The Elephant's Travels 2013

This is the first Team Elephant blog post for 2013. It is a month late because we are a month late recovering Elephant from the shippers. There must be reasons for this delay, but I am yet to have anyone explain them and, to a great extent, we don't care about the reasons. Our own preparation and planning has been sufficient but sometimes people, or organisations, just let you down. What matters to us is getting on the road. The rest is just waiting around.

It hasn't been a big week, but it has been a good week. Team Elephant has continued to wander around California getting our American legs and waiting for the US Government shutdown to end so that the national parks open up for visitors.

After our escape from the chilly mountain retreat of Lake Tahoe, we returned to the fertile valley. This brought us back to an orderly grid of roads and cropping producing a vast array of fruit and vegetables. So much is grown here that California alone is the world's fifth largest agricultural exporter. As fascinating as this amazing fecundity is, the long central valley of California is no place for Team Elephant. The roads are straight, flat and dusty. The traffic is heavy and the towns close together and congested.

West from the flat oil-town of Bakersfield California, the vast fields of California's Central Valley grow every type of fruit and nut and the roads run straight and square and disappear into the dust haze. Our “rest” day in Bakersfield had washed away with our sweat as we spent our time navigating around this spread-out city. Despite a long day we managed only the essential administration and postponed our rest for a better day.

There is no easy way to get from the coast to the mountains in central California. All roads lead, as straight as a gun barrel, across the wide agricultural expanse of the Central Valley. The day after our family dinner with Blair, Kristen, Ewen and Lily, we let out east across the valley with the sort of mile eating determination that comes naturally to Americans, Australians and Canadians. The just settle down to it and get on with it mentality. The drive all Saturday to the Bachelor and Spinsters Ball, dance all night then drive all day Sunday to get home mentality.

Phoenix is a huge city by any standards. With more than four million residents it has managed to spread itself out over a huge area of southern Arizona. It is the sort of place you seem to be almost there for hours. Phoenix is dusty, flat and... well … flat. It is a favourite winter hangout for retirees from the frozen northern states and, apparently, a good place to retire generally. Our reason for going there was to have a couple of administration days before we disappeared into Mexico.

Well... a lot can happen in a week in Mexico. Since crossing the border from that other United States a week ago we have crossed through the Sonoran Desert and stayed in its blighted villages, crossed the Tropic of Cancer, sweltered along its steamy coast, rested up in a faded coastal tourist town and joined in a fiesta in the city of Durango high in the Sierra Madre Occidental. It has been a big week for Team Elephant. Sonora is a relatively poor northern state of Mexico, bordering the USA and inflicted with the some of the grim back-wash from the poorly named “war on drugs”.

We lingered on in Durango for a further day, slept late, caught the cable car up a nearby hill to take in the city, walked 300m through an underground tunnel between the main square and the minerals museum, visited the Museum of Francisco (Pancho) Villa and enjoyed a cheap dinner of the local speciality, gorditas. It was somewhere during our idle day that I checked my email back at our hotel and discovered to my dismay that we needed to go to Guatemala. Exactly why is a much longer story but suffice it to say we need to export Elephant from Mexico.

By the time we arrived in Morelia, our ideas about Mexico, if we had any at all, had largely been dismantled and were ready for a rebuild. There may have been no better place for that to happen than this stunningly beautiful town of 130,000 laid out in a grid pattern in the 16th Century. Morelia, of course, has a huge cathedral (every Mexican city worth its salt has at least one of those) but it also has a vast stock of beautiful and substantial buildings, extensive well maintained parks and well used public plazas.

This is a story about how the nature of a journey can change quickly and for reasons we can't control. But before we get to those dramatic events, there is a little more routine travelling needed to set the scene. When we finally got into Oaxaca we found a good location for a little administration that was needed before we disappeared into Guatemala. Experience has taught us that it is best to arrive at a border with all the necessary copies of passports, licences and bike registration ready to go. At the small crossings, a photocopier might not be available.

By the time we got to the Guatemala border we were feeling a little weary and not at all in the mood for the usual border-crossing circus. We had ridden a long way out of our way to avoid the major commercial crossing from Mexico at Ciudad Hidalgo and opted for a little used crossing at Las Champas/La Mesilla but border crossings are always fraught. We braced ourselves for a long, expensive and frustrating day.

After "Huehue", San Cristobal de las Casas was a different type of town altogether. This was a tourist town to its bootstraps complete with trendy restaurants, walking streets and stalls aplenty selling tribal handicrafts. As San Cristobal also provided an excellent jumping off point for tours to various pre-Spanish ruins and a number of national parks, it was at the top of the backpackers' must see list.

Having decided to ride up to Guadalajara we planned a route which took us on a sweep along the southern shore of Laguna de Chapala, around the western end of the lake then back along the northern shore. We had heard that the town of Chapala, which was only a half hour from the airport at Guadalajara, had become an ex-pat colony for retirees from the USA and Canada. While we don't usually find places like this attractive, it seemed worth a visit to see for ourselves this aspect of modern Mexico.

So, we finally come to the end of this episode of Elephant's travels and this blog is simply to tie up some loose ends as we head back to an Australian summer and some more mundane tasks. We spent our 10 day break at La Manzanilla doing very little indeed. Both of us were tired by the time we arrived and it was a year since we had managed to fit in a genuinely relaxing break.