the last post

hi , i´m not entirely sure anyone is reading this so i will be brief.

10 days ago i made it to Rio , and unfortunately alone, andy and wei ling are still on their bikes but have taken a longer route to rio so will be there in a few more weeks.

i guess this blog does not really capture the scope of a trip on a bike for one year, all the highs and of course the obvious lows ........ i.e ¨breaking up¨ with my traveling companians.

i just finshed filling up my fifth notebook with my musings of the trip and unbelievely i have written something like 600 pages in the last year and to be quite honest i think the only person who will read it is my dad and even then only because he can speed read ........ and maybe me when i am an old man( or at least an older man).


new york was in fact so long ago that it feels like a different trip altogether, i have been spending my evening retracing the route and trying to send an email to everyone that looked after us on the trip , and not surprizingly that list is very long and of course the majority i have no way to contact, so really this is the only way i have to say thank-you to all those people who hosted us, who fed us , gave us directions and didn´t hit us on the roads,

a great trip with ups and downs .

now i am in guatemala and trying to learn spanish ,

and i will be home for christmas


Andy

it´s been a while

hi everyone,

yeah it´s been a while ,

when i last wrote i was just about to start two weeks of spanish study in the beautiful lakeside village of San Pedro in Guatemala. hummmm a huge amount has happened since then.including the beaches of El Salvador the deserts of Honduras and the lush tropical jungles of Costa Rica. it is amazing how diverse the land in central america is , the only common factor being that it is always very hot.

3 weeks ago we made it to San Jose the capital of Costa Rica to visit a friend of Andy and Wei ling´s who runs a Macaw Sanctuary , these amazing birds are huge and noisy and very endangered and we spent 5 days helping to feed , clean, de-worm and de-tick them , amazingly these birds are worth about 25,000USD a piece and i did consider smuggling one home - however it turns out speedo do not make Macaw Sized budgie smugglers - which i guess it not surprising since they are mostly made for Australian men !!

after Costa rica we headed to panama city checked out the canal ( of course) and then went to the San blas islands on the Caribbean coast of Panama , from there we caught the Stahlratte ( steel rat) a german run yacht to Colombia , of course 2 lines does not quite sum up the experience of spending 4 days sailing around beautiful tropical islands while drinking imported beer and swimming at every opportunity . the Captain of the ship was Lugwig - a fat 45 year old german lifelong sailor - know as Lulu to everyone he made this trip one of the highlights of our trip. however even more amzing was that last night at a pizza bar in cartagena i bumped into Lulu again and his 23 year old -supermodel like- colombian girlfriend . i{m thinking of coming back to cartagena when i finish this cycle trip .

anyway . that´s it all in a nutshell, please check out andy´s blog as he has actually been recording things along the way and has lots of photos,. and even though it would seem i have forgotten about all my family and friends because of my complete lack of communication- i can tell you that that is untrue - it´s just that being on holiday is hard work and very time consuming

next week we will be in Venezuela-

ciao

Andy
--
"Don't expect people to listen to your advice and ignore your example."
www.andysballbustingadventure.blogspot.com
www.libertytoredemption.wordpress.com

Ahh Diaharrea - the up side!!

Well , i have to admit something , and it's a little embarrassing - i have been lying to you all......

because lately, I have just not been enjoying riding up hills as much as i have been making out , I'm not sure just when or how it happened but it did. You hear of this kind of thing happening to other people's relationships , and i always thought that the love that hills and I had was just too strong. But I guess after so so many hills on this trip that the thrill just slowly went. When even a 5 hour non-stop slog up a hill over 60 kilometres and 2000 metres elevation does not excite you, you know that something is seriously wrong. When a hill like that poses no challenge what is the point of even getting out of bed.

So anyway I had been living this lie for the past few months , every time I got the top of the hill I would holler and shout and say how "great it was" and "check out that view" and "it's great to be alive" etc etc but the truth was it was all a show , really there had been about as much thrill for me as putting my tongue on a 9V battery.....

I was having what I can also describe as the biggest crisis of my life , especially because i could not see a way out ....... when....... the answer literally entered my mouth in the perfect shape of a prawn (fried in garlic and butter)..... let me explain


For many years i have lived my life by several simple rules - I have only one regarding food and it is to " only eat seafood at restaurants where you can physically see the ocean" ( thus you can guarantee the freshness of the food) ... however several weeks ago i broke this rule and had shrimp at a place that not only could I not see the sea it was in fact so far from the sea that scientists believe that it could be the place that Noah's dove found on olive branch because it was so far from the sea even god couldn't be bothered covering it with water. Anyway it was a long way from the ocean and i did ponder this as i ate those prawns. 3 hours later as i was bowing down to my toilet and re tasting the prawns ( still so delicious) and at that time I had no idea that this would reignite my love for hills.

You see --- when you bike you have to eat to have energy , however if your both your top and bottom holes are purging themselves every 30mins you can't hold on to your energy and suddenly even a minor rise in the road looks like the Swiss alps and the amount of effort to get to the top-- drains you both physically and mentally and dare i say it spiritually , it was like I was seeing mountains for the first time and as what they really are - the spawn of the devil!!! at the the mere sight of them my legs trembled , my heart sank and i fell into pits of despair. I was reminded of times when i was 10 years old and my father would strap a pack on my back (that was twice my size) and make me walk up hills with him only feeding me dry biscuits and rice and calling it a fun..........AND....... he was RIGHT it WAS and IS fun !!! just like those days when i was a wee tacker, my passion for hills was forcefully and unexpectlying reignited over those days of diarrhoea where getting to the top of every hill would have challenged Hercules himself and the thrill of making the top was as genuine a feeling as man can have.

I realised that it wasn't the hills that had changed but it had been ME!!! I had got too strong for them and it doing so had become so proud and horty......... all i can say is that i can´t wait to be an old man and so frail and feeble that even the walk to the letterbox in the morning will represent a physical challenge worth celebrating.



Anyway , we are in Guatemala now and at a Spanish school for a few weeks before moving on

check out andy's blog for lots of photos etc.


Andy

--

"Don't expect people to listen to your advice and ignore your example."

www.andysballbustingadventure.blogspot.com

www.libertytoredemption.wordpress.com

Merry Christmas

Hi everyone, i just saw that my last blog entry was almost a month ago , so I thought it was time to clog up your inbox again.

Anyway merry Christmas and happy new year, we are almost 6 months into our trip now and I really thought we would be finished by now but infact are not even half way.

we spent Christmas at a beach on the west coast of mexico and apart from giving myself a christmas sleep in ( i got up at 6.30 instead of 6) we also spent plenty of time in the water and generally relaxing our sore legs, Andy got me a great lucho libre mask( the mask of the wrestlers of mexico) and as a joke i decided to wear it for a day - little did i know ........., everywhere we went i got the respect i have thought i always deserved, kids stopped throwing stones at us , dogs ran in the opposite direction ( and if they did open their mouths it was only to weakly mewow) , shop owners gave me the price locals pay for coke , and woman everywhere lined the streets adn threw their underwear in my direction, , i made the sollom oath to wear the mask for the rest of the trip until a chance meeting in a town square with a real wrestler -- at that point it become clear that the mask comes with certain expectations - i.e to wrestle others for the entertainment of the public - this is when I took of the mask and got on my bike and left town under a hale of stone throwing kids and chasing barking dogs - all i can say is _ lesson learnt!!!

Today we went to the local attraction of a giant sinkhole ( much like harwards hole - for those in NZ) , it was simply amazing and of course for a tiny sum of pesos i also abseiled down into the hole , now i think at this point i should say that i have a bit of a problem with hieghts (which somehow i had forgotten since my last abseiling experiance in alice springs where passing tourists had to pull me up a 50 metre cliff i was stuck half way down) so it was probably not the best idea. About 20 metres down an 120 metre cliff I realised I was only attached to a single steel bolt that had been attached to the cliff 5 years ago and with a guide who spoke no english. My life didn´t really flash before my eyes but I did think that although i´m not to young to die i am certainly too beautiful to die , however i did make it to the bottom where there was an amazing limestone cave to see with probably the most pristine stalitites and mites that i have seen which made the testicle pinching abseil worth it .... did i also mention that there were cave painting to see on the way down that my guide told me were 10,000 years old .....

Mexico is simply amazing but I hate to think what would happen if OSH and DOC ever got here , i think abseiling with no safety rope and crwaling through pristine caves while taking flash phots of ancient cave painting would probably be impossible.

Anyway , next week we are in Guatamala and another spanish school for a few weeks,

Andy


"Don't expect people to listen to your advice and ignore your example."

www.andysballbustingadventure.blogspot.com

www.libertytoredemption.wordpress.com

Maraposa Monarca

As always we are still alive despite the best efforts of the driving
public of Mexico, and we have had an exciting few weeks.

but it stick to the highlights probably the most amazing thing was to
see the the Monarch Butterflies in there winter habitat in the
mountains of Mexico. If you didn´t already know - every year hundreds
of millions of butterflies fly from Canada to Mexico to generally
chill out and when it gets warm again they will mate and then head
home ( the females that is the men prefer to die after sex) . Anyway
as it happens we got to go visit the mountains where they hang out
waiting for the sun, however the catch is the walk to the top of the
mountains- imagine ,if you will, a group of old and disgruntled
mountain goats getting together and thinking up a path up a mountain
that would challenge an "Olympic Champion Mountain Goat". hopefully
you will start to get an idea of a track that was never intended for
human transportationthat we had to walk/crawl up. However the
butterflies are more than worth it , there were literally millions
upon millions fluttering around the top of the mountain, they were
quite unconcerned by the humans walking around it was what I would
call a butterzard ( a blizzard of butterflies), Andy took hundreds of
photos and you should definitely check them out on his blog.

The other highlight of the last month was visiting the town of
Paracho- this is a town that for hundreds of years has specialized in
the making of guitars. Certainly the best guitars in Mexico come from
Paracho . Anyway I went in search of a new guitar here, after a long
afternoon of searching, inspecting and playing i finally found HER, a
beautiful "one of kind" guitar. Made of a specially imported wood
that the master craftsman had been carefully drying for 10 years to
ensure the best sound. He had then spent the best part of 3 months
making her. So when when his price for this work of "musical art" was
less then what i make in 2 hours it seemed almost criminal for me to
then bargain him done to half that price. Of course afterwards i
felt pretty guilty when i realised he also has several children to put
through school and a son with Down Syndrome (but not so guilty to then
get him to throw in a spare set of strings and a bag) :-) . Now you
would think that i wouldn´t have slept easy that night - but as it
turns out music really does sooth the beast and after several hours of
playing that evening i slept very well -

plenty of other things have happened including a Mexico Day parade in
Guanajuato, a terrifying night in a brothel in Leon and a new speed
record of 70.7km/hr going down the side of a volcano but those stories
probably warrant their own emails

i hope everyone is well, merry Christmas and don´t be shy about
sharing your own stories .

Andy

Near Death Experiances -( Andy G gets all the good stuff)

Well tomorrow marks the last day of our surjoin in the lovely city of Zacetacas,

Just a quick recap, in my last update Andy G was feeling sick with a tummy bug, however (,thankfully) , he got over that pretty quickly and we were back on the road to Zacatecas , and the only "notable" thing that happened was andy G came close to being killed as he decided to play chicken with a 16 wheeler truck down a steep road - hmm i didn´t partituarly endear myself to my friend when I told him to "harden up" even though he was physically shaking for about 30 mins afterwards (- -- i really am going to make a great dad one day!!!!!) unless your paying me by the 1/4 hour don´t expect alot of sympathy :-). did I mention that i have bought a whip and yell mush mush at andy and WL when i think they are not riding hard enough or when ( heaven forbid) they are not enjoying the uphills ( although to be fair i have only ever met one other person who enjoys uphills as much as me - he knows who he is)

Anyway we did make it all safe and sound to Zacatecas where we have spent two really great weeks at the local spanish school, despite being pretty intense i have enjoyed it - i would even go as far to say that i haven´t unenjoyed learning spanish. We ( AG, WL and me) decided to stay with different host families while in school so we could really be pushed at speaking spanish and get a much needed break from each other ( the above story should explain why!!)

It has been great to get off the bike for a little while , wearing clean clothes on a daily basis and meeting new people - going to an actual fiesta and meeting locals and drinking the very occational beer without worrying about it killing me the next day on the bike. oh and meeting some Brazilian girls all I can say is ay aya aya aya. Hence I am very keen to get back on the bike - brazil is still 5000kms away.!!!!!

anyway on Andy G´s blog he has posted lots of great photos so have a look at

http://libertytoredemption.wordpress.com/

I do love getting the occational reply´s so don´t be shy , I hope eveyone is well where ever you are

Andy

p.s if you noted any spelling mistakes i put them deliberately to keep you on your toes, and also the spell check is not working

Hola with Diarrhoea, (best friend of the budget traveller)

Hi everyone,

Andy G has Diarrhoea - well it had to happen - and it couldn't have happened to a nicer person. Right from the start of this trip I have been kind of expecting it - not really in a good way - more like in the way that you are expecting death - you know its around you just hope that it won't happen to you :-).

But despite the last day or so, we have been having an unexpectedly good time , we met up with Marco a local to the city of Monterrey and he let us stay at his apartment he took us to dinner we went to the movies and Walmart and generally had a good time and when it came time to leave he rang has parents in the next city and we biked to their house and spent a few more days in the bosom of mexican hospitality - before reluntantly moving on.

For the past few days we have been biking in the Northern desert of Mexico with about 50 types of cactus and not much else - but it has in fact been really beautiful camping in the desert and waking up with mouth -fulls of dirt -- humm

My spanish is coming along and I can now conjugate the verb "to be" but still don't know why I would want to?? but i'm told it will be useful. I can also wirte a accurate description of myself on Mexican dating websites - Soy un (I am a) guapo ( hansome) , calvo (bald) chico ( boy) de Nueva Zealanda ( from NZ).

Hopefully Andy will be over the bum squirts in a few days and we will continue cycling - of course whose turn will it be next ??


Adios

Andy

p.s I have a video of a Tumbleweed chasing me down the highway in mexico ( yes, fairdinkum, a real, honest to god, tumbleweed like out of a John Wayne movie - when I next get the chance I will upload it)