April 30, San Cristobal to Tehuantepec - 240 Miles

Today was a day to enjoy the scenery coming down the mountains in Chiapas, and to make quite a few miles toward Oaxaca.

It turned out that we had to go up and down at least two more parts of the mountain range, and part of a third.  The curve riding was fun, and without too much traffic.  However, any of our U.S. road safety people (like my daughter Laura) would have fits over the lack of guard rails, where just a moment of distraction would mean a tumble down the steep sides, of maybe a thousand foot drop down to the valley floor.  It was a little scary.

Unfortunately the scenery wasn't as good as we'd hoped.  It seems there were small forest fires just everywhere, and all of the valleys were full of smoke.  The west side of this mountain range, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, seems to have had very severe drought conditions, as much of Mexico, and is very dry.  We couldn't tell who or what was responsible for the fires, except along the road.  There seemed to be unsupervised fires right along the shoulders of the roads, and these added a great deal to the fires further into the forest.

Remembering that where we were was at the very southern extreme of Mexico, right next to Guatemala, the temperature extremes for the day were something else.  When we left the top of the mountain city of San Cristobal, the temperature was about 50^o F.  An hour later at the bottom of the mountains it was 80^o as we shed the warmer clothes.  Then within another couple of hours it got up to 103^o.  Quite the day!  We drank lots of water, and were very happy to find an air conditioned hotel.

Unfortunately we didn't hook up with out friend, Bob Pearson, so we hoped that he got his tire fixed and was on his planned way.

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