# Oaxaca to Puerto Escondido - Prologue (Long)



## tigerdog (Mar 16, 2004)

Well I was going to post this some time ago, but circumstances got in the way. Last month my wife Brooke, our friend Craig and myself took a road trip to Oaxaca from our homes in Mexico City to celebrate the end of the school year. Last time Brooke and I went to Oaxaca we found out about Pedro Martinez who does mountain bike tours based around Oaxaca City. One that caught our eyes was a four-day one-way support ride from Oaxaca City over the Sierra Madre del Sur to Puerto Escondido. Craig has been my regular riding partner down here and he jumped at the chance to get one last big ride in before he moved back to Colorado.

We were all feeling a bit tired and rusty and decided to head down a few days before to get in some warm up rides around Oaxaca.










Arrival in Oaxaca










View from the Hotel

Our first ride took us north out of the city past the observatory up dirt roads to a bizarre ghost highway that never got finished.










Looking Back on the City










Road to Nowhere

After crossing the highway we found what we thought was a nice section of singletrack. We were soon to discover the perils of Oaxacan trails. Thorns! Not only did my arms look like I'd been clawed by a Jaguar but I had a blowout. We soon discovered that Brooke had a flat too. We decided to make a retreat to the jeep trail carrying our bikes.



















Portage

Once back to the safety of the jeep road it became apparent that Brooke and I had flatted both tyres on our bikes with multiple thorn punctures on each and we had a shortage of tubes and patches. Craig rode ahead to get the truck and we limped round the rest of the loop.










Let the festival of flats begin!

Once we made it back to civilisation and found Craig and the truck we made a vow to pick up plenty of tubes in the morning. This turned out to be rather difficult as both Craig and I needed Prestas for our rims. There are 4 bike shops that I know of in Oaxaca and of course the last one we went to actually had some presta tubes.

The next day we went on another jackass ride south of the city where I had another flat. Riding in Mexico always seems to be a bit more of an adventure than one bargains for and when you get lost people always want to help with directions even if they might not know where you need to go or have much of a concept of time or distance.

The next day we decided to take it easy, watch Mexico beat Brazil, drink some beers and patch half a dozen innertubes. We were going to need all our energy for the next four days...

To be continued...










Singlespeed - Oaxaca Style










Rest day


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## Warp (May 24, 2004)

Plain Cool. You have me green of envy. I wanna go there and ride. My granpa on my mother's side is from a little town in Oaxaca state called Tlaxiaco and I'd like to ride there some time.

Keep showing the world the beauties from Mexico.


Gregg - If you can read this - Don't we deserve a Mexico Board?? It'd be cool.


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## LyNx (Oct 26, 2004)

> Once back to the safety of the jeep road it became apparent that Brooke and I had flatted both tyres on our bikes with multiple thorn punctures on each and we had a shortage of tubes and patches. Craig rode ahead to get the truck and we limped round the rest of the loop.


Next time this happens just remember that all patches are are fancy rubber with glue. So just decide to sacrifice a tube, cut it up, rough it up a bit and apply glue and voila you have patches  It works and saved my bacon already while on a ride by myslef and ran out of patches.


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