Leaving Puebla is not hard.

Mexico is full of abandoned building projects. I like the scuptural steel forms of this example, spotted while passing through a village just outside Puebla.

The day is long and the road unwinds into a arid valley bounded by dry rocky hills covered with mesquite and Joshua trees in flower. The nopal, too, is blooming, each paddle fringed with bright red blossoms while the agave cactus send giant spears shooting into the sky, green shiny heart shaped pods, bursting into bright yellow clusters of flowers.

Can anyone tell me if these really are mesquite flowers?

Suddenly, as I come around a long curve a hill comes into view thick with towering columns of tall straight cactus.

Incredible vegetation.

Cactus valley.

The day is hot and I have to rest in the afternoon under a rare shade tree and it occurs to me that maybe I have done this all back to front, traversing the mountains in the north in winter and now heading towards the desert peninsula moving into high summer.

When I finally find a place to camp – to the side of the road hidden from view of passing traffic by a long mound of earth – I eat a left over piece of Spanish tortilla, cooked the night before in Puebla.

The stars appear one by one and it is so long since I have camped out in the open that they have shifted and the sky appears unfamiliar to me. Orion is low in the north-west. In the south, hovering just above the horizon the Southern Cross appears for the first time on my journey. I watch it and during the night when I wake it is still there in the same position – the axis the world is spinning on – but I can’t locate Paleides and Taurus in the new alignment and I am bereft. I wake again just before dawn and Orion, too, has vanished.

In the morning I continue to ride among incredible cactus. Before long a mountain ranges looms ahead.

Fat cactus.

An impressive cactus tree... I wish I knew the names of these plants.

I'm heading towards those there hills...

I wake on the second morning out of Puebla having camped by the side of the road, just out of direct line of the car headlights and so hidden by darkness, but exposed once the sun has risen, clearly visible with a simple sideways glance. I am up quickly and gone without breakfast. Thorn bushes cling, tearing at my bare legs, as I push my bike back to the road; everything hard rough surfaces, spines and prickles.

A few kilometres brings me to Teotitlan where I must choose between heading south into the heart of Oaxaca or east towards Vera Cruz. The eastern route is slightly more direct and, with my visa clock ticking, I decide to go that way. Turning off the more travelled route I begin, without preamble, to climb. The sun rises behind the mountain range I am ascending and so I am, at least initially, sheltered from its rays.

Rising, slowly, out of the desert valley, I watch the mountain range on the other side. The road winds higher and higher, snaking in and out of the folds of the mountain ridge. I top a crest and the road follows the top of the ridge for a while rolling up and down before rising steeply again. The mountain tops are less barren than the valley and lower slopes and there is some tree cover but now the sun has risen the heat is intense.

Looking back down into the valley during the long climb upwards.

I drop down into a another valley to face another long brutal ascent to the township of Huautla – a grim settlement strung out along a ridge, tin shacks spilling down the precipitous slopes. People stare – there are no smiles here – the atmosphere is uncomprehending and hostile. I feel like I might be the first tourist to ever stray this way but I discover later that the place is famous for its magic mushrooms and sees its fair share of foreign visitors.

Huautla - a sprawling ugly town strung along a mountain ridge. This one of the only places were I have felt genuinely uncomfortable simply riding down the main street but maybe the 30 kilometre climb in 35cxvx degree heat was a contributing factor.

I rest in an internet café, venture to the tiny market behind the square to buy supplies and go on. Incredibly, after a brief descent, I start to climb again, up and up.

The sun sets over mountains such as I have never seen before, lofty peaks marching endlessly into an deep blue haze. I camp just outside a small village in another of those half built construction projects, the only level ground to be seen – hanging over the edge of the deep valley.

Sun goes down over the mountains at the end of a hard day's climbing.

When I wake, I finally begin to descend, speeding through villages, barely awake, the inhabitants – poor folk in indigenous dress – wary and amazed to see a gringa tourist whizzing past on a bicycle at dawn.

I drop out of the sky and into jungle. The world has been remade over night, here the air is warm and damp and multitude of unknown birds scream in the trees. I stop to watch black birds with yellow tails tend to their Christmas stocking nests, hanging from the trees, stuffed with hidden treats. Two of the raucous bickering birds tumble towards the ground locked together, breaking apart just before hitting the ground.

I continue descending but I soon stop again, amazed by a toucan which takes off in flight from a tree beside the road before landing on another tree lower on the slope. I watch until the bird takes off again chased by a shrieking smaller bird. With its massive clumsy yellow bill, how the creature manages to stay airborne is a complete mystery to me.

Pure jungle magic but hot, oh, so hot!

And on the other side of the mountains, a humid sunrise...

It is is a different world here.

A looming rig on the narrow, shoulderless, road.

We contemplate the map, fruitlessly searching for an alternative route.

A potential contest between bike and truck is hopelessly unequal.

We spy a roadside cafe in the distance and retreat indoors to gather courage.

Trucks rule here, too.

The chicken pen is dwarfed by another giant rig.

Even indoors the respite is only partial. Trucks feature here, too.

Fortified by burritos, we venture outside again to take on the behemoths. We ride only a short way down the road before Oscar, our friend from the border appears. He has passed by the immigration office in Janos on his way home, only to be reminded that tomorrow is a fiesta, followed by the weekend. This means that we would spend three days illegally in Mexico, since our entrance still hasn’t been officially registered, and so he offers to drive us back to the border, with our bikes, to process our papers and then drop us back on the highway. Eventually it is agreed that Jeff and Cass will accompany Oscar back to the border post with our passports while Jason and I wait on the highway minding the bikes, chatting and admiring the sky.

After an hour or so Jeff and Cass return with our passports in order with a generous allowance of 180 days to spend in Mexico. We ride on and as dusk falls we spot a gate that we can wiggle under with our bikes and head into the scrub to make camp and watch our first Mexican sunset.

Mexican sunset...

... over the mountains.

Jeff in his mosquito net cocoon at dawn.

We ride in gathering darkness, into a headwind, uphill, out of Silver City on the highway, covering around twenty miles before turning off onto a gravel road. We make a hasty camp without the comfort of a campfire and dive into our tents. It rains during the night and by morning the precipitation has turned to snow. We huddle in the tents until mid-morning hoping the weather will improve, eventually setting off, still into a stiff headwind, this time on heavy wet sand. We are supposed to be losing elevation but whatever downhill gradients might exist are not discernable in these conditions.

Jeff, rugged up against the icy wind, studying notes from an out-of-date guide at an uncertain intersection.

A piece of wood on the ground provides a missing clue that sets us straight.

Our destination is Hachita, some fifty miles away, a virtual ghost town, which none-the-less has a functioning Post Office where Jeff is expecting a food box. We spend all day battling the icy gale and arrive in Hachita at sunset and set up camp beside an old water tower on the outskirts of town.

Water tower on the outskirts of Hachita.

Camp at dawn. Jeff favours a tarp over a tent.

In the morning the sun rises and the wind has dropped. Jeff sets off to the Post Office to get his parcel and spreads out his goodies on a group of picnic tables to organise. I wander the town, checking out abandoned buildings and the detritus of human settlement.

The cafe and store clearly hasn't been open for some time.

An abandoned house.

Love this old bike.

The Saloon is also closed.

The astute reader might have noted that I mentioned that I was meeting three guys in Pie Town and only two have been introduced so far. Jeff’s brother, Jason, is the missing member of the team. He has spent the last couple of weeks visiting a friend who offered him some temporary work in Albuquerque. Jason is intending to rejoin the ride in Hachita and we are also expecting Cass to meet us here in time to cross the border together the tomorrow.

Some time towards mid-afternoon we are all assembled and organised and set off towards the border which is around fifty miles away.

Everybody is finally assembled and almost ready to go. Cass, in the foreground, Jeff, in red, and Jason, in green.

A constant stream of shipping containers cross the continent in both directions.

In the morning, I contemplate my options. I am heading for the Grand Canyon. The maps I have at my disposal are from a cheap road atlas I bought in Baker from which I pulled out the pages that covered my route south and threw away the rest. The secondary roads are marked on these maps, but only very vaguely. I can see a paved road, of about sixty miles, heading north from just east of Peach Springs toward a place called Supai on the western end of the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. An unpaved road, of about fifty miles, links this road to the highway to the main tourist destinations on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I have no information about Supai and I know nothing of the terrain but I am already keen to abandon well-travelled tarmac again in favour of more remote regions.

I ride into Peach Springs, which, despite the pretty name, turns out to be an impoverished reservation town, in search of more information. Boarded up and burnt out buildings line the highway and run-down houses are surrounded by rusting car bodies. The sky is grey and the air cold. Nobody is on the streets; there is no reason to be as there are no shops and nowhere at all to go.

A reservation building on the highway west of Peach Springs.

The only sign of life is at the Hualapai Lodge – a tourist facility that seems virtually deserted by patrons but reasonably well staffed. When I express an interest in the road to Supai, people are bemused.

“But there is nothing there,” they exclaim.

“It’s going to snow,” another person warns.

The maps available at the tourist information desk add nothing to my existing knowledge but I am undeterred. I ride off armed with all but useless maps to investigate whatever ‘nothing’ there is to see on the road to Supai.

I realise on the way out of town that I have forgotten to fill my water bags and, reluctant to return two miles downhill to the Hualapai Lodge, I ask a women leaving her house if there is anywhere I can get water. After a moments, hesitation she allows me into her house to fill my bag at the kitchen sink and then I am on my way.

Once I turn off Route 66, the drivers of every car on the road slow and stare at me. One women passes me and then takes the trouble to make a U-turn to return to ask me if I am lost. I assure her that I am not. She drives off and then clearly unconvinced I know what I am doing stops again, reverses and asks where I am going. I tell her, that even though I might not know what I will find when I get there, that Supai is my destination and that I am intending to ride from there to the highway. She shakes her head and warns me that the unmade road is very rough and then drives away.

The road is lined with memorial markers and, unlike the ones on Route 66, these appear to signify the actual sites of fatal accidents and I am struck by their frequency. These roadside memorials are ubiquitous on highways, all over the world, but their density here, on what appears to be a lightly trafficked, largely straight, tarmac road, is troubling.

The monuments are elaborate and well-cared for – ornate crosses sporting colourful bouquets of plastic flowers, balloons, toys – dedicated to un-named individuals simply referred to as ‘Sister’, ‘Brother’, ‘Mother’, ‘Daughter’, ‘Son’. This is truly a highway of tears and I think of the book I have just finished, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian in which the protagonist, Arnold Spirit, explains that the difference between growing up as an Indian and growing up as a White is the number of funerals you have to attend – that death is everywhere on the reservation and 90% of it is related to alcohol.

I pass a group of women getting out of a pick-up on the road. They greet me and I enquire if I am lost. I ask them what they are doing. “Looking for pinons,” the senior member of the group informs me. I follow them into the trees by the road to learn what pinon nuts look like.

A pinon nut - traditional food for the Hualapai.

Collecting pinons.

Pinon.

I continue through the grey afternoon. The last five miles of road descends steeply and then ends abruptly in a carpark overlooking a place that leaves me utterly speechless.

Supai, it turns out, is a Native American settlement in the canyon that is only accessible by foot, mule, or helicopter: home to the Havasupai people, who have fought a long hard battle to get access to their traditional lands in the canyon and on the surrounding plateau. The carpark is full of the unseen Supai’s residents’ vehicles.

Hualapai Hilltop - looking into the Havasu Canyon.

Hualapai Hilltop - looking into the Havasu Canyon.

Havasu Canyon.

Woefully uniformed and unprepared, I don’t have my food or my equipment sufficiently well organised to be able to walk down into the canyon and camp overnight but this is a place that I would very much like to return to. Feeling a little thwarted I cycle, in the dark, back up the hill to where the barely visible, inadequately signposted, unpaved road will lead me across the plateau to Highway 64 and the well-trodden South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

9AM BIBLE STUDY
10.15 HEAVEN
POTLUCK AFTER

Potluck after... ummm,... what exactly is going on here...?

Entering the wild west - home of the wild burro.

The saddest donkey I've ever seen. Eyore to a 'T.'

Route 66 clearly occupies a significant place in the US collective cultural imagination. Groups of stone-faced men, sometimes with an equally stone-faced female passenger behind them, pass on Harley Davidsons living out their odd dream of freedom. The road is lined with informal memorials – markers dedicated to the memory of these pseudo-rebels who feel their eternal resting place is somehow best represented by this strip of iconic tarmac.

Route 66 is lined with memorial markers - a testament to the iconic place this road holds in the US cultural imagination.

The scenes that unfold along the highway allude to all the bravado and folly of the settlement of the US west. The fundamental unsustainability of American life tangibly evident in the crumbling cultural icons lining the road.

The ruins of who knows what... a mine, perhaps?

Classic cars.

How do cars and roads get to play such a huge role in a people's imagination?

The almost empty streets of Highway 66 towns.

ABC dining...

The railway played an important part in the settlement of the wild west.

Unsustainable agriculture - irrigated pastures in the desert.

The landscape is phenomenally beautiful and, somehow, filled with melancholy.

Evening light in the Arizonian praries.

Under the thin crust of supposed cilivilization the mountains remain untouched.

The appearance of pavement produces mixed feelings: I'm 20% happy, 80% sad to see it.

After passing through the small settlement of Goffs, where I spent the morning chatting to a volunteer at the East Mojave Desert Museum, who kindly lets me download my photos there, I find myself on the Route 66, a highway which actually no longer exists, heading towards Needles.

Route 66.

Needles has the desolate air of a town whose time, if it ever existed at all, has long since passed. Things are patched up, cobbled together, paint flaking, car bodies slowly rousting. People are unsmiling, hard eyes and closed faces. A group of wannabe punk kids sitting on a pile of tyres at a service station direct me to the sole grocery store on the other side to town. They tell me it’s long way. I tell them I’ve come from Alaska so it’s probably not too far and their eyes widen. The boy with a dyed blonde Mohawk, sporting a large U-bolt in one ear, tells me he jumps trains and has travelled all over the country. A man inside the garage calls out to me as I ride off, “What do you do when you get a flat tyre?” “Fix it,” I reply. He clearly doesn’t know how to respond to this unexpected piece of information.

Shopping done I ride out of town as the sun slips behind the hills. I have no plan and only a hazy idea of what lies ahead. The highway has no shoulder and the Saturday night traffic is busy. The Mag light is a poor replacement for my head lamp and I ride in darkness through a semi-urban area – a mixture of casinos, seedy bars, liquor stores, dollar shops, interspersed with fields. My camping prospects are not looking good.

I see a quiet looking area on the other side of the highway and go to investigate. It is a golf course – I case it for camping potential as the Saturday night traffic passes on the highway. A few factors tip the balance against bedding down on the Willow Springs Golf Course: tomorrow, being Sunday, could see some enthusiastic early morning golfer and it occurs to me that perhaps I am coming just a little bit too itinerant.

I contemplate my options. I am tired and filthy and have spent the last eight nights camping alone in the desert. I turn and ride the five miles back down the highway to Needles and check into the Needles Inn – a salmon-pink edifice that attracted my attention when I first entered the town, the first of a series of seedy motels on the west side of Needles. The fact that the heyday of this establishment has long since passed is evident in prominent advertising of its status as a historic Route 66 motel. Finally, I get to step into my real life road movie.

My expectation are not at all high but I quickly warm to the Needles Inn. The management consists of a woman and George, her middle aged son, an eccentric with firm religious convictions. Sadly, the woman’s husband has just died but she seems in reasonable spirits. The entire extended family is in Needles for the funeral and currently housed in the hotel which partly explains why it is so busy. The atmosphere despite the sad occasion is festive. Children run about and play with noisy radio operated toy vehicles in the parking lot. Doors open and shut constantly. People stand about in small groups chatting with relatives they clearly haven’t seen in a long time.

Needles Inn.

God mobile - the van, it transpires belongs to the hotel manager.

Nice number plate.

The hotel manager and her son.

I retire to my room and have a long shower. Hot water is very welcome. I bring my bicycle inside with me and spread my belongings all over the floor. The bed is vast and there is wi-fi internet. What more could a girl ask for? I fall into bed at 2AM and in the morning I turn on my computer again. As check-out time slips by I go to the office and negotiate a second nights stay at a bargain basement biker’s rate. George is happy to oblige and kindly does my laundry for me while I gratefully spend the day trying to get this blog up to date.

Towards evening George knocks on the door of my room and asks if I will talk to some of the children about my trip. I agree and a group of three or four hyperactive youngsters troop into my room to view my bike and then sit fidgeting on my bed while they ask me questions about Australia.

A bed the size of a football field.

Packed and ready to leave the Needles Inn - of which I grew very fond during my two night sojourn there. A hyperactive child, a relative of the management, rushes by.

The desert, as always contains surprises.

My first thought was that this sign had to be a joke but, apparently, it is not. An endangered species of desert tortoise is a resident of the Mojave Desert.

I ride to Kelso where, disappointingly, there is absolutely no food of any kind to be had – I’d fled Baker so quickly I neglected to restock my food pannier, which is on the bare side. One of the rangers at the information office gives me a couple of granola bars along with maps of the area and another man also takes pity on me and gives me a slice of cold pizza and an apple. Slightly fortified I go to strike out into the desert again only to discover that I have lost one of my four litre water bags somewhere en route.

Eventually, a little flustered, I set off to a campsite 35 miles away climbing high enough to enter Joshua tree forest again.

I love these trees!

Amazing!

This roadside plant caught my attention, too. Gold stars on a silver bush - beautiful.

I get caught out after dark before I reach my destination. This time there is no moon to help me and I discover that I’ve have also lost my brand new head-lamp. I ride five miles in utter darkness along a corrugated sandy track. As I skid and slide into unseen pits of deep gravel, I curse and swear. Five miles can seem a very long way. At one point I have the urge to cry and I even stop, not far from the unseen campground, to call for help but there is nobody there. I finally stumble my way into the pitch black campground and put up my tent automatically in the dark and then cook up a meal by the light of a cigarette lighter.

Another desert sunset. A mile or so down the road, I discover that my new head lamp is missing, possibly it fell unnoticed out of my handle-bar bag during this sunset photo stop.

In the morning, I return to the turn-off to the campsite where I stopped at sunset to take photos and I hope to find the missing head-lamp. As I am riding, my frayed gear cable gives way. I push on to the junction where I am disappointed by the absence of my light and address myself to the gear cable dilemma. I unpack my tools and spares by the side of the road.

Two cars pass without a glance as I work on my bike but a group of motor-cyclists stop. They offer me beer and cold pizza and hold my bike while I make adjustments. One of the men offers to ride all the way back to the main road to look for my head-lamp. He returns after an unsuccessful search but gives me small Mag light he has in his bag as a substitute.

These guys were gallant enough to stop to offer help when they saw me working on my bike. Two cars had already passed without a glance; I think that's very bad manners out in the desert.

With my bike back in order I continue through the desert. The Mojave Desert has much more diverse vegetation than Death Valley. As the elevation drops somewhat I discover more species of cactii exist than I ever could have imagined. I can camp where-ever I please here but pushing my bike off the road requires some care as I discovered to my cost after an incident which required me to get out my tool kit to find my needle-nosed pliers to extract two thorns deeply embedded in my foot following a moment of careless contact.

Don't mess with these plants - those spines are savage.

More spikiness...

... and yet more.

But these are my favourites.

Monumental!

I am fascinated by the internal structure of these plants.

I’m so glad I chose to struggle across the rough dirt tracks to experience the vast emptiness of the desert away from the highway and traffic. Soft sand clutching at my wheels, washboard corrugations rattling my bones – it’s all a gift and I am very reluctant to leave. It is rare to find a wild place where you can sit a whole day and not see a trace of human presence, where so few people come there is no litter at all.

The first night I was here in the valley I stood far from my tent in the middle of the silent desert and turned a complete circle. Not a single human light to be seen and a silence that made me wonder what are all the sounds that I usually hear – running water, birds, insects, the wind in trees – there is none of that here. Even when the wind rose during the night, the only sound I could hear was the flapping of the tent.

The junction gravel road on the left, tarmac to the right. Which would you have choosen?

At the end of the sandy road, where I rejoin Highway 127, I rest for a few minutes. I am surprised by the mysterious appearance of a flock of six birds that settle in the middle of the road. They are stately and tall, long legged, white with black wings. They look like wading birds, oyster catchers with long beaks. Their cries are reedy and thin. They stand in the middle of the tarmac strip running through the desert and stare about them before stalking gracefully up the hill. I stand and they are startled, flying off but they circle the sky before returning to the same spot, sentinels of the intersection, perhaps? They are distinctly elegant birds and they look like waders – incongruous in the desert, testament to its hidden waters.

Regretfully, I take off towards Baker on the smooth tarmac surface of Highway 127.

I had toyed with the idea of passing through Los Vegas but when I arrive in Baker, a strip town of maybe one hundred and thirty people, it is enough of shock to the system after a week in the desert. Who knows Baker’s reason for being, it consists of half a dozen stores, a few gas stations, a restaurant called the Mad Greek with the sadly exaggerated claim of selling the world’s best gyros.

The Mad Greeks in Baker. Bright lights after a week in the desert.

Sadly, not the world's best gyros.

A constant flow of cars traverses the highway and people stop for an ice-cream and a cold drink.  Everybody in the place looks like they are on tranquillizers – disinterested, vacant, slow. It is hard to attract anyone’s attention for long enough to finish a sentence. Wanted posters on the window of the store sit alongside a list of rules and regulations for the use of the local recreational area in the dunes which suggest discharging firearms and explosives are inappropriate behaviour. The people emerging from the passing cars are the kind of people I have only ever seen on TV before; a blonde women with gigantic silicone implants in ridiculously high heels totters past, a snappily dressed African-American with a huge diamond encrusted pendant proclaiming his name – Ray – peruses my bicycle.

It is almost nightfall and Will’s Fargo is a roadside motel that looks picturesque enough for me to enquire if they would give me a special deal for the night. White and blue with a swimming pool advertised – I could imagine myself in a road movie. The man lounging in reception staring vacantly at the TV is clearly unimpressed by my proposal and so my hopes are dashed.

I retreat to the desert, to an area which I hope is not the local recreation area where people are probably discharging firearms and explosives, and set up my tent. Cars stream away on the interstate towards Vegas through the night. I watch from afar the moving lights sucked relentlessly toward the brooding red glow in the night sky to the east.

I retreat to the desert to comtemplate the sky.

Car lights on the interstate - a constant stream rushing towards Vegas.