Milky Way

There is a strange prevalence of Milky Way bars in Guatemala, considering the simplicity of most other snacks. This fact, combined with the lottery-winning odds of Lizzie and Ali wearing red and blue t-shirts when coming across a broken bridge, left us no option but to create an homage to a very memorable ad from the early 90s.

Watch our valiant attempt here. 

P.S. We had ordered the producers to find us a 2' river but accidentally wrote 2" on the visioning board...#spinaltap. The river does actually get to 2m by the end of rainy season so lucky we were there at the start to attempt our heroic fording of the "river". 

Back to School

When we decided to embark on an extended cycle tour, we thought it might be prudent to do a bit of a test run to make sure we really understood what we were getting in to, and that it would actually be fun! We took a three week trip to Vietnam at christmas which helped us identify a few additional pieces of kit we would require for a smooth journey and, most importantly, it made us realise how important communication was for a more fulfilling trip. As we found out, Vietnamese is nigh on impossible to pick up in a year, let alone three weeks. Playing charades to order a sandwich or find the nearest toilet (entertaining one another no end as we become proportionally more adventurous in our actions based on how urgently a result was required) was a daily adventure, but this left no real space for any meaningful conversation (other than one lady letting Lizzie know she’d done well to find a husband with such a big nose).  All this, and the fact that it is a much more accessible language, as well as one we have some grounding in, led us to commit to significant effort to learn Spanish before and during our trip.  

In the months prior to the trip, we adopted a Blitzkrieg approach to learning Spanish. This entailed:

• an audio CD, (Michel Thomas, very engaging and a good foundation for some grammar)
• an app (Duolingo - highly recommended for expanding vocab),
• a split Spanish/English book (disaster - this was short stories by the likes of Cevantes, written in ye Olde Spanish rendering it somewhat useless unless we want to talk about chivalrous knights and brooding storm clouds),
• a Spanish book with simple stories and some vocab (the stories left something to be desired but it was good to consolidate our learning),
• Spanish podcasts (great to practice listening to people actually speak)
• and finally some Spanish lessons in the evenings (from the dynamic and pensive Fernando who had a strange obsession with the shipping forecast).

This gave us the basics for the start of our trip and has facilitated simple and straightforward engagement with the people we’ve met along the way - where we have come from, where we’re heading, how tired we are, how hungry we are - all pretty stimulating stuff…

So, before we left, knowing our Spanish wouldn’t pass muster if we wanted to find out about political opinion, historical knowledge or who just won the Champion’s League, we identified a great looking Spanish school in San Pedro, on the shores of Lake Atitlan (Lago de Atitlan - see how good our Spanish is now??!). The lake is stunning - about 15km long and proudly ringed by a monotony of mountains (2500+ meters) and a veritable collection of three volcanoes (over 3000+ metres). Whilst this made the school somewhat challenging to cycle to, once we were there the views were pretty ok. 

Lake Atitlan

We have just left the Lake, after a week there improving our Spanish. We opted to fully immerse ourselves in the learning by staying with a local family (with whom we conversed solely in Spanish), going to Spanish school for four hours in the morning, having copious amounts of homework in the afternoon (that wasn’t mentioned when we signed up!) and conversation class in the evening.

The family were great - Bartolo and Lea, their twin children Frank and Angie (6) and little Bartolito (2). Staying with them was probably the highlight of the week as they were hugely generous, welcoming and, most importantly, ridiculously patient as we took two minutes to decline the correct version of ‘to go’, in saying something hugely stimulating such as ‘we went to the pub for a beer after class’. They must have loved the insight we brought to their lives… One of the things that left a really big impression was the way they operated as a family - Bartolo ran a computer business but worked hard to make time to be at home to help managing the three children; Lea running the house and looking after us whilst already clearly having a lot on her plate; and the children, who were so well-tempered, and loved playing with each other or happily alone, not pleading for attention as Bartolo and Lea helped us stumble and stutter through our simple Spanish phrases.  All this, whilst always laughing and joking (yep, thats right - we understood their jokes in Spanish). This happy, well functioning and good natured family set a high standard for anyone and were a pleasure to spend time with.

Our wonderful hosts

At the start of the week, we were slightly nervous of our ability to concentrate for a four-hour Spanish lessons with just the teacher and the two of us.  Lizzie was particularly concerned given her strong propensity to daydream and regularly nap (she once achieved the particularly impressive feat of falling asleep in a one-on-one meeting). Worryingly, the ‘classroom’ had no windows to stare out of as it was already outside, set in a beautiful garden next to the lake, staring at the volcanoes and wondering what it might have been like to live in Pompeii - serious ammunition for daydreaming (auto-correct keeps changing this to Pompey, which is perhaps an even worse fate than doesn’t bear thinking about). Fortunately, we had the most energetic and engaging Spanish teacher, Clemente, who regularely described himself as ‘loco’ and spent the week trying to prove the point.  He used some wonderful acting to demonstrate the subtleties of the language; a simple description of the disctinction between two different forms of the verb ‘to know’ in two different past tenses (a nuance which the Engllish language lacks) led to two elaborate 5-minute performances, with him (enthusiastically) playing multiple characters. We now have this wonderful memory etched into our brains and we expect this will keep it rooted there for the long term. If only Miss. Goodwin had had the same panache…

Clemente and our "classroom"

Since leaving formal education and entering the world of work, we have both really noticed the joy we get from learning - this seems to stem from a number of factors. Despite much discussion, we are yet to pin down the relative magnitude of each so in no particular order they are:

• We are not being forced to learn but are doing so because we want to and so choosing our subject
• There is a more tangible outcome from the learning
• It allows us to use our brain in a different way from normal
• The progress feels discreet and rewarding
• We’re paying for it and so want to make the most of it!

When Ali went on a French exchange trip as a teenager, his friend John and he pulled every trick in the book to avoid the family, stay in their room and attempt to complete every challenge in Brian Lara cricket (Michael Bevan’s knock against England at the 1999 World Cup was a real sticking point that required us to avoid the family for an entire day, coming down only for lunch and dinner). With the benefit of time, some maturity, and the above factors, we couldn’t get enough of spending time with the family, practicing with them, with each other and asking endless questions. The result is, hopefully, that the next three months of the trip will see us having far more rewarding conversations with people along the way and getting so much more from the trip. Vamos!

Whilst the intensity and masochism of our learning Spanish didn’t leave much spare time, we managed to cram what free periods we had with exploring the town and the lake. It was great to have a week in a place and get use to its rhythm and traditions (in particular going to the Mr. and Mrs. San Pedro competition one evening, which involved some apparently hilarious skit in Mayan, a lot of incense and some slow walking). The lake is surrounded by three volcanoes, which not only creates a stunning vista but presents a challenge that we couldn’t refuse - on our one day off, we got up early to hike up Volcan de San Pedro, although it turns our that cycling muscles are different to hiking muscles as the next day, and the day after, and the day after that we could barely walk down the stairs our legs were so tight. Lesson learnt.

Lizzie was given a magic stick
to hike the volcano

We also managed to continue our developing tradition of swimming before breakfast -  we seemed to have the lake almost to ourselves at sunrise, with just a few fisherman gently paddling by, collecting the night’s catch. There were some eerie half structures in the lake, ghosts of old buildings that the rising lake has gobbled up - in a storm in 2007 the level increased significantly and reclaimed large swathes of land, but thankfully it has been relatively stable since. One benefit of the old structures is they are used as a refuge by fish - a fact taken advantage of by local fisherman who snorkel at night with torches and harpoons. Ali joined them one evening - swimming at night with a torch was an awe-inspiring and magical experience; the harpooning of fish less so. He managed to get one that would barely feed a kitten and another that would just about have generated a ceviche starter.

Early morning swimming 

Harpooner Hunter Gatherer

It was wonderful to have a week off the bikes and really use our brains rather than our legs. The intesntiy mean it didn’t really feel like a break, we’ll just have to wait for the beaches of El Salvador to feel like we might be able to relax on this trip! 

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

Lost in Translation

Generally, the experience of any given road by car and by bike are very different. The range of these experiences will obviously differ depending on the road, but at the least you might imagine that in one, a softly humming engine exerts itself whilst you nod sleepily to its purr; in the other, the sweat slowly beads on your brow as the wind blows against your knees and you puff a little with gentle exertion.  This distinction is the mild version, but either way we’ve come to learn that a serious filter is needed to advice given by drivers of cars about what a road might be like to ride by bike.  

For example (genuine experiences):

‘there is a shop just round the corner’ = ride on 15km

‘it kind of rolls up and down a bit’ = there are some mega climbs coming

‘the road is a bit rough at times’ = brace yourself, you’re wrists are about to develop carpel tunnel syndrome (Lizzie hasn’t felt her little finger since Mexico)

But the filter that we need to apply isn’t simply one of magnifying whatever caution we have been given, we also need to adjust the other way. People simply struggle to believe that we’ve cycled the 20km from the previous town, let alone intend to cycle across their entire country (and some), and so often quite achievable challenges are declared as ‘IMPOSSIBLE!’.  The combination of these two distortions mean that whilst we regularly ask for advice about the roads (most importantly: ‘esta asfalto!?’) we then have to triangulate this against our own random assessment of how ambitious/lazy/melodramatic our interlocutor appears.  Of late, this assessment has been letting us down.

We were told that the road from Fray Bartolome de las casas to Pajal was completely unrideable; and so we shrugged, hopped on our bikes and gave it a go.  Some might call this arrogance but honestly, if we stopped every time someone said that, we’d hardly ride any of this journey. Hours of pushing our less than compliant loads (millions of man hours have been invested in making bikes ideal riding machines, I’m not sure any have been sunk into the less glamerous ergonomics of pushing) up a rock strewn 14% gradient, we realised that our current finger in the air, triangulating activity doesn’t leave space for the answer to ever be ‘Oh, okay, let’s get a bus then’.  Five hours into this ordeal, after pondering the difference between something being character building and just bloody hard work, and off the back of a timely little outpouring from Lizzie to let Ali know just how tired she was, the second truck of the day shuddered to a halt just in front of us and a couple of chicken laden ladies descended.  We saw our moment and in an instant we were up, bikes, panniers and all, bumping around for the next hour in the back of a cattle wagon to cover the remaining 20km.  We consolled our moment of weakness with the fact that we would never have been able to cover this distance via the Sisyphus-esque torture through which we were putting ourselves.

In part, we share this story to contrast it with two days later when we finally heeded the warnings of locals about the quality of the road, and keen to maintain this expedition as a bike ride with a heavy load, rather than a hike with an obtuse load, we took a bus for the 20 something Km for which we’d recieved a very similar warning to our previous boulder strewn Everest - and didn’t first feel the need to discover this for ourselves.  The bus wound down and down to a river crossing where we insisted on dismounting to the utter horror of the very friendly conductor. ‘No, you can’t, it’s such a steep hill.  No you can’t, it is asphalt, but it’s not possible...but, but, let us take you to the town, but, but….. why!!??’.

Needless to say, we got off the bus and crawled hour after hour up the 1,000 metres; this time, delighting in the pleasure of the smoooooth asphalt and feeling like we were doing what we have come to Guatelmala for.  

Philosophical Musings from the Road

Cycling can be a meditative activity. Once you have mastered riding without stabilisers, that slamming on just your front brake could lead to premature ejection from the saddle and that they drive on the right in Central America (that one took a while at “intersections”), your brain is almost entirely freed up to contemplate life’s big questions. As we typically ride for between five and six hours a day, this creates a huge cerebral void to fill. As I am sure you can imagine, we endeavour to put the world to rights, to evolve the musings of Plato and to discuss Lizzie’s evolving tanlines ahead of a (very important) wedding we are attending soon after our return.

In general, the ever ready presence of Google means that most fact-based questions are stopped in their tracks before we are able to explore/argue our own foolproof logic, or highly creative lines of thinking, to suppose our own answer. However, in the absence of a free hand on the bike to tap away and find the ‘real’ answer [note to reader: not everything you read on the internet is true] we’ve gotten quite a lot of mileage out of some good puzzlers.

The fact that each question is so related to our immediate experience might suggest that there is a lot of blood going to our legs and not a lot to our brains, but we have been genuinely engrossed for hours on these:

Can you get sunburnt through tattoos?

If you freeze soda water and add it to a flat drink, would the ice cubes make it fizzy?

What is the quickest you can eat something and it start to be absorbed into your blood?

If an ant is transported in our pannier bags (a frequent occurence in the peanut butter jar), does it:

1. join another colony at its destination
2. for a new colony at its destination (let’s presume there was a boy ant and a girl ant in said pannier)
3. die

Is there a common buffalo between the tomato and the mozzarella? Or is their perfect synergy one of life’s most beautiful coincidences?

When did people first arrive in the UK?

Do birds fly with their beaks open to breathe whilst they fly?

Does each type of cloud formation form at a specific height? If so, what are those heights?

Did we just blow your mind? Insights and answers welcome!

Tacos and Jerk Chicken

In keeping with tradition and our ongoing endeavour to emulate Levison Wood, we have put together a video for the first part of our EPIC adventure, through Mexico and Belize. Click here to watch it.

Ode to The Greatest Show on Earth

Your stunning regularity masks your irregular beauty,
The Queen of punctuality, you never shirk your duty,
The ease with which you rise and fall
Modestly suggests, it's not a miracle at all.
Yet your daily arrival is The Greatest Show on Earth,
Bestowing us with your light, and brightly bringing birth
To the day in front of us, and the world around us,

Opening our eyes, to what before them lies.

I sometimes fear that you will not come,
Your predictability shot, your time done,
That some strange turn will have kept you at bay
And we will continue, blindly, seeking out the day.
But, glorious, you inevitably appear
A piercing orange bulb, dangling near
A reassuring presence, so taken for granted
My fear subsides. Angst supplanted.

Your indiscriminate generosity is unquestioning,
As we each, personally consume your offering,
But daily, as your power concentrates,
The acuteness of your gaze penetrates.
Is it your wrath or your raw being
That leaves us shaking, hiding, seeing
How we might escape your overwhelming presence
That hints at a nasty fate, a cruel deliverance.

From soft, generous beginnings you have become a monster,
A raging, seething, burning imposter.
Your gentle pink touch is transformed,
Now an unrelinquishing stranglehold.
What insighted this beating agression
From the friend we awaited with such impatience?
You are changed and now so are we,
Weakened, wilted, we are ceasing to be.

And then steadily your tenderness returns,
With a gentle ebbing, your grasp weakens.
Your march across the sky becomes a slipping round the corner
Your fans line up to capture and adore you.
The happy glow returns and we all admire your colour
The heat of the day forgotten, we are ready to love another.
With your dying rays upon us, we shower you with praise
What a beauty, what a blessing, what a maker of days.

I will miss you until the morning
When I'll greet your rise, imploring.
You will return in splendour,
And we will watch, comply, surrender.