Going The Distance

We start the day with an interview with the local Sonora paper, El Imparcial. They interview us for about an hour and take a photo of us in suits on the bike. It then appears on the front page of the paper. Arriba arriba!

Time to turn up the heat and cover some miles. Our dodgy tyre has cost us valuable days, so it’s time to burn it to Mazatlan, and our next rest stop with a friend. Captain Mike bravely says that he can cover 8 hours driving, so off we set. In the midday heat, the temperature gets up to 45 degrees C. It’s bastard hot. We’re totally drenched. No roof, no A/C and no respite, we cover huge distances listening to A Short History of Nearly Everything.

We take refuge from the 1pm sun in McDonald’s in a seaside town of Guayamas, where a friendly American comes up and starts chatting about the bike. Ah, the Ural Effect, we know it well by now. But it turns out Chris is a Jehovah’s Witness, here from Oklahoma with his wife, to lead bible groups and spread the word of the Witnesses. He and his wife, Rachel, agree to an interview. They are a young, sweet and earnest couple – he’s around 24, she 21. They have real belief in what they are doing, and they have a strong marriage as a result.

We asked them about the foundations for the marriage and how important their shared beliefs are, and it seems they are everything. The young couple met when Rachel was 18, and the two of them were working together on the construction of a Kingdom Hall in Oklahoma. They eventually got together and marred about a year after that. They spoke with the fervour and passion of the religious, and it was nice to see how it bound them together (in the same way that Mike and I are bound by a forced faith in the Russian Burro we ride). We heard their sweet love story, asked questions to get to the bottom of stereotypes (door knocking? “Well, if people don’t want it, that’s no problem, but we want to share the word”; refusing blood tranfusions? “if there was no other way, I would have to let him die. But we believe we will be reunited after death”) and the thing which we really took away is that Rachel and Chris were required, before they married, to think hard about the practical elements of their forthcoming marriage. Not wedding, marriage. Watchtower publishes a small book called The Secrets of Family Happiness which requires the spouses-to-be to think about tough topics like what happens if one spouse gets ill? How many children? What if we have an unwell child? What happens if a parent gets ill? Though I’m not religious myself, this seems to me like a very good idea: forcing young lovers to think about the practical side of an impending union. A lot of the advice we’ve heard from experts and couples alike is that shared goals, and mutual understanding is vitally important. In fact, Dr Gottman has devised an exercise for couples in crisis where couples are required to talk about their ideas on key things – ranging from “how do we celebrate Christmas?” right through to “what are my ideas on God?” etc (sadly, we couldn’t fit the cards on the bike, so I’m doing that from memory, but you get the idea) But that’s my thought for the day (Oh God, I’m Jerry Springer now. One Reuters article and I think people are actually reading this gubbins…) strip back the lovey dovey and think of it as a business partnership for a second: where do you want to be in 10 years? What do you want to achieve together? Is it travel? Is it a big house? Is it a menagerie of kids? Is it a lapdog and no talk of little people?

BEST BIT OF MEXICO SO FAR: I take over driving the bike for a while to give Mike a bit of a break. I find the bike very heavy, and I’m quite a nervous rider. I spook quite easily (turning to the right can be hard for a weakling) but for short bursts, Mike can kip in the sidecar and feel a bit restored. After half an hour, I pull over – ill-advisedly on the run up to a right hand turn, so Mike and I can swap places. Mike decides to take a piss. At the side of the road. BIG MISTAKE. This is against the law in Mexico, we learn. A policeman comes over and starts rabbiting in Spanish. Mike speaks Spanish, but not perfectly – what he did glean was that the policeman said “it is an offence to our pristine and beautiful public highways that you whipped your cock out and took a slash”. Much threat of being taken down to the station. Until $5 sorted it out. Saweet.

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