el grandisimo

finally, you can all breathe a sigh of relief, the blog is back. i write this on the 4^th april from our little hotel room in antigua, guatemala, on the laptop with the letter b missing, so if there are any strange discrepancies involving words with b’s in them, that is the reason why (sorry it's taken me 20 days to actually post this blog, it's hard to make it to an internet in this part of the world sometimes so it's been stored on my memory stick). me and bert are here on our way from mexico back to belize, and it just happens to be semana santa, the most important week in the catholic calendar, and antigua just happens to be the 2^nd best place in the world, after seville in spain, to witness this. totally unplanned by us as we weren’t ever intending to go to guatemala, only to the yucatan to see a few ruins, but how exciting and fortuitous things are sometimes.

rewind almost 4 weeks to mexico city on saturday 7th march where i had spent the day wandering around, waiting for the arrival of el grupo that night for the macmillan mexico coast to coast bike ride. in preparation for this ride i had done approximately no serious training, so i decided to top it off with a big mexican hamburger from a stall in a park that evening. as usual it was totally amazing, as most mexican street food is. i then watched some mexican men playing chess in a park near the diego rivera museum which was unfortunately closed so i couldn’t go in. i had decided not to go up the tower earlier as i had found an english national geographic magazine and the budget didn’t allow for both things, and i figured i had already seen mexico city from the air when flying over it (remember the gigantic stone dog?). anyway, the macmillan group were meant to be arriving around 9pm so i checked into the hotel and went to post-burger sleep for a while. obviously it was hard to get to sleep i was so excited about meeting them all. er, not really true, but i was excited at seeing mi amiga siobhan (who i met on a peru macmillan bike ride 2.5 years ago) (known as siob from now on), especially as she was bringing a camping mattress for me and some other important things like afterbite, and of course her amazing wit and fascinating chat and random stories.

sunday march 8, day zero
after hotel breakfast and brief briefing, and most people probably wondering who i was and why i hadn’t been on the flight from london, we set off on a bus to alvarado which was where we would start the ride the next morning. i have to say that this bus was not the usual high quality i am used to from mexican buses, there was no toilet, no air conditioning (usually there is too much), and no brakes at one point – the little bus driver got underneath to examine it in his smart pinstripe trousers and it seemed to work after that. i hope his trousers were ok as they did look very smart. the journey was long, we stopped for lunch somewhere who knows where, and then were dropped off by a hilly (undulating…) field by the side of the road, in view of the atlantic ocean but not near enough to go for a swim, what a tease. our lovely discover adventure leaders fiona and kenny did a tent demonstration, after which me and siob attempted to put our tent up on top of one of the hills so we would have a nice view. ha, everyone else down in the valleys will be so jealous of our sunset view tent we thought. then a huge gust of wind nearly blew us into the faraway ocean so we decamped to a safer location down below with the clever people. probably a good thing really as we didn’t want to ostracize ourselves immediately from the rest of the group by camping miles away from them.

monday march 9, day 1: flat all day
i can’t remember how i slept that particular night, but overall i slept amazingly well in the tent every night, which happened to be the smelliest tent i’ve ever slept in, from the very beginning of the trip though which doesn’t make too much sense to me. in fact it seemed to get less smelly as the week went on which is probably just that our noses became desensitized as we became less and less clean. after getting up, we took our tent down. this seems like an obvious and pointless comment, but in our list of how this trip compared to our peru one, it is an important issue. in peru they put up and took down our tents, brought round hot water in the morning to our tent door for us to wash with, and had table and chairs in the evening for eating our dinner at. those were the days…. and we made a point of pointing out the comparisons on all possible occasions. what, no waiter service for our dinner? tsk, this would never happen in peru. our mexican crew were great though and made us amazing food, one night we had salmon with some sort of creamy sauce, and every morning porridge with yoghurt and fruit and granola, which always makes me happy, so please don’t think i’m seriously complaining, i wouldn’t dream of doing something like that.

the riding today was flat all day, as the title of that day’s map suggested. it was long, around 94k, and it was hot. we passed lots of trucks with sugar cane on them, and later a sugar cane factory. we ate our bodyweight in nutrigrain bars and bananas and mangoes along the way. it was nice to start the whole ride with a long flat day to get used to the bikes, and for me to get used to the concept of cycling for longer than 2 hours then giving up and eating a pizza and collapsing on the floor for the rest of the week and hoping that some divine intervention would somehow get me through the 8 days to come.

the last 10k today really dragged so it was nice to arrive at camp and jump straight into a muddy mosquito ridden river to cool down. we then panicked in case it was quicksand, and in case there were some stingrays waiting for us on the riverbed. neither of these things happened. the campsite was long grass and thick with bugs, like a horror film, you open your tent door for one second and they’re all inside swarming around your head. me and siob developed the airlock tent entry technique which involved entering the porch bit of the tent, closing the front door, then getting in the main bit of tent, obviously making some sort of spaceship beeping noise during this procedure. we were quite proud of our invention and will apply for a patent in case any of the others who saw try to claim intellectual copyright to it. i think today was the salmon dinner day. i got eaten alive by mozzies even through my long sleeved jumper and trousers tucked into socks method (won’t be patenting that as it didn’t work, weird how some people just do get bitten and others don’t).

topics of conversation today were: would you rather have a fox that picks locks, or a dog that can predict fog? (for me it was the dog as it would be useful for bert and his flying business); why do they pronounce c and z without the lisp in non spain spanish speaking countries? (steve who used to live in mexico city and speaks spanish properly said it is something to do with a king of spain who had a lisp); kim used to be a goth; barry reminded us of simon cowell.
marks out of ten: 8, so nice to be on a bike all day, but loses points for bugs and stingrays.

tuesday march 10, day 2: into the foothills
started the day as every day from now on, with a warm up from rick, one of the many fitness trainers on this trip. (nb: the general level of fitness on this trip was very high, which scared me and siob, and now we are determined to get super fit for our next ride in central smerica in november (more to come about that later)). rick goes out with nick, and she is an elite athlete pentathlete, it said so on one of her tshirts. they have the best how did you meet story ever – they met on one of the heats for gladiators the show where you go and fight against big strong gladiators. after the warm up we have a briefing from DA fiona who also gives out maps for the day. helpfully she had marked them not to scale, otherwise who knows what sort of confusion that could lead to. other things of note regarding the maps were one day some radio masts were marked on there, but we never saw them; one of the roads she had noted was new tarmac! from 2002. which siob pointed out was actually 7 year old tarmac and from then on we wondered what vintage the tarmac was we were cycling on was; one day it said cross at side of road which we think meant we were supposed to stop and be cross at the side of the road. which happened fairly frequently anyway so no need to highlight it.

we set off with our mosquito bites, today was more undulating (a favourite word of DA, which can mean anything from totally flat to practically vertical). today it meant a bit up and down but nothing too strenuous. there was a bridge with a big queue of traffic due to road construction, lunch was by a river which we swam in and with rocks to jump in from which me and siob didn’t dare do but george who was 73 did, he was our hero and has run 7 marathons already too. there were hammocks to swing in and a mexican came to try to sell us strange medicinal products. we set off again, a truck went past spraying the road with water which sprayed us too which was nice as it was really really hot. when i’d done the little cycling i’d done in belize as training, i had only gone out towards sunset when the hot sun wouldn’t get me, but really i should have gone out at noon to prepare myself for cycling all day in the massive heat as it is exhausting. this was also the point at which i realized i had lost my camera around 2 hours ago, when going over one of the speedbumps. i heard something at the time and figured it was something from siob’s little shopping bag which hung from her handlebars and had suncream and camera and who knows what else in (i don’t think you’ll see lance using one of these, nor had it been tested for aerodynamics in a wind tunnel, but it was a useful cycling accessory and didn’t slow us down any more than the pig in my back wheel which was also the pig which had done land’s end to john o’groats with us, what a pig).

we stopped in a small town for some beers that afternoon, only 4k from the campsite, in an area called valle nacional, ninjasteve said can you believe they nationalize the valleys here, blimey. (there were 3 steves on the trip, ninjasteve because he was thin and wiry and had some cool but ultimately ironic ninja moves, guitarsteve who played the guitar really well, and handlebarsteve who had a slightly pornographic handlebar moustache which someone had sponsored him extra for if he had it for the whole ride). anyway after 1 corona i was very drunk, i tried to drink a 2^nd one but i really couldn’t drink more than half. perhaps due to the altitude, which i don’t even know if we were at, and why isn’t the opposite of altitude deeptitude we wondered? the bar was a small concrete room, with a juke box behind very strong metal bars and padlock, and some asleep and drunk mexicans in hats, one of the more awake ones tried to get me to dance, i tried to explain that i smelt and couldn’t dance anyway. the next and last 4k that day were up a hill, i suppose DA would call it an undulation but it was like scaling a cliff face after those beers. the campsite was in the grounds of a mexican family’s house, by another really nice clean river, no sting rays. we went and washed in it like in a timotei advert. loads of little children crowded all around us at the campsite and offered to put our tent up, which we let them do and then they charged us, fair enough, as it was probably the best it was put up for the whole trip even though one of the long poles was where the short pole was supposed to be so the airlock technique became a bit more tricky. the children couldn’t pronounce siobhan’s name so renamed her shibu. after dinner we were briefed about the next day, day 3, the challenge day. 58k uphill, going from 250m altitude to 3000m. oops, when i had originally looked at the trip profile i thought that day went from 350m to 2000m, which would be hard enough, but suddenly it was all seeming ridiculous. robin who has done this trip 4 times before gave us a team tactic talk about it too, he was going to try to beat his record of 3 hours 50 minutes to the top. err, that’s about how long it takes me to eat my porridge before setting off in the morning. went to bed slightly worried.

other things of note: ocelot does not rhyme with foxtrot, jason…
marks out of ten: 8, for beer and rivers, loses 2 for me losing camera

wednesday march 11, day 3: ellie and the minstrels
hill hill hill hill hill hill hill hill hill hill hill hill hill hill hill. there wasn’t much else happening in my head today. every 10k there was a water and food stop, the first 20k were actually fairly ok, some bits crazy steep but i felt quite positive, though also slightly in denial that it really was a whole day up hill. i cycled next to small siobhan (not siob) for a while who had sailed around the world for 6 years which is super cool. my toes were hurting quite badly today so i took some cocodamol at 20k which made me quite spaced out and a bit dozy, not the best mental state to climb a huge hill in and not a wind tunnel tested lance approved approach i’m sure. still not sure what is wrong with my toes but more to come on that scenario later in the blog, basically all you need to know now is that they hurt a lot when i cycle. 20-30k was hard work, as was 30-40k, but we got a bit excited as we seemed to do those 10k considerably faster than the previous ones. DA marco assured us it was definitely 10k we had just done, so we set off happy for the next 10k. i cycled with guitarsteve most of the rest of the way and he had his first ever chocolate minstrel, from lovely ellie from macmillan cancer support, at around 2750m, what a cool place to have your first minstrel. minstrels taste amazing after a hardcore 30k uphill ride that’s for sure. at one point i noticed a cute furry little caterpillar that looked like a pipe cleaner and guitarsteve cycled back to look at it, which i thought was insanity to add 3 metres down and 3 metres up hill to an already massive amount, just to look at a caterpillar. perhaps the minstrel had gone to his head by this point though. 40-50k went on and on and on and kind of defeated me into a delirium, every corner you were hoping there would be the next fuel stop and it never came, the corners just went on and on and on and you keep pedaling and you’re going slower than you’ve ever cycled in your life and you can’t imagine how you will even keep going, but you do somehow. times like that is when you remember why you are doing the challenge, and you think of the fact that it isn’t as challenging as having cancer or losing someone to cancer, and that thank god you are fit and healthy and no matter how hard this is you should be grateful you can do it, and grateful to all the people that have sponsored you to do it and help continue macmillan’s work. all that is what keeps you going mentally. and also some sort of internal competitiveness that comes from growing up with an older brother who was really good at everything and had a better bike than me, and he could cycle with no hands and when i tried it i fell into a rose bush and got all scratched; or another time me and him and dad went riding and i had a crap old bike and couldn’t keep up with them and threw my bike on the floor in a tantrum. so thanks james and dad for instilling in me the need to prove a point to the world.

on arriving at 50k DA fiona told us that actually yes that last 10k was in fact 13k and the one before it had been slightly under 10k too (the one we had thought we had done really quickly). at least we weren’t going mad then, and good news as that meant there were only 5k left to the very top instead of the 8k we thought it would be. we refueled (with food you understand, not petrol), and set off. it took me 1 hour 10 minutes to do this last 5k, which makes it a speed of 4 point something k per hour which makes me want to cry even thinking about it now. this was the hardest and steepest hill i have ever cycled up, way tougher than any of the days on land’s end john o’groats, and much harder than day 5 in peru which was the challenge day there and was 5 hours up hill on a dirt road with big rocks. i had to stop every 200m or so to rest and swear a bit, and it was getting cold and cloudy as i was nearing the summit, though i had no idea how much further away that was. i was going so slowly i was practically going back in time by this point. guitar(minstrel)steve was still with me but i had had to resort to listening to my ipod to occupy my delirious brain. finally there was a sign saying el mirador (viewpoint) (not really a view to see as we were inside a cloud by now) which i knew meant the top, and there was one of the vans and inside it was siob, ninjasteve and simear, who had been there a while and were equally delirious. i threw my bike on the floor, downed some boiling hot coffee and collapsed in a heap.

there was 8k or so left to the campsite, but mainly downhill and euphoric knowing we had conquered the evil hill. i cycled the last bit with siob and ninjasteve and we crossed the finishing line together. all the tents had been put up by people already at camp, hooray, and robin had beaten his record and done it in 3 hours 45 minutes, hooray. it had taken me from 7am to 6pm approximately, i don’t think that breaks any records and i certainly won’t be returning to see if i can do it any faster. ate dinner and went to bed just a bit exhausted.

marks out of ten: 10 for having finished it, but downgraded to 7 for it being so horrendous and making us cry.

thursday march 12, day 4: 20 questions
thank god it’s not day 3 basically was what characterized day 4. my legs were totally powerless, and we had a big long climb in the morning can you believe it. not too steep thankfully and lots of nice pine trees to look at along the way. lunch was by another river where we did some more timotei advert moments, and threw rocks at other rocks – why is that always so entertaining? me and craig found some swings to swing on and craig told me he used to be a professional footballer until he broke both his legs, which was interesting, i think it was dundee united he played for. we had a strange and very bland fruit as part of our lunch, you put lime and chilli on it to make it tasty, but it still wasn’t. after lunch was loads of downhill, ellie nearly fell off into a ditch but managed to hold it together, and nick from gladiators flew over a speedbump and got loads of nasty road rash injuries on her arms and legs which the docs bandaged up. the speedbumps (topes in spanish) appear with absolutely no warning in mexico which is not good when you’re going down hill fast. you always have to be on the look out for them, generally if there are houses or villages around there will be topes, but sometimes they just appear in the middle of nowhere to catch you out.

me siob kim and jason played 20 questions to pass the time going up the long hills. we thought of more animals with special powers that also rhyme, like a gorilla that’s good with polyfilla or a wood louse that could build you a house. other interesting things were that jane and jeanette got renamed french and saunders, and kim lives on a houseboat near london. the campsite today was rocky and really thorny with funny little plants with spikes everywhere. there were no bugs though as we were still fairly high up, probably around 2600m. we tried to bang in the tent pegs with rocks but this mainly just bent the tent pegs. tsk, this would never happen in peru. nor would the toilets we had, which were long-drop toilets, ie a hole in the ground that you do your stuff into and then shovel a bit of dirt back over it. which is fine if you are one of the first to use it, but it quickly fills up and becomes the opposite of a hole. me and siob chose to just wee right by our tent if we had to get up in the night, or in fact in the morning behind a little spiky bush and it turned out everyone was watching – we thought they had started the warm up already and were busy doing that. perverts.

interesting facts: ann who is a pilates instructor studied stage management at guildhall which is where i used to work.

marks out of ten: 7, as i was tired from day 3 still.

friday march 13, day 5: eat my dust
uh oh friday the 13^th. lots of people had had strange dreams, due to the altitude i think, and from the strange cow noises that went on during the night. jeanette heard the cow right by her tent and thought it was going to eat her and jane. jane told her to be quiet and go back to sleep. jane is very caring like that, i wondered if she was a nurse she had such a compassionate nature. in fact she makes evening wear, or so she says – she didn’t manage to rustle up any ballgowns for us despite constant pestering. today was a really nice long 17k ascent to a place called la cumbre which means the summit, with a good view and a few little shops, but no ice creams. my muscles were starting to hurt less by today and the up hill was becoming about 1% easier finally. then we had a 30k downhill to oaxaca, really nice swooping corners, good vintage of tarmac and nice views. some of the boys went crazy fast which scared me a bit as you never know what the traffic is going to do, often you see buses overtaking lorries on blind corners here. thankfully nobody died. there were lots of potentially rabid dogs along the way but if you pretend you are throwing a stone at them or kicking them they generally run away from you. we regrouped and cycled through the outskirts of oaxaca, which could have been my hometown if i had taken the job at the berlitz school in december but isn’t. it was busy traffic but mostly very polite and didn’t mind waiting for us all to go past, which would never happen in london. i had a wee at the side of the road. we undulated along in the heat until the lunch stop in zaachila, which was a cute little town with a square and a large clock and a market but nowhere to get a good coffee. would have gone and prayed for one in the church in the square but that was closed too. inigo (mexican bike crew man) told me a shop i could get one at but when i went there it was selling only coffee beans and i didn’t happen to have my coffee bean grinding machine or kettle with me on the bike so that was no good either. sat and ate my lunch in a minor depression at all this hardship and wondered if i could cycle to the nearest airport and fly to the beach instead.

after lunch DA decided to change the route a bit for a short cut as there wasn’t too much day left and we still had a way to go. so we then had 10k along a dirt sand track which was cool but hard work as you really wiggle around if you get in vaguely deep sand and then fall over. at least you only fall into sand so it’s not too painful. it feels like you have a puncture as you can’t control where the bike is going very easily. i cycled with graham who is robin’s friend but isn’t insane like robin who cycles at least 50 miles every day in his normal life in preston. graham had a cool compass on his bike handlebars. after the dirt road there was lots of long flat-ish road to the campsite which had a pool which we all jumped into in our cycling clothes. really nice treat after long hot dusty day, as were the (freezing cold) showers and proper toilets. me and siob hung our clothes out to dry in a tree which became known as the clothes tree. we put our tent up and yet again wondered how come we were so crap at putting our tent up. we put it right next to one of the swimming pools and hoped we wouldn’t forget in the night and walk into it. drank beer and ate dinner and talked to jamie who works for open university which is interesting as i did one of their music courses a few years ago. he told me about one of their other courses which he referred to as t189 but i don’t know what that means now as i am not fluent on all my open university course codes and it sounds like something to do with robots like r2d2, and consequently me and craig laughed quite a lot, i hope jamie wasn’t offended (my music course code was a214 fyi). peter who is a doctor and lives in the lake district did an impressive trick with a broom which we tried to do but weren’t bendy enough. it involves kind of bending yourself around it in a yogic way, hard to explain in words, maybe peter has a video of it he can share with us?

interesting fact: when siob met me on the peru bike ride she thought i was a good at negotiating corners on my bike despite not being able to drive which is strange as i could drive, perhaps she had mis-overheard some conversation.

marks out of ten: 3 at midday, but 9 by dinner time thanks to clothes tree amusement and beers.

saturday march 14, day 6: shift f7 (thesaurus)
today was the 7 year old tarmac day, and there was no note on the map saying not to scale, so we could only presume that it was to scale. DA fiona used the word soporific in a briefing which really impressed us and also proved that she is a bit posh too, otherwise she would have said sleepy. me and siob got our tent down super fast and stood around waiting for our prize but it didn’t appear so after that we regressed back to doing things slowly. this morning was some truly undulating undulations. i got carried away and cycled as fast as i could as it was so much fun, and then completely ran out of energy and thought oops you wouldn’t catch lance doing that. we regrouped by a few shops and ate some really strange little bananas that dried out your whole mouth, perhaps they had loads of potassium in? there was then a quite hardcore 10k climb to lunch. as usual, robin did the climb in about 1 second so he cycled back down to encourage people who were struggling and to update us on how much further there was to go – what a nice man. but still mental. at the lunch stop there were lots of hungry looking dogs, we gave them some nachos. one of them looked a bit like a dog crossed with a bear so we called him dogbear.

after lunch was a load of downhill, we had been looking forward to this, but sadly it was into a headwind so wasn’t that much fun. what a let down, the reason you do the up hills is to get a good load of down hill so it’s pretty disappointing when it doesn’t deliver. we stopped at a café bar in a town next to a bike shop and ordered some coffee which turned out to be hotter than the sun and all i managed was one gulp and third degree internal burns and then we were off again. 18k up hill was not a nice prospect at this point so i also downed an energy gel and ate 5000 nutrigrain bars to get me started. i cycled with siob and ellie (no minstrels today), and we called ourselves team womb as that was one obvious thing we had in common i suppose. someone pointed out that it could stand for women on mountain bikes which was rather clever. there was also team mabob which was middle age birds on bikes, which was ann (jamie’s wife who also works at open university but didn’t throw strange r2d2 acryonyms at me), little siobhan who sailed round the world, and marion who is from Ireland and is a nurse in walthamstow. we asked her which famous marion she’d rather be and she said maid marion. the up hill seemed to get longer and longer, and the sun was beginning to get lower in the sky and we started panicking that if we didn’t step on it we’d get ‘swept up’ into the van and driven into camp. there was no way that was going to happen we decided, and stepped it up a gear. ie we went at tortoise pace rather than snail pace. my strange toe and foot issue became an issue again at tortoise pace, but we had to get to the top so we could have the 15k downhill to camp. thankfully we had miscalculated the distance left, and what we thought was 4k left was more like 2k and we turned the corner and there was the top, and DA fiona and some others shouting encouragement. i weed behind someone’s small wooden house, put ninjasteve’s bright yellow lollipop lady jacket on as it was cold and getting less daylight, and then off we went down the hill. for me this was really the best moment of the whole ride, the sun was almost setting, there was amazing huge vast mountainous scenery, clouds with sun behind them that looked a little bit like heaven and i’m not even religious, lovely tarmac and sweeping corners, and we’d put in a lot of effort all day and there was nothing more left other than this downhill to enjoy.

camp was a lay-by at the side of the road, the first and nicest lay-by i’ve ever camped in and very much undersold by DA. rocky ground, but we put some of our guy ropes round other people’s pegs so we didn’t have to strain ourselves too much putting pegs in the impossible ground. sneaky. sheila had fallen off her bike at the bottom of the downhill, and had been bandaged up by doctor helen and doctor derek. doctor Derek was on our trip in peru too, he is from scotland and has done loads of cool trips since we last saw him in peru. doctor helen had a good joke about daz and how it stops colours from running. drank some beers in our lay-by and went to sleep hoping none of the mexican lorry drivers would drink or sleep drive over our little campsite during the night.

interesting fact: ellie’s mum mrs whitfield teaches maths at the school i went to for my a-levels in bradford.

marks out of ten: 10 for the amazing downhill and the novelty of camping in a lay-by.

sunday march 15, day 7: injuries
i can’t remember much of today’s cycling, but the notes i made say: ‘downhill. 30k uphill. craig’s bike squeaky. long climb to lunch. military stop. simon off edge of cliff. simon cowell cut foot open in river. drunk boy at lunchtime’.

so there was some downhill, from which simon flew off the edge and fell 25feet into a ravine. amazingly he was ok, perhaps it was the strength of his tattoos that saved him. there was a very drunk boy at our lunch stop, ninjasteve told me he was the son of the owner of the little restaurant there. the drunk boy told me he loved me and would i come and see his room. ninjasteve said maybe i should, i could stay and marry him and would inherit the restaurant. tempting as it was i declined. i think he told some other people he loved them too, so obviously i was fairly heartbroken. i think today was the lunch stop that on the way there me and siob commented to each other, oh we’re doing ok today, seems like nobody’s gone past us for ages, we must be somewhere near the front. turned out we were right at the back and there was nobody left to go past us. very amusing.

that night we camped by a river which doubled as a bath as usual. we quickly drank the bar dry as it was the penultimate day of cycling. simon cowell barry stood on something sharp in the river and had 3 stitches in his foot. it wasn’t a shark or a sting ray. we sat round a campfire by the river and guitarsteve played his guitar and robin played the harmonica. we looked at the stars for a while. feels like something cheesy out of dawson’s creek now that i write this. to bring it back down to earth kim challenged siob to a fight, and siob laughed in her face. siob’s wrestling name is giganticos, she is very tall and once she nearly broke my leg in one second in a leg wrestling match. so watch out kim you don’t know who you’re messing with.

interesting fact: some of the group (i’m not sure exactly who) had had a sweepstake on how many days i would wear my stinky dirty cycling top, and i had outdone even the highest bid….. in my defense, i’ve not got too many clothes left having been away from england for around 7 months now so you’re lucky i didn’t wear just one cycling top for the whole 8 days.
marks out of ten: 9 – closest i’ve ever come to marrying into money.

monday march 16, day 8: not flat all day
el dia ultimo. long uphill from the dawson’s creek camp, which felt like one of those dreams where you’re expending all your energy on trying to get somewhere and you’re hardly moving. i guess that is what happens when you do only 6 hours training for a huge massive strenuous bike ride, i literally did not have any muscles, like that mr man character, mr jelly. my favourite was mr bump, i liked his bandage round his head, and when my brother fell off his bike into a brick wall a few years ago and we went to get him in hospital he looked just like that which made me laugh (not at the time as i was quite worried, but definitely afterwards in hindsight). anyway i digress. we took photos from the top of the bit we had come to, and wondered when we’d be able to see the sea, as we were now very close to puerto escondido, our final destination. we carried on on some great undulations and you really noticed the heat as we got closer to the coast and lower down towards sea level. we regrouped for our final regroup, at a small bar that probably wondered what the hell was going on with 50 sunburnt english cyclists turning up on a monday morning. we had celebratory coronas, hard to hold when your hands are so numb (as i write this my 2 last fingers on my right hand are still numb at the ends), and generally rejoiced that it was all over and hadn’t we done well. from the atlantic coast we had cycled 650 kilometres - via huge vertical mountains, swarms of mosquitoes, lovely toilets, one shower in 8 days, nutrigrains galore, confusing maps that weren’t to scale, bananas that dehydrated you, dogs that tried to trip you up, campsites in the most unlikely of places – to the pacific coast, all still alive (some less so than others). we cycled that last few k to coco’s beach club which was our last lunch stop, and ran straight onto the beach and jumped into the sea. then pretty much jumped out again as the waves and current are pretty strong here, and instead sat safely where the little waves were. would be quite ironic to drown in the celebration waves after all that hard work. was quite spectacular sea and waves and rocks and all felt quite poignant as i realized what we had achieved. you don’t think about it whilst you’re actually doing it, you just get on with it and think about the next nutrigrain stop and chat to whoever you’re cycling next to, and take in the scenery and the moment, and then before you realize it you’ve finished and you’re celebrating and you know that you’ll have to think about returning to normal life again soon which is a real bummer. so you start planning your next ride of course, which is central america from panama to nicaragua, for macmillan again, in november, (depending on whether i can fundraise enough for them and whether they have spaces left). and then somewhere in the future after that is from mexico (or Alaska, still in discussions, mainly with myself) to patagonia. more to come on this later.

anyway after the poignant sea, we drank pina coladas, ate our last pasta with spam lunch, swam in the pool, drank more pina coladas, then were told to get back on our bikes and cycle to our hotel up the road! fat chance, not up that hill. i pushed my bike this last bit and checked in to our amazing hotel, which looked like a turkish mosque, was all painted white with arabic style décor and arches, and a swimming pool. i hope nobody out there that sponsored us for our ride will hold it against us that we had this one night of luxury after all our hard work for the last 8 days, i really feel that we deserved it after everything. it was such a relief to get in a proper bed and a proper shower, and unpack our things and make ourselves look human again and not like smelly tramps. we had a celebration meal at the coco beach club, where there were cool swingy chairs round the bar, and ellie made a big speech about how amazing we all were. well i presume that was what it was about, but i can’t remember too much of the whole night, sorry ellie. predictably and in typical pickles style i lost most of my possessions throughout the night. we went out into puerto escondido too apparently, but i can’t recall much about that either.

interesting fact: if you order a shot of tequila at the coco beach club, they automatically bring you the one that costs 95 pesos, ie the most expensive.
marks out of ten: 10! despite, and because of, the above fact.