May 3 - Izucar de Matamorros to Cuernavaca - 160 Miles

Today's riding was the complete opposite of yesterday's - not many miles, but absolutely and totally terrible road.  This road gave new meaning to "back roads".

Perhaps I got over zealous in trying to include the Mexican State of Guererro in our ride between the cities of Oaxaca and Cuernavaca.  The reason for this was to allow myself and Alex to say that we had ridden in ALL of the Mexican States on the main body of Mexico, and Jim would have that one more state also.  (The last two Mexican States, Baja California and Baja California Sur will have to wait for another trip.)  The State of Guererro didn't quite fit into the overall plan, so we planned a "short" ride on one of its roads, to say we'd been there.

The road is shown on the maps as paved.  One might call the road "paved" because there was slightly more pavement than rocky yellow dirt.  The potholes were so big and deep we had to drive the motorcycles down into one side and up out of the other side.  It had rained the night before, and some of the big potholes were muddy.   If it had rained more, we'd have had to hire a ferry to ferry the bikes across each of the potholes.  And add to that the fact that there were many, many small villages that had their own set of even bigger potholes, with Topes intermixed, we were riding the Gold Wings like dirt bikes.

It was clear that this road had been paved at one time, but not maintained for many years, and the net effect was that the residents of the little villages out in the dry, dry hills of Guererro were not getting their share of the government road money.  The road through the villages was much, much worse than between villages, because that was where the main wear and tear was.  This all confirms my theory that in Mexico there is government money for building new things and new roads, but there is no money to maintain them.  Once built, they go to pieces very quickly.

Once again, there were the cute little burros everywhere, with a few being put to work either as pack animals or being ridden for basic transportation.  They didn't seem to mind.   There were several people riding horses as basic transportation also.  Then there were the cattle alongside or in the road again, a variety of Brahma cattle that seem very docile.  There are no fences, and I couldn't see any brands on them, so I don't know how their owners keep their claims to the cattle straight.

While driving that road wasn't great, we just accepted this as part of our Mexican Adventure.  We're having fun anyway!

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