My fitness plan is simple: I pedal. I pedal at daybreak or I start shortly afterwards. I pedal nearly all the day. I pedal in high gears. I pedal in low gears. I pedal till my bottom bracket squeaks. I pedal standing. I pedal sitting down. I pedal fast. I pedal slow. I pedal where I want to go. I pedal South (always South). I pedal till the sun burns the skin off my arms. I pedal hoping that really is the peak of the hill I see and not another step to more of the same hill. I pedal till I see visions of warmshowers and soft beds. I pedal till the dry riverbed under the bridge looks like an inviting place to sleep. I pedal determined to claim those few inches on the side of road as mine. I pedal on the path beside the road when the trucks take what is mine. I pedal always glancing in my mirror for that truck with my name on it (I hope it does not exist). I pedal hill after hill, how many could there be? I pedal till my amigos are incredulous with my pedaling. At night my body heals, and when I arise I am stronger and more confident. I am forging a weapon that no road will conquer. I will see this to the end……God willing.

Although far from fading into anonymity, I noticed that about one hundred kilometers South of Ciudad Victoria, people were not shouting something about Panama or newspaper from the side of the road, I guess I am beyond the range of El Cinco´s  circulation. Upon exiting Victoria, all the advice I received was to cut to the coast and take the dual lane highway to the industrial city of Tampico because it was flat. I ignored the well intended advice and rode South on the old Pan American highway into the Huasteca. The sorgo fields of Tamaulipas changed to cane fields and orange orchards. The sugarcane operations looked ancient. They process the cane by hand feeding the stalks into a turnstile press drawn by two horses squeezing the juice out. Then they bottle it and sell it. The whole process, from field to market is right there beside the road.  The road turned bad after Ciudad Valles and I mostly rode the path beside the road to the small town of Aquismon.

I hired Jaime (pronounced HI-may) to drive me to “Soltano de las Golondras” in his camionetta. It was the worst road I´ve ever been on. It was strewn with boulders and rocks, I had one arm on the seat back and my hand on the dash, the passenger window was gone; no doubt somebody smashed it with their head while making this ascent. Jaime says he has been making this drive twice a day for the last seven years. There are indigenous women walking the steep road carrying wood on their backs suspended from their forehead with a strap, others are carrying a child on their back. None of them look over five feet tall. We wind our way up the mountain in a stump pulling gear. Jaime starts asking me what California is like. He and some amigos are leaving February 3rd for North California to pick apples for nine dollars an hour. He expects to be there a year, maybe more. He leaves behind a wife and two daughters. I sense his sadness, but he is also excited about the adventure. We encounter a big backhoe in the middle of the road working, Jaime shuts the motor off and we wait for him to make a way. It took over an hour to go 13k. It´s quite cool when we get out of the camionetta. We climbed 900 meters. Jaime stays with the truck while I continue on with an indigenous guide on a goat path for a half hour. Finally, we reach the Soltano. The first thing that strikes me is how quiet it is. There are about a dozen of us there, each of us perched on a boulder. I am the only gringo. The Soltano is a pit about 200 feet round at the top and cone shaped. It is 1000 feet deep and about 500 feet round at the bottom. I, of course, want to hang my head over the edge and look for the bottom, but an indigenous kid asks me not to. I respect his request, the indigenous own the Soltano de las Golondrinas. We are waiting for the sparrows to return to the pit at dusk. Eventually, about a dozen come screaming just over my head and into the pit. They are beautiful bright green birds, and they circle in the pit descending to the bottom. As it gets darker more bird come till it resembles a meteor shower into the pit. It sounds like a volley of arrows, each bird making a quite audible “whoosh”. Someone reminds me it is time to go, it is almost dark. If it got completely dark while we were here we would never make it back to the road till daybreak, it was a very remote place. I tell Jaime to show me how fast he can drive down the mountain, but I guess he knew I was kidding, or maybe he did not what to break his camionetta, it´s his livelihood. He teaches me some Wastek phrases on the way back, he is fluent in both languages.

The video I took at the Soltano did not turn out too good, so to give you an idea what the place is like, this link is to a two minute video of some base jumpers leaping into the Soltano. It is from the “Caves” episode of the 2006 BBC documentary, Planet Earth.

 The girl running the internet cafe here is wearing a tee shirt that says in English “I love Mark”, you believe that? Is it a sign?