I spent a day in Palenque after my fall and I worked on the bike.
Most of the damage was superficial, but I did have to find a metal shop to cut off the broken brake pedal peg and drill a hole so I could use a bolt to make a new peg... Real off-road machines have brake and gear pedals that fold out of the way when the bike gets dropped but my bike is really just a street tourer that has had a bunch of protective equipment added to it along with luggage carriers and knobbly tires.
The other major fix that needed to happen was to re-attach the latch mechanism to the side luggage case. Luckily it had simply sheered off the 4 pop rivets that were holding it on. I managed to find a shop to sell me some rivets (for all of about 30c) and after using a vice to straighten the slightly bent buckle hinge I simply pushed the old rivet stubs in and re-riveted the latch back on - good as new... apart from the ugly gouges in the outer plastic!
Then I straightened up the mirrors and the hand grips and re-glued the indicator plastic back together.
The only problem left then was the clutch.
I thought I had fixed this from a couple of weeks ago but it was back and getting progressively worse. A friend had suggested (via email) to change the oil - which was definitely rather nasty black after the frying I gave it, but that wasn´t going to fix it I decided.
So, I was resigned to having to crack open the engine case and see what was really wrong (even though I know nothing about these things). I had a look around in Palenque but I didn't like the feel of the mechanics shops, so I decided I would limp on to a bigger better town before attempting this one.
After the mechanical work in the morning, I rode about 10Km out of town to the Maya ruins that the town is named for and spent a couple of hours looking around.
I have to say that the ruins are impressive in both their setting and their scale. It is quite hard for me to imagine how the society managed to achieve such large structures and earth moving just with manual labour. How the heck could they devote so much time and effort to these structures and still manage to feed themselves?
That was about it for Palenque, so the next morning I headed out of town and spent the day riding along a route that hugged the Mexico-Guatemala boarder to see what the country was like - Answer: Very "jungly" with quite a few very small and isolated villages... and Oh yes, about a dozen military check-points (clearly interested in drug trafficking) - I had no problems with them although I always had to stop and take my helmet off and chat with them and show them the contents of my bags - I guess they get a bit bored out there in the middle of no-where.
Eventually I arrived at a large town near the boarder (Comitan) at about 4pm and found a cheap place to stay without much problem. Then I wondered around the central district and looked at the twenty-odd modern stainless steel sculptures that they had - very good!
Then I had some food and checked in on the Internet.
It turned out that Teryk whom I had met in Creel (northern Mexico) was going to be coming to the boarder crossing where I was going to cross on the same day (tomorrow)! It would be great to see a friendly face and discus my clutch problem, so I sent him an email saying I would hang around at the boarder till noon and hope to see him there.
Then I went and got some sleep, since my body was as stiff as a board - to be expected two days after the crash.
