We met with guides Pedro and Abel shortly after landing in Oaxaca. Pedro is former Mexican Champion in Mountain bike and ran a half marathon in 1.07 so he has been quite fit. Abel is a very helpful assistant. Pedro spoke a little English, Abel spoke only Spanish – our adventure begins...We drove out of the city of Oaxaca and into the Sierra Nortes. We drove the car half way up the mountain and then unloaded and started biking. It turns out that from the start Pedro was ok with what we call a Hammerfest. While Pedro and I pushed each other to the limit, Whitney was not far behind. We climbed straight up for 30 minutes finally reaching 9000 feet or close to 3000 meters in altitude. At the peak we are surprised to see a caravan of mules (or Donkeys) carrying big logs and firewood through the pass. We snapped some pictures while we sat down and rested. It took another 3h until we got to lunch and by this time we had grown mighty tired. The Sierra Nortes apparently have no flat land. Either it was uphill or downhill! – No rest. We climbed and descended so much we finally lost all count on how many mountains we had biked and gave up all hope of trying to make some sense of where we were. Then came lunch – such a fantastic experience. In a small village, we stopped at this old couple’s house. They were both in their 80’s and prepared a meal for us on the fireplace in their house. The fact that there is a stove and an oven in the house does not seem to matter since they are only used as backup when the primary heating source (the fire pit) is full. The meal was absolutely fantastic and we had a terrific time.
After lunch we biked for another couple of hours and got in some great single-track that was extremely narrow. The last uphill really got to our legs, so when we finally came to a small village late in the afternoon I think we all felt shared happiness in just laying down and eating some mangos and pineapple. What a fantastic day and we still had 2 more.
Pictures
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