Marching About

The Complete Bike Tour I have tried to catalog at least some of the experience of riding every stage of this tour. Here, I've stitched all of the individual rides together and added some pictures to the route. It's quite a striking visual and really amazing to see, having experienced every inch of it.

 From One Activity to the Next:     My couchsurfing host, Dorian, is an artist and graphic designer. He works for the government cultural ministry and promotes and studies visual arts around the country. He showed me a wide variety of artwork from Nicaragua, from Leon to Bluefields on the Caribbean coast. There is a huge variety of art and influences packed into such a small space. He had a plan in his head and I was fine to go along with it and let someone else be in the driver's seat for a while. We started the day with a breakfast of Nacatamales, traditional Nicaraguan style tamales - corn meal filled with pork and potatoes and wrapped in a banana leaf. We picked them up from a house just around the corner from his. An elderly lady came out of the nondescript house with the Nacatamales in a plastic bag, these were some truly home-prepared delicacies.   The wrapped Nacatamales A delicious Nicaraguan breakfast We then set off to the offices of the ministry of health...

 The Search for a Bike Box My highest priority for my first day in Managua was to secure a bike box. I intended to fly home with my bike and the way I've always done it is find a bike shop and ask them for a cardboard box that they plan to discard. I started by going to a large box store called "Top Bike". I got there right as they opened at 8AM. They sold all different kinds of bicycles - road bikes and mountain bikes were on display in their store and they seemed to have a large warehouse in the back. Yet somehow, just like the stores the day before, they did not have any bike boxes! The saleswoman was helpful and said she knew of a bike shop that might be able to help me and called the owner who confirmed that he could box up my bike for me. When I asked directions to the shop, she just gestured in a direction down the street and said it was somewhere that way, ask someone a bit further down for "Lenny" and I'll find the shop. I started walking that way a...

 The Last Day Of Riding I have mixed feelings about my last day of riding. I'm elated and, frankly, a little bit surprised that I actually managed to do this entire tour from my originally planned start to final destination. I'm also a little bit happy to be done with riding as well, although after a few days I know I could ride more. I'm also interested in how I will interpret all of these stories and experiences once I am no longer in the throes of the tour and having to figure myself out every day. I'm curious as well about what my next ambitious project will be, I guess I can't just go on new bike tours every month.     My morning ride out, with the volcano behind me   With this in mind, I left early from Momotombo, very determined to reach Managua before the hottest part of the day. The last 40 miles were not very hilly, but there was an intense headwind, that did not let up for one second the entire way. Some people told me this was the normal southern winds a...

 Expect the Unexpected I got out early enough from the hotel in Somotillo. My goal was to make it to Leon, about 40 miles away according to the map, by noon and be able to tour around the city a bit. Strava had some other plans for me, however.    One of the volcanoes out in the distance that accompanied me for about 15 miles during my ride.   My first 25 miles were smooth. I was treated to wide open views of the volcanic range, multiple volcanoes puffing clouds of smoke from their craters came in and out of view as the road twisted around. It was flat and I was cruising at a pretty good clip. It was already 90 degrees by 9:30 and I stopped briefly for some cold water and Gatorade. Only a few miles after I resumed, my route instructed me to turn off the main road and onto a dirt road. This one seemed much smoother than the ones I had taken in Guatemala and I started down that path. Very shortly thereafter I ran into some very deep sand. My bike weighs too much in th...

 The Final Border Crossing Today was my final border crossing for this trip. And it was also the most arduous. I got an early start from Choluteca, before the extreme heat started to settle in. It was only about 30 miles to the border, although a headwind and several hills kept my pace around 15mph. I had to stop after an hour for some cold drinks - my water was already hot and the sun is intensifying as I head south, just as May, my couchsurfer, had predicted. There's something wrong with this picture, I just can't figure it out... Interesting spelling on this sign at a fried chicken stand Pleas for help from people living in rural areas - asking the president for aid so they can work the land. Riding by a solar farm. This was the second one I passed today.   Other than the heat, the ride was pleasant. Once I got to the border, it became slightly less pleasant. There was the typical miles-long line of trucks waiting to be processed, and the familiar lack of signs directing me...

My ride today is still within Honduras - no borders. It's also only about 25 miles. I wanted to make sure I could take the heat before doing a longer ride. I'm also a bit encouraged, because at this point I only have about 150 miles or so left until Managua. The view as I headed out of May's house and out of her village of San Jeronimo I was still pretty tired, but made it to Choluteca with no issues. The town seems to be more of a place where people lived and worked, but the tourism opportunities were all outside of the town. I had originally planned to stay with a couchsurfer here, but she had left the country and was trying to make the perilous journey to cross the border into the United States from Mexico, so she was not around. I decided I would try to keep cool and checked into a hotel in downtown Choluteca - one with air conditioning. I lay in bed under the air conditioner, and caught up a bit on this blog. The streets riding into Choluteca I did go into town for a...

Needing to Cool Off I was hot, exhausted and thirsty. In the morning I went to a nearby shop and downed a liter of water and a 2-liter container of maracuja, or passion fruit juice. My head and body felt hot and under the hot sun, my body temperature was simply refusing to go down, no matter how much cold liquid I poured into it. I couldn't even think of eating at that point, either. May suggested we go to her house, where there would be power. She lived in a nearby village, San Jeronimo, and we walked along a dusty dirt road to get to this small, quaint village. I lay in a hammock in her kitchen as she set up a fan to blow on me and I dozed off while she took care of some things at home. She lives at her father's house, but he spends a lot of time with the business in El Salvador, and is usually away for months at a time. May also informed me that hopefully I could recover well from the heat, because it was even hotter in Nicaragua - she had spent a year living there and assur...