What happened…

Andrew writes: Playa Perula has some of the strongest pounding waves that I’ve yet had the pleasure to experience. They weren’t necessarily tall waves, or too many waves, just long, slow, rolling waves that built up all along the 3km of coastline and then came crashing down all at once. This was a nice sound to fall asleep too, and I slept soundly. I even missed hearing the alarm clock by a few minutes because it was so loud. Then Amanda and I lay in the tent watching the sun rise up over the mountains to the east. We share loads of sunsets, but somehow dawn eludes us most of the time and so it’s more special for me to spend time like this with Amanda. Then I made us breakfast and while Amanda sat on the beach enjoying her coffee, I went for a morning swim in the ocean. I gotta be honest, those waves had me a little scared, but the water was so warm and inviting!

So it was probably about 0900hrs by the time we rolled out of Punta Perula, with the sun on our left and a hill in front of us. Good old Coastalegre, which in Spanish I think means, “Land of Many Hills”. For some reason I think in our heads we thought that the coastal route south in Mexico would be “flat”…which it is in a sense, we rarely find ourselves above 100m. Yet today was spent huffing and puffing up, then coasting down, turning a corner or two, and then climbing back up. Probably the longest climb took us maybe an hour, but there were lots of little climbs and it got to the point where I was thinking inwardly, “Enough is enough!”. It felt hot, even though the temperature was probably only 32C or so. Maybe it was the humidity.

For some reason today, I think I was hungry all day. Perhaps this played a part in the sluggishness I felt when trying to conquer Coastalegre. I can only attribute this to not eating well enough yesterday, which in hindsight, I think we rode long and hard and then didn’t re-fuel very well in Punta Perula. Today we stopped for some PB&J tortillas around 1000hrs, then lunch in Emiliano Zapata, and that still didn’t seem enough to give us the RPMs we needed for riding. So when I first saw the ocean at around 3pm, and that there was a beach, and buildings attached, I pointed to it and declared to Amanda, “We’re sleeping there!”.

My first priority of course was to find food and we had a couple of apples, and drinks down at the beach, as we did some people watching. Then we found a place to sleep at a hospedaje, which is sort of like a hotel I guess. It’s probably more accurate that it’s for long-term stays, as most of the other guests appear to live here full or part time. Right away we hit up the grocery store next door and stocked up on fresh vegetables for a wicked pasta sauce I had in mind. It was a total team effort as Amanda washed and chopped the veggies and then I did the cooking. Onion, tomato, carrots, chile pepper, mushrooms all went into one pot, and shell pasta into the other. It’s rather nice having dual stoves and pots to match to make cooking that much easier and fun. We just sat outside of our room soaking in the shade, and enjoying one another’s company….and the food! I’ve got similar plans for a hearty breakfast tomorrow so that we can have loads of energy for whatever else the road wants to throw in our path. Bring it on!

Amanda writes: As Andrew said today was a lot of climbing but somehow it was worth it when we got back to the ocean. The heat and poor eating had us both a bit a bit grumpy but somehow when you ride all the time you can get past it more easily. La Manzanilla seemed to be another gringo town and still nice.

Today’s Photographs