Day 82 - 95: La paz, rest days, great times
Yes, I am still alive! You can stop reading here if you want.
How to describe my 2 weeks in la paz? La paz is a great city. Very safe, chill and beautiful city, with amazing sunsets and great people. Too much happened to give a detailed account of this extended break so I decided I would just hit some highlight moments.
One of the first nights, I found myself sitting on the floor of my large Airbnb balcony with 4 others sitting around. Yes, there were 5 of us squeezed into the small space. Manuel and Fiona from previously and two French brothers, one of whom has been cycling for 6+ years. We were enjoying a great home cooked dinner.. I helped by peeling carrots..
At this point I was a little tired of cyclists and really felt the need for a break, not from the bike but from the typical cycle chat. At this point, I didn’t care about all the amazing things that all the amazing people around me were doing as that is now the definition of normal or even boring. So I was delighted when the Convo turned in weird and wonderful directions. We talked about how we all use mental models unknowingly and implicitly to view the world through. When the world around us seems weird, it can mean the mental models we are using are flawed or just wrong. We all tried to formulate what some of our go to models are, which in itself is an interesting exercise. What models do I not have internalized that allow others to view the world in a totally different way than me. Brought me a new meaning to the saying “all models are flawed, but some are useful”. An interesting reflection.
In an effort to forget that I am a cyclist for a couple of weeks, I decided to get myself a pair of jeans, a normal shirt, and a razor to get rid of the disaster that was my beard. Quite weird feeling something approaching “normal” after nearly 3 months looking (or being?) homeless.
A friend and I decided it would be a good idea to go kayaking. Spoiler alert, it wasn’t a good idea… So we sourced a 2 person inflatable kayak, loaded it in and took a 20 minute Didi (like Uber in Mexico) to a cool “must visit” beach. The area is totally without network coverage so we asked the driver to pick us up in 2 hours. After inflating the kayak, the problems started. I forgot my swim wear. Didn’t really have waterproof bags other than a small plastic bag to put phones into. I attempted to make it watertight with a shitty knot.
We didn’t check the weather beforehand… Of course it was very windy (25+km/h) with big waves. We reasoned that if we could just get beyond the waves, it would be calmer. So we rolled up our trousers as much as we could, waded out and hopped into the kayak, of course got absolutely soaked in the process. We then attempted to paddle as fast as we could to get away from shore and the waves… Only to realize we had put the paddles together wrong meaning one side of each paddle was just slicing the water making them useless. Each wave was now crashing into us, threatening to turn us against the waves which would capsize us. Of course we were getting wetter and wetter and water was rising in the kayak.
We then decided to make the only good decision of this endeavor which was to call it quits. We attempted to turn our slowly sinking vessel which left us turned the wrong way to the oncoming waves. Is pure luck that we didn’t capsize. We made it back to shore sitting waist deep in water in the kayak.
We then realized that there was a little plug at the bottom of the kayak for letting water out of the kayak when at shore. Of course you are supposed to not have this open when actually using it… Guess what we forgot to do?
Good news was our makeshift phone waterproofing worked. But everything else was soaked. All of this took about 5 mins to play out. Meaning we still had the best part of 2 hours before we would get picked up. So lay on the beach, trying not to make eye contact with any of the other beach goers, who I can only imagine were laughing their asses off at this train wreck. Fun tho!
Also went to a Drag Show. First time at one of these. Was… Interesting. Definitely not my thing.
I am a scuba diver. And the sea of Cortez is supposed to be pretty great for diving. So I decided to give it a go. First dive was pretty good and I saw a huge variety of fish.
The 2nd dive was class. There is a huge 300+ member sea lion colony called Los Islotes located on the northern tip of the island called Isla Espíritu Santo. After about an hour on the boat, myself, the dive master and 3 others arrived. The first thing you notice is how loud they are. Many of them hang out on the rocks and beach. But you see them popping up randomly all over the place. We had our dive brief with our diver master. The most memorable statement was something like this. “There are 3 types of sea lions. The babies, the juveniles, and the adults. The rule of thumb is you can play with any that are smaller than you”.
They are so playful. Not 3 minutes into the dive I feel something pulling my leg. I looked behind, expecting to see one of my dive buddies trying to get my attention, only to see that a little sea lion was playing with my fins. He (or she?) was biting and pulling my fins, having the time of his life, completely undisturbed by the fact that he was completely removing my ability to swim.
The visibility was so clear. Probably 30+ meters. And man, can these sea lions move. The adult males can be so huge, maybe twice my size. Seeing them swimming towards you like a rocket can be quite scary. They are so nimble in the water. The big ones ignored us. The dive continued and would see them play with each other and us. They are so damn playful. Have heard the saying before that sea lions are like the dogs of the sea. Totally agree. They are like little playful puppies.
The next dive highlight was going into a little underwater cave. The dive master said during our dive brief, that we might do this provided that there were no adult males inside. After he gave the all clear, we went inside. There were 4 babies/juveniles inside playing with each other. One approached me and started playing with all the scuba dangly bits (regulators, straps, etc). The dive master had told us that if we feel confident, we can expose our clenched fist to them so I did. The little puppy of the sea started playfully and gently biting my fist. Super cool! It was really like playing with a little puppy.
We left the cave and floated around a little more. We skipped the safety stop as this was such a shallow dive, our dive computers wouldn’t have registered it. Is a small ego thing but I wasn’t the first to run low on air so I wasn’t the person that was the limiting time factor on either dive. This is a change for me as I am usually always the first to run low on air.
One of the cool things about taking a longer rest is that so many cyclists that I have met previously in Baja slowly passed through la paz while I was here. Was always great to catch up with them. Met Marcus and Blake one night for tacos. Probably the best al pastor tacos of the trip. Blake noticed there was a bar with a pool table next door to the taco place so we said we would go for a game and a drink. The bar was very quiet so it took us longer than it should have to realize that this is not the type of place we should be… We left pretty quick.
Jan is another cyclist who I met previously and was delighted when he rolled into town. He also stayed in the AirBNB for a few days. Had many interesting talks. One such talk, I was telling him about the 75 hard health/fitness challenge I did last year. We decided that we would create our own similar 30 day “winter challenge” with similar must do Todo items every day. 100 pushups + situps daily (to balance the cycling), read 10 pages of a book, a cold shower (if available), no bullshit sweets/cookies/etc, and similar items. Nice to have an accountability buddy for such a challenge.
Another evening, I decided to go for a walk along the malecon (super beautiful sun sets here every night). Was much louder and more people were around than usual. And became more and more so until I reached the middle of the malecon which was a full on street party. Doesn’t matter that cars couldn’t pass through the main street as the local football team won and this is far more important to celebrate than for locals to get to wherever they needed to go. Any poor soul that tried to get through this party would have their vehicle surrounded and rocked and shaken by 30+ people. It was all in good fun though. That is until a police car tried to pass through. After some hesitation, a rock-the-boat was attempted on it too, causing a car load of tough Mexican police to emerge from the vehicles with huge 3 foot long guns. The locals retreated to the sidewalk. Was a little scary but the 2 local guys who I met a 30 minutes before and who were giving me drinks didn’t seem worried which helped ease my concerns. The crowd dispersed not long after this.
The last public journabale note of la paz I will mention is Jan bullied me into buying a drone. Prick… So now it seems like I am one of “those” people with a drone. Have only taken it on one test flight so far and crashed it 4 times. But it is cheap and pretty indestructible. Let’s see how this goes over the next while. I will not be editing or composing videos. Just putting some raw footage online might be cool.
Is hard to condense 2 weeks of happenings into a journal entry, but these were some of the highlights. Also spent a lot of time resting, reading, hanging out in coffee shops and ignoring my Spanish course.
Myself and Jan are getting the ferry from la paz to Mazatlan today. This is a 16 hour ferry over to mainland Mexico. Seems like buying tickets online is complicated so we will just arrive early and hope for the best.
I am not sure what the plan is once I get there. Have 2 options that I am considering.
First is to stay in Mazatlan for a week. This would mean I have a stable place to spend Christmas. The idea of spending Christmas in my tent in the middle of nowhere isn’t so appealing. Mazatlan seems like a nice and bigger city so it could be cool. However this would mean I would have taken a 3 week “rest” at which point it isn’t so much rest as laziness.
The second option is to take 1 night in Mazatlan and then continue cycling with Jan. Not sure where I would spend Christmas then but maybe I could work this out in a few days.
TLDR: Yes am still alive.
