Capn's Blog

[rskovride]

I hope you make it with the least amount of pain as possible. Sounds like the adventure has begun.

[CapnAwesome]

I hope you make it with the least amount of pain as possible. Sounds like the adventure has begun.

Well this happened in 2012, you'll have to stay tuned for the ending. I guess a blog is normally about what is happening now, but whatever. I need to catch up to the present first.

[John V]

And then...

[mlmooney89]

Omg I don't know who I am more mad at CapnAwesome for painting this great story in my head and just dropping it or alpha male for commenting on this thread (which I didn't realize was old) which is why it caught my attention. I read everything and then noticed the last date from CA was back in May, my jaw dropped. Come back and finish this damn you! :p

[CapnAwesome]

And then...

Okay, I'll continue.

[CapnAwesome]

Capn's Blog, November-December 2011

These are real things that happened to me in 2012, when my friend Dan and I decided to hitchhike from Las Vegas, to Patagonia in Southern Argentina. This is the story of Cathy and Sterling and our trip through Northern Mexico.

The epic of Cathy and Sterling (Part 1)

   It was our first full day in Mexico Our goal was audacious to say the least. We planned on hitchhiking all the way to Patagonia, the Southern Region of Argentina. To make the trip even crazier, we had to get there by climbing season. We wanted to be there by the first week of January and it was already November 11. That gave us 6 weeks to hitchhike the whole 10,000 mile trip. We weren’t sure whether or not this was even possible. We weren’t sure of much and we definitely had not idea about what was going to happen next.

    We had been dropped off the night before by our American friends and our first night of our trip was one of the most uncomfortable of the whole trip. It had rained hard in northwest Mexico, an area that normally never gets rain. After spending some time in a bar for ex-pats (Americans and Canadians living in Mexico) we sheltered in the loft of an abandoned restaurant for the night. It had huge porch umbrellas we were hoping would keep us dry. They did not.

Nevertheless, by the morning we were in good spirits and started our journey with high hopes. Once we were started, all my anxiety about the trip that had built up over the last month faded away. We were now doing it. Our first ride was an American, who was stoked (like almost everyone) about our trip. He even gave us 20$ to wish us well and remarked that it had been years since he had seen ‘anglos’ hitchhiking in Mexico.

     We got a series of rides from locals. Everything was going smoothly and the rides were coming quick. Everyone was friendly and interested in us. We found ourselves in a small hamlet, one of the many in Mexico that spring up on their own to accomedate travelers on the Mexican highway system, which is divided into pay roads, which are as nice or nicer than the American highways and the carreterra libre, the free roads, which are of varying quality.

Dan and I were hitching the pay roads. The idea being that it would just be faster and probably a safer way to hitch. That’s when we saw the ride that defined the first part of our whole trip. It was a 1979 ramshackle toyota RV. The kind that has a small truck for the front. On the back of it was painted ‘zigzag express’ and a New Hampshire licence plate that read ‘peace.’

“Look.” I said to Dan, “New Hampshire.”

    Almost on cue the ZigZag express pulled over and stopped for us. Dan and I ran towareds the RV and the door opened.

    A friendly looking older blonde woman greeted me, she was a little overweight with crystal clear blue eyes that always seemed a little distracted.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

Her northeast accent was immediately obvious, “We are going all the way. We’re going to Panama!”

We looked at each other in disbelief.

“We are going to Argentina!” Dan told her, as we boarded the zigzag express.

     We then met the other passenger of the small RV. Along with Cathy was her adult son, Sterling. He was thin and had thick rimmed square glasses and a 1000 yard stare, as though at some point he had seen something horrible in his life. He spoke in a strange monotone voice that was a little off putting.

The RV started up and Cathy asked us, “Are you really going to Argentina?”

“That’s the plan.”

     Now one would think that getting picked up on the first day by people going almost half the distance would be amazing luck and in many ways it was. Cathy and Sterling were wonderful, kind people who drove us thousands of miles for free.

    However we quickly discovered that despite their audacious plan to drive from New Hampshire to where the road ends, they were not experienced travelers by any stretch of the imagination. Their combined travel experience was this: Cathy had left the country once, having spent a week in an American style resort in English speaking Belize. Sterling had spend a couple of weeks in Spain, backpacking around before quickly being overwhelmed by the experience and getting flown home by his mother. Their total Spanish vocabulary was two words, hola and gracias, both of which were only spoken by Sterling.

     By comparison, my travel companion for the trip was Dan. He was an American who had grown up in Caracus, Venesuala when it was the murder capital of the world. His parents were American missionaries who taught english and he was fluent in English and Spanish. At 18 he had joined the US army and done two tours in Afghanistan as support for where he had come under fire and been under threat of IEDs. He was broad and muscular with a long beard and eyes so blue that they stood out even in the whitest parts of America, much less the Latin American countries we were going through.

    Then there was me. I was already a seasoned traveler.. I had spent the last three years on the road with no car as a hardened climbing bum. People had taken to calling me ‘King of the Dirtbags’ based on my uncanny ability to live on small amounts of money. I had logged thousands of hitchhiking miles, from Alaska to Mexico. Although compared to Dan my Spanish was shit, I had studied it in high school and had managed to hitch around Mexico the previous year by myself. That was where I had met Dan, in Potero Chico.

     It was very quick that this gap in travel experience started to show. On the first day we could not have been happier, despite the fact that Cathy and Sterling said they wanted to be in Panama by Christmas (much slower than we planned on traveling) they flew down the Mexican pay roads at top speed that a 79 Toyota Dolphin will go. We were making excellent time and we thought that maybe they had just overestimated how long the trip would take them. The Mexican pay roads, like American highways, bypass towns and cities and give a straight show to where you are going.

     The second day was our first hint of trouble. That was when Sterling, who was driving at the time, decided to try out the ‘Carreterra Libre.’ The free roads of Mexico, even for those Americans used to driving in foreign countries can be a major problem. Their maintenance is spotty at best, they head straight into the maze of Mexican towns and cities, where the signs directing your back to them are poor if they exist at all (not that Cathy and Sterling could read them anyway.) They are also covered in ‘topes’ the Mexican speed bumps which are inexplicably abundant on the carreterra. For a reason that we couldn’t figure out, perhaps because they we just used to driving in America, Cathy and Sterling seemed to never see the topes.

     WHAM! Hitting a vicious tope at 45 miles an hour in a 35 year old RV is an experience I could do without. WHAM! Every tope would send stuff (or us!) flying around the tiny RV. WHAM! Repeatedly smashing into topes didn’t seem to make them easier for Cathy or Sterling to spot. WHAM!

     Mexican roads are not made for RV travel to put it mildly. Cathy and Sterling were also not ready for the Mexican roads. The first city that we hit took us hours to get out of. Eventually either Dan or I positioned ourselves near the front seat so we could be a constant guide, warning them about Topes and reading the road signs for them. It became quickly exhausting. We wondered if it would be a faux pax to just asked them if we could drive?

     There were other problems that started to immerge as we entered day two with Cathy and Sterling. They seemed constantly confused by exchanging currency and I don’t think they ever got a hang of it. Dan had to constantly accompany Cathy into banks to help out. It was that second day that Cathy breached a pressing subject with her.

    “I need to get some Pot!” she declared. “I’m not used to going this long without it.”

     She had left her weed at the border 48 hours ago and was fiending for it already. At our first major stop at the famous beach of Playa encantado, Cathy started asked random mexicans in english where to find some weed. One sketchy looking fellow said to follow him and she was about to when Dan and I stopped and told him to just bring it here if he had some. We never saw him again. We assured her that we would find some for her.

     Not far away was the beach town of Sayulita, a surf town that Dan had previously lived in for a month the winter before. It was filled with ex-pat Americans and is extraordinarily safe. People leave their cars running with their keys in it with no fear of theft in Sayulita. It was a logical place for us to find weed and within thirty minutes of arriving, we bought a huge bag for her for 20$ that would last all four of us (Cathy generously shared her weed with us) for the rest of Mexico.

     We spent three days in Sayulita, surfing and hanging out on the beach. This was the Mexican experience that Cathy and Sterling were looking for, one where they could speak a lot of English and have constant access to American style amenities and restaurants. At this point, despite the occasional hiccups of getting lost and Cathy trying and failing to use her Mastercard in rural Mexico (“I thought they take mastercard everywhere!” She remarked), we were still happy to be with them. That’s because the true craziness hadn’t even started.

     Chain smoking weed with her son, believe it or not, did not improve Cathy’s driving nor Sterlings ability to get lost. Post Sayulita, Sterling started to bizarrely turn off the main road, convinced that some random dirt road would lead to the next hidden Sayulita. Mostly they would quickly become to choppy for the RV to travel on. Once it ended in a fence with about thirty ‘no tresspassing’ signs on it.

    “We need to get the fuck out of here now.” We told them.

    More than a week into traveling with them, lost in a Mexican city and going around in circles, Sterling remarked ‘I don’t mind getting lost’

It was after that day that Dan and I started to discuss leaving Cathy and Sterling. We were travling slower than we wanted to now, and their lack of travel experience and instincts were wearing on us. They would frequently leave the ZigZag express unlocked when they shopped (All our stuff was in it too!) and we were worried about what would happen if the old RV broke down in the middle of Mexico. We would almost certainly have to help them find a mechanic, if there was even one who knew how to work on it.

    The stress of dealing with caused me to drink even more than usual. As we pulled into a town for the night, Dan and I would go out and find a bar and drink with locals. They were universally enthusiastic about our trip and laughed at our misadventures with Cathy and Sterling.

    One of these times we stopped in a small rural Mexican fishing village. Cathy said she was going to make pasta dinner for everyone and Dan and I went out drinking. After an hour we returned to the RV, only to find the ZigZag express, with all our stuff inside of it, missing.

(To be continued)


ZigZagExpress in Mexico


You are not in America anymore:


Dan and I, in a random ass beach town in Mexico. 

---

[mlmooney89]

You need to publish this fucking shit.

[The Grand Nudger]

Would make for a badass legit travel blog. Then, when you're famous..we can all say we knew you when.

[CapnAwesome]

You need to publish this fucking shit.

This story is just getting started. It gets crazier, way crazier. It's not like I thought that hitchhiking to South America would be easy or anything, but it is even crazier than I imagined.

That being said I do plan on putting it all together in a book sometime. I think this will help me focus my thoughts on it. Pester me again for the next part if I am lazy about it.

[mlmooney89]

You need to publish this fucking shit.

This story is just getting started. It gets crazier, way crazier. It's not like I thought that hitchhiking to South America would be easy or anything, but it is even crazier than I imagined.

That being said I do plan on putting it all together in a book sometime. I think this will help me focus my thoughts on it. Pester me again for the next part if I am lazy about it.

Oh you don't have to worry about getting lazy on it cause you have hooked me and I will keep demanding more.