These guys helped us find our way back to the main road

I plopped this cool little kid on the back of my bike for a photo. He informed us of a fallen tree that will bar us from continuing

Isaac and his steed

Heading back to the main road

We rounded the first volcano with no problems at all the roads were a lot of fun. We returned to our hostel and obtained a map of the island. With renewed confidence and vigor we set out to tackle the final loop of the figure eight.

It takes a little time and a few U turns to find the start of the next volcano loop. The road is absolutely perfect. There were huge trenches and moguls running perpendicular across the entire road one after the other. Like giant speed bumps, or where they small ramps!

We find tons of great hostels and hotels on this road that far exceed the one we are staying in for the same price. We stop at one hotel for some lunch. Right when we order it starts to pour. We smile.

Since the boat ride over here the sky has been anything but clear. We can’t even see the volcano when we are riding right next to it. So, for it to rain on a day when we can’t see shit anyway can mean only one thing. MUD! It was perfect.

Isaac “Salty Pirate Bastard” Simmons

Uhh… a much needed detour from 20,000 miles for Parkinsons Disease

I want to explain these two pictures. Yes they were staged and photographed. We deserved it. We had been riding through this kind of shit all day, worse, much worse. I am by no means complaining. Only after we realized that we weren’t going to run out of daylight or gas did we stop to mess around with the camera. I also have video!

Some of the puddles were much larger and/or deeper and grouped together in huge sections. Fortunately it was more sandy and rocky than muddy. Otherwise we would have never made it with the type of tires we had on our bikes. There were only a few patches of deep black mud.

I wish that I took more pictures like this during the whole trip. It seems that when things are really grimy, difficult, treacherous, the last thing on your mind is to take a picture. You are just so focused on the road ahead that you get in a zone and can think of little else. It is quite liberating actually.

This second loop of the figure eight was much tougher than the first. That coupled with the growing doubt of running out of gas and daylight. The roads were well used by buses and banana trucks. I have never in my wildest imagination seen buses (what we know as school buses) rock crawl in ultra low gear up some of these steep unpaved gullies. These vehicles kept the road nice and packed.

When rounding the home stretch the locals on the road, in buses, on banana trucks would give enthusiastic smiles and thumbs up for the crazy gringos.

We made it home tired, very dirty, completely satisfied and ready for some more pavement and border hassles.