Tuesday, 17 September, 2024 – Saturday, 21 September, 2024
We woke up in Julie’s and Patrick’s house after a short night. We stayed up late, researching Mexico and talking about possible solutions. Honestly, we were scared about Mexico, and the easiest way out would be to just skip the whole of Central America. But, as usual, the easiest solution wasn’t the best one; there were some problems if we decided to skip the next part of our journey:
- We can stay in the USA for 90 days; after that, we must leave the country; there isn’t any option to extend our visa. Based on the date of our arrival, we need to be out by the end of November.
- Flying from the USA to the north of South America would bring us straight into the rainy season. Wet and depressing days? No, thank you. An ideal time would be at the start of June in Colombia, then going south from there. Anything before that is probably too soon.
- If we can’t stay in the USA during winter, nor can we fly to South America, then we have to go back to Europe. But winters in Europe are too cold for us to cycle and camp, even in the warmest places, like Turkey or Greece. This means that we would probably need to fly home and stay there a couple of months over the coldest weather, then continue from home to Turkey or Iran and fly from there to South America. After a lot of talking, we agreed that this option is not that bad; it would be nice to spend holidays with family, and we would spend this time planning out our further travel more thoroughly while also intensively learning Spanish. Speaking Spanish would make traveling in South America a thousand times easier.
- The final option is to continue into Mexico, despite all warnings and possible dangers. We know that in the media, Mexico is portrayed in a bad light, and we know that there is a lot of crime in the country, but we talked with a couple of people who cycled across it, and they had only good things to say. We believe that just like in any other country, there are a lot of good people, and there is a small percentage of those with bad intentions, but as we’ve heard, cyclists are normally not their targets. We’re not carrying anything valuable enough to be worth the struggle and potential problems.
We haven’t made a final decision yet, but we have decided to cross into Mexico and at least give it a try. In our minds, we split Mexico in two parts. The first part is the Baja Peninsula, around 1500 kilometers of mostly desert that is considered safer and more similar to the USA, with a lot of people speaking English. The second part would be the rest of Mexico, and we would get there by ferry from La Paz in Baja to Mazatlan on the mainland. This part is much larger, and we would need to speak some Spanish. If we leave the USA in a couple of days, it would still be possible to try out Baja and come back to the USA in case we change our minds. We could then still fly home from here, as long as we’re within our initial 90-day visa period. Baja will also be a good place to learn and practice Spanish.
Once that was decided, we felt much better. Coming to this conclusion wasn’t easy, and we changed our minds multiple times in the process, but we’re happy with the outcome. Avoiding Central America completely because of the fear would feel like a defeat, especially based on media stories and warnings from people who never went there. It can’t be that bad if so many people still cycle there. Hopefully, these words will age well.
In the meantime, while we were still uncertain, Julie and Patrick invited us to stay one more night. This way, we were able to leave everything at their house on Tuesday, day 85, and we went to Monterey Bay Aquarium! Our hosts were too kind, and they were able to get us tickets for free, saving us 100$! Next time that we have a rough day, we will go treat ourselves to a restaurant or a nicer place to sleep, and we will think about Julie and Patrick ❤️.
The day in the aquarium was amazing, and we felt like little kids again. We were among the first people there when the aquarium opened at 10 am, and we stayed for over 7 hours. And even after that much time, we could easily stay longer. We saw sea otters, octopuses, fish, sharks, sea stars, penguins, sea birds, jellies, kelp forest, deep sea animals, and much, much more. But without a doubt, the best thing was a pool with different rays that you could put your hand in and pet them! Most people working in aquarium were volunteers, and you could see their passion for sea life when you talked with them or asked some questions.
When we were done with the aquarium, Julie and Patrick came and picked us up, then we went to the nearby beach with their dog. We’re a little bit ashamed to admit it, but this was the first time that we touched the Pacific Ocean, even though we were riding next to it for the past week. Julie also knows a lot about sea life, and she took us to tide pools by the beach, where we could see and touch some small crabs and different squishy things. In the evening, they treated us to dinner in a Vietnamese restaurant.
Now that we made up our minds about entering Mexico, we wanted to do it as soon as possible, so that we still have enough time to try out Mexico and come back if we don’t like it. And besides that, there was one more thing: between us and the Mexican border was Los Angeles, a huge city with over 10 million people. Passing it would mean at least 3 to 4 days of long riding, alongside expensive accommodations of around 50-100 dollars per night. So, because of these two reasons, we have decided to rent a car in Monterey and drive all the way down to San Diego, a city 30 kilometers from the Mexican border. This was for sure a faster and cheaper option compared to cycling there. Before the final decision, Julie connected us with her friend Andrew in San Diego, a cyclist who has been in Baja multiple times. We had a quick call with him; he calmed us down about the dangers in Mexico, and he was willing to host us for a couple of nights in San Diego. So, it seemed that we finally had a working plan again.
But, apparently, it’s not that easy to get a last-minute one-way car rental from Monterey to San Diego. I don’t know what we would do without Julie; she helped us once again! She called a couple of car rental agencies, and after a few denials, she convinced a lady to rent us a car even when she said they didn’t have any available. In the end, we paid 185$ to rent a one-way car and around 60$ for 700 kilometers of gas. We couldn’t be picky about what car we got; it was a Mitsubishi Outlander Sport, and luckily it was big enough to fit both of our bikes with minimal disassembly. From the time of rental, we had 24 hours to return it in San Diego, with around a 9-hour drive to get there (it depends on the LA traffic). We said our goodbyes to Patrick and Julie in the afternoon of day 86, then it was time to go.
There were still around 3-4 hours of daylight, so we decided to take a car to (almost) the same road that we would take to do a Big Sur detour. This way, we could see what we were skipping. Close to Greenfield, we joined on Highway 101 to Santa Barbara, where we went back on Highway 1 by the coast. When it was too late to drive (something past midnight), we parked by the road and slept for around 5 hours. We were parked by some other cars and campervans, even though there was a sign “No overnight parking”. On the morning of Thursday, day 87, we opened our car doors and somehow started an alarm on our own car. It took us a couple of seconds to find a car key and disable the alarm, and by this time, we probably woke up everyone around us. It goes without saying that we just started a car and drove off to avoid any more embarrassment. We passed Los Angeles in the early hours, so we didn’t have much traffic, but we heard stories of being stuck on an 8-lane road in the middle of rush hour. We arrived at a car return point in San Diego Airport on time, then it took us 45 minutes to get everything out of the car, assemble our bikes, and put on luggage.
From the airport, we had a 7-kilometer ride to Andrew’s place, and even though he wasn’t home, he left the back doors open for us, and he sent us a picture of where we could set up our tent in the backyard. We met him in person around an hour after our arrival. We “clicked” in a second, and he was incredibly easy to talk to. We had a light dinner, and he insisted on having some wine with it. After our first bottle, his Slovenian language pronunciation was scary close to that of a native speaker, and we did our best to present Slovenia in the best light possible so that he might come one day on a visit there. It was a really fun evening!
We planned on staying with Andrew for 3 nights, leaving on Sunday morning (day 90) and passing into Mexico. But in the meantime, we had some planning to do, and Andrew was the best possible host one could get. He took us around San Diego; we went to Ocean Beach; we tasted San Diego tacos; we went to Cabrillo National Monument from where we could see San Diego and the Mexican border; and one evening we even went to a local festival, where we tried our first churros. And to top it off, Andrew took us to “The Friendly – Pizza and more” where he got us each a slice of pizza and a delicious burger!
Oh, and one more thing. As we’re writing this, we’re already in the Baja Desert, and we value this even more: Andrew bought us a detailed map of the Baja Peninsula because he said that there won’t be a phone signal most of the time. And he was 100% right; we already had three consecutive days without phone service, and we had to rely on the map for planning our water stops.
Some more pictures:
