Where We Rode

None of these routes came off a map. Basil cycled more than 100,000 km in Mexico, scouting quiet backroads years before they became tours — carrying a GPS, a cycle-computer and a little dictaphone to record road notes as he rode. Much of it was solo — but Joel, who guided alongside Basil in the first seasons, rode some of it with him from the very beginning, and the first rides of all came years before there was any company to scout for.

1997 · Mazatlán to Puerto Escondido. Basil's first long ride in Mexico ran the length of the Pacific coast, part of it alone and part of it with Tom and Casey, two cyclists from Wisconsin he fell in with in Puerto Vallarta and rode the rest of the way with. They rode into Puerto Escondido on 24 March 1997 — the Monday of Semana Santa, and the night of a lunar eclipse, which they watched from the sand of Playa Zicatela, where they slept. Both Pacific tours — Views of the Pacific and México's South Coast — were later cut from that single coastline.

1999 · Cancún to San Cristóbal. In the winter of 1999 Basil rode from the Caribbean to the Chiapas highlands with Pat Alati, the friend whose own touring had drawn him into it and whose idea it was to make a business of the thing. That route became Yucatan to the Clouds. The next year Pat helped organise and guide the company's first tour, in the Yucatán, with Joel guiding too.

February 2001 · San Cristóbal to Chetumal. Weeks after the first scheduled season had finished, Basil and Joel left San Cristóbal together on 16 February and rode north-east out of the highlands into the Yucatán, parting company in Chetumal on 5 March.

November 2001 · the highlands. When Views of the Pacific found no takers that autumn, Basil spent the empty weeks exploring instead. He left Valle de Bravo on 12 November, rode through Michoacán and Guerrero, and came down to Zihuatanejo on 5 December — three days before meeting Joel there to run the second México's South Coast. That ride became Mountains & Natural Wonders, first offered the following season, and the dispatch Basil sent from it in December 2002 retraces the same ground.

November 2011 · the Devil's Backbone. The last of the big exploring rides began by accident. When that autumn's Day of the Dead tour ended early — the riders had to fly home for family reasons — Basil and Alexandra found themselves in Guadalajara with weeks in hand, bought maps, and rode north through Zacatecas to Durango, then over the Espinazo del Diablo, the Devil's Backbone, down to the sea at Mazatlán — where the whole story had started fourteen years earlier. Alexandra wrote it up as it happened; the posts are indexed on the dispatches page.

From 2004 onward it was Alexandra who rode beside Basil, both on tour and out ahead of it: she took over from Joel on the guiding roster that season and explored every new route with him from then on. The dispatches are full of it — "while exploring a new route with Alexandra last June" in the summer of 2004; a fortnight of riding through Querétaro and Guanajuato in August 2005 looking for a central-Mexico tour; the whole length of Belize in April 2006; and, as Basil dryly put it after a April day scouting the Yucatán in 46°C, "empathy training". Joel returned in the final seasons, guiding with Karin.

The GPS logs still survive. In the winter of 2008 a single Yucatán scouting expedition ran 55 days and about 4,150 km (January 2 to March 16), tracing the quiet roads, cenotes and Maya sites that would become the mature Yucatán program — the Calakmul dispatch was written from the top of a pyramid three days after it ended. Earlier, in March 2007, a Tabasco loop was ridden and logged; the Under the Volcano tour around Puebla was scouted over about 620 km in August 2012; and the eight stages of Cycling the Valleys of Oaxaca were plotted in August 2013. Hundreds of spoken road-note recordings from these trips still exist, waiting to be transcribed.