On the ferry “Chihuahua Star” for the next 14 hours, heading for the Mexican mainland. Jungles, ruins, rainforests and await.

Five days of Spanish later and I’m ready to get back on the road. The school and its teachers have been first-rate, readying me for the next three months. It’ll take a little bit more vocabulary and sone studying, but I think I’m good enough to interview people to get the info I need. Omar, one of our teachers, below. And a useful guide to a pig.

Stunning blue sky today, fruit on the trees and mucho Español.

After breaking a ball joint & shock absorber on the painful road to and from the whaling stations, we were not amused to see the road to San Francisco. It was 27 km of rocks, and took about three or four hours. I vowed to get the shock replaced *after* the return leg, hoping we didn’t take out anything else…

Update: good point, Top Gun… It’s the road from the highway to San Francisco Sierra – the first 9.5 km is tarmac and then it’s a nightmare

Erg what a day, running around dealing with bloody mechanics whose own cars breakdown, mending ball joints and replacing tyres. All part of the fun. Rice & Beans was an ok place, bit noisy, bit leaky, but I’m sitting in a yurt – a wigwam, basically – at Ignacio Springs just up the road, run by Gary and Terry from Canada. And it’s quite blissful. The weather is a bit moody, and it’s bloody freezing, literally hypothermia-inducing cold, in the desert at night, so my enthusiasm for getting mules down into the canyon to look at caves, going on hefty treks, and camping out, has been slightly, erm, dampened.

Well the offending ball joint has been replaced with a less offensive one, but the shock absorber looks and sounds buggered, too. It’s not a stressed point, though, not in the same way as the joint, so I’m slightly more relaxed about replacing it: time to turn the music up if it bothers me. I’m now filthy, having watched the stupid mechanic dislocate the driveshaft from the CV joint, allow the brake pipe to take the entire weight of the shaft + brake + hub, and fumble about trying get ge shaft back in. Anyway, time for a shower and a nap.

I respect a man who takes his carbs apart in the rain. Some fuel problem stopping us leaving the parts store and going back to fix our car. I initially thought it was fuel evaporation, priming the carbs by hand – Nico sucked some fuel into a pipe and dribbled it in – but it fails to carry on running. Hmm. Nico’s wife in red there.

I’m sitting in Nico’s battered Nissan Pathfinder, must be mid-1980’s spec, heading up highway 1 back towards Guerreo Negro. Whether we’ll stop there, I don’t know, but we need a new lower wishbone mount, which is definately *malo* moving quite freely and smoothly, exactly the opposite of what it should doing. A new tyre on top of that, and refilling the two petrol cans completes the list.