GPzMike Abroad

Jump to the present: I changed my flight today so it's a done deal: I'm staying. It was a cool phone call, too. A person actually answered the phone. Like, after 3 rings an honest to God real person! And get this: she was helpful!! Straight to the point helpful. Unreal. I was able to merely cancel my return flight and she said I should just give her a call when I know when I'll be flying back to the states.

Okay, now back to MHB2:

There we are, Alidia and I well up the creek and we are looking at the rear tyre...and she's going flat. It's a slow leak but it's still a leak and we've got miles and miles of nasty rocky off-road terrain to navigate. The only thing to do is keep on keeping on, try to go as quickly as possible but also avoid sharp or big rocks as they will cause a snake bite and then we will be pushing. {Snakebite: when the tyre compresses allowing the rim to slam down on the sidewall causing dual cuts in the sidewall...hence 'snakebite'} But the bike is getting very hard to control since the rear is wallowing. We decide that Alidia should hop off and ford the river on foot while I take the bike thru after we have a very close call that nearly dumps us and the bike in 2 feet of water. This further slows us down as Alidia is in flip flops and hardly better equipped to ford it than I am.

After another 2 or 3 crossings a fellow motorcyclist pulls up on a new bike and warns me of my low tyre. I nod acknowledgement and offer up a smile and a shrug as if to say 'yeap...and not a gas station in site...what's a man to do?' To which he responds by pointing at Alidia and then pointing to his bike. We get the gist...but do we dare? Alidia will be on her own...not that she can't fend for herself, but that we will be separated without phones or any other way of finding each other. It could be a bad thing. But what choice do we have? If she stays on the back of my bike we are probably doomed...in a mile or perhaps only another 100 feet. There's just no way I can keep off all the potential snakebite rocks or potholes between here and Jacmal and keep up enough speed to not let the tyre just go flat from the puncture it has. So Alidia decides it's best if she hops on his bike and away they go with assurances that she will be dropped at the corner of the National Highway in town.

I hide the gleam in my eye as she climbs aboard the other bike: I already have formulated a plan and it involves a lot of fun. You see...my theory goes like this: spin the tire fast enough and it will hold it's shape just fine. So the trick is to unweight it and run'er hard. I sit up half way on the tank and uncork the wild demons residing in the 125cc finely tuned Chinese machine. I still have to asses each river crossing closely because the bike is still very unstable in the swift currents. I nearly dump it three more times and it only makes me more timid for each subsequent crossing...making matters worse still. But out of the water I am flying at 40mph trying to slalom around the worst bits and trusting the bike to float across anything else. Then 50mph...but I don't take it any further as I'm starting to get close to Jacmal and the dirt road is becoming more populated with pedestrians and other motorcyclists. I can only imagine the looks I get zooming by some of the folks, but I'm too dialed in to notice.

Once back in Jacmal proper I immediately see Alidia; lo and behold she's been dropped right next to a little tire repair shop! She tells me of the ride sandwiched between the rider who she swears had never heard of a toothbrush and another passenger he picked up who'd never seen the good side of a bar of soap - and she's giving me grief because I had fun on the bike...lol. 100gd later and a fascinating lesson in tube repair we are on our way. He uses half a leaf spring from a car to press an inverted piston from a car onto the patch. Then he pours diesel into the cylinder and lights it. He leaves that burning for some unspecified time and presto chango it's as good as new! Necessity is indeed the mother of all invention!

And so ends our first day's attempt to make it to the waterfalls of Jacmal: a great and fun adventure despite not finding our destination.

The following day, after consulting with another source, and then letting a local motorcyclist take us to the dirt road that turns off the National Highway, we head into the mountains. We are, embarrassingly, heading left out of Jacmal rather than right as we did yesterday (which means no matter what we did yesterday we were NEVER going to find the falls as we were up the wroooong river...).

Today, though, we feel confident...and we now remember the name of the damned place we are trying to find (a key ingredient). We still end up taking a very long way around to find our way to the trailhead, but we have much fun along the way riding up one steep road and down the next passing all manner of local folk and exchanging "bonswa's" the whole way.

And so, finally, we arrive and are the first blan's of the day. We are accosted by a crowd of men all angling for our attention and business. It gets uncomfortably heated for a bit and I even think about just turning around and riding away: to hell with them if they can't be more pleasant about this. But we did take two days to get here and it would be a shame to not make the last bit of the trek all due to some ill manners. So we finally 'pick' a fellow who seems to at least have some english under his belt. He directs up to pull ahead while the rest of the crowd grabs at us and the bike and tries to stop us. Again the thought crops up: fuck'em - just leave, park down the road and work your way around this bunch of goons to the trailhead and on up to the falls on your own - I mean, really....how fucking hard can it be??? Surely less than scaling Half Dome outside the wires or Clouds Rest in Yosemite.

It's about this time that they are grabbing at the handlebars and trying to stop us from going forward while the 4 that are 'with us' are urging us forward. We finally break away but not before one of the fellow who looks a tad inbred warns us in broken English that if we don't go to his store and sign some paperwork we should 'be very careful'.

We finally get parked and after explaining to our 'guides' that we are not going to pay any money to them they decided to accompany us anyway.

We all get to talking each in our broken language of the others, laughing and joshing and having fun. All the stress of the arrival falls away as we make our way up to the basins. The water is hardly blue as it's been raining a lot in the upper reaches and so there is much silt in the water. It's brown, but it's wonderfully refreshing and cool. The first basin turns out to be 57 feet deep and the second basin is an astounding 97 feet deep. The uppermost basin is not really very accessible from the second basin - perhaps I could have scaled it, but the only way down would have been to jump and it was a treacherous looking jump with outcroppings on the way down. I'll be posting pictures tonight as well so you can see what it was like. The waterfall fell with good force and would carry us along the rock wall very nicely. There were a couple of spots where we could slip behind the waterfall and peer out at the folks hanging out on the very large boulder sitting in the middle of the 2nd basin. It really is a beautiful place and I could see very easily how when the water actually is blue and there are no noise making folks around it would be quite spectacular.

So Alidia and I hang out, we swim, we jump off the rocks, and take a few pictures. My camera gets dunked in the water which wouldn't have been so bad but it was on at the time. I let it dry out a few days but no luck. Ah well.

On our way back down the mountain I am still enjoying myself but there is also some trepidation. One of the guides falls back beside me and tells me I shouldn't pay more than 100gd to them. I've already decided I will be paying them something as they really were a joy to have along. We certainly did not NEED them, but they hung with us, swam and showed up the route up the rocks for jumping, took pictures of us while we played and the like. I had already been thinking 100gd sounded a reasonable sum, so I fished one from my money pouch and, as we came to the trailhead, I slipped it to the head guide.

When we rounded the bend to come into the main clearing area I noticed that they had covered our bike with a sheet to keep it out of the sun. At that moment I knew they really were trying to be good guides and I felt like the service was a fair trade for the money.

As I approached the bike's location I saw some commotion out of the corner of my right eye but thought nothing of it at first. The activity quickly resolved into a man moving rather quickly toward one of our guides and, figuring this was going to be a continuation of the previous argument but this time with a focus on our guides...a bit on infighting...I meant to gain the bike and make for the flatter lands directly. I had not had a chance to make eye contact with Alidia, but somehow knew she was shadowing me and had the same idea (and if she didn't she'd quickly get the idea once I was on the bike and putting it in 1st gear).

What I didn't see because of my decision to beat a hasty retreat was the man zing a rock at one of the guides. Nor did I see the other rock he had in his hand. The one he then came at me with and clocked me at the base of the skill with. It was the size of a softball and thankfully it was a chunk of rubble rather than a chunk of stone or it could have actually done some damage. As it was it hurt like hell.

I turned and started toward the fuck ready to do him in but the guides and a few others had quickly grabbed him and were hauling him out of my range. "He's crazy, he's crazy", they said, and they immediately had the sheet that was covering the bike and were using it like a rope to tie his hands together. I realized that public opinion would count for a lot here and at the moment it was in my favour, but it could be fairly easily swayed if a blan started grinding the face of a local into the dirt. The Law here doesn't really exist: it's mostly handled vigilante style: quick and to the point. I'd rather not be the brunt of that so I just go back to getting on the bike.

That's when the inbred fucker comes up to me and in broken english says "See? I told you to be careful".

Alidia and I hop aboard the bike after quickly checking me for bleeding and pupil dilation and get the hell outta there.

The business sense that some Haitian fellows display is beyond my comprehension. Why would you entice an attack on a member of your paying public? Even if the money does not come to you it's (A) going into your community, and (B) once word gets out that you attack people you will all lose clientele.

There are other examples of incomprehensible business behavior as well: Joe's Bar next door for instance. On Sundays our base does not have any cooks so we must make our own food. Sometimes the bar pulls out it's bbq and makes chicken and other goodies on Sunday nights. But only sometimes. When it's there it's good and there's generally a line. So why aren't they doing it every Sunday? You gotta bunch of folks next door to your establishment that have money and have hunger and have the choice of making some spaghetti or having some bbq chicken.

I must admit I don't know the whole of the story: perhaps there is a propane shortage or a chicken shortage or a plantain shortage or a rice shortage?

Or the Sapi-Bon men: these are guys cruising around town with buckets insulated with cardboard and full of great big icey pops (frozen sugary water flavored to be orange or grape, etc, etc). Why would a fellow in that line of work not try like the dickens to figure out where our crews are going and target them? He'd make a killing with little running around catering to a bunch of blan's who are not acclimated to this weather - many of whom are not acclimated to extreme physical labour either. A perfect clientele if ever there was one, I should think!

Okay...back to the story at hand so we can get up to date before December. We pull over on the bike about 1/2 mile down the road so I can have a slight post adrenaline meltdown and then we are on our way again. The trip off the mountain is much quicker as we just keep pointing the nose of the bike down at any intersection and find that we come out in town rather than the 4 miles outside of town when we headed in for the trip. But there was one rather ugly water crossing where I nearly botched it (but don't tell Alidia...I recovered it quickly enough that I'm not sure she ever realized we were in jeopardy of a good dunking).

We decided to stay on an extra day in Jacmal since by now it was growing late and there were heavy clouds in the mountain pass. Given the failing light, the likelihood of heavy rain, and the nasty bump on the head we decided the odds were not profitable enough to make the run for Leogane.

I'm glad we waited as the run for home the following day was fantastic. Well...as fantastic as two up on a 125cc with ribbed front tyre and rear tyre in matching technology can provide! We were really getting into a good groove and got to playing with an SUV that clearly knew the road and while he did not have the cornering prowess we had (hahahaha) he did have the ponies on us. We led him up thru the twisties, he'd pass in the straight bits and we'd catch him back up in the next section of twisties. I could see he was pushing because more than once I saw his inside rear suspension fully extended and just barely maintaining contact with the tarmac. That made both Alidia and I a tad nervous but he certainly knew the road well, so we'd just bide our time until we had a good section to nip by him. At one point as we led him into a section of uphill sweeper hairpins we were heeled over rather nicely when a black pickup came around in our lane (one of the beautiful things about Haitian drivers is their ability to drive down the middle of the road for no reason other than they seem to think there's no way another vehicle will want to have the other 50% of the roadway). I knew the SUV was close as we'd just finished a short uphill straight so I knew there was no joy to be found in slowing: the only alternative was to dig deeper and hope the tyres didn't get uppity about it. I tapped the front brake to get 'er up on the nose (two up with two backpacks behind us going uphill while accelerating makes for a skimpy front contact patch!) and then dipped down into the turn. The bike held just fine but as soon as I was assured my new trajectory was safe I got back to the original lean angle: pushing the envelope that far was not something I wanted to do too much of without safer equipment (like at least a helmet).

When the we got to the end of the road on the outskirts of Leogane the SUV pulled over to the side of the road and as we went by Alidia and I waved and beeped at him...and wouldn't ya know it, he was well aware that we'd all been playing as he stuck his head and arm out the window with a huge grin and a big wave! Sweet!

But I tell ya: what I wouldn't give for a modern sportbike or dual purpose bike here! There are times when I pass a local fellow on his 125 and he speeds up to retake me. Sure would be fun to drop a gear and really show him the way thru the next corner! And it's just plum embarrassing to be overtaken but a huge assed bus while I'm wringing the neck of the 125.

Makes me wish like hell I hadn't sold the F2 but brought it down here, dammit! With the cowlings removed it would be able to handle the speed bumps and the off-road stuff to some degree while still being able to eat anything on the road for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and still have room for desert and a late night fridge raid!

Okay, that's the completion of the Tales of MHB2. Next up is a quick overview of what's gone down since then and then we are ready to get back to normal blogging. Just in time for MHB3 in about 1.5 weeks! lol

BTW, I've gotten the webcam up and running but as much as I'd love to report that it works lovely it doesn't: it's a POS on any service other than Skype it seems. Can't figure out why...so I am now using Skype a lot for Instant Messenger duties that include live webcam usage. I'm still monitoring the other services, but would encourage everyone that has a webcam to grab an account on Skype so we can have some face time! I am gpzmikel. Learn it. Use it.

Love to all! G'night for now (body is tired as it's fighting off some infections).