Cycling across El Salvador

If you like El Salvador, you'll enjoy the somewhat wacky tale, Cycling across El Salvador which made the short list in the 2007 Gonzo Travel Writing Contest at RoadJunky.com.

Here are the first three paragraphs:

On a whim, with no previous training, I decide to ride a bicycle across El Salvador. Heck, when I look at a world map El Salvador is only about the size of my pinkie fingernail. It’ll be a piece of cake.

Mamacita Rita, my newly purchased, heavily used mountain bike has eighteen available gears but, even with serious effort, I can only make use of five. The front brakes don´t work, there are extra wires that enjoy poking me in the calf and most of the seat cover is torn, revealing pink plastic my ass can´t stand.

The fact that Mamacita Rita’s job is to move forty pounds of packs and me from the Guatemalan border to Honduran border through El Salvador makes me more nervous than the time in third grade when Mrs. Edwards said it was desk cleaning day, which meant I’d have to flip my desk and expose the six months worth of boogers I’d been storing.(continue)