My life is entirely in the hands of near strangers and new acquaintances. On other bike trips I’ve traveled with close friends, but this time it’s an army of mercenaries. Yesterday and today all those hired deckhands came together to push this trip out of drydock. We arrived in Tijuana early this morning and now the gang’s all here.
First, there’s Jon Knebel. I met Jon only five weeks ago, but I’m convinced he was born to bike the border with me. Not only has he spent a substantial amount of time traveling in Mexico, but he has just published a textbook, Learn Spanish Through Spanglish: Stories de la Jungle, that describes a new way to learn Spanish using special mixed-text Spanglish translations of classic Latin American stories. In addition to rivaling Rosetta Stone, he’s already started and sold several businesses, and he’s just 29 years old. He loves to bike, and actually has done a solo trip from Houston to Mexico City. And I caught Jon at just the right moment. Most people can’t dedicate six straight weeks to pedaling around the desert, but Jon was preparing to move to Mexico anyway, and was ready to sell his belongings, settle his debts, and drop his U.S. phone number right then and there. I spent just 90 minutes with Jon before we flew to San Diego together, but he’s turned out to be exactly the guy I needed on this trip.
Jon is the friend of a friend whom I met through my younger brother’s teacher. The second guy on our team, David Bravo Rivera, is someone Jon once biked with for a few days in Mexico. I’ve spent weeks talking to this friend of a friend of a friend on the phone, but just met him for the first time today in Tijuana. Davi, as he calls himself, was born and raised in Mexico. He’s a professional muralist sponsored by the Mexican government. That’s impressive in its own right, but several times when I’ve called Davi I’ve heard saws and other power tools whirring in the background because Davi is actually building his house. Have you ever met a 25-year-old who’s building his or her own house? I haven’t.
The chain stretches even further. Yesterday I learned that one of Davi’s friends, Pablo from Argentina, is planning to tag along with us on our trip with no expectation that we pay his expenses (that’s a friend of a friend of friend of a friend for those of you keeping score at home). Oh and we’re staying at Paco’s house tonight in Tijuana, an acquaintance found through Couchsurfing.
My favorite gun-for-hire though joined us early in the morning on our way to the Mexico port of entry. Jon and I were struggling to carry three bikes and extra bags between the two of us through the maze of border checkpoints. I turned around at one point to find that a stranger had taken over the third bike and was talking with Jon rapidly in Spanish. Apparently he had offered to ride with us into Tijuana. By the time we reached the metal detectors, Jesus had turned into our porter, organizing our bags, and giving us directions. I don’t think Jesus had spent much time on a bike until today. We had to give him a refresher course on how the brakes worked. He dodged and weaved through traffic and took us all the way to where we needed to go just because he had nothing better to do. (We paid him!) He told Jon that we needed to bike at a steady pace because of his heart condition—pedal too fast, he’ll “hemorrhage in his brain.”
