Where did you sleep last night?

One of the best bits of this journey is the amount of time that we get to spend outside, both riding our bikes, but also sleeping.  At home, the walls are often too solid and the distance between our lives and the outdoors too great.  Here, if we wake up in a hotel and know that the sunrise is taking place outside without us, we feel as if we are missing the best part of the day.

Although our route is very populated, that doesn’t always translate into places to sleep.  Having our tent with us certainly allows us to be much more flexible in the length of a day’s journey, but we’ve been racking up quite a variety of locations to lay our heads.  

When we are getting into a town that we want to explore, or want a day’s rest from the road, we often check in to a hotel so that we can unload our bags, wash some (filthy) clothes, test whether we can break through the daily download limit on the hotel’s WiFi  and not be burdened by the very vulnerable presence of our bikes out in the open.  

We’ve also been making use of a fantastic online community called Warm Showers - a network of cyclists who have other cyclists come and stay as they pass through their home town; be that in their spare room, on their sofa, or as we were treated to in Mexico, give up their room and sleep on the roof of their building so that you can have a bed for the night.  The small number of people in this community we have been housed by so far have been incredibly generous, accepting us as utter strangers into their home, opening their hospitality and their friendship to us.  Sometimes they are not even cyclists, just incredibly generous people looking to help others along their way.   

But camping is definitely our [read Lizzie’s] favourite mode for sleeping.  With the fly off, watching the moon cross the sky and hearing the white noise of crickets and cicadas strike up their nightly chatter.  Sometimes this has been in allotted campsites - like in Tikal National Park, where we spent the night listening to howler monkeys (who sound an awful lot like lions); the Belize zoo (dreaming about the jaguars we’d just seen) or a place in Guatemala where the field glistened blue with the eyes of thousands of tiny spiders as we walked in the dark to our tent.  Sometimes we’ve stopped in places that look like they might once have been somewhere but by the time we arrive feel like they have lost their way - like the ‘chicken restaurant’ in Mexico which was really just a family home where they still farm chickens and we slept amongst the wonderful chirping of 50 odd chicks; or the ‘piscina’ in Guatemala with an empty swimming pool and a broken slide where a friendly old lady let us sleep under the tallest coconut tree the world has ever seen, which she insisted was more than 90 years old.  And sometimes we’ve had the absolute treat of finding ourselves somewhere which leaves everyone involved wondering what on earth is going on!  One of these is described below from our diary.

Not knowing where we will sleep each night is one of the things that keeps this feeling like an adventure.  Each day stands alone with its own unknown qualities; with no idea what it will bring, or how it will feel in a way that we simply hadn’t anticipated.  

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We’ve been waiting for the rain and this afternoon it came in the form of a torrential downpour that flash flooded the concrete surfaces of the small town in which we took cover.  

We knew that we had a big hill to climb and wanted to get some miles in and find somewhere to camp before it got dark so we sat the storm out, ready to ride on when it passed.  We’d looked at the elevation profile on a satellite map and chosen a couple of potential places to try.  It’s pretty hard looking at a satellite image to work out if any given building is a good bet though; whether it will feel like a friendly village where we can ask people, or just an odd collection of buildings that look unwelcoming.  Google maps for Guatemala is very poor for some reason, and it well under represents the amount of habitation there is by the roadside, but that doesn’t mean that we can assume there will be more than it suggests.

As we set out, the rain had passed, but the sky still held a magic dark light and had started to glow a dull pink.  It was beautiful, especially when we turned into the mountains and the shapes in front of us began to darken, gradually becoming silhouetted by the light.

As we rode, we started to climb very steeply.  In a way I loved it; when I’m anxious I seem to ride much better, my mind isn’t wandering, I am focused and strong.  It feels good generating the sweat bristling on my arms.

As we rode into the mountains, the light was increasingly blocked out and it started to feel quite gloomy.  Even though I knew that the village we were aiming for would come at about 16km, when we reached 13km and saw no sign of it, I began to feel anxious.  Would we have to go down the way that we had come up?  When would we decide to do that?

The road wound closely around the rock, with jungle on both sides.  Where would the village be? There is something amazingly liberating about riding into the closing darkness not yet knowing the place where you are going to pass the night.  

At about 15km we swooped down a pass, the silhouettes of the mountains now strong against the reddening sky; it was breathtaking.  My heart beat harder as we swung round a number of corners, and then there were lights by the roadside, huts beside us, and we were in the village.

Almost the first building we saw was a church.  Rather than follow the road towards lights and people we went through the gate and found a collection of ladies and children.  I presented my best spanish soliloquy on why they might help us find somewhere to sleep for the night.  It was evident that only one of them spoke any spanish - ‘yes,’ she said, ‘how about here?’ and pointed to exactly where we stood, a covered area directly infront of the house.  I clasped my hands together and squealed grateful joy that had them all giggling.

We proceeded to set up camp whilst they all sat and shamelessly stared.  A number of kids lined up outside the compound and joined the staring.  The family inside had no Spanish at all, but occupied themselves practicing saying my name… ‘Lie-z; Lizzzz; lie-zie, etc.’ as well as hiding and peeking around corners at us. At one point the vicar turned up, who did speak spanish and we chatted to him for a while whilst sipping on some hot and sweet drink we’d kindly had thrust in our hands.

We had only an hour or so’s activity to do before curling up, but our turning in for the night seemed to coincide with the procession past our tent of the church band who wanted to practice singing some uplifting praise filled songs, accompanied by some brass and a drum kit.  We were so entertained by the experience of the band seemingly being as good as inside our tent screeching their way through a blinding set of alleluias.    

Setting up camp on the porch