I wake up and feel okay. Weird; I don’t know why I felt so light-headed last night. I depart Guadalajara for Tepic at 10:45 a.m. On the way out of that city, I spot a green 650cc Triumph with United States registration, and the rider, a man with long blond hair, sitting on the curb smoking something.
I pull over to make sure all is okay, and we have a chat for a while. Brian tells me that he’s been living in Acapulco, on the west coast, for a couple of years, and was heading home to Las Vegas, Nevada, in the United States when he had a blowout in his rear tyre. He spent all his money to get home on a new tyre and getting it replaced, and now he’s contemplating his next move and how to get home.
I make an offer to shout him food and gas for a couple of days, and when we get to Las Vegas, where I was heading anyway, he can put me up for a couple of days and show me around town. He agrees and off we go. The next stop is Mazatlán, in 150 miles.
On the way, we hit some rough roadwork, and soon after he notices a bag missing. We double back and ask the road workers if they saw it, and they say they saw a truck coming the other way stop and pick something up off the road.
I ask if it was anything valuable. “Only two years’ work of poetry,” he replies.
We travel on, but I think he’s devastated.
In Mazatlán we stay at the Hotel Lerma, only a three-minute walk from the Pacific Ocean. It costs $1 for two of us for the night. We spend a day here. Brian speaks Spanish well and knows the customs of the people, and we meet a few locals in this lively resort town. We also meet a couple on a 600cc BMW. Other motorcycle travelers have been extremely rare so far.