Aug. 14th, 2007 02:19 pm
Mexico Day 4
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heatray5dAltitude sickness:
Creel, it turns out, is somewhere between six and seven thousand feet above sea level. I did not realize this until Day Four, when Tegin and I rented bikes on which to ride to the local hot springs.
The hot springs are at the bottom of a canyon 20 kilometers away from Creel. Just outside of Creel, the first stage of the ride is a 2-kilometer long hill with a 5 or 6 percent grade. This is reasonably steep, but not murderous. Roadways don't get much past 9 percent. I think ski slopes might get as extreme as 10 or 11 percent, but I bet Tegin and probably![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cris know more about road grades than me.
A few months ago, Cris and I did a team ride with a couple other guys. It was an overnight ride from Boston to Westfield, via Manchester and Brattleboro – roughly 260 miles. Around fifty miles of that was climbing of this nature, done in the middle of the night, in freezing weather. It was difficult, but by no means impossible. I mention this only by way of comparison, because halfway up this 2-kilometer climb, I had to get off my bike and rest. I felt like a midget had moved into my stomach and started banging on the bottom of my heart with a broom handle to try and get it to shut up.
This is what altitude can do to you if you're not used to it. It was startling, and distressing, and I really thought I was going to die until I realized how far above sea level we must be.
Hot springs:
To get to these hot springs, you ride up this hill, and along the side of a highway for 11 kilometers. Then you ride eight kilometers down a dirt road to the edge of a canyon, where you embark on an extremely steep 3-kilometer descent along a cobblestone road. If you are smart, you walk on the cobblestones. If you are really smart, you go back to Creel and rent a car.
At the bottom of this very long walk down the side of the cliff, during which you may or may not be passed by a screaming crowd of field-tripping Mexican summer campers, there is a river.
Allow me to interrupt this tale here with an extended parenthetical. I'm not sure you quite undertand how long this 3 kilometer walk down (and eventually back up) the side of a canyon is. In one episode of Cosmos, Carl Sagan walks around Trinity College with a super long strip of paper with many zeroes printed on it. I haven't seen Cosmos in maybe 20 years, but I think he's trying to illustrate how many stars there are in the universe, or maybe how big a googol is. Anyway, the point is that Sagan walks around for a while unrolling this narrow spool of paper around medieval architecture, through dining halls and fountains, across cricket greens, probably leaving dew-sodden sections of paper everywhere and getting in everyone's way. This strip of paper, as Sagan intended, has always been my internal reference for when something is long or numerous, and this is what I mean when I refer to exactly how long these three kilometers were.
Mounted in the cliff side adjacent to the river is a series of man-made pools of varying depths. The water in these is full of people, pee warm, and smells like the river. It is not the image one conjures when one hears the phrase "hot springs."
I think of hot springs as peaceful, naturally occurring pools of warm or even sulfurous hot water. These are public swimming pools. In any case, they are certainly nice to float around in after a long, hot walk, and one of them is even deep enough to dive in. We splash around and hope we don't get ringworm or something.
The walk out is punishing, to say the least. When we finally get back to town, an elderly couple from Texas who saw us walking up the steep cobblestone road through the windows of their rented van tells us we are crazy. The woman grabs Tegin's face and blesses her.
Creel, it turns out, is somewhere between six and seven thousand feet above sea level. I did not realize this until Day Four, when Tegin and I rented bikes on which to ride to the local hot springs.
The hot springs are at the bottom of a canyon 20 kilometers away from Creel. Just outside of Creel, the first stage of the ride is a 2-kilometer long hill with a 5 or 6 percent grade. This is reasonably steep, but not murderous. Roadways don't get much past 9 percent. I think ski slopes might get as extreme as 10 or 11 percent, but I bet Tegin and probably
cris know more about road grades than me.A few months ago, Cris and I did a team ride with a couple other guys. It was an overnight ride from Boston to Westfield, via Manchester and Brattleboro – roughly 260 miles. Around fifty miles of that was climbing of this nature, done in the middle of the night, in freezing weather. It was difficult, but by no means impossible. I mention this only by way of comparison, because halfway up this 2-kilometer climb, I had to get off my bike and rest. I felt like a midget had moved into my stomach and started banging on the bottom of my heart with a broom handle to try and get it to shut up.
This is what altitude can do to you if you're not used to it. It was startling, and distressing, and I really thought I was going to die until I realized how far above sea level we must be.
Hot springs:
To get to these hot springs, you ride up this hill, and along the side of a highway for 11 kilometers. Then you ride eight kilometers down a dirt road to the edge of a canyon, where you embark on an extremely steep 3-kilometer descent along a cobblestone road. If you are smart, you walk on the cobblestones. If you are really smart, you go back to Creel and rent a car.
At the bottom of this very long walk down the side of the cliff, during which you may or may not be passed by a screaming crowd of field-tripping Mexican summer campers, there is a river.
Allow me to interrupt this tale here with an extended parenthetical. I'm not sure you quite undertand how long this 3 kilometer walk down (and eventually back up) the side of a canyon is. In one episode of Cosmos, Carl Sagan walks around Trinity College with a super long strip of paper with many zeroes printed on it. I haven't seen Cosmos in maybe 20 years, but I think he's trying to illustrate how many stars there are in the universe, or maybe how big a googol is. Anyway, the point is that Sagan walks around for a while unrolling this narrow spool of paper around medieval architecture, through dining halls and fountains, across cricket greens, probably leaving dew-sodden sections of paper everywhere and getting in everyone's way. This strip of paper, as Sagan intended, has always been my internal reference for when something is long or numerous, and this is what I mean when I refer to exactly how long these three kilometers were.
Mounted in the cliff side adjacent to the river is a series of man-made pools of varying depths. The water in these is full of people, pee warm, and smells like the river. It is not the image one conjures when one hears the phrase "hot springs."
I think of hot springs as peaceful, naturally occurring pools of warm or even sulfurous hot water. These are public swimming pools. In any case, they are certainly nice to float around in after a long, hot walk, and one of them is even deep enough to dive in. We splash around and hope we don't get ringworm or something.
The walk out is punishing, to say the least. When we finally get back to town, an elderly couple from Texas who saw us walking up the steep cobblestone road through the windows of their rented van tells us we are crazy. The woman grabs Tegin's face and blesses her.
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