Peenie Wallie

So, I pack all of my crap up into two backpacks. I strap one on the back fender and put one on my back and I'm off. I've got about a grand in my money belt, two cameras, a laptop, a cell phone, a helmet cam, and a GPS and I take 8 West to 163 South to I-5 South and I'm just skint back. I'm keeping up with traffic and we're running about 60 or 80. Who the hell knows? I have no speedometer and I'm not about to pull out my GPS while I'm rolling down an interstate that's 7 lanes wide on my side.

The bike starts to sound funny like it wants to die and that's what they do when they're starved for fuel, so I'm thinking I need to gas up and I'd rather do it in the U.S. than in Mexico, because, obviously I'll be killed and swinging from a bridge if I stop for gas in Tijuana. So, I switch it to reserve and I take the next exit and I want to get some gas, but I've got my credit card in my money belt because I'm so sure I'll be killed on this trip and frog-marched from one ATM to the next at gunpoint that now, just to get gas, I have to take off my money belt which I do in front of god and everyone else at the gas station.

So, I fill up the tank and now, I'm thinking that I want to go back 2 exits to Palm Avenue and go to the military surplus store to get a better backpack than the one I got at Walmart because it already broke this morning when I tried to put it on my back so I want to go back to get a military issue one from the Army Navy Surplus store and I turn around and go north on I-5 and, as soon as I do this, I realize I've made a mistake.

I see the cop parked underneath I-5. He turns his lights on. I'm freaking out. Freaking out. Then, I see that he's dealing with some issue on the other side of the interstate. He's not after me. But I get on the Interstate going back North and I think Jesus Christ why am I headed North on I-5? Like they're not patrolling I-5 North out of Tijuana. OMG what was I thinking? I switched the plates on my bike and now I'm out shopping for backpacks? WTF?

I go north in I-5 about 3 miles and exit Palm and find the army navy store and it's closed, of course. It's only like 8 in the morning, but I'm on track now. I need to get my @ss across the border with great haste. So, I get back on I-5 heading south and after I got about a mile or two, suddenly, the guy beside me is honking and I look back and my backpack is sitting in the middle of the interstate. So, I do a U-turn and drive the wrong way down the interstate shoulder and I jump off the bike and run into the interstate and retrieve the backpack. No one ran over it, by the grace of god. It didn't have anything valuable in it. Just some walmart tools and tie downs and stuff like that. No cameras or laptop. That was on my back. But now, I'm on the side of the interstate trying to kick start this 650cc beast and the cars are just streaming by and I am a sitting duck. If a cop comes by, he's going to pull over and rape me and I have to get this show on the road and this is a slow motion nightmare. I'm going to prison or I'll be fined for thousands of dollars and the cop is going to be here any second. It isn't like this area isn't heavily patrolled. It's a war zone, for christ's sake.

I notice that something is not quite right with the throttle. It's getting stuck, but I'm not clear why and suddenly, it dawns on me. I've got to scrap the adventure. I've got to kill it outright. The bike isn't running right. It couldn't be helped. I'm having throttle trouble and my melted backpack is in the middle of the interstate.

But I get the bike started and then I just throw the other backpack between my legs resting on the gas tank and I get on the interstate heading south and I try to clear my head. At some point, I decide that I'm OK. The throttle is acting funny, but I have the tools to fix it. The backpack isn't a serious crisis. I'm very close to the border. I decide to keep going.

I roll up to the border, but there are more cars crossing this time than the last time I came down. Plus, I'm on a bike this time. So, when I pull up to the PASE, NO PASE light, it doesn't do anything. I look at the guy and they just wave me on, so I proceed slowly forward. I roll across the border and follow the signs for Mexico 1D and, believe it or not, I get lost again. This time, I was following another bike instead of following the road signs and this is a dangerous town. I mean they're killing people right and left down here. Not the place you want to be screwing around.

And I get straightened out and get back on Mexico 1D and I'm driving through Tijuana and, well, what can I say. It's Tijuana. But maybe you've never been there. I'll tell you what it's like. You can breath. More smog than you can imagine. It burns your throat. Smells like fiberglass, burning plastic, burning tires, smog. You name it. Bad air pollution. On my right is the "new" border fence. And it's a nice one. There are areas along the border controlled by the military. Theirs. Ours. I can't be sure. But military tents with guys in camo with machine guns and unmanned monitoring stations all along the border and people are being watched. Everyone is either watching or being watched.

On the side of the road, there's a culvert full of trash and something nearly human is lying on the concrete shoulder of the road and digging through this trash in the culvert. I did not run over him, but someone will one day. The road is divided, and where there is construction, 24" steel rebar protrudes up through the concrete. Don't hit those. Yikes.

Then, Mexico 1D turns South. This is the turn I missed last time I was down here. I see it now. I'm on 1D headed south. It's actually a clear day (for Tijuana) and I can see the islands off the coast. Not sure what they're called. But I'm rolling south on 1D. Go through the toll road and pay the man and I'm rolling south.

My plan is to stop at Rosarito and deal with the backpack situation. I'm certainly not going to stop before then. So, I'm rolling south and balancing the backpack between my legs. The wind is about to make me go deaf, inside my helmet. Why? I dunno. Probably my helmet is old and doesn't fit as well as it once did but the wind is just howling inside my helmet and it's seriously too loud for me to enjoy the ride.

I get to Rosarito and I pull over into a PEMEX. I like PEMEX because I feel like I can trust the people that work there. We know who they are. They're employed by Pemex. They have timecards and schedules. If they're robbing people on the clock, then they're idiots.

So I roll in there and I sit down and take stock of the situation. I find my ear plugs and put them in. I repack my backpack, but I see that it melted onto the muffler before it fell off onto the interstate. So maybe that was the burning plastic smell, eh?

I use my bungee cords to tie it down to the gas tank and then I start heading South again. (I've already seen Rosarito.)

But the wind is still too loud. And, I'm rolling down the coast between Rosarito and Ensenada and I'm thinking about Pete. Peter DeLeo drove an XR from Southern California down to Peru and right about now, I'm thinking...why? Like, it's basically a dead run on Mexico 1D right now. The wind is so loud in my ears I can't think. I'm thinking that this is not the ideal way to see the world. I'm thinking that I should have rented a car, quite honestly.

I stopped south of Rosarito to take a photo of the bay and some fish farms they have growing there. While I'm stopped, I adjust my ear plugs and the right one wasn't in right, apparently. Wasn't seated properly. So I shove them both in until they're about to touch my brain and once I got it put in place properly, the world got quiet and the trip became much more enjoyable.

The place that I stopped was just on the shoulder, and I decide that I won't do that again. There is some traffic here. Not a lot, but enough that I don't want to get run over. I decide not to stop on the shoulder again. The trick to staying alive is looking for things that you're doing wrong and correcting them. And I am on this trip. I'm learning as I go.

It's hard because I'm in unfamiliar territory and am border-line "lost" at any point in time. I'm following Mexico 1, basically. That's the basic plan.

They say necessity is the mother of invention, and now I'm kind of getting things dialed in properly. With my backpack strapped to the gas tank, it's really not in my way at all. I have the lighter backpack on my back with only my laptop and cameras in it. At some point, I take one of the cameras out and wear it around my neck.

Now, for the record, I'm sure that this is not bright. Like it doesn't take a genius to figure out that, if I wreck going 70 mph, a camera around my neck would probably slice through my spine like a guillotine. But this is where we are.

Somewhere South of Tijuana, or possibly Rosarito, it dawns on me that I'm on vacation in Mexico, and I'm having a good time. This is actually the first time that it occurs to me. I'm rolling down Mexico 1 and I'm on the verge of a great adventure. And I begin to feel a little better about the trip. So of the stress from getting through San Deigo and Tijuana starts to fade.

Just before I get to Ensenada, I drive through a military checkpoint. There's guys in fatigues in the middle of the road and they're stopping everyone that comes through and for everyone that doesn't stop, there's a guy in the middle of the road surrounded by sand bags with an M2 .50 caliber machine gun that shoots 10 rounds a second that are as big hot dogs.

They take one look at me and just wave me through. For the record, lets be clear. There is a war going on down here. This is a low-grade war zone. No question. But they're looking for drug runners. And I'm clearly not a drug runner because a) I'm heading South instead of North and b)I'm on a motorcycle. So how much drugs could you carry, seriously. So, they see me with my camera and just wave me through the military checkpoint and I stop on the other side for a few clandestine photos with the long lens because I don't see guys behind .50 cal's in the middle of the road very often. Not any more, anyway.

So, I get out and start chaining up my motorcycle in a handicap parking space just the other side of the military check point and some police type of guy walks up and says in perfect English "Where did you come from? Your bike is safe here. This is not like Tijuana." And I'm relieved. He says he'll watch my bike and I go to take surreptitious photos of the military and when I come back, we start to talking and he tells me this.

"If you are going South, before you get to Bahia San Quentin, you will see some people set up on the side of the road selling clams. The signs will say "mariscos". You should stop there. They are delicious."

And I'm thinking. OK. Right on. Clams for sale on the side of Mexico 1. Now we're getting somewhere. And if my tour guides are going to be the people I meet along the way, than I can live with that.

"How will I know them?" I ask, fully aware of my shortcomings.

"There are great piles of shells. You cannot miss them."

I drive into the town of Ensenada and stop at a Pemex. I check my tire pressure and my oil. The front tire only has 5 pounds of pressure in it, so I put some more in. I have no idea how much pressure is in it, but more than 5 pounds. I know that much.

I roll through town just to check it out. It's fairly large. But, as I come around this point into the port, there's a cruise ship sitting there at the dock. And now, I remember the last time I was here. We came back from Hawaii on a cruise ship and docked in the harbor at Ensenada and that's the last time I was here and that was in 1993, so it was 16 years ago if it was a day.

Ensenda is a pretty big town. It has a Home Depot and all. Then, I go by the coast and there's a sign that says "Playa Abierto", so I decide to drive down onto the beach for a bit. I get some guy to take a few photos of me at the port in Ensenada.

Then I'm rolling south again and the next town that shows up on my GPS is called "Bahia San Quentin" and I'm thinking...I need to make tracks. I need to get moving because, I'm already a day behind on this glorious open-ended journey to the center of nowhere. If you don't have any set travel plans, then it may not be possible to get behind, but I felt like I was, in any event.

So I blow out of Ensenada and start rolling South and now, for the first time, I'm really enjoying myself. The traffic drops off substantially. So, I'm not racing down a four lane toll road trying to maintain any speed. Instead, it drops off to a two lane black top road and we go through some mountains. It's just beautiful. I'd say that it reminds me very much of the Sacred Valley in Peru (Urubamba and Ollayantatambo). That stretch just south of Ensenada was just breathtaking.

And I'm blowing through mountains above these irrigate fields and it's just awe inspiring and, to be honest, I've had no trouble with the police. Now, true enough, there are military checkpoints every so often, but they just wave me through.

And it reminds me of a time, long ago, in the spring of 1990 when I'd just bought a Mustang GT and I was blowing through the backroads on the way to Brookhaven and I was going about 90 down this gorgeous two lane black topped road when I passed a cop. And that cop never stopped and never slowed down and never turned around and never came after me. And, of course, I'll never know why. But I like to think that he knew that I was just out stretching my legs in my new car.

And, this is how it is in Baja, so far. Now, maybe tomorrow, they'll throw me in jail and beat me with trucheons and deny to the embassy that they've ever seen me. But so far, I've not had any trouble to speak of.

As I came into one little town, I saw some little shacks on the side of the road and they all had signs that said "Mariscos." As I'd not eaten anything all day, I pulled over, did a U-turn, and went back. There were several shacks. I picked one in the middle that was brightly colored. It said "Mariscos San Quentin" and "El Sabor de la Vida".

I went into the store, but could only get one ear plug out. I'd realized much earlier in the day that I'd pushed my left ear plug into too far. So far that I couldn't get it to come out. It actually went in so far that it didn't work as well, if you can believe it. I started thinking that I'd stop and dig through my tool boxes and get out the needle nose pliars and try to pull it out that way. I started noticing the hospital/doctor "plus" signs on the road signs of the little towns. I imagined myself going in and asking for a doctor or nurse to look at my ear. I rode like this for a long way.

So now, I needed to talk to this guy, but I could only hear out of one ear, and he had this horrible music from his truck blasting through two speakers into his little roadside shanty hawking mariscos. I'd have never chosen this one if I wasn't essentially deaf when I walked in.

So I told him I wanted some Mariscos (clams) and some Camarones (shrimp) and he cooked them on the spot for me.

While he did this, I went out in the parking lot and started trying to dig out my left ear plug. Eventually, I managed to extract it and by then, he'd produced this enormous bowl of soup, with an avocado cut up in it, on top of the camarones and mariscos. It also had "pulpos" (this is either squid or octopus, I'm not clear. Something with tentacles. In any event, it was the best soup I've ever had. Reminds me very much of the soup I had in Peru just outside of Pisco or Nazca...my memory fails me on this.

But it was just the best soup I'd ever had and it cost 130 pesos for the soup and the coke, which was about $10.00.

So, I got my photo taken at the restaurant, which has a big ginormous map of Baja out front and a little "you are here" pointing to Bahaia San Quentin. So, I asked the guy what was the next town down the road and he told me that Rosario was only about another hour. And I really did want to get as far as possible before dark, so I hit the road for Rosario.

Now, the trick here is that Rosario isn't on my Garmin maps that I paid $50 for. But it's on this guy's hand painted map of Baja. So, I quiz him about it somewhat, to make sure he's not on crack because there's a game I'm playing here.

The game is this. I have a new 4.6 gallon IMS desert tank. I know that much. What I don't know is what sort of gas mileage the bike gets. So, I don't know how far I can go on a tank of gas.

My rough guess would be that I get about 50 mph, which would mean that I could go about 225 miles on a tank of gas, roughly. So, I track my mileage, but then every time I get to a Pemex, they fill it up and the gas pumps only show liters. And, no, I'm not all checked out on the metric system. Thanks for asking. So, I know that they put in 8 liters of petrol, but that's all I know. I have no clue how many liters are in a gallon. So, this really doesn't tell me anything. I make some rough calculations that I get roughly 11 miles to the liter, but again, this information is pretty much useless.

So, when I ask this guy about the town of Rosario, I want to make sure that a) the town is where he says it is cause it isn't in my gps and b) they'll have a pemex.

So, I take his word for it and start rolling south. At some point, I came up to a check point where two Federales were standing in the middle of the road. Always, I stop. Always, they wave me through. Like, other people, they stop and question. I watch them. When they see me, I think it's all they can do not to laugh. And, just for clarification, I don't see a lot of other tourists down here doing what I'm doing. I don't pass a lot of dirt bikes loaded down with gear.

So, I got through that checkpoint and I ended up behind a car that was just cooking. He passed me. And I was wanting to make time so I followed him. Now...how fast was I going? I have no clue, but we were flying. Like, I was hunched over the handlebars and going balls out in top gear. For some time we went like this.

And, this is the beautiful thing about baja. Eventually, you realize that there pretty much is no law down here. Or, none to speak of. I mean, there are tons of checkpoints, but it's not nearly as heavily patrolled as say Morrison, Colorado. Not even close.

At some point, I came up behind a cop as I was driving. Now, the speed limit is marked. It's either 40 km/hr or 60 km/hr or 80 km/hr. It keeps changing. But I came up behind him and I knew he was a cop cuz people down here don't have ski racks. So I was following him and then he turned on his lights and pulled over to the other side of the road to check on someone that had broken down, apparently.

I went on by. Well, it wasn't too long before I looked in my rear view and saw him coming up behind me with his lights going. And I'm thinking...here we go. This is it. This is what everyone prepared me for. And I pulled over and he went on by me. So I got back on the road and followed him with his lights still going. After about 10 km, he turned them off. So, he was running up behind me with his lights on to see what I'd do. To see if I'd run. But this is not a new game. I've had cops do this to me in Mississippi. These are old tricks.

Finally, I've gone 100 miles without refilling my tank and I've passed a lot of Pemex stations. My thought was that I wanted to see how far I could go instead of refilling each time I saw one. It just seems stupid. But now, it's getting close to dusk and I have no idea if there's really a town up ahead named Rosario, or if it's another 300 km to the next town and it will be on the Sea of Cortez. Such is the fate of people that trust their travel plans to Garmin. It's certainly not in my GPS.

It started getting cool and closer to dusk as we were winding up these canyons with those peculiar enormous dragon cactus plans like I notice in San Diego. We're driving up through these barren canyons and I imagine myself running out of gas in the dark and sleeping in the freezing cold desert between the cacti but eventually, I roll up to another military checkpoint.

I couldn't tell you how many I went through today. A lot. More than 6. I'm not sure what their guns are. I'll have to clarify this with Robert. I think that they're FAL's.

So, I rolled up and he just waved me through, but now I'm getting testy. Like, how can they be so sure I'm not a threat? So I try to talk to the guy. I ask him this "quanto kilometers a Rosario, por favor?" And he's like "dos". And I'm like "Dos cientos?" and he's like. "No. Dos kilometers."

And, sure enough, I roll down the hill and into Rosario and the first thing I see is a Pemex and I'm so glad to see it I can't say. I just pull up and I say "Roho". They have two different types of gas down here. Essentially, it is "regular unleaded" and "premium unleaded". The regular unleaded has a green handle. The premium one has a green handle. And I've heard other people order by color, so that's what I do. I pull up and say "Roho". And he starts topping it off and asks me if I want a cup of coffee.

I'm like...sounds great. So they give me a cup of freeze-dried coffee and then charge me 11 pesos for it, when I'd assumed it would be free.

But, like an idiot, because of the coffee incident, I didn't notice how much gas he put in. So, I know I can go 100 miles without hitting reserve, but that's all I learned in my little experiment.

When I return to my bike, I notice that some oil has leaked out on the ground. I ask him if it was from my bike and he apologizes and says "no. No senor." But I realized later that it was. Now, a slow oil leak is not, in and of itself, a huge deal. But it does make me wonder where it's leaking from and why. I'll check it again in the morning before I leave.

I ask him how far to the next town and he says this. He says "three hundred kilometers". Now, I have no idea how far this is in miles, but it doesn't sound close. And I see a hotel and decide that I'll crash for the night and we'll try to ride again in the morning.

According to the odometer on my bike, I rode 267.7 miles today. So, not as far as I'd hoped, but the Baja peninsula is a long peninsula. I'd hoped to ride 333 miles, so that I could make it to Cabo San Lucas in 3 days. Now, it looks like it may take 4. I'm honestly not sure how much faster I can go. The problem is that you have to refuel, and eat, and I'm already shooting from the bike while I'm riding. Think about that, for a minute. I drive the bike with my camera around my neck and shoot with both hands. So, I let go of the handlebars going about 60, point the camera at the target, and squeeze off a few rounds as I drift into the oncoming traffic or onto the shoulder. It's not the brightest thing I've ever done, but you have to do something, and stopping every time I want to get a shot isn't working.