David Connors wrote:>
> Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 12:36:37 -0500
> From: "Connors, David" <connorsd@hhmi.org>
Subject: RE: PVMT
I want to know the good, the bad, and the ugly opinions about motorcycle tour
operators.
To those of you who have had a positive experience, can you give specific examples (snip)
Dave Connors
Bill Juhl responds:
Dave, I have no experience with other tour operators other than heresay so this is
based on one trip with PVMT. And this is not a plug for PVMT specifically either:
The good elements:
** PVMT, Alberto and Rob took the burden of planning off of me. Going to Mexico came at
a busy moment in my life. I simply didn't have the time to plan and research and get smart
about what was going to happen. Going with a tour let me let them do the planning and all
I had to do was show up with a prepared bike ready to ride and listen up at the daily
briefing. That made it possible this time for me to go, had it been otherwise I'd have had
to pass.
** Acquire instant expertise on the environment, the road, the lodging, the local food,
motorcycle maintenance.
** Acquire companions (admittedly potluck here, but I had good luck) with whom to share
the days adventures, recount triumphs and clink Cervezas with as night falls. Also the
same guys pick your bike up when it falls, loan you parts, show you how to fix something,
pick up the cap that fell off the back of your bike, pass you their trail mix at the
overlook, make helpful suggestions, medicate you with Ibuprofen, make you laugh sometimes,
and tell great stories with varying degrees of embellishment, inspire you sometimes and
annoy you at others. Some of these people if you are lucky you may connect with and life
has a funny way of bringing connections back around again. The tour guides had the
greatest measure of the above qualities, but the rest of the group was an equal
contributor.
** Gain an "if s..t happens" emergency backup plan. In my
case, it happened (entirely of my own doing). It was very damaging and painful and not
going to heal without a lot of hours under a surgeon's hands. Without the support vehicle
and the tour guides, it would have been unimaginably more difficult. It doesn't always
happen to the other guy.
** Gain an insight into local customs. e.g. after the first fueling,
one of the people got upset when he recounted and figured out he'd been shortchanged (by
his standards) by the Pemex attendant. Our guides explained that the common practice is to
round up to the next peso and that is the gratuity that by custom goes to the attendant
and it is normally assumed by the attendant in giving you your change. That isn't in the
guide books and that bit of local knowledge took one person from feeling like he was
ripped off (albeit for a small amount) to understanding it as a practice within the loca
context. A small thing, but it made he and all of us more comfortable once we understood
that.
** If you've not ridden in an emerging nation, you can use a tour to see what it is
like and gain expertise/comfort to enable planning and doing your own trip the next time.
Tolerance required. To exist and enjoy traveling in a group of any
size, you have to bite the bullet on individualism to some degree and adopt a behavior
that goes with the flow of the group and the tour. With an organized tour with a fixed
itinerary this is even moreso a requirement. It's just the nature of the beast. For an
individual that has trouble with this or isn't comfortable in that environ then a tour
group is probably a bad fit.
SPECIFIC EXAMPLES of TOUR GUIDE ACTION:
When I holed my valve cover half way down into the Copper Canyon, we had the expertise
and materials to make an on the spot repair and it was done quickly by Rob of PVMT. I
already knew the drill, but only 1-2 of the other riders (not counting the guides) knew
how. The prior month, Alberto had run into an R11GS being hauled from Batopilas all the
way back to the border with an easily fixable similar problem that the owner didn't know
how to deal with. This doesn't require an organized tour but it speaks loudly for not
going alone. And as well for being knowledgeable.
Meals: In the parts of central Mexico we were traveling some of the
area is extremely poor and meals in general are very limited. I am very satisfied that we
did much better with our guides help than we would have on our own. The meals included 3
essentially first class private dinners in very very nice settings that were generally not
available to the public and that would have been impossible on our own. When we were in
the not so good areas, we had as good as was possible. Without the guides interaction we
would've done ok, but in this case we did very well.
Lodging: Most cases equal to at least a Holiday Inn or average Best
Western in the states. Probably you could do as well on your own, but a nice part of this,
was that the group spread out during the day, and each day we had a map and knew where we
were going that night and sometimes took different routes and arrived at different times
... each on his own pace more or less and the lodging was ok without any hassle. Also
checkin and departure was all handled by the guides each day and the group was
preregistered so the daily "admin" went smoothly without fuss of individuals
having to each check in and out daily.
Language and legal requirement fluency. Inside the border at
about 20km you have to register your bike, pay a $12 fee with a credit card, and get a
sticker applied that you have to surrender on exit. There are no signs in English and I
didn't find any English being spoken by the Mexican police manning the facility. We met a
couple of riders who were going through also (KLR's in a pickup). They were there ahead of
us bouncing around the multiple windows and talked a bit about how they were old hands,
had done this numerous times, etc. After the 2.5 hours it took us for our 13 bikes, we
were about to leave when one of them came out and said they were stuck in the registration
process and asked if our tour leader, Alberto would come back in and translate for them.
(He did). Not a big thing as I didn't notice any dead gringos hanging on pikes, but it
reduced the stress and time of dealing with that.
At dinner we frequently had no servers who spoke english and there were a variety of
local options that having two fluent Spanish speakers along helped us deal with and
experiment and enjoy the meals all the more.
Running Interference. In one stretch heading
down to Batopilas, there is a rural school along the road. It frequently occurs that the
school is out for recess about the time riders pass who left Creel after breakfast. Lately
the bigger boys have found that if they block the road with a human chain they can induce
traveling motorcyclists to stop and make a "donation". Our tour leader got there
first, straddled his bike in the road, and stayed there as a road guard til all of the
bikes passed. The several dozen restrained boys at the roadside didn't look happy at being
denied their booty.
Emergency aid. At one point due to an emergency Alberto was able
to have the local police use a radio relay to the towns ahead to locate Rob and the
trailer who was 3 hours ahead at that point, and to tell him we had a problem and needed
him to turn around and come back. As a significant number of police stations were involved
in the successful search for the Gringo towing the motorcycle trailer, I personally found
that inventive and amazing. Later in Batopilas (also known as "the town
without ice") Alberto found a small pharmacy that had a little ice and then made
several runs to keep the ice bag on my shoulder filled.
Museum guide. The ruins at Paquime outside of Nueva Casas
Grandes have a fascinating museum. Knowing it to be closed on Mondays, our guides had us
hustle dropping our bags on Sunday night in time to get us out to walk the reconstructed
ruins in the setting sun with about a half hour left to enjoy the museum before it closed.
I would have hated to have missed that.
Telephone Help. Every available pay telephone and our hotel room
phones in Creel are tied into a scheme that requires you to use a regular credit card
(VISA etc.) and the first minute runs off reputedly at 15-20 dollars. AT&T and other
telephone credit cards can be used in Mexico, but not through these phones which block
access to those companies. I harranged the desk at some length at our hotel with no luck.
With some sharp Spanish words from our guide, a previously non-existant telephone appeared
magically from underneath the registration desk. With it I could call the Mexico AT&T
access number and get my call through back to the states. Never would have happened
without Alfredo's intervention.
Coaching. Everyone going on the tour is expected to be
competent in handling their bike over the roads planned. This rarely
holds true and lacking an on-bike qualification test before leaving, the tour company
can't control it. That's the bad part. The good part is that the tour
guides did a fair amount of quiet coaching and watching over the riders who found this
trip to be challenging at times, and that includes me. And that let people do things
they otherwise wouldn't have, or helped them avoid unpleasantries.
