(20) Baja to Cuidad Obregon
Tonight we are in Creel, Chihuahua Province. I’m just writing a few things down now while they are still reasonably fresh in my mind tonight.
We left La Paz on the ferry at 2:30 in the afternoon on the 19th. I realized a while ago that I neglected to pack chain lube when we left Arizona. La Paz actually has a Honda motorcycle dealer. So first thing after breakfast on the 19th I headed out from the hotel in search of the Honda dealer. As would happen, I selected the Honda dealer from the menu in my GPS and headed off. Only to arrive at the Honda car dealership! I have had absolutely zero luck entering a Mexican street address into our GPS units and having it recognized. Since this was a motorcycle specific GPS I assumed it would have the motorcycle dealer preloaded rather than the car dealership. Yet again, it’s what I get for assuming.
With a little help from Google I was finally able to find the Honda motorcycle dealer though. Our bikes are Kawasakis, but chain lube is needed for any chain driven bike and therefore pretty much ubiquitous at any motorcycle dealer. For all the non-motorcyclists, it is what it sounds like: a lubricant for the chain to help it last longer before needing to be replace. After that mission was accomplished it was back to the hotel, pack and relax a bit before heading off to the ferry.
Neil paid for both of our ferry tickets online. I have no idea what was going on but they kept telling me that both my Alaska Airlines and my credit union cards were declined. I called B of A (who actually issues the Alaska Air card) and they said they never saw and attempt to charge being made and there were no declines on the card. In the end I gave up and let Neil pay for mine. I’ll just catch the next bunch of hotel nights to pay him back. His card worked fine. My cards have been working fine everywhere except the ferry system web site. so no big deal.
Boarding the ferry was just about as bad as crossing a boarder. We first had to check through customs. The customs here told us we shouldn’t have needed to pay duty on the tires when we came into the country since they were for use on the vehicle we were riding. Queue Mark giving one extremely loud eye roll for that gem. Anyway, after getting through customs we were kind of waved “over there” to have the bikes weighed. After that the customs guy said to go to “the building over there” to get our boarding pass. Well, as would be expected there are no signs anywhere indicating where the scales are. There are semi trucks all over the place so using one of them as a guide as to where the scale was didn’t work. So we headed to what we thought was the building the customs guy pointed at. That is until someone came out yelling and waving us away. Then it hit us, we just keep driving around the port to the one place where no one shoos us away and that must be the scales. It took a couple of tries, but it worked!. They had both of us drive up on the scale at the same time. They guy there was able to point us to the right place for our boarding pass and that part went smoothly.
The next problem was trying to determine which of the three ferries that were docked was ours. The nice lady in the boarding pass office finally came to our rescue and told us to just ride across the parking lot to the last ferry in line. They did check the pass before letting us drive on so I was pretty sure we were going to wind up in the right port at the end.
When we got on there were three other motorcyclists already on and tying their bikes down. Two were Mexican guys on Harleys and the third was a guy from Prescott, AZ that I had messaged several months ago in one of the motorcycle groups I belong to seeing if we were going to be in the same area. It was great to run into him. The three of us were herded immediately to the restaurant on the ferry. Apparently the only food service on our trip was offered while in port and came with the price of the ticket. So we headed in and ate.
I was not feeling well that day. Mainly just tired and a headache I couldn’t shake. So eating wasn’t high on my list of priorities. I think my issue was that I was a bit dehydrated so I ate a little sandwich and had a couple bottles of something to drink. Then it was off to find our seats and hang out for the 8 hour ferry ride to Topolobampo on the mainland. Our scheduled arrival time was 10:30pm. I had a hotel booked and paid for in Toppolobampo but I noticed that it’s website said that the office closed at 11:00pm. I figured there was no way we were going to get offloaded from the ferry and to the hotel before the office closed. So, I called Hotels.com *who I booked the room with) and they contacted the hotel to let them know we would be late check ins. That said I still wasn’t too sure that the message got across.
The first part of the ferry ride was pretty good. No real waves and I was able to nap in my seat a bit while one of the Spiderman movies was blaring away in Spanish. However, later the seas started to get a bit rough and when one of the TVs started swinging back and forth on it’s mounting arm and banging into the bulkhead I knew that I had to go find somewhere to lay down. Luckily the next salon over had a row of 3 seats that were unoccupied and I was able to lay down, get a bit of sleep and ride out the worst of the seas. When I woke up the seas were calm and we were about 3 hours out from Topolobampo. I got up and located Neil and Bob (the biker from Prescott) out on deck. They had headed for the outside during the rough part of the voyage. We pretty much just sat around catting for the rest of the ride. None of us got sea sick, but apparently many others did.
About thirty minutes out from port we got enough cell signal that I asked Neil to call the hotel and double verify that they would be there to get us into our room. I really did not want to do the 25km ride to the next town with a 24 hour hotel in the dark. Bob had no hotel reservations for the night either so he was paying attention and planned on getting a room at the same hotel as us if someone was there. After Neil’s call our hopes were not high. It was obvious at this point that we were not going to dock on schedule. The person Neil spoke with said maybe they could stay until midnight and if they left maybe they could figure a way out to leave us a key to our room. In the end we all figured we would just get there as fast as we could and hope. Otherwise it would be a 25km ride in the dark to the Holiday Inn Express in Los Mochis.
We got to the hotel a about 12:15am. In the end all worked out. The night watchman was ready for us and gave Neil and I our key, checked Bob into a room and also checked the Mexican pair on Harley’s into a room. Neil and I were showered and in bed by about 1:00am. All’s well that ends well!
The next morning we had a short day planned so we didn’t have to get up early after the late night before. After a good night’s sleep, some Motrin and a bunch of water to drink I was feeling fine the next morning and we set off for Cuidad Obregon. That was just a 250km ride on one of Mexico’s toll roads. There were three toll stops on the route. 46 Pesos per bike per toll booth. At the current 20 to 1 exchange rate it woks out to give or take $7 per bike to make the journey. By the time we arrived it was obvious we weren’t in Baja any more. Temps in Cuidad Obregon were in the mid 90s and 80% humidity. Check and all was fine and we decided that we wanted something other than Mexican food for dinner. Luckily we found Mr. Steak just a few blocks from the hotel and had a great steak dinner before going back to the hotel and hitting the hay.
Well, change of trip update plan. This post is already long enough. So I’m going to stop here and pick up on the Copper Canyon part on the next post. Bye for now.
