Cycling in the Big Apple and Old Mexico
By: Jurgen Heise
January 1, 2011
The past two weeks have been a whirlwind of travel activity for me, especially when one considers where I’ve been riding my bike. Never mind the details as to how I came to roam the streets of New York City on a borrowed townie, or rack up 300+ kilometers down here in Quintana Roo— punctuated by a 55-mile beer ride with the lads just a week ago. I’m riding the bike, and that’s a good thing.
Not a Schwinn but still a pretty sweet ride
For those of you who have never ventured outside of the known Tuesday night club ride or the well-planned tour of the West Texas hinterlands, riding a bike in NYC or in Mexico may sound intimidating— but it really isn’t. It’s just riding a bike, for crying out loud. People do it every day, thousands of them. So why shouldn’t you, or I?
During my mostly fortunate life I have ridden in a number of different locales, and I must say that the experience has been about 99% positive. The remaining 1%, of course, is occupied by the fella throwing a cup of chew dip at you; the bubba buzzing you and then sitting there with a gun a half mile down the road, glaring; and the huge truck (doble remolque, or double trailer, in Spanish) laying on the horn and giving you the closest shave of the left upper arm you ever had. So, let’s talk about the 99%, OK?
I found myself in New York as the house guest of old friends who live in lower-eastside Manhattan, no less, ideally suited to explore the Big Apple by subway, hop-on hop-off bus, or on foot. I chose Barry’s townie, a Schwinn he’d bought down at Frank’s Bike Shop. Now, you should pay a visit to Frank and his cave—I hadn’t seen a darker, more cluttered, more real bike shop than his since my last extended tour, back in Ecuador many years ago. Frank even has cobbled together a triplet (that’s a tandem built for three, for those not familiar with the term), and he’ll tell you the story if you just give him a chance. There were rows and rows of Schwinns clustered together like sardines in a can, pedals inverted (Euro style) and bars turned so a few more could fit. Talk about inventory control! That’s where Barry bought his townie, at Frank’s.
When you live in an apartment in Manhattan, you don’t want to crowd your gazillion-dollar 10th-floor real estate with a bike, so you park her outside, laboriously tethered by multiple locks to a signpost that’s tall enough. All those innocent bikes look non-descript, little wallflowers with no sex appeal—but at night the predators come out, or sometimes during the day. So you lock her carefully.
Coffee, as Barry calls her, allowed me to see New York from angles that would have taken a multitude of different modes of locomotion. Yes, that hard, hard norther bit like a knife, but I rode all the way up the west-side of Manhattan almost to the George Washington bridge that you can take over to Jersey, if you so choose on a nice summer’s day. A safe, but not empty, bike path—there were other cyclists, jogging nubiles in ever-so-tight tights, and the occasional in-line skater—allowed me to gaze at the immensity of New York, the Hudson, and the opposing shore. When I finally turned east I entered Harlem and its world of hair salons, extension mongers, and beauty parlors—and its more squalid parts. On toward Central Park (everybody was out on bikes, skates, or running shoes!), all the while flowing with traffic and never more than a minute or so away from some wailing Kojak-esque siren. Is all of New York City on fire or being mugged, all the time?
On a three-speed townie, you don’t go very fast, but you can stay more or less abreast with the motorized wave if you come to understand how the traffic works. Now, as you know, I’m a fairly law-abiding citizen, especially when it comes to red lights, stop signs, etc. Well, this is NYC, so forgeddaboutit! No, I didn’t ride like a bike messenger (Coffee was too buxom in the bars for that), but there are certain “adjustments” one has to make if one wants to stay with the flow on 5th Avenue at 5:30 on a pre-Christmas Friday afternoon. And I have to admit, it was actually quite an adrenaline rush to dodge the yellow cabs, busses, and pedestrians—damn pedestrians!—and roll with the flow, even if it entailed judiciously ignoring the color red.
And then you’re suddenly on the Riviera Maya, with your Ritchey BreakAway, trying to not gain more than 10 pounds in a week’s time because of all the culinary (and liquid) temptations in the all-inclusive. While I’ve crossed the entire republica on two wheels (the entire length of the Baja California and from Matamoros to the border with Guatemala) I had never biked in the Yucatan. It’s flat here, West Texas flat. And that’s about where the similarities end. While we have our intricate network of farm-to-market roads, there are just two thoroughfares here: the one leading north-south (toward Cancun and Chetumal, bordering Belize) and the one going across the peninsula to Merida. That’s it; the rest is jungle. There are a few dirt roads, leading to the occasional cenote where—so the legend goes—Mayan virgins were sacrificed to the gods and tourists nowadays spend a day frolicking in the crystal-clear waters, looking for remnants of said virgins; however, all these pathways are short dead ends and lead nowhere. So, my 300Ks down have been mostly alongside heavy traffic on perfectly smooth shoulders, with busses, taxis, pick-ups, and the occasional fume-belching lorry passing me at high speeds and with great noise—all this despite the frequent signs that admonish drivers that Este camino no esta de alta velocidad; no sirree, this ain’t’ no high-speed road, even though it is four lanes wide with a big shoulder similar to I-20 between Abilene and Weatherford.
If it weren’t for the maddening noise, it’d be ideal. Even so, I put in several 50+ mile rides that took me to Cancun and Playa del Carmen, where the city traffic wasn’t bad at all and I was surrounded by the more traditional sounds (Norteño music) and smells (tacos al carbon) of Mexico. My favorite ride, though, has been the one going at a 90-degree angle away from the coast. Asphalt as smooth as a baby’s butt and hardly any traffic make it perfect. The incessant wind (so there was a second similarity to West Texas, after all) doesn’t bother you because you ride through the Mayan jungle, close to the edge of the forest, which takes the bite out of that breeze. You marvel at the strange trees, hear the odd noises of the tropical birds, see the occasional saucer-sized emerald-blue butterfly, and only mildly wonder why yet another tiny little cantina appears to be abandoned, here in the middle of nowhere.
The infamous Mexican speed humps
As mentioned twice, these roads are about as smooth as one could ever hope for. How do the Mexicans do it? I don’t know, but we sure could learn from them in Texas where chip-and-seal is de rigeur. One thing I’d be happy to do without, though, is the ubiquitous speed bump, or tope in local parlance. Watch out for that yellow sign that announces those humps, coming up in 100 meters. Better slam on the brakes, because these are road boobies that come in a cup size 42 DDD. Google it—that’s BIG! Even on a bike you have to really take aim to make it between two of those unjoyful mounds that will slow down any car, bus, or truck. And they extend these tope to the very, very end of the road or shoulder so that there is no going around them! Este camino no esta de alta velocidad … right on.
If I didn’t know better, having traveled in so many other parts of the republic, I’d think that everything is on a grand intermodal scale in Mexico. Well, it’s not so, but down here on the Riviera Maya they like to impress their rich cousins from north of the border who take the airport shuttle to the all-inclusive tourist compound. This is a modern country, judging by the square footage reserved for informacciones. Official road signs every 500 meters (or less) advertising that it is only 28 more kilometers to the Jollie Jungle Hotel, that Playa del Carmen is another 10 K, or that “A clean highway is a safer highway.” Good to know, but you wouldn’t guess it from the trash littering the narrow swath before the jungle takes over. At least the reading is vastly entertaining, and if you don’t know the Spanish word for “safety belt” after your first 50-mile excursion, well, don’t blame the Mexicans. Like clockwork, the signs admonish you to use those cinturóns de seguridad.
And thus it goes for me: one minute here, one minute there. In between these two cycling extremes I managed to squeeze in last Sunday’s beer ride with the local lads while home to unpack, wash clothes, and repack. I must say, even though New York and Mexico have much exotic allure, it’s hard to beat going out with the boys, if for nothing more than timing things so well that you arrive—after 45 miles, no less—one minute after the beer store opens at noon. I won’t be able to replicate that anywhere else!
