Culture bottle (Three states in two days)

Thursday May 16th - Friday May 17th

After chilling in Zacatecas, I hit the road again. One of my favourite ways to travel, on a bike on otherwise, is to decide on the day, what it is I'm going to do that day. And so it was that I woke up on Thursday, not knowing whether I was going to get on my bike, put my bike on a bus, hitch, or... stay another day! The first option won out in the end, and I set out on what looked like a long, but gentle downhill ride to Aguascalientes.

I enjoyed the semi-desert landscape, although after a while it got a little monotonous. I was more preoccupied by a sudden bout of nausea and stomach pain that came on just after having a snack that morning. A similar thing had happened to me on the last of the 5 days ride to Durango. I was beginning to wonder if my stomach was finally feeling the toll of the interesting and varied foods I had been sampling. This would be disappointing, because I had reached the conclusion by that stage in my trip, that I may actually have intestines of steel. I hadn't had more than mild stomach upset from eating anything in the last year and a bit of touring the Americas. I would eat anything, including any kind of street food, only taking caution by drinking filtered/purified water in areas where people didn't drink the tap water.

I unfurrowed my brow, downed a cocktail of ciprofloxacin, omeprazole, and metoclopramide, and continued on, only mildly dismayed at the thought that now my Mexican meals might have to include not only lime, salt, and chili as standard, but also antibiotics.

Yay!

Don't mind if I do... ("Rest area")

I never got tired of seeing these "prolonged descent" signs

After a while I began to feel a little better, and continued on. I was pretty psyched to hit the 3000km mark of my ride. I had taken my time by most bike touring standards, but damn it if it didn't feel good anyway. I enjoyed some nice prolonged downhills, and racked up the 120km mark for the day on entering Aguascalientes, the capital city of the state of the same name, after leaving the state of Zacatecas earlier in the day. Aguascalientes again blew me away. It was so beautiful. Stunning colonial architecture, ornate gardens, and really cool vibe to the centre and surrounding bars and cafes.

Not bad Aguascalientes, not bad.

Someone actually more heavily loaded than me. Believe it or not there is a motorcycle and a person under all that. (I had to get close to even see them though.)

After chowing down on a meal that included nopales (a type of cactus), I was again reminded of how rich the cultural variety is here in Mexico. Across Mexico, from state to state, and even from city to city within the same state, so much changes. Different words, expressions, and accents colour the language. Food varies in terms of dishes, but also in variations on the same dishes, or even types of tortillas! And of course the people too; attitudes, appearance, ethnic makeup, and dress, all vary greatly.

Perhaps because of this cultural variation, people liked to ask what the comida tipica (typical or local food) is in Australia. I almost cringe when I get asked this now, because the most typical food I can think of is Vegemite and Tim Tams. Our beloved barbecues are certainly not unique, and our meat pies and fish and chips come from our English heritage. Perhaps the most interesting things to eat in Australia are those brought by immigrants, in the form of delicious Italian, Greek, French, Indian, Sri Lankan, Thai, Indonesian, Chinese, and Japanese food (although the list is of course much longer). I guess all of the above is a reasonable response to the question.

I rode out of Aguascalientes mulling these thoughts, still concerned that there was a uniformity to my own culture that stood in stark contrast to the diversity I saw around me in Mexico. Food, accents, language, clothing, and culture really don't change that much across Australia, I thought, and the variety we do have is all recently imported from other countries. My musings were interrupted by yet more nausea, and I had to stop and rest near a store. My water bottle caught my eye, for no apparent reason, but as I looked closer, I could see disturbing blotches of white, grey, and even green through the semi-transparent blue plastic. I looked inside. Yep, they were definitely inside the bottle. I shook it, and poured the water into a transparent bottle. It was disturbingly cloudy.

It looked harmless enough...

...or was it?

No it was not.

In hospitals, we use bottles filled with culture medium (tasty bacteria food) to grow, isolate, and test antibiotic susceptibility of bacteria. I realised that I probably hadn't washed that bottle properly in almost the whole year I had had it, and was in the habit of keeping an electrolyte solution (which included sugar) in this particular bottle. It would sit there with this liquid in it all the hot day, and some of the night before I refilled it. In that moment I realised I had basically been keeping bacterial culture medium, in ideal conditions, in my beloved blue water bottle. I had been growing, isolating, and ingesting, a small but significant amount of bacteria each day I had cycled since I started using electrolyte solution - somewhere on the road from Mazatlan to Durango. Now the bouts of nausea and abdominal pain made sense. Although perhaps in the tradition of Australian doctors who like research, no-one was going to give me a Nobel Prize for drinking this bacterial solution. I just felt stupid. And a little ill.

I threw the bottle away and rode on. I was still mildly nauseous, and still preoccupied by our lack of cultural diversity. Why was it this way? I wondered...

Cogitation was interrupted when I crossed over to the state of Jalisco, the third state in two short days, and where I was planning on finding a town to stay for the night, somewhere down the road. This planning was further interrupted by my wheel making a strange sound, some time later. After checking the bike, I realised I had broken a spoke. I did not have the tools to fix it, and I was in no-man's-land, between towns, and it was getting late. I could try to ride further, but I had seen what had happened when my friend Greg tried to do the same - it just led to more broken spokes, and a bent rim. I was stuck.