Shoot dang. Its been a minute since I flew from Puebla, Mexico to Dallas, Texas. Then I flew from Dallas to Denver. Then a flight from Denver to Omaha where Mother was gracious enough to pick me up. But that was the end of my trip. I’ll go to my Mexican adventure.
I spent a lot of time at the Gato Negro coffee shop and book store while I was in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua. It was there that I found a plane ticket from San Jose, Costa Rica up to Mexico City, Mexico. That was about a week into November. I think the ticket was for the 16th of November. I did some more fooling around in Nicaragua like traveling to Isla Ometepe for a few days before spending all day on a bus to San Jose to catch my flight. I woke up at 5 a.m. to catch a shuttle to the airport and flew to Mexico City.
Flying into Mexico was surreal. I had tried to plan a trip to the country after I graduated in 2015. I had a vision, a dream if you will, of going kayaking in Veracruz at Aventurec within a month or so of graduation. I talked about it and planned it for a lot of the last semester that I was in school. When graduation finally came reality hit. I got a job as a hydro-ceramic engineer (dishwasher) and started my first post-graduate job on my birthday. It was an introduction like any other, to the real world and my travel plans fell to the wayside. Landing in Mexico and realizing that dream felt pretty good.
Mexico City is a cool city. I read about cities and try to research my movement strategies (i.e. mass transit) before I get into them. Berlin has the S-Baun, Prague has a fantastic Metro and tram lines, Paris and France in general have a great train network. Mexico City has a great subway that was designed for the illiterate, I could handle it. So when I got through customs at Benito Juarez International I was feeling good. I didn’t have an agenda and this was the first city that I had come into without feeling a slight unease in my gut. Premonitions of trouble that inspire caution in my movements usually follow me around when I travel internationally, not here though.
So the first thing I did was hop on the subway with all of my gear and make my way to my hostel near the center of the City. I had forgotten how much I like mass transit systems. So many people smashed into a little space traveling around together but going about their own lives. I got a few looks because I was hauling around a big-ass backpack with all of my kayaking gear in the middle of the city. What struck me was how few tourists I had seen. In Central America tourists are everywhere, there’s no escape. Here there are mostly Mexicans going about their work and doing what they do. There was some full on culture to be seen and experienced.
I spent about five days here when I had intend to spend two. I just kept meeting cool people and doing awesome things. I walked for half a day just looking. There are ancient ruins in the middle of the city. I sat at a cafe and had a mescal the proper way with chili and orange slices on the side. The Cathedral has a pendulum that shows how much the church has settled since 1656 (turns out, a lot. The city is built on an ancient lake bed). I went to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s house. I read a recovering heroin addict’s memoir. I learned about the healing potential of Ibogaine (look it up), I ate a lot of tacos and smoked a couple joints, I met a French girl named Marie and an Argentinian actor whose name I don’t recall… It was a great few days in Mexico City.
The time came to catch the bus to Tlapacoyan, Veracruz. This is where the kayaking was to be found at a hostel and rafting outfitter named Aventurec. There is a high density of waterfalls in the area that attracts kayakers from all over the world. The first dude I met is a fellow named Weaver from Carbondale, CO. Here I was in the middle of Mexico shooting the shit with a fellow who grew up with several of my friends from college and had done a some kayaking in Durango with one of my biking buddies. Its a small world. Its even smaller when you’re kayaking.
My first day on the water was awesome. It was my first time in a kayak in three months and it felt great to crush through some waves. The section we ran was the rafting section for the company and had maybe three class III’s and a bunch of class II. It was a nice warm up before stepping it up to the Pesma section of the Alseseca. The Pesma has several class III’s and one big class IV called Double Drop, all in about one quarter mile. I hit that a bunch while the big boys were running the committing class V Big Banana section upstream. That shit is way out of my league. Turns out I was out of my league for the most part down there in Tlapacoyan.
The step-up was to the Roadside section of the Alseseca. This is the one that is featured in all of the Mexico video edits that you’ll see. The hike in is down a hill through a cow pasture. When you get a line of kayakers carrying their boats through the pasture it makes a great shot for any kayaking video. When I got onto that I was feeling turnt up. The entrance is a twenty foot double drop that I screwed up. I missed an eddie above the top and did a spin off a rock into the drop. I made it through fine but that messed up my whole mind space for the rest of the run. I had run my first waterfall but my confidence had been shaken. Kayaking is as much a mental game as it is skills… I need to work on my finesse.
So I kept paddling down and ran a bunch more waterfalls and then I took a swim. There was a twelve foot waterfall that you had to stay left on to miss a rock in the landing with a late boof stroke off of a rock lip. I was concentrating on staying left and missed my boof stroke at the lip and “plugged” the landing. A boof is like dong a wheelie on a bike, it keeps your bow up so you land flat. My kayak went in vertically when I wanted to land horizontally. I was upside down. The recirculating current was holding me at the base of the waterfall. Whenever I would roll up I would almost immediately get turned over again. I missed some rolls. It was the shits and I was getting beat down so I pushed out of my boat and took a swim. I was with a stacked crew of badass kayakers from mostly the Pacific Northwest U.S. that helped me pull my shit together. That was about half way down.
The rest of that run went ok with a few portages. My head was in the wrong place after my swim so when we went for another lap and I swam again I took it as a sign and hike out of the canyon. I spent a little while on the side of the highway waiting for the crew to pick me up. It was humbling to say the least. I didn’t get on the Roadside again during my time at Aventurec.
Because of that swim or because of some bad tacos in town… I don’t know, I got sick. By sick I mean that about 1 a.m. I woke up feeling like I had to vomit. I ran to the railing outside my room and projectile vomited into the jungle. With the abdominal contractions of vomiting I forced some diarrhea out my other end. I was a mess so I took a shower and cleaned myself up. Then I tried to go back to sleep only to find that this vicious experience would be repeated ever thirty minutes for the next eighteen hours. It may have been one of the most unpleasant periods of sickness of my remembered existence. It was “shitty” to say the least.
I finished my two weeks there at which point I was low on cash and had to make a decision about where I was headed for the winter. I could catch a flight from Puebla to Denver for pretty cheap but after that I didn’t know. Was it Durango or Iowa? In Durango were all of my college friends with whom I could ski pow, party, and have a good time. I had gainful employment opportunities there. I missed my friends and I missed Durango but I had been there consistently for most of the past four years. I hadn’t been to Iowa for a long period of time for a long time. I was a different person from the one that left for college in 2011 and I wanted that person to spend time with his parents.
I went home on December 8, 2015 for an indefinite period. I told myself that it would only be two months max. I found gainful employment at my cousin’s feedlot during the day and started waiting tables at The Roux at night. I was hanging out with my parents and getting to know them in a different context and hearing stories that I hadn’t heard before. I found that I won’t be moving back to Iowa long term and I won’t be moving back to Durango long term, any time soon. I need to go somewhere I haven’t been. I need to challenge myself some more and do some more growing. I’m not the person I want to be yet so I’m still searching and learning. So I’m headed to the Salt River Canyon to guide rafts for Mild to Wild. I look forward to going back to that canyon that I only got to see for a bit last year. There’s no internet, no cellphone, no electricity. We live by the sun out there in the Sonoran Desert. So if you want to see me, come out to the Salt River between March and May to go rafting.
bdawgingit 