I’ve ridden a few hundred thousand motorcycle miles in my life and I can safely say that today was in the Top Ten for most challenging rides. It started out beautifully: up early, showered, a few wonderful chorizo sausage breakfast tacos made by our host Jorge Barrientos (and a few wrapped in aluminum foil for later in the day), packed up and were on our way.
We fuelled the bike to the brim (plus a small auxiliary bottle for emergency fuel), bought a syphon, some Sanborn’s Mexico vehicle insurance for the Beemer and quickly found ourselves at the border. The United States couldn’t wait to see my tail lights, simply collecting three dollars for the toll and shutting the toll window to wait for the next vehicle at the sparsely trafficked border crossing. Um, it was good to see you, too!
We rolled slowly over the concrete bridge crossing the murky Rio Grande and I thought of those who try so desperately to cross that tiny river to better their lives. The Mexican side of the border has changed dramatically since my last land crossing in 1993. New buildings, much higher tech security, more balaclava-clad soldiers carrying wild-looking weapons. We parked in the mostly empty parking lot in front of the large immigration center and Holly stayed with the bike and gear while I went in.
The process is much more professional now and they were all very helpful telling me which window to go to next, etc. The only true frustration was the final window, the payment window, where I got someone very new and it was her mission to check every…single…number and letter on my driver’s license, motorcycle registration, insurance and passport. Same thing for Holly’s paperwork, minus the motorcycle, of course. They took a deposit on my VISA card of $440 US which is refunded upon leaving the country to ensure you don’t sell your vehicle while in the country. I finally received about an inch of paperwork and my fancy vehicle sticker and out the door I went, free to roam the country for the next six months, according to my passport stamp. We had a quick snack and headed into Mexico.
At the border, these two Mexican police officers kindly offered a covered area where we could put on rain gear and have a snack before heading into Reynosa.
Instantly we were dumped into the utter insanity of Reynosa, Mexico and after three or four near misses, I wondered how in the world Mary and I ever pedalled through this same crazy town 20 years earlier, nearly to the day. Bedlam. The Wild West. But the smell of diesel plumes from buses and charcoal fires from the countless street vendors reminded me of why I’m drawn to this part of the planet so strongly: there’s a chaotic rhythm that’s hard to describe to people unless they’ve travelled in it before. The barkers at every street corner selling everything imaginable, the laughing taxi drivers who smile and wave as they cut you off in the sea of traffic ebbing and flowing toward the town’s end and deeper Mexico. Latin America is on a constant simmer and I love it dearly.
A kind citizen pulled alongside us at a stop light in mid-town and had me follow him and his wife to the outskirts of town and our highway south. He had witnessed my spectacular feat just moments earlier of being culled from the large traffic herd and left to fend for myself against the guard rail of the oncoming vehicles. The road had magically, at some unseen wave of a wand, become one way and apparently we were not going the way it was meant to be going. It was so absolutely crazy that Holly and I were both laughing aloud.
So we sat there, huddled against a concrete guard rail as a round man in a very tiny car laid into his horn. I held my hands up to say, “Yes, I understand I’m impeding your progress forward, but where in the world would you like me to go?” As with all things in Mexico, it soon sorted itself out, traffic stopped three lanes wide and I did a lovely 180 and then an equally lovely and illegal u-turn and found my way back to my lanes south.
The road south was in great shape, divided for many kilometres but it is not a pretty stretch of road. There are many abandoned homes, restaurants and PEMEX gas stations. It reminded me strongly of riding through war-torn Nicaragua in 1987 when the people nearest the fighting had simply moved on, leaving their concrete and glass lives behind.
I had planned to ride to Tampico from the border directly but when seven different people, including a Mexican customs officer, tell you not to ride that road…you simply don’t ride that road. I had heard much about the intense drug war plaguing the state of Tamaulipas but thought we could slip through using the old familiar roads of my earlier travels. Common sense prevailed after the fourth column of fully garbed combat soldiers passed us in their open-air pickup trucks, holding on loosely to the roll bars and staring through us. We passed through the tiny village of San Fernando, notorious for two of the largest recorded massacres in the Mexican drug war, fuelled up again and continued south, now headed for Ciudad Victoria.
It began to rain steadily and we pulled off the road into a desolate Mexican Federal Police yard where, after a brief chase by a limping, snarling dog, we jumped a small curb and pulled under a tiny canopy to stay dry while we changed. Two men came out the back door and greeted us with smiles and said we were welcome to come in to change or to rest for a while. We donned our proper rain gear (thank you again, Gerald Tunches!) and after a brief workout of my quickly returning Spanish, we rode off, feral dog in tow. First dog chase of the journey…
The rain continued to fall and the highway had small angry rivers of water careening down its sides as the road rose and fell. The yellow center line began to vanish but it didn’t matter as we seemed to be the only vehicle on the road. I had to watch my speed as the water began to cover the road making it difficult to spot the odd pothole or uneven piece. Normally I would stop and look for a place to camp for the night to wait out the weather but it’s funny what a 12-year old piece of your soul named Holly does to your hard-core traveller’s instincts.
We pushed on for Ciudad Victoria and as we got closer the rain fell harder. Fat tropical drops hammered us and probed our rain gear, finding a few entry points where we failed to secure the suits properly. The rains filled the ditches as we entered the city outskirts and the road shoulders were now swollen with turbid water freely flowing across the entire surface. We stopped under a gas station overhang to escape the deluge and I removed the GPS, the only thing left uncovered in the downpour.
On we rode, into rush hour and the roads were flooding now and we had nowhere to go. Every cross street we came to was a river of water flowing past. It was surreal…and we were fortunate to be heading into the city and not out. I wanted high ground quickly and so I told Holly to hold on tight and we suffered through countless sprays from vehicles racing past us, trying to beat the rising waters. Had I been riding solo I would have stopped and put on the GoPro camera but the flooded streets were dicey and Holly’s safety would have been jeopardized so the thought came and went.
I’d like to say the drivers of the car and trucks and buses were helpful but that wouldn’t be true. They cut us off, rode our tail light and roared past angrily as they tried to get home. We’d had an online offer a few days earlier from a local BMW rider to stay with his family if we passed through town but at that time we planned to be bypassing the city so we politely declined. Now I had no way of reaching him (no Mexican SIM card in my phone) so we began searching for a hotel in the high part of the city, no easy task in Ciudad Victoria.
My visor was rain-streaked and wet and foggy on the inside which reduced my vision. And then Holly spied a place and we pulled in, rode down the slippery tiled driveway and grabbed a room, had hot showers and thanked our lucky stars.
