After the snow you get mud

When we left Guachochi it was still freezing and if you ask me how I knew this, then just look at the following picture, and no we don’t have an ice machine with us! This is actually our water canister…

We managed to get some money out of the ATM with my Visa card, so I think the machine just didn’t like Seb’s Mastercard. It was a Sunday when we left and everything in town was closed, except for the liquor store…hey you have to keep hydrated, no?!

The roads from Guachochi towards Hidalgo del Parral where so good that we just kept riding past Parral because we couldn’t get enough of the twists and turns in the road.

The scenery here in the mountains is so big and spacious.

Nice snow free curves that scream to be ridden.

Just see where the road takes us.

Riding the line.

After all this hard work it was time for some necessary vitamins.

Some nice local church.

I wonder what the watchtower is for?

The closer you get to ‘civilization’ the more they are aware that they need to take the necessary action for disabled people.

How happy a small ice-cream can make me.

It looks like an abandoned military post, or they were just having their siesta, who knows.

After all these windy roads, we felt that it was time for some luxury and we found this in the roadside hotel in La Zarca. When we entered the room, we were both amazed how big it was and it even had an air-conditioning system that could produce heat!!  All this was ours for just 300 Mexican Pesos, how cool is that!

I am glad that this little guy slept outside because he would have probably given me nightmares otherwise…

Leaving La Zarca, we thought we would have an easy ride to Durango where we would settle down and relax, but this wasn’t counting all the roadworks we had to pass. As long as they have deviations onto hard gravel this is not a problem for us, it just slows us down a bit but that is all, but when they have you ride through mud it’s a whole other story. I immediately felt that I was back in Russia where we had been on a similar road once with our DRZ, but with our motorcycles now we have very little space between our fender and the wheel which almost caused us big problems.

The mud started sticking to our wheels and it became hard as a rock after a while. The only thing we could do was put the bike in fist gear and let the bike guide us to a dry patch of hard gravel all the time drifting away.

See how the mud pushes the front fender upward, then sticks there and just blocks the whole front wheel…

Zero traction control.

Ah dry land and time to scrape away the mud from the fender. You can see how the mud scrapes on the front tyre and causes it to deteriorate way too fast.

After our mud bath we were happy that we found a car wash in the next town, so we gladly paid 150 Mexican Pesos to get our two bikes a big scrub down!

Ah, what a sight for sore eyes, a shiny bike!! It’s almost as if nothing ever happened…

After our bike wash we pushed on towards Durango, but before we got there we had some more road work, but this time it was just hard gravel, so the bikes got fairly clean to Durango albeit a bit dusty…