We get up at our usual time of 5:30am PST (we haven’t yet switched over to Mountain Time since entering Baja California Sur). It’s a cool morning and only 32km to the Walmart in La Paz. We eventually set of and find that the hills are in our favor. Looks like it’s pretty much downhill from here. About half way I spy a snake chilling on the road. It was a fair sized snake and still alive. Up until now all the snakes we’ve seen on the road have been dead. I yell ahead to Kevin as I’m sure he’ll want to stop and take a photo (if he takes photos of dead snakes on the road he’ll surely take a photo of a live snake). He stops, u-turns and heads back to check out the snake. As he approaches the snake a car comes along and runs right over the snake. Half crushed, the snake is still alive (barely) and is now trying to wriggle its way off the road. It doesn’t make it as a semi-trailer trunk comes and finishes the snake off. It’s dead now. I ask if Kevin still wants to take a picture. Dumb question, of course he does. I hand him the camera and he takes his photo.
Leaving the lifeless snake to cook on the road we head onwards to La Paz. As we get closer small markets start appearing in amongst a lot of abandoned buildings. The wind starts to pick up trying to keep us away from Walmart but we’re having none of that. We press on. Walmart appears in the distance, only 1km left. Good times ahead. We reach Walmart, but before we sample the goodness inside Kevin poses for a photo out front (this is a Walmart to remember). After the photo we park our bikes and I head in first to select my 3L drink. It takes me a little while to find the drinks and unfortunately most of the pop drinks are not in a refrigerator. The cold drink selection is lacking. I narrow it down to two: a strawberry Fanta or an apple drink I’ve never tried. Both are 18pesos or thereabouts. I head out and give Kevin my order and let him decide between the two for me when he gets inside. He heads in and I take my seat outside watching the bikes.
He comes out a little while later empty handed and says he’s rather disappointed with this Walmart. They don’t have a cold chocolate milk (in Mexico, where chocolate milk was invented!) and, as I had observed, most of the pop drinks aren’t cold either. He heads back in saying he’s going to get some drinks and a couple of pastries. I wait some more. Sometime later he comes out with three bags full of food. He first hands me my 3L drink of a carbonated apple drink. Disappointingly I find that the drink is unchilled. He says the unchilled apple drink was 10 pesos, so he got that instead of the 18 peso chilled drink. No matter as it was still early morning and I wasn’t really hot yet. He also pulls out a 1L milk for himself, an orange for me, a banana for him, two pastries (one maple glazed donut [I love those]), a pudding each (the same pudding I found in the garbage a week or so earlier), and a plain bun. We dig in. When we finish eating I still half 1.5L of the apple drink left. Kevin heads back into Walmart for seconds. I wait slowly sipping away at my drink.
He comes out again, this time with two bags full of food. A 2L container of apple juice for himself, another maple glazed donut each, another pudding each, and a large slice of cake. We dig in again and this time I finish my 3L drink (it was kind of disappointing since the carbonation wasn’t strong). I ask about filling up our empty water bottles, but Kevin decides that we won’t stock up on water here since there will be plenty of places to get water near the hotel we’ll eventually find.
Before finding a hotel we head to the ferries office. We need to figure out how and when we’re getting to Mazatlan. We’re guessing (from what we’ve read) that the next ferry leaves on Tuesday (it’s currently Sunday). 6km away we make it to the ferry office. Since this is Sunday it’s closed. No matter, that was to be expected. On to plan B, find a hotel or tourist office to inform us of the schedule. That’s no problem; a tourist office is just a short distance away on the waterfront. Kevin susses out the situation and we’re told that a ferry leaves on Sunday at 5:00pm. That’s today and it’s currently 12pm so we still have plenty of time to cycle the 17km to the ferry terminal. Kevin says we can take it slow, no need to rush there. We can stop and get food along the way. Having checked the GPS maps while he was inside I inform him that I don’t really see much of anything in the direction of the ferry terminal, everything is south of us. He’s confident we’ll find something, there’s got to be at least and OXXO (the local convenience store) along the way. Okay, fine. Before we head off we find an ATM and reload our cash reserves. Off we go to the ferry. It’s easy enough to find. Take the one road and follow the coast. Food: not so easy. The GPS was right, there’s nothing. Something has to be at the ferry terminal though.
As we reach the halfway point that 3L apple drink I consumed earlier in the day strikes back. I need to take a leak and I need to do it right now. I yell ahead to Kevin, who sounds annoyed with my request. He stops by a post on the road and expects me to prop my bike up against it. I don’t have time to lift my bike over the curb and balance it against this post. I tell him to just hold my bike for all of 30 seconds. No, he proceeds to prop his bike up against the post while I wait trying my best to keep from pissing my shorts. He finally comes over to hold my bike and I run over to the edge and relieve myself. He tells me to hurry up. Why the rush all of a sudden, I thought we had all day to get there? Oh, that’s right, mister smarty pants is upset there’s no food in site (like the GPS said) and he chose not to stock up at Walmart. We head onwards.
Eventually we reach the terminal and Kevin heads past it looking for food. Now I get upset because our priority should be making sure we can get on the ferry. We can figure out the food situation later, it’s not like we’ll be doing anything for a while since it is only 1:00pm. We head into the shipping yard and are called over by a guard who tells us to stop. We must first press this button (similar to the button you’d push to signal to cross the street) she’s pointing to. So Kevin goes ahead and presses it. Then she looks in my direction and asks if we are family. Kevin answers, “Si.” I don’t need to push the button. She waves us onward. I didn’t understand this at all. What is so special about this button? Why didn’t she just push it for us? It’s not like it’s reading Kevin’s fingerprint or anything. She seemed very adamant that Kevin push the button. It’s the second time I’ve seen this type of button; the first was at the Mexican border crossing where some people pushed it and others didn’t. What’s the point? Seemingly useless things like that bother me. I asked Kevin about it and he didn’t care.
Sorry, got off on a little rant there. Back to the story. We get our tickets (double the price we expected, we were charged around $200US for the both of us and our bikes) and are told there are showers and electrical outlets onboard (good a place to finally charge up our stuff). We find a place to wait. Kevin finds an outlet and I whip out the laptop to get some writing done while he goes off in search of food. Sometime later he returns with a 2L orange drink for us to share. I’m a little disappointed as I don’t expect we’ll be getting any food on the ferry (it’ll be too expensive for our budget). He says the guy at the lone mini-mart is an asshole and we won’t be shopping there anymore. So I guess this drink plus the ¼ full bag of cornflakes we’ve saved will have to sustain us until we reach Mazatlan tomorrow. Oh joy. We make short order of the cornflakes and the drink. Now we’re left with nothing (we don’t even have much water). No matter, it’s not like we’ll be working up a sweat cycling all day so we should be okay.
At 3:00pm we head for the ferry. As we get up another white guy walks by carrying a backpack loaded with camping gear and motorcycle helmet. A fellow traveler! Only our third one thus far in Mexico. He tells us that he’s riding his motorcycle to Argentina and he’s also on this ferry. We part ways saying we’ll meet up again once on the ferry.
On the ferry we unload our bikes and put them in a little storage room and are told to take anything we need with us as there will be no access to the cargo decks once the ship leaves. Kevin takes his two small bags. I on the other hand take a lot of stuff since I don’t know what to expect on the boat. I end up taking my two small bags (one with my change of clothes and the other with the electronics that I’ll be charging), a large one (the one with the laptop), and the handlebar bag. We’re on the lowest desk and need to climb up a 4 floors using a narrow and steep staircase. With only his two little bags and all his strength he wizzes up the stairs with ease. After the first set of stairs he’s long gone. I trail far behind, alone with my scrawny arms carrying all my baggage and using feet clad in cycling shoes. Shoes which are good for cycling but not so good at climbing a metal staircase in as they have no grip. I need to be extra careful not to lose my balance, slip and fall backwards down these stairs. Ages later, after banging into walls and tripping on the stairs several times, I make it to a door. A door which poses another problem: I can’t turn the handle because my hands are full. I stick out my elbow and give the handle a good whack while pushing against the door. No luck, this being a ship the door is one of those heavy doors that takes a big push to open so that it’ll keep from opening due the boats rocking motion while at sea. Luckily a lady on the other side, whose job it seems is to just open this door for people, opens the door for me. I clamor through with Kevin waiting on the other side. Other crew members are also waiting behind a desk waiting for me to present them with our tickets. I pull them out from one of my bags and after some discussion we’re directed to our seats.
The seats are similar to those you’d find on an airplane but with more leg space. We plunk ourselves down and position our bags. On the wall in front of us are several wide screen TVs all showing some movie with what’s-her-name staring in it. You know the actress I don’t really like, her. Unfortunately, being in Mexico, it’s dubbed in Spanish. No matter, I didn’t care for the movie anyway. We also notice that there are no electrical plugs near our seats. It seems the ship does have electrical outlets like we’d been told, but they’re used to power those TVs that are currently playing crap. That means two of the four bags I brought are now rendered useless. Nice! Kevin goes out in search of the other luxury we were promised: showers. He comes back shortly, having found the showers, to get his shower gear. I wait. And while I wait I notice there is no air-conditioning and it is really getting hot. I’m working up a sweat just sitting here. I decide another one of my bags shall be rendered useless since I won’t bother changing into fresh clothing. As I’ll likely be sweating in this sauna all night there’s no need to dirty my clean clothes. I’ll still take a shower but I’ll jump right back into my filthy, and I’m quite sure stinky clothes—having lived in them for weeks on end it’s hard to tell since I’ve gotten used to whatever smell is now emanating from them. I figure all the other passengers will be sweating like pigs tonight, working on concocting their own smells. I’m just one step ahead of them. Kevin returns from his shower. He’s chosen to change his shirt but retain his cycling shorts minus the padded underwear. I head for the showers. Because I’m such a nice guy I do everyone the favor taking off my shoes and socks, and pack them away in my bag wear the smell can’t escape. If even I can smell the stench from my socks then it must be really bad. Ahh, it’s nice to walk around barefoot again (I haven’t been able to do that in Mexico as you never know what lurks beneath the sand). I return to my seat to work on generating sweat.
The remainder of the day is pretty much uneventful. Kevin goes for a walkabout on the decks outside, takes photos, eats cream and sugar he’s found in the café (our version of desert), uses his netbook, and tries to get to sleep in the heat. Eventually he gives up trying to sleep in the chair and joins some of the other passengers who’ve resorted to using the floor as their bed. I go for desert too and then take a walkabout on deck, stopping to watch several satellites pass overhead. I also notice that several groups of people have setup camp on the decks outside where it is much cooler. It seems that all the benches and chairs have been claimed by truckers. One even brought his own hammock which he’s strung up. Lesson learned, always do as the truckers do; they’re the smart ones. I return to roast in my seat and watch some more movies. Until 1:00pm or so (at least that’s when I fall asleep) movies play (really loudly). We are treated with Hangover, that movie with the guy from Hangover and Robert Downey Jr., The Family Man (which is surprisingly in English and only subtitled in Spanish), and Rango (this one was pirated since you could hear an audience laughing—at who knows what—in the audio track, and the video quality wasn’t BlueRay grade). I eventually fall asleep watching Rango. It’s such a boring movie that it has the power to put you to sleep even while you sit uncomfortably in a pool of your own sweat.
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