kind of heat that makes you talk about swimming pools, and cold lakes, and fall weather. crazily enough, this is supposed to be the coolest time of year in central america. oh god, guess what else? there is totally algae growing inside my water bottles. i think the only time i ever cleaned them out was when i was home in CA. ok, hope everyone is good. miss you all bunches. love,
-jessie

san vicente

2006-11-11T17:30:00.000-08:00

so, we got totally lost leaving san salvador, el salvador, and today we ended up on this tiney country road that circled this giant crater lake at the top of this extinct volcano. the road was awesome, and there was almost no traffic, but i think we were climbing forever. the last 4 kilometers were torture. it was super, super hot, we were hungry, and tired and the climb was just relentless. erik said we were going 3.5 miles per hour. we were hoping that once we got back up into the mountains it would be cool, like in guatemala, but it wasn't at all. the climb just totally zapped all of our energy. we ended up eating lunch at this place that was the el salvadorean equivalent of mac donalds, and i tried to eat a 1/2 burger, but it was way too much meat and i couldn't do it. this is a picture of erik at the end of the day in our hotel room.
and this is a picture of me from last night's hotel room. my mom wants more photos of me... i'm not totally sure how this happened (i'm going to blame it on crappy maps), but yesterday we accidentally got on the wrong freeway at the end of the day, while the sun was setting, and everyone we asked said there were no hotels for miles, and miles. we totally panicked and started biking really fast, and ended up at a "couples hotel". they had only one room available, and there was no running water. sometimes bike touring is awesome, and sometimes it's like desperate times, desperate measures. to flush the toilet, there was a garbage can full of water, and a bucket, and you just dumped water into the toilet bowl until it flushed. so we had all been using the toilet and not flushing, and peter goes into the bathroom, and we hear this scream, and he'd accidentally dropped his boxers in the toilet. he decided the best option was to rinse them out in the garbage can full of water, and hang them off of this protruding rebar coming off of the bathroom wall. then we got some pupusas to eat, and i drank a bunch of beer (i wasn't in a great mood due to being lost and the lack of running water). the pupusas were kinda messy, and i was a little drunk and washed my hands in the gargage can of water, and peter was like, "hey, you pretty much just washed your hands in my pee." not the best night. anyways, soon we'll be in honduras. it's cool flying through countries like this. hope everyone is good. love,
-jessie

Pacaya

2006-11-07T11:36:00.000-08:00

don't read this one dad, pacaya has not gotten any safer since the last time i was here....
So there's an active volcano near antigua guatemala, and it's only like US $10 to go see it. last time i was here, 6 years ago, the volcano was not as active and you could climb all the way up to the crater, but now there's been a whole lot of lava and you can't get up there any morè. they pack up a bus load of tourists, and then the bus driver walks up to the volcano with you carrying this huge shot gun, which doubled as a walking stick. when you get up to the base of the volcano, everyone just sort of spread out and started climbing over the "cooled" lava flows to where the molten lava was flowing. the ground was super hot, and if you stuck a stick into the lava where we were walking, it would catch on fire. it was really crazy to be walking over all this stuff. the lava was super unstable, and just underneath the surface you could see red moltan lava.
by the lava flows there was a guide, and he said if we just hung out and waited the lava would reach where we were standing in a half hour. he said it was moving at a rate of 5 kilometers per hour. you didn't want to stand too close to the flows because of the heat. but i was close enough that i could hear the rocks cooling and tumbling down the side of the volcano. it sounded like a river, but made of stones instead of water. it started to get dark, and i was feeling a little scared because it was hard enough climbing over the lava when you could see were you were going. looking at glowing lava in the dark is pretty cool though. the clouds over the flows were pink colored, and it was just this wild contrast between the black cooled lava, the red molten lave, the dark blue sky, and the pink clouds of smoke and steam. we did end up getting down off the lava flows before the sun set, but we had like an hour climb down the side of the mountain in total darkness. we all looked super cool with our matching petzel head lamps. i think that if pacaya was in the US, probably you'd be allowed to climb up to the base and look at the lava, but there's no way that you'd be alowed to climb all over the flows.
this is a picture of antigua, guatemala. it used to be the capital of guatemala, but in 1777 (easy date to remember) there was a big earthquake that destroyed most of the town, so they moved the capital to guatemala city. antigua is really cool looking though. the streets are all coblestone, which sucks if you're on a bike, and all the buildings look like they could just as easily be in an old european city. all the doors are made of huge slabs of wood with these ornate knockers shaped like lions or womens' hands. it's cool just to walk around and check out the old buildings. this is probably like the worlds least attractive photo of our spanish teachers, but it's the only one i took. i invited them over for dinner last night becuase it was our last day of classes. Milli (my spanish teacher) is on the left, and then on the right is Ceci (erik's teacher), and next to her is Molli (peter´s teacher). the teachers said we were all bad students because we never did our homework, but i liked hanging out with them cuz they were funny and always telling mildy of color jokes. milli kept cracking up at me when we had class because all of my grammer examples were totally morbid. like we'd be learning about past participles, and my examples would be stuff like, "the dead dogs rotting along side the highway", or the "broken bicycle was fixed by me.", or "the sick cyclists are in the hotel". i think maybe i could be hired to write a dick and jane style spanish primer for the adams family if they ever wanted to learn spanish. i think we're leaving tomorrow. love,
-jessie

Antigua

2006-11-04T13:27:00.000-08:00

we are in antigua guatemala hanging out for a week taking spanish classes. i'm not sure how much good it's doing us, but i think we all are really glad to have a week off. peter got really sick (from food), and erik spent the first couple days asleep. i went to make a phone call on halloween, and came back to the room at 6:00 and found both of them totally passed out. it was maybe like the lamest halloween of my whole life. i wandered around for a while, then came home, ate a bowl of cereal and read for a little bit. i was really bumbed out about it because halloween is my favorite holiday, but then it ended up the next day, dia de los muertos (day of the dead)was really awesome. i went to this pueblo with my spanish teacher and some of her friends, to see these kites made out of tissue paper called barriletes. this is a close up of one of them. the indigenous people make them, and a lot of the messages were really political. this one says "live in peace and protect the world", but a lot of them said things like "guatemala, you've hurt me so much. you've burned my land, killed my ancestors, but my culture survives." at the end of the day, they tried to fly the kites. a lot of the came crashing back down to the earth and were destroyed, but some of them flew. and it was so crazy. it just looked like these giant, ornate jelly fish flying through the air. on the strings the indigenous people put messages to the dead.
fifty seven percent of guatemalans are indigenous, and they are really, really different from the ladino (non-indigenous) people of guatemala. the indigenous people have really strong spiritual beliefs. for example you're not supposed to take pictures of them because they think you are robbing their sole. the women still wear traditional clothing, but most of the men use western clothes. during dia de los muertos, the indigenous cover the graves of their relatives with pine needles and flowers and hang out in the cemetary all day remembering their family members who haved passed away. it was really beautiful.
This is a picture of the "organ meat stew" i had for lunch. next to it, in the pot with the red rim, is iguana. the big black lumpy thing is beans. yum... i kinda wanted to try the iguana just so i could say i'd eaten iguana, but the organ meat stew was not sitting well in my stomach, so i had to pass that one up. love,
-jessie

Panajachel

2006-10-29T17:19:00.000-08:00

wow! guatemala is so awsome! these last couple days have been some of my favorite from the whole trip. we crossed the border into guatemala and like just started climbing straight up. it was crazy. it was so steep i almost couldn't do. peter was hanging out with me, and we'd go for a little bit, then stop and take pictures, then climb a little more, and then stop again. i'm not sure, but peter thinks we were climbing for like 5 hours. just straight up. sometimes i couldn't believe how steep the road was. i was in my granny gear and standing up. also, the condition of the road was horrible. we weren't on a major highway, but more of a country road that connects up with the interamericana highway. you couldn't ever take your eyes off the rode because it was just totally filled with potholes. we had no idea how steep the road was going to be, and we were aiming for this town san marcos, but we never made it. i saw a soccer field, and peter and i camped there, erik ended up sleeping in this woman's house, and gary hitched a ride in a pick up. we stopped just in time too, because this thick, thick, fog rolled in and you couldn't see more than a couple feet in front of you, and then it started to pour down rain. seriously finding a spot to camp on a super steep mountain is hard to do, so it was really lucky we got to that soccer field. the next day we all found each other in san marcos.
after san marcos we has some downhill, but also a lot more climbing. this is a picture of erik at the top of this pass after it had stopped raining. it totally hailed that day too. it's been really cool up here, which is so nice after all that insane heat. there's this town called quetzaltenango in spanish and xela (pronounced "shay-la") in mayan, and we wanted to spend some time there. it was about 15 k from where we stopped the night before, and so we figured with all the intense climbing we'd been doing it would take us about half a day to get there. but it was all downhill! it was totally nuts! like we just cruised down there in 15 minutes. it was a crazy downhill too becuase there was so much to see, but then if you took your eyes off the rode, you'd die. like we're flying down this mountain and there are all these indigenous women in hand woven skirts and embroidered blouses balancing jugs of water on their heads, and crazy mud huts, and wildly decorated buses churning out black smoke, but if you turned your head to check them out, you'd fall off the side of the mountain.
after quezaltenango/xela we met up with the interamericana, you can see that the road is in much better condition and there's even a shoulder. the riding was great. unfortunately i got really, really sick the night before we left. like i was up puking and was so nausious i couldn't sleep. in the morning i had diarhea. when we stopped for breakfast, but i was so messed up and ill i couldn't even drink a cup of coffee. i wanted to die. everyone's eating, i felt so bad i just pulled up the coller of my shirt over my head and started crying. getting out of town was a nightmare. the road was terrible, potholes everywhere, buses blasting you in the face with black smoke, dust and sand flying everywhere, street venders hawding crap from all sides. i felt like i was in hell. every bump in the road made my stomach lurch. i didn't think i was going to make it. then the road mellowed out after we got out of town. we had a lot of climbing, but it was an easy grade. we summited the highest point in the central american ineramericana highway, and it seemed like we were higher up than the clouds.
then we had this awesome downhill into this crazy town, where everyone was indigenous, dressed up in these wild outfits, didn't speak spanish, and like a lot of the old people didn't have any teath. we wanted to get lunch, but it was too crazy. all these indigenous kids and old folk surrounded us and like started talking in an indigenous language. i can't even describe how insane this experience was. like i almost felt like we were surrouned by space aliens. i'm sure they felt the same way about us. the guys ended up eating lunch in a cafe later on in the day.
we finished the day with another screaming downhill to this lake called lago de atitlan that is totally surrounded by volcanoes. this was one of the most awesome downhills of my whole life. i bet we were flying downhill for at least 15 minutes. at one point peter turns around and screams at me, "oh my god! what f*cking grade do you think this is?" it was so steap, and the sun was setting, and we're flying past waterfalls, and huge volcanoes. it was really amazing. the crazy thing is, we biked about 50 miles, had a huge climb, and i totally didn't eat the whole day and was really sick. i think if you'd asked me before this stip if it was possible to be up all night puking, and then be violently ill the next day and bike up and down mountains for 50 miles without eating, i'd probably tell you no way. but i totally did it. sometimes i think if you set your mind to something and are just really stuborn about it, you can do it no matter what. i'm still really sick though. we took a day off today to cruise around the lake in boats, and i still haven't really eaten. i kind of feel like there is a midget army in my stomach and like they're all wrestling, or maybe knife fighting. i'm back on the ciphro though...
clyde flew back to the U.S. he left tapachula mexico, but then had a bleeding sore on his lip and was worried it was skin cancer, so he flew home. i feel bad. also, he said he was lost with out me to translate for him. i really wish we could have said goodbye in person. so now we are a group of three...
-jessie

san juan

2006-10-26T17:57:00.000-07:00

we're finally in guatemala! yay! i'm so, so happy to be in guatemala! i forgot to bring the camera so i'll update more when i can post photos, but it's totally freezing cold, and like all we've been doing is climbing up these steap, steap mountins. like peter thinks that yesterday we rode uphill for 5 hours! ok, hope everyone's good. love,
-jessie

Dengue Fever - Yawza!

2006-10-24T14:12:00.000-07:00

so we still haven't left tapachula. clyde's been sick for a while, which is why we've taken so many zero days lately. before he wouldn't let me take him to the doctor, but then yesterday he wanted to go. this is a photo on the wall of the laboratory. i asked the lab technician what it was, and she told me that it is jesus assisting a surgeon. it's good to know that jesus is on board with the mexican doctors. it was funny translating for clyde, because it was sort of like the opposite of my job 2 summers ago where i translated for migrant farm workers when they went to the doctor. anyways, it ends up that clyde has dengue fever. i'm totally getting paranoid that i'm going to get it. the doctor said we are all at increased risk becuase we've been sharing hotel rooms. like if a mosquito bites clyde and then bites me, i'll get dengue. i'm covered in mosquito bites. for some reason i have more bites than anyone else. also, there are 4 types of dengue, once you get one type, you can't get it again, but you can still get the other 3. the doctor said that there is one were blood come out of your eyes, ears, nose, ect... you get the picture. aaaaaaaaaaah! i'm so freaked out about dengue. anyways, we're going to leave clyde here, and he's going to catch up with us later. he's going to take a bus.
last night peter and erik and i came back to the hotel and realized that gary and clyde had the room key. so i figured we should go get a beer. we are kinda in this shady neighborhood, and after asking around ended up in this place called el gallito (the little rooster). it was kinda sketchy and erik didn't want to stay. he wanted to buy the beer and drink in the hotel room. but i wanted to stay, and peter said he'd do whatever i wanted, so we stayed. it was like this room with bikini girls on the wall, and a juke box and plastic tables. the owner came over and started talking to us, and kept giving us more free beer every time we tried to tell him we wanted to leave. he was really funny. i kept going back and forth between english and spanish translating what he said. the owner, mario fabio really wanted a photo of us, but he said he didn't use the internet, so today i got two photos developed and we went back and gave them to him. he was so happy about it, that he gave me this rediculous wooden plaque with a an eagle eating a snake on a cactus carved into it. i didn't really want to bike around with it, so i gave it to the guy working at the hotel.
Everyday it pours down rain in the afternoon. like crazy, crazy amounts of rain. this photo doesn't really do it justice. the other day peter and i got caught out in it, and it was insane! anyways, hopefully tomorrow we'll leave for guatemala. i was going to have everyone take a week off in antigua and take spanish classes cuz i'm getting tired of being everyone's translater, but now i'm not sure we should because we've taken so many days off with clyde being sick.
-jessie

Tapachula

2006-10-23T13:24:00.000-07:00

i think tapacula can best be described as tiajuana's southern cousin. it's a major border city with guatemala, and it's super crazy and intense. almost anything you could want to purchase is on sale here. wedding dresses, motorcycles, plastic toys, soccer shirts, washing machines... there are a ton of indigenous women from guatemala here too. you can tell because they are wearing those handwoven skirts and the embroidered shirts. appearently everyone just sneaks across the border because to cross legally is $10 US. this is a photo of me that peter took. i am petting a snow tiger in parque migel hidalgo in tapachula. check out my super hot tan lines from my t-shirt. yawza! i talked to my mom and dad last night and they wanted a picture of me on the blog. here's to you mom and dad!
i think probably i make the worse decisions ever when i'm hungry. so erik and peter ran out of money in esciuntla and there were no atms, so i shared mine with them, but it ended up that we all left escuintla broke with out snack food. we should have waited for clyde and gary where the road split off for tapachula, but we were all so hungry that we decided to go into the city a little bit and eat lunch near the highway and catch them as they came in. we stopped at this sandwhich place, and i was so hungry i didn't feel like asking the guy what kind of sandwhiches he made, so i just told him i'd have two of whatever this other lady was eating at the counter. so my sandwhich was like a meat orgy. it had bacon, hotdog, hamburger and sliced ham all chopped up and friend together. then he put it in this bun with some cheese, a big smear of mayonessa and some raw onions and hot sauce. then he smeared mayonessa on the outside of the bun and fried the sandwich on the grill. i ate both sandwiches. i didn't feel good afterwards. also, clyde and garry took a different route into the city and we didn't end up seeing them so we rode into the center and found them there. then it started pouring down rain. all the guys sat at one table of this cafe and i ended up hanging out with this guy Ruben who bought me a lot of beers and some tequila. sometimes i really wish the other guys could speak spanish. there was a slight break in the rain and i went to try and find us a hotel room. the streets were flooded like rivers. it was crazy. people selling cds and cassete tapes under plastic tarps. bicycle taxis waiting to take you across the river streets. i ended up in a bad neighborhood with guys laying in puddles of water huffing paint out of empty coke bottles and then this morning i saw kids doing it. i did end up finding a good hotel room though.
this is a picture of this snack that peter really likes. peter's totally obsessed with bimbo baked goods. this one cracks me up though because it's like a chocolate doughnut called "negrito", which means "blackie" in english and has a picture of this dude with a 'fro on the front. there are no black people in mexico. anyways... hope everyone is good. clyde's sick so we're hanging out waiting for him to get better before going to guatemala. love,
-jessie

Esquintla

2006-10-20T19:02:00.000-07:00

i've been hanging out with peter a bunch, and it's been really awesome. everyone keeps asking me if he's my brother, which is cool. today we were biking along, and this truck piled high with watermelons passed us, and peter was all, "man, it be awesome if that truck stopped and gave us a watermelon." and they totally did. it was so great. we each ate half a watermelon, and it was just the best watermelon ever. sweet, crisp, juicy... then we went swimming in the river. our next plan is to buy cheap plastic rafts and try to raft down the river. the current is pretty strong. sometimes bike touring just seems like the best thing ever because it doesn't matter what you do. if you want to stop and eat watermelon under a bridge and swim in your stupid spandex bike shorts, you totally can.
tomorrow we're going to be in tapachula and then the next day guatemala. i'm really excited to get to another country. it seems like we've been in mexico forever! right now we're in this town called escuintla, and right before we got to the hotel, i saw this guy who had a three wheeled tricycle taxi and he had a flat. i helped him fix it, and he was super happy because there isn't a bike repair place in escuintla and he didn't have a patch kit or anything. he had never seen tire irons before. the wheels were bolted on and he just tipped the whole thing over in the street to fix the flat. anyways, he said he wanted to give me a tour of the town, and so i got a ride in the bike taxi. it was pretty sweet. he said it weighs a lot and sometimes really fat ladies want rides and that sucks. anyways, hope everyone's doing good. i'm not sick anymore and am totally biking at a reasonable pace. love,
-jessie

Tehuantepec

2006-10-17T11:20:00.000-07:00

I'm so, so, so, so tired! as my parents always say to me, i've been "burning the candle at both ends". i left puerto vallarta three days after gary and clyde and two days after erik and peter. i caught up with them in acapulco when they took their zero day, but i didn't take one, so when we got to puerto escondido, i was totally tired. then instead of resting i stayed out all night and got up early everyday to make pancakes and go surfing and what not. i probably shouldn't have gone out the night before we left, but it was just so, so nice to hang out with girls, that i figured it'd be worth it. but then i got sick. so now i still haven't rested and my throat hurts. I can't keep up with erik, peter and clyde at all. i have like zero energy. maybe next rest day i'll "rest". It just seems like if you're going to go into a new place, might as well hang out with people and see the town, otherwise what's the point? i really miss all those girls i was hanging out with. i can't even tell you how awesome it was to have girlfriends. they were super, super awesome.

these are photos of what the road looks like. i think erik, clyde, and i are all bored of it. peter still likes it. but it just looks the same everday. soon we will get into guatemala, and i think things will be different and more awesome. lately i've been listening to the ipod during the day while i ride because i'm hoping that listening to music will give me some more energy. erik peter and clyde were getting more water at this store, and i was hanging out with these kids. this is a picture of them listening rocking out to the ramones. they said they liked the music. anyways... hope everyone is good. love,
-jessie

puerto escondido 3

2006-10-14T18:40:00.000-07:00

these are the three girls from puerto escondido that i've been hanging out with today, laura, yuli, and claudia. they want us to go out tonight, but i think i should sleep. laura is a teacher, and i asked her about the barricade across the highway that said carlos is a represor of teachers. she said that carlos is the secretary to the state of oaxaca. in spanish it's secretario de gobernación. i'm not sure what that means in english. anyways, she said that initially the teachers were on strike because they wanted a salary increase. but that it got really politcal, and now there are teachers who were politically active who have been "disappeared". in spanish it's called "desaparecidos".
everyone at hostel shalom is so, so nice. i really like it here. maybe one day i'll come back. yuli says that if i stayed here for three months, i could get really good at surfing.
-jessie

puerto escondido 2

2006-10-14T11:55:00.000-07:00

i'm so tired. i need to sleep. i've been hanging out with this girl yuli who works at the hostel. yesterday she took peter and i surfing. we left the hostel on her moto. so it was yuli, peter and i plus a surf board and a boogie board. it was so super fun, but we were all to heavy for the moto. my brain is all confused right now and it's awkward to speak english because i've been speaking mostly spanish for the past 24h. i can't remember how to say moto in english, but it's like a small motorcycle. after we were done surfing we went to the supermarket and made everyone a super good pasta dinner. then yuli, peter, her friend laura and pretty much everyone else at the hostel (except erik) went out to this bikini fashion show, and bar. and it was so crazy. we all drank a lot, and we were dancing in the rain. we didn't get back till super late, and then i woke up early to make everyone pancakes, except we didn't end up leaving today because peter is really hung over and it's pouring rain. so i guess i could have slept more. i'm hanging out with yuli and laura and this other girl claudia right now. it's cool to hang out in a city with people who live there because they know were all the cheep stuff is. they took me to this restaurant where it's only US $1.80 for a big breakfast and a cup of coffee. also, it's nice to meet cool people and be able to hang out for a little bit instead of just leaving right away like we usually do. yuli's been laughing at all my crazy tan lines, and she says she has an extra bikini that she's going to give me so that i can get an even tan at the beach. i'm a little embarrassed to show off my white, white stomach, and white, white thighs. we'll see.... i feel really out of it though, sometimes i think maybe i push the envelope too far or whatever. also, today yuli got fired because she slept in too late. i hope she can get her job back... i feel bad.
-jessie

Puerto Escondido

2006-10-13T08:26:00.000-07:00

Lot's of animals wandering around in mexico. pigs, horses, donkeys... all walk along the road and also die along it. i have seen more dead dogs in mexico. i guess in the US there are people payed to clean up roadkill. not here. i wonder what would happen if like there was a giant decapitated horse in front of my apartment. probably i wouldn't clean it up. how do you clean up a dead horse? you can't bike it away, so you'd need to borrow someone's car. but would anyone loan you their car to put a dead horse into? and would anyone help you lift up the dead horse? i think probably i'd just leave it to rot like everyone does here. also, there's no trash pick-up. people just through it along the highway. there are a lot of giant scarey looking vultures. they eat trash and dead animals along the highway. what do you think everyone at home would do with no trash pick-up. would people burn it, or just throw it one the street? some garbage doesn't really burn though.
I tried a new fruit yesterday called "tuna" in spanish. i think it's from a cactus. you peel off the skin and then eat the inside. there were a lot of hard seeds, which i spit out, but later learned you just swallow. the fruit was really good though. super juicy and tasted kinda like melon. it's really exciting to eat a new kind of fruit because it's always a totally new unimaginable flavor, almost like discovering a wild color you've never seen before.
Erik's hair grows in leaps and bounds. it's kinda cool being back with the guys, but also kinda a bummer. probably is a lot safer though, and maybe my mom can stop worrying a little bit. the thing that's awkward for me, is that none of the guys really speak spanish. so i can hang out with other people but they can't. i try and talk and translate for them. but it doens't really work that well. also, they're really into staying in hotels, but you don't get to meet new people when you stay in a hotel. erik says he feels like he's trapped in that movie groundhog's day, where everyday is the same. but i think it's just because that's the way they travel, only talking to each other and sleeping in hotels instead of asking people if they can camp on their property. Peter still looks the same as when we started i think. this morning we woke up before everyone else and made pancakes for everyone. i think the other guys liked it. we're staying in this super rad hostel. everyone went to bed last night, but i stayed up till like 3:30am drinking beer and playing cards with these guys from spain, switzerland and mexico. i totally lost, but had a great time and learned a new card game. also i met this girl yesterday who's going to take Peter and I surfing and boogie bording after lunch. it's raining right now though, which sucks.
There's supposed to be a lot of political unrest right now in mexico because a lot of people think that the election votes were not counted correctly. this is a picture of this barracade that stretched across the highway. it says "carlos is a represor of teachers." i don't know who carlos is, but someone told me that the teachers took over the radio station in Oaxaca. Anyways.... hope everyone is good. i'm doing good, except i'm hardly sleeping at all right now. not sure why.
-Jessie

San Marcos

2006-10-09T18:33:00.000-07:00

So acapulco was a huge city. i really had no idea that it was so big. when i last updated, i stopped at the edge of the city to take a break from the traffic cuz i felt like i was kinda freaking out. so the highway just ended and dumped you out onto surface streets, and all i wanted to do was get outa acapulco and back into the coutryside. i keep winding deeper and deeper into the city, crazy traffic, noise, skyscrapers. i'm looking for a sign or some street that looks like it will take me outa town, and i am at this one corner, i look over and see peter. what are the odds right? it'd be like running into someone randomly in the middle of san francisco or something. so i end up meeting up with everyone and we go out for dinner. i was so excited to speak in english that all these english words just kept running outa me and i kept giggling and drinking beer and didn't eat much of my dinner. we went out to see some clif divers, which is supposed to be a big deal in acapulco, and then today we rode out. so i'm back with the group right now. i slept on the floor of their hotel room. i didn't sleep very much though.
so today we're stopped at this little tienda drinking sodas and taking a break from the heat. this coke delivery truck stops to drop off/pick up bottles and there are two armed guards. clyde thinks this is insane and starts taking pictures. i end up talking to the one guy and he says that all these roadside stops pay in cash and that the truck carries like $100,000 pesos ($10,000 usd) so they need to armed guards. clyde wants to know if he's ever used the gun, and the guy says he used to be part of the mexican arm. then he wants the guys to take a picture of me and him together.
it was totally insane, it was taking peter for ever to take this picture! and the guy was totally groping me. what's funny though, is like in mexico, i'm a tall person. i am 5'3'', and i'm totally bigger than the guy with the gun! he's like simultaneously groping me and puting my finger on the trigger. awesome. not sure about staying with the group, but i'm gonna ride with them a little bit, might take off later. hope everyone is good!
-jessie

Acapulco

2006-10-08T13:22:00.000-07:00

this is a photo of this really nice family i stayed with in Zijuantenejo. they were super into my bike trip and gave me this little toy wrestler, which i now have mounted on my handlebars. People have been so, so nice to me - it's crazy. like i feel overwhelmed by kindness. today i was drinking a coke at this little tienda by the side of the road. i ended up talking to this guy and his kids for a little bit, and he was all, "doesn't your water get hot?" and i said i was always drinking hot water. he took his machete and cut down some little branches for me and then strapped them onto the back of my bike over the galon jug of water i have on the back rack, so it was in the shade. so nice, huh?
yesterday as i left Zijuantenejo, there was this crazy party down by the river. i guess they have a kind of boat race, and at the half way point are bands, and food, and everyone is hanging out chearing on the rafts. i threw caution to the wind and ate a whole buch of street food, and i didn't get sick! i think i have a stomach of steel now. i ate a big cup of sliced up jicama, cucumber, papaya, watermelon and oranges with hot sauce. fruit and hot sauce is a really awesome combination. all these people kept coming up and talking to me, and these two guys Rene and Fernando were super nice, and Fernando is going to put me in his magazine. pretty cool, huh?
It's still super, super hot. yesterday i drank 5 liters of water, most of which i think i sweat out. all day long i'm sweating. this is a picture i tried taking of my face so you can see all the sweat. gross, huh?
I'm in Acapulco right now, but i think i might not stay here tonight. it looks like a huge crazy big city, and i kind of just want some place chill. i sort of feel overwhelmed sometimes. like i just get into city and have sensory overload.
-jessie
p.s. thanks so, so much to everyone who's sent me emails and commented on the blog and what not. i miss everyone a bunch, and it's so great to hear from everyone.

Zihuantenejo

2006-10-06T17:04:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of what i ate for lunch. what could it be? who knows... i stopped at this roadside cafe, and i asked what they had for lunch, and i didn't recognize any of the words they said. so i just told them i'd take the last thing they'd mentioned, and this is what came out. i think the tortillas are blue corn tortillas, and i think there was maybe some kind of red meat and chiles in there, but as to what those white blob-y things are, i have no clue.
-jessie

Lazaro Cardenas

2006-10-05T17:09:00.000-07:00

biking by myself is going really awesome! i feel a lot better about everything and i´m sleeping a lot better too. i´m not sure what was going on before, but i was having a really hard time sleeping through the night, which i think contributed to the exhaustion.
it's funny, i think before this trip i was thinking that i'd find "the real mexico" by biking through here. but i`m beginning to realize that there's no such thing as "the real mexico" because everywhere is so different. the other night i ended up camping with this family in cerro de ortega just outside of tecoman. both the mom and the dad worked in the banana fields. the dad invited me home (i think he was a little drunk) and then when i got there, his wife (or as he refered to her his "mujer") was like, "what are you doing? who is this? why have you been drinking?" it was a little awkward, and so i just told them that i´d set up the tent in the yard.
their two little girls were super cute, and were totally mezmerized by my bike, tent and sleeping gear. they were amazed that the sleeping bag could fit into the little stuff sack, and then i told them it was filled with feathers and pulled one out for them. they thought it was magic. i guess sleeping bags are kind of magic.
then the neighbor kids came over and showed me this tree. there are these little yellow fruits you can eat off of it called "nancy". they were really good. i don't think we have them in the US. So the house was like a one room cinderblock thing with no running water or electicity. they lit the place with candles at night, and then if you check out the photo of the mom, that big cement thing she's standing next to is filled with water. it's crazy cuz these people were only two years older than i am, but already they had a family. the evening was kinda awkward for me though, because the mom got upset that i could cross the border so easily, but mexicans had to "run across". i didn't really know what to say, and just told her that it totally wasn't fair. it's crazy to think how my american passport let's me go wherever i want, but if i was poor and mexican there's no way i could do my bike trip. in comparison with that family, my trip seems rediculously extravagant. Then i told them i was going to sleep, and they really wanted me to sleep in the house, but i felt like i'd be imposing, so i told them i was going out to my tent. then the mom, dad and kids came out, and the mom was like, "aren't you scared? come inside. vampires will come and carry your little house away in the night." and i was like, "no really, i'm fine." and then the mom was all, "wolves will come out of the hills and eat you. drunk men will walk into the yard in the middle of the night and bother you." it was totally insane. like they would not leave me alone. so finally we compromised, and i moved the tent into the back of the house so that it couldn't be seen from the street. but then the dad and mom got in a fight and i could hear him hitting her and her screaming, "don't hit me! don't hit me! you're drunk!" it was wierd....
i keep trying to take pictures of all the crazy wildlife i'm seeing but all the birds fly away from me and the iguanas slither away into the jungle plants. i have seen a lot of this flower though. anyways, here's one animal that moved slow enough for me to get a picture. giant tarantula!
Last night i stayed in this indigenous village called Tizupan. I ended up hanging out with these guys and eating watermelon that they chopped up with a machete and put hot sauce and chile-lime salt on. water melon is surprisingly good with hot sauce. these guys were so, so nice, and we all hung out for a while, but i was super tired and ended up telling them that i wanted to go to sleep. one of the guys, was like, "here, i want you to have this watermelon for your trip." if you think about it, a watermelon is probably like the worst present you can give a touring cyclist. it's huge, weighs a ton, and in order to eat it, you need a pretty big knife to chop it up (the blade of my knife is probably an inch and a half). so i told him that it was too much for me to eat by myself, but they gave it to me anyways. ha ha... i gave it away to this guy i saw in the town the next morning. here's a picture of one of the guys chopping up the watermelon with a machete. anyways, the sun's setting and i'm going to get a hotel room tonight and take a shower! yay showers! i love being clean! love,
-jessie

Puerto Vallarta day 3

2006-09-30T16:39:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of me relaxing at dales appartment. i'm still feeling tired, but i think i'm going to leave tomorrow morning. there's supposed to be a 27 mile climb out of puerta vallarta so hopefully i'll get an early start.

mostly i´ve been reading, walking on the beach and hanging out on dale's roof drinking tequila. it's cool watching the sunset from up there because the ocean mirrors the sky and you can watch the water change from blue to green to grey to black as sky changes color. there is a pirate ship that takes tourists out for a sunset ride with free booze and you can hear their drunken revrlry drift up the hillside. at 9:00 the pirate ship shoots of fire crackers and they seems to be exploding right onto dale's roof.
my family is really worried about me biking by myself.
-jessie

Puerto Vallarta

2006-09-29T07:46:00.000-07:00

I've been in Puerto Vallarta for a couple of days now. it's super, super touristy here, and the crazy thing is that it's not even tourist season. people tell me that the tourists don't even start arriving until november because it's too hot right now. it was weird riding into town. all these crazy american hotels, the shereton, holiday inn, burger king, costco, pizza hut. it was late in the day, and it started to pour down on us. plus, the roads are these crazy coblestoned insanities, and it was really hard to bike up them. the mexican drivers were super awesome though and kept honking and waving at us and flashing us the peace sign and thumbs up. i really think mexicans are so much nicer to cyclists than canadians and americans.
This is a picture of this hotel room we stayed at in las varas. that's peter looking through the bars of our glassless window. the place was super ghetto, and we ended up pushing these two beds together and all three of us slept on them. the "bathroom" was literally a cement hole in the wall with a spigot coming out of the wall and a 5 gallon bucket underneath. i think that was the sink, and then there was a shower head, and a toilet. once you took a shower, everything was wet, and then you needed to fill up the bucket of water and dump it into the tiolet to get it to flush.
this is a picture of this yogurt we ate that morning. it's called "lala", which is cool because that's what we used to call my sister Laura when she was little.
We were really into the hotel we got in Puerto Vallarta. here's a picture of me in the bathroom after biking throught the downpour. you can see that the shower has it's own divider so water doesn't get all over the rest of the room. sweet right? then we turned around and saw this sign on the door.
basically it says child prostitution is a crime.
We've been riding past some really pretty beaches.

I think the trip is falling apart a little bit though, so i am in low moral. i think after three months of traveling like this, there is a certain type of exhaustion that settles into your body and doesn't leave. i remember feeling like this on the appalachian trail. big pete packed up and went home to wisconsin (i think i spelled that wrong). Dale decided to rent an appartment for a month here in puerto vallarta. here's a picture of the view from his window.
and here's a picture from inside the place.
pretty nice, huh? probably this is a little bit crazy of me, but i just started feeling like i couldn't deal with anyone, so i told erik and young peter to go ahead with out me, and i'm just hanging out here with dale for a little bit. this morning dale and i were sitting in his new place drinking big pete's instant coffee that he'd left behind and talking about life. what a crazyness, huh? probably none of us will even stay friends when this is over, but for right now we're each other's best friends. i wonder how it will be traveling alone. i guess if i don't like it i can always catch up with the guys. it just started seeming exhausting to be around them. i wonder if we are all losing it. Dale thinks we wont finish. i hope i finish. i bet young peter will. he seems indefatigable. i think erik wishes he wasn't still on the trip. but he doesn't like the idea of giving up. he's really homesick though. i don't feel homesick, and i still want to do this, i guess i just feel tired of a lot of stuff. we'll see how the future plays out.
-jessie

San Blas

2006-09-24T09:25:00.000-07:00

i´m super loving being in mexico. it is so, so awesome. all of these towns we're riding through have been so cool. outside of mazatlán we stayed in this town called Escuinapa, and it was just really awesome. we got in as the sun was setting, and it seemed like the whole town was just out and about, hanging out on folding chairs in the middle of the sidewalk or chilling in the town plaza. you never see that many people outside in US towns or cities. Erik and i went out for dinner, and i ate marlin. that´s pretty cool, huh? maybe i´ll be the first kid on the block to eat a marlin. it tasted great, kinda like a cross between lox and tuna. the next morning we ate breakfast in the market at this little food stand, and we got scrambled eggs with chiles and tomatoes, beens, cheese, a huge stack of fresh tortillas, and coffee for $6.
I got erik this giant wonder woman piñata for his birthday, and everyone has just been cracking up when he rides by, because he strapped it to the back of his bike. no one in mexico has blond hair like erik, and kids on the street yell, "Santi Claus!" when he walks by. it´s pretty funny. when i ask people to guess his age, they always think he´s 40 or 50. one day this guy thought he was peter's dad. then yesterday this guy asked me if he was my husband, and when i said no, he asked me if erik was my dad. ha ha...
so yesterday for erik´s birthday we stayed in this totally posh hotel with air conditioning, and there were white terry cloth robes in the closet and we got a bottle of white wine, cranked up the AC till the room was only 60 degrees, and took showers, and hung out in the white robes getting tipsy. it was like the most awesome thing ever. we kept just like cracking up because we felt so posh.
mainland mexico feels significantly cooler than baja, which is really nice. it´s super humid though. so still hot, just not as bad as baja. it´s a really nice change to go from the desert to this wet tropical environment. everything seems to just grow like crazy out here. huge flowering bushes with orange flowers, vines, wild marijuana plants, giant snakes, armadillos, and so, so many butterflies. the birds are really crazy too. i don´t recognize any of them, but some fly by with these huge elongated tail feathers that are at least as long as their bodies, and other ones seem to live near these marshy areas and they have huge pink feet and legs and black and white bodies. sometimes i look up and see whole swarms of dragonflies hovering overhead, and down along the side of the road are enormous yellow and orange crickets that are as big as two of my fingers put together.
it rains for a little bit everday, but it´s warm, so it doesn´t bother me too much, and afterwards it´s so hot that you dry off fairly quickly. it seems like a lot of places must just flood constantly. ok, hope everyone is doing awesome. the past couple of days i´ve been in a much better mood, and this morning i didn´t even have diarhea. yay! love,
-jessie

Mazatán

2006-09-20T14:03:00.000-07:00

We had an 18 hour ferry ride from la paz to mazatlán. we got so, so bored. i think already conversation is pretty limited among the three of us. but an 18 hour ferry ride really stressed our meager conversation skills. we were talking about ways to entertain ourselves, and peter suggested that we ask the cafeteria for a 5 lb bag of sugar and some spoons and see how much sugar we could eat. there was nothing out there but the ocean. and the ferry rocked, and i felt nausious. we slowley made our way through several icecream bars, a bag of potato chips and the mexican version of hostes cupcakes, and then it got dark. we were hanging out on the upper deck and peter got really excited because off in the distance you could see lightning out on the ocean. we watched the sky light up for a while, and then peter and erik went to sleep out on the deck. i wandered around and watched families lay out blankets on the floor and curl up together. people slept on benches and under chairs. it was kind of like a mini homeless encampment that was slowly moving across the sea. eventually i passed out underneath this chair and was awoken by the guy asking me if i spoke spanish. he then told me that he had an extra bed in his cabin and i could sleep there if i wanted to. i told him no (seemed sketchy), but then later wished i´d said yes because the floor wasn´t that comfortable. around 4:30 i walked back up to the deck that peter and erik were sleeping on. it was getting pretty wild outside. we were right by the lighting, and the whole sky became illuminated every time a bolt of lightening shot into the sea. the wind started howling and the waves started getting choppy. peter got really excited and decided to videotape us on his digital camera, and so i held the headlamp (for light). we were all cracking up just because it was so insane, and the wind was blowing so hard, and then we hear a giant crack and this florescent light explodes off the wall showering glass everywhere, which immediately is blown all over the deck by the crazy wind. at that moment the rain started coming down, so we moved inside.
around 6:30 the ferry moved out of the storm and we go back on deck to watch the sun rise. we can still see lightning off in the distance behind us. i kept trying to take a picture, but once you´ve seen the lightning it´s to late to photograph it. i think i´m not meant to be out at sea. i´m not a natural born mariner. i´ve been off the boat for a while now, and i still feel nausious and like i have vertigo.
we met up with the other guys. they ended up having to hitch for a while because of the hurricane. but everyone is doing good. i got a hotel room for myself tonight. i´m just feeling a little tired i think. Hey Michele, thanks so much for the offer to stay with your father in law. i´m totally not computer savy and couldn´t figure out how to send you an email from the comments page. hope everyone is good. love,
-jessie

la paz

2006-09-18T20:44:00.000-07:00

we're in la paz. tomorrow we're taking an 18 hour ferry to mazatlan on mainland mexico. hopefully we'll be able to meet up with the rest of the guys, although i got an email from dale and he said they were waylaid because of the hurricane. if this image loads, it's a picture of the hotel we're staying in. it's pretty cool. everything is cement, even the beds. peter, erik and that british guy andrew and i are all staying here for $30. not too bad. la paz is cool. it's the first major city we've been in for a while, and tonight we went to a chinese restaurant, which was a nice change from beans and tortillas.
i'm really tired of having diarhea. it's exhausting to be sick on top of the heat and biking. i'm changing the name of the blog to diarhea diaries instead of jessie bikes. i might go to the doctor when we get to mazatlan.
it's really good the have peter back. here's what he looked like after biking 110 miles.

it's funny because really, this has been the nicest biking of the whole trip. the best road, least traffic, and most curtious drivers. but the heat and sickness killed me. people say that around december baja is like "paradise". but it's not right now. the scenery really is beautiful though. i wonder how long it will be this hot. people say that october is the start of the rainy season. maybe soon it will be totally hot, raining, and i'll still have diarhea.
We're still not totally sure whether we'll stay on the coast or go inland. inland we'll be doing a ton of climbing, there will be a lot of traffic, and we'll have to worry about stuff getting stolen (we haven't had to worry about this at all on baja), but we'll get to see a lot of cool mexican cities and it will be cooler with less mosquitos. on the coast it will be flat, hot and more resort towns. flat sounds nice though. also biking in big cities is stressfull. ok, hope everyone is good, and thanks again for the nice comments. i really miss everyone so much. all the guys are really nice, but sometimes i miss having friends who are girls, or maybe friends who are guys who aren't wearing spandex. love,
jessie

Ciudad Constitucion

2006-09-15T18:32:00.000-07:00

Yay! Peter is back. he´s so, so crazy! he biked 95 miles, then 97 miles, then today he biked 111 miles! he{s been sleeping by the side of the road, has crazy diarhea, and is totally covered with dirt, but he caught up with us so quickly! So that{s super awesome. today 9/15 is some kind of mexican independence day holiday. if i was a better tourist i would know what it is, but i{m sure we{ll find out tonight when we go out.
I{m in a much better mood today. i{ve started taking cipro again so my stomach is feeling better. i wonder if i{m just going to be constantly on this stuff for the next couple of months. also, it wasn{t as hot today. we did 72 miles, and it wasn´t that bad. we seem to be leaving the desert and entering some kind of weird grassland with cactus growing out of it. i´m a little worried about this new hurricane that´s supposed to be coming in. i tried putting in pictures, but i can{t tell if they worked out or not. i miss everyone super much, and thanks for the comments. i really like them. love,
-jessie

loreto

2006-09-14T12:04:00.000-07:00

Erik and i are in loreto. our group is totally split up now. big Pete, Clyde, Dale and Gary are on mainland mexico. they took the ferry over from santa rosalia. it{s funny because i was doing most of the route planning so i always had all these guys asking me how much further and where we were stopping and all that jazz, and then after they left, erik and i woke up and started riding south, and we pretty much had no plan, and didn{t know where we were going to stop that night. it was a lot easier. we{ve met up with this british cyclist that peter was riding with after he left us. he{s in touch with peter. appearently peter got a cheap cassette and rear hub, hitchiked back up to near guerro negro where he broke down, and is trying to ride quickly down the peninsula to meet us in la paz. he{s so crazy.
the riding is really horrible right now. the scenary is beautiful, but it{s so, so hot. erik and i both drink so much water, and we never pee. i{m sick of drinking water. i don{t even want to do it any more. i feel like we{re constantly dehydrated. also i{m sick again. for the past couple of days i{ve had this stabbing pain in my stomach all day. i think the last thing i want to be doing while sick with food poisoning is biking 50-60 miles through the desert in extreme heat. it{s making me feel really, really exhausted. we got another hotel room last night in loreto and today we{re only going to go 25 miles. so that{s good. both of us are thinking of maybe going inland once we get to mainland mexico to escape the heat. we{re just going totally crazy out here. the other day we were biking through this canyon and i was like, "erik, i{m dying..." and we stopped, and for some reason erik started yelling, and it made a really cool echo, and so we just stopped and yelled up this canyon for a while listening to the echo. erik was like, "look any time we get too hot, we{ll just scream a lot." i just really don{t want to be this hot any more. also, i don{t want to be sick anymore. so, good news about peter, sad that the group split up. hopefully we{ll get to la paz in one piece. think good thoughts for me, cuz i{m not feeling that great right now. love,
'jessie

Santa Rosalia

2006-09-11T15:13:00.000-07:00

so it seems like the hurricane hit santa rosalia pretty hard. i just ate lunch in a cafe that had no running water and a lot of flies. none of us are feeling super awesome. it´s just too hot. this american guy just came up to us and was like, "what on earth are you guys doing biking through baja in the summer?" i guess he lives here. i asked him how it is in december and he said it´s like a paradise. not right now though. also people are having bike trouble. in guerro negro erik and i got this hotel room, and peter and the other guys camped. so peter met some british cyclist and just took off with him. he didn´t even come by the hotel room to say goodbye to erik and i. then yesterday we accidentally biked 90 miles, and erik and i were hanging out at the campground, and the other guys ran into peter hitchiking on the road. His rear hub is totally messed up and needs to be rebuilt. he told the guys that he was going to hitchike here and look for a bike shop, but there isn´t one. we haven´t heard from him, and i´m a little worried about him because he´s only 18 and he doesn´t speak any spanish. i wish i´d seen him on the road cuz i probably would have offered to go with him. we´re wondering if maybe he decided to take the ferry to mainland mexico. then erik and i are rolling into town today, and erik´s pedal totally craps out. it just stops turning. so he tries to fix it, takes the thing apart, and it´s toast. the american guy erik is talking to says he has a pedal he can give him, so hopefully that works out. i dunno. it´s like i´m so hot and tired i almost can´t think straight. we´re talking about maybe taking the ferry to mainland mexico in hopes that it´s cooler, but people say it´s the same. also, if we cross over now as opposed to biking down to la paz, the only road going south is a toll road, which means we´d have to sneak our bikes on. i´m so, so tired. i hope erik gets another pedal and i hope we can some how find peter. i think we should stay here on baja and bike south, but maybe that´s a bad idea cuz some places don´t have water. also, i´m getting tired of being everyone´s translater.
the other night i had a dream that it was my birthday and my parents were buying me a chocolate esspresso milkshake and it was so cold and delicious. at night when we go to sleep, the ground is hot. you can feel the heat surge up at you through the floor of the tent.
'jessie

guerro negro

2006-09-09T15:29:00.000-07:00

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

san vicente baja

2006-09-03T17:23:00.000-07:00

we got really confused leaving teajuana and there was a toll road and a free road, and we were stopped by these guards at the toll road, and then got totally lost trying to find the free road. then this lady told us to just climb under this barb wire fence and go up this embankment to the toll road and ride on it anyways. so we did. here's a picture of the guys trying to get their bikes up there. erik's back. so that's cool.
Here's a picture of everyone riding on the toll road next to the no biking sign. the toll road was really nice though. we only rode it from t.j. to rosarito. other than that it's been the free road.

hey, internet speed might be slow, so not sure about photos. i think it might have been 110 degrees today. I'm really glad to be in Mexico though. It's funny, everyone we've talked to thinks it's crazy to bike down here, but Mexican drivers have been the nicest drivers so far. i think maybe in the U.S. people get annoyed with bikers, but in Mexico driving is a lot crazier, so it seems people have more patiences with us. everyone has been waving at us and totally moving out of the way for us in their cars. there was only one scarey stretch with no shoulder coming out of Ensenada. i'm a little delirious right now because of the heat. i'm just sweating so much. baja is a neat place though. people seemed blown away by us biking. when we told this one guy we'd biked here from alaska he want, "Ay! No!" and covered his face with his hands. then we told another guy, and he went, "Ay Yay Yay!" it was pretty awesome. i really wish it wasn't this hot though. we've started filtering water, which is a pain in the butt, but i think will ultimately end up saving us money.
-Jessie

Leucadia

2006-08-29T20:52:00.000-07:00

yesterdaty peter, dale and i biked from hollywood to dana point. i thought would be about 70 miles, but it ended up being 90 miles. by the end of the day i wasn't in the best mood either because we haven't been sleeping that much. anyways, we got to the campground and the guy at the gate told us that there wasn't room for all of us at the hike and bike. i was like, "look, it's totally dark, and we've just biked 90 miles. what do you suggest that we do?" and he was like, "I don't know but you can't stay here." so peter and dale stayed in the hike and bike, and i ended up just putting my tent up on the beach. It was not the best day.
But then today, Peter and I had am amazing, awesome day. we only had to go 30 miles from dana point to encinitas, but we got totally side tracked and didn't even make it to encinitas. right now we're in Leucadia because this really awesome guy Steve saw us biking along and invited us in for dinner.

This is a picture of him and his wife Brenda. They made us a great dinner of pasta and we had ice cream for dessert. it was my third ice cream of the day. Steve showed us all this cool stuff on google earth, was full of advice about biking south of here, and even burned a cd of my pictures and is going to mail it to my parents. so awesome. thank you Steve and Brenda.
So then earlier today, peter and i were talking about stuff we might want to take down to mexico with us. Peter still has these really crappy sit ultegra shifters on his bike, and he wanted to change them over to friction. the first shop we tried was too busy, but then at the next shop, they guy was like, "well, i'm too busy, but i'll give you the stuff, and you can do it. i'll help you if you need it." he was super. super awesome! Here is a picture of him (chuck) and his friend Chris.

Peter kept being like, "this is too great a challenge!" but after three hours, he had totally switched out the sit ultegra shifters to the bar end friction shifters. It was a little insane though because peter and i pretty much eat constantly. and that was three hours without eating, so we felt totally nuts by the end of it. Chuck recommended this place next door called Angelo's that had $3 veggie burgers, and we totally scarfed those down. while we were eating, i noticed that for only $5.60 you could get 2 eggs, 2 pancakes, 2 ham, 2 bacon, hashbrowns, and toast. we almost camped behind angelo's, but we figured we should keep riding. Oh, Chuck wanted me to mention that he felt very validated that we'd both chosen to switch from sti to friction shifters. he is a big fan of friction shifters because they never need to be adjusted. ok, hope everyone is good. Probably in like 2 days i'll be in mexico!
-jessie

hollywood hollywood!

2006-08-27T19:51:00.000-07:00

you know what is really cool about l.a.? there is a giant building called the oppenheimer tower. way to represent oppenheimers!
you know what's not so cool about l.a.? it's really huge. i figured it wouldn't be a big deal to go from malibu into l.a. to meet up with allie, but it ended up taking us forever to get through town. appearently l.a. is 468 square miles. i think s.f. is only around 50. it felt totally insane to be biking through the giant metropolis on our loaded touring bikes. anyways, now we're hanging out with allie and it's really awesome. this is a picture of allie and i on her roof.

allie also took me in when i was on the appalachian trail. she says i smell a lot better on this trip. being able to take showers all the time is really rad. love,
-jessie

Malibu

2006-08-26T23:22:00.000-07:00

So, when i said that i biked really fast to get back to the bay area, what really happened, was that i biked really long days, but at a really slow pace. At one point i did consecutive 100 mile days. It was cool because I had a whole week off to hang out with friends and family, but what was definitely not very cool, is that i got some really bad sores on my butt. my mom bought me this stuff called chamois butt'r (ha ha.. what a clever play on words.) and now i have to put it on my butt every day. I though my butt would have healed during that week off, but it didn't. now Peter and i ride along and i have to be all like, "ok Peter, time for me to put more lotion on my butt). i think from here on out i'm going to call this problem "the situation". right now "the situation" is not good.
A couple of days ago Peter and I met up with this guy Dale who i biked with in alaska and canada, but haven't seen for a long time.

I figured we should celebrate Dales return, and i purchased some malt liquor beverages. I chose Old English because peters from England and i thought the word "English" in the name might make him feel more at home. i think the subtle "malt" complexities of the old English really paired nicely with the potatoes and canned beans we cooked up that night for dinner. i might have gotten a little bit distracted by the beer, and forgot to eat much dinner. then there were these three surfer girls who were camped next to us, and they invited us over to hang out at their fire and drink tequila. i'm not sure what happened, but i some how got incredibly drunk, passed out, and then woke up a couple hours later at 4:00am unable to fall back asleep. when the surfer girls saw me the next morning, they were all, "wow, you don't look very good, do you need some aleve? Emerg'enC?" it was ugly. i'm sticking to beer from here on out.
Tonight we're in Malibu and this is where we're staying.

Bobbie's friend Barbara is putting us up, and she took us to see this free dance performance in downtown l.a. it was this modern dance troupe from Beijing. they were so, so amazing. i'm really glad we got to see such a cool show. thank you Barbara for putting us up and feeding us and taking us out for a night on the town. Tomorrow i'm going to hang out with Allie.
-jessie

in cambria

2006-08-23T15:40:00.000-07:00

i´m on a spanish computer with a really crappy key pad, and also it´s the library so i can´t upload photos.
being home was fun, but also made me feel totally insane because i was trying to see so many different people and coordinate meeting up with the other bike riders and what not. but over all it was good. it was really nice to spend time with my family and friends and what not.
right now i´m in cambria, which is south of big sur. it´s been gorgeous riding, with nice clifs along the coast. the fog has been really intense and totally controls the climate. sometimes the fog wins and it´s pretty cold, but then the sun will burn it off and it will get hot. erik´s girlfriend is here so he´s riding by himself so he can spend some more time with her. so right now i´ve been hanging out mostly with peter. it´s pretty fun hanging out with him. today we saw all these elephant seals, and peter got really excited about them. it was just me and him hanging out on this cliff over looking the beach, and there were probably almost 100 elephant seals down there. the giant males kept fighting with each other and then making all these snorting noises, and peter was like totally cheering for them and taking a zillion pictures as they bit each other in the neck and tried to drown each other. then we road a little further, and we saw a cow pasture that had a heard of zebras in it. i´m not kidding. it was totally insane.
peter is still speaking funny british english. today he was yelling at me about something called ¨strimming¨, which i eventually figured out meant weed wacking. then he wouldn´t believe me that we called it weed wacking and i had to ask this guy in the super market to convince him.
anyways.... we´ll probably take a zero day in l.a. and then head to san diego. hope everyone is good. love,
-Jessie

2006-08-13T17:05:00.000-07:00

I'm back at my parents house in palo alto. I totally left the group and biked really fast to get here. then i called my parents on my cell phone from the front yard, and my dad was like, "where are you?" and i told them to come to the front yard. and there i was waiting with the camera. i think maybe they look more shocked then happy, but really they're like pretty happy to see me.

this morning i was riding along and i met this guy cameron who was also on a bike, and we were talking and stuff, and he was all, "that's an annoying noise, i used to be a bike mechanic and could probalby fix it." he lived in fairfax, and we went back to his house, and he took apart my bike and like put this crazy blue/green grease that was designed for boats, and he totally fixed this horrible, terrible noise i've been biking with since fairbanks. i had one guy in the yukon try and fix the noise, and he was kinda condiscending and like told me that nothing was wrong with the bike, and that i was "chasing red hearings" so i never tried to get it fixed again. anyways, thanks so much to cameron the world's most awesome bike mechanic. This is a picture of cameron at his house. cameron if you read my blog, send me an email with your address, i want to mail you like a thank you something. here's my email address jessieoppi@yahoo.com.

since i left the group and started biking on my own, people have been super nice to me. also, i think most people think it's totally insane to be a single, woman bike tourist. the other night i was in this camground and was talking to this guy, and he said he'd come bring me coffee in the morning and then like he showed up while i was still in my tent with this huge mug of hot coffee, and a little debbie snack, and a banana. it was pretty awesome.

hey, my mom just walked in and told me that this was the "most shocked" she's ever been. that's cool.

-jessie

2006-08-07T13:44:00.001-07:00

i'm in bandon oregon. soon we'll be in california. i'm getting really, really tired. i think we need to take a rest day. other than that things are going good. i talked to my mom on the phone, and she told me that erik can't bear mace people cuz it's considered asult, and he could go to jail. so now we're trying to think of new things for him to bear mace. this morning i was awoken by really loud crows, i think maybe if this happens again erik could bear mace them. i can't upload photos right now.
it's funny thinking about coming home and seeing everyone. i think we'll be back around the 17th.
chris and lauren are checking in to see where we are. i really hope they can catch up. i talked to them yesterday and they're still a little bit behind us. there are a lot of cyclists now, and we keep meeting people. i'm not that into the road though. it's highway 101 and it goes right along the coast, but it's super busy. erik calls it monoxide highway. ok, hope everyone is good. love,
-jessie

2006-08-03T10:59:00.000-07:00

So we cycled through washington and now we're in astoria, oregon. We took a ferry from victoria to port angeles, and then it was night time, and we found this patch of grass in a city park to camp on. it looked so nice. but then at 3:00am these sprinklers came on, and like totally went right through the vent in the side of my tent and started soaking me. i was like swearing and running around and trying to move my tent, and i fell into a puddle of mud and lawn clippings, and i was so mad. anyways, the next morning lance armstrong was like, "that was some storm, huh?" also tomorrow is lance's birthday and he's going to be 72 i think.
i'm at the library and i can't put pictures up, which sucks.
We biked through the olympic peninsula. eveyone said it would be really cool, but it didn't seem that great to me. there was like a rain forest though, so that was cool i guess. also, now there are racoons. one went through my pannier and ate all this stuff. last night Erik, Peter and i slept at this rest area near the bridge into astoria. i think my standards of living are going down. we weren't supposed to camp there, and like we were right by the highway, and there was this really big light on us, and like all these semi-trucks and what not. Peter's from England and i guess they call them "lories" over there, and so we're all, "look, you gotta call them semi-s now." but then yesterday he refered to one as a samuri truck. ha ha. I tried fixing my bike myself, which didn't work, but i got a ton of grease on my hands. then i was trying to clean lettuce in the bathroom sink in the rest area and like all these ladies were tyring to wash there hands there and i was looking at my black greasy fingers and thinking, "is this even making the lettuce cleaner?" also last night we put all our food in the bathroom so the racoons didn't get to it.
anyways, not too much else to report. lauren and chris are behind us now cuz they went rock climbing with kernby. but maybe we'll see them again closer to san francisco. i miss them.
also, thanks to kernby for putting us up in his house in vancouver. that was like the most awesome thing ever.
-jessie

2006-07-28T23:23:00.000-07:00

Here is a photo of these rad kids from Santa Cruz. We're staying at their friend's house in Vancouver. We've been eating a lot. here is a photo of us all eating.
Check out the previous two entries for some photos of my favorite downhill, and also an insane nightmare of a day involving a crackhead bike theif and a lost wallet.
Also, thanks to everyone who left comments. it's really good to hear from you all. i miss you. love,
-jessie

2006-07-28T23:10:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of Erik about to go down the most awesome downhill ever. It was so rad.

2006-07-28T22:52:00.000-07:00

Oh my god today was so crazy. We’re in Vancouver and like we were super exhausted when we got here. Erik and I went food shopping at the Canadian super store, which is kinda like Wal-Mart, and I accidentally left my wallet and the counter, and it never showed up, so I called my dad, and he had to go out on his lunch break and mail me a new atm card. But it came today, so that was good. And like yesterday we were so broke down and tired that all we could do was lay around this house. I was too tired to read, all I did was lie on the floor all day and listen to my ipod.

So today we go downtown to china town, and like Lauren and Chris (these two rad kids from Santa Cruz) and Erik and I all lock our bikes together, but Garry (aka lance Armstrong) locks his up solo. So we get out of the restaurant and Garry’s bike is not there, but there’s this other crappy bike on the ground. Someone clipped his cable and stole his bike. So this crack head guy comes up with a bike with a baby trailer attached to it, and is trying to pick up the crappy bike and balance it on the baby trailer and Lauren and Chris are like yelling at him being like, “man you stole our friends bike” and there are like mom’s with baby twins in strollers trying to get through and the crack head’s bike is falling off of the baby trailer almost on top of the twins and everyone is yelling at this guy, and he’s all, “I didn’t steal your bike. Maybe my friend did though.” And so he leaves his crappy bike and is trying to bike away from us and kernby follows him on his bike. We’re waiting a hella long time and kernby isn’t’ coming back, and we’re getting worried thinking, like maybe kernby tried to play hero and something bad happened to him. So Lauren wants to go to the library, look up his cell phone number from an email and try and call him. We end up at this community center, and Lauren has me stand outside and watch the bikes, and it’s so sketchy. Like we’re in crack head central. I’m standing there by our bikes, and am surrounded by people smoking crack with like vacant eyes and sores and abscesses on their bodies. I’m just trying to be invisible, and then Erik rides up on the bike the crack head left behind, and like we’re just hanging out waiting for Lauren, and then this huge dude starts like looking at us over the top of his sunglasses and pointing and then he’s got some other tweaker dudes with him and starts walking towards Erik and I, and I’m thinking, “oh my god, what’s going to happen.” And he grabs a hold of the crack head’s bike that Erik’s riding and is all, “that’s my bike.” And Erik is like still holding onto it and is all, “look, someone stole my friends bike and this is the one that was left there.” And this huge crack head dude’s like, “that’s my bike.” And his even huger girlfriend was like, “you better give him his bike back.” And Erik’s still holding onto the bike, like talking to them. I’m totally just not saying anything, and then the dude grabs the bike. Finally Lauren comes outa the community center, and we’re all, “we gotta get outa here, this dude just took Erik’s bike” and she’s like, “what! We gotta get it back,” and we’re like, “no, we gotta go.” Lauren thought that it was Erik’s touring bike, not the crack head bike. Anyways we find a payphone and call kernby and he’s like gone back to his house to hook up a trailer and put his folding bike for Garry who now has no bike since the crack head bike got stolen. We’re like panicking and don’t end up meeting kernby but start going to different bike shops to find Garry a bike. We’re looking for bikes and call kernby again, and apparently he gave his cell phone number to the crack head, who stole Garry’s bike, and the guy called him and told him to meet him at the home depot with a hundred dollars and he’d give him the bike. So we’re at this bike shop trying to figure out how to get all of us over there since we’re short a bike, and I’m all, “maybe we should call the police.” And the dudes are like, “no we wanna beat him up.” And Erik’s like, “I’m gonna use the bear mace on him.” And so like I give Garry my bike to ride, and Chris and Erik just like take off, and Lauren puts me on her back rack, which is totally not designed to hold that kinda weight. It’s like this insane ride up and down hills and over potholes and my ass is like slamming into this rack and Lauren is totally just hauling. Anyways, we get to the home depot and Erik and Chris are like, “you won’t believe what just happened.” Apparently there was this cop talking to his girlfriend or something, the crack head rode by on Garry’s bike, looked at the cop, and took off. Chris tried to chase him down, but got cut off by freeway off ramp traffic or something. So we’re just hanging out at home depot, and Lauren uses their phone to call kernby again, and kernby says that the crack head called his phone and he’s go the bike. In a few minutes we see kernby coming into the home depot parking lot, walking with three bikes. There’s his bike, then the trailer with the folding bike in it, and then in his other hand is Garry’s bike. So, Garry ended up losing $100, but got his bike back. But we’re all feeling really crazy right now. Like it was such a bad day just talking to crackheads and seeing if they were selling bikes and what not. Anyways, I’m going to try and stay out of big cities from now on. Also, crackheads suck.

hot!

2006-07-24T13:39:00.000-07:00

So it's still totally hot! But today Erik and i got up at like 4:30 in the morning to beat the heat, and we got here in pembleton by like 1:00. So not too bad for a 60 mile day. first thing we had a really killer climb out of this river valley. then we had a good down hill, rode along this river and then had this super awesome downhill that lasted for like 8 miles! it was the best downhill of my whole life. it was so steep, but you never had to put on the breaks. We seriously coasted for like 15 minutes. I keep seeing all these dead butterflies on the road. i think maybe it's been so hot that the butterflies are just like dying and falling out of the sky onto the road. i'm trying to upload photos, but it's not working.
-jessie

2006-07-23T16:02:00.000-07:00

So check the one before this. i couldn't figure out how to write after puting the photos in. also sorry about all the spelling mistakes. i'm always paying for internet so i figure why waste time with the spell check, right?
So this is a photo of this guy Gary that we're biking with. He's so, so awesome. like he's 71 years old. We decided to start calling him Lance cuz he's wearing the yellow jersey. So we just tell everyone that he's delusional and thinks he's on the tour de france. he think's it's funny.
Here is a picture of "Lance" and the pelleton leaving prince george, bc.

The giant Tide bottle on the back of Lance's bike is a pee bottle. all these guy take bottles into their tent at night so they don't have to get up to pee at night. Gary's is totally the biggest though.
Gross right?
So we're supposed to be in vancouber soon. i can't wait to get out of canada. it's so huge, and like no one lives here. I'll post some more photos of canada after this, but i'm giving up typing cuz the keyboard is all weird. just so you know, all my skin is still burning. I told everyone that we gotta get up at 4:00am tomorrow morning so that we can get as far as possible before the heat sets in.

For a while i was riding around with these moose antlers on my bike, but they were really heavy, and so i had to get rid of them. They were bending my bike rack. Erik's got some photos of me riding the bike with them, but he doesn't have a way to get the photos onto the computer so you can't see them for now. that's garry (aka Lance) next to my bike.

Here is a picture of Erik on the Cassiar Highway. There was a lot of unpaved muddy roads, and it rained a lot.
OK, i'm going to check email now. I hope everyone is doing good. Love,
-Jessie

2006-07-23T15:50:00.000-07:00

It's so hot here! i'm going to go totally crazy. we biked like 65 miles today from clinton to lilooet or something and it's like 39-40 degrees celcius. i think that's like 105 or something. I'll try and upload some photos of today, but i'm on dial up so we'll see.
This is a view from the road we came down. it was totally crazy. super dry and like the air actually hurt you. i've never cruised downhill in pain before. Just being in the sun made you feel like all your skin is burning off. it's unreal. we just were going down, and down and down, and it just hurt so bad. Here's a picture of me at the end of the day. And also a picture of Erik. We look super crazy, huh?

2006-07-18T09:01:00.000-07:00

Hi all, the bike trip is going great. right now i'm in prince george british colombia and i'm expecting to be in vancouver in like 10 days. i can't wait to get out of canada. canada is huge. 90% of the people who live in canada live along the US border, so we've just been biking through total wilderness forever! We left alaska along the AlCan highway. i guess they built it during world war II because the japanese bombed some of the aluetian islands and they wanted a way to haul stuff to alaska. there is not much along that highway. then we took the cassiar highway and that was even more desolate. just trees and mountains and bears, and so, so many mosquitos! like lethal amounts of mosquitos. Also, there were these black flies and when they bite you, they take a chunk of you with them and blood drips out from where they bit you. here's a picture of what i looked like when one bit my eye.
pretty sweet, huh? The cassiar was really pretty and i got to see a glaciar. The glaciar glowed blue, and i was hitchiking and got picked up by these road mainainance workers and they told me that even when chunks of the glaciar come off, they still glow blue. one of the maintainance workers said he put a chunk of the glaciar in his cooler, and it stayed frozen three times longer than normal ice. glaciars are pretty cool.

The one thing that really sucked about the yukon and also the cassiar highway was that all the food was really expensive and in restaurants portions were small. I ordered french fries in this one restaurant and there was like maybe 15-20 frenchfries and it was $5. It almost made me want to cry. So i'm trying to cook more. but sometimes cooking is disgusting. like for some reason almost everything we make ends up looking like puke. check out this dish.
In here I put, some freeze dried vegetables, some cheese tortelini, a piece of bread, three slices of american cheese, and a package of beef mushroom gravey. looks pretty good, huh? That was a meal i cooked on the cassiar though. now i eat a lot better because we're on the yellow head highway and there are a lot of food stores.
Here is a picture of Erik. Usually i'm biking with him or this other guy Gary. Gary is 71 and is cool. Anyways, there are a lot of people who want to use the internet, so i'm off. love everyone and hope you are all good.
-Jessie
here's a funny picture of him. There are a lot of