Months ago when I first got a bike here, I went for a ride all over the place to see how far people could get when I decided to rent bikes.
The answer was, "not very far"; There just are not that many roads here, and they are almost all dead ends.
However, I did find a couple of quite seriously steep 4WD roads. I even managed to ride my motorbike up one of them (though Im far from an off-road technical rider). At the top of the really steep dirt road, there was a nice little local village and the road became a straightforward gravel road...and that lead back to the nice paved roads and back to San Pedro.
So I had found a nice little loop route, but it was way too hard for novice riders and for my little rental bikes to even consider riding up.... But maybe they could get "down" it instead!
So then a month or so went by and I was getting to know how to rent bikes etc, and one way and another I didnt do anything about the tours.
But, last week there was a little group of keen tourists who had such a good day out on my rental bikes that they came back and wanted to rent again, but they also wanted some more ideas on where they could ride...So, I hit them with my now polished sales pitch!
And the poor fools agreed to give it a go ;)
And it went very well.
Most of the route is easy enough, but the really steep descent does require some specialist skills that I had to teach them on the spot.
The road is so steep and loose that you need to have both feet paddling on the ground (unless you are a skilled off-road rider)...but the road is also so steep and loose that you cant just use the front brake...the front wheel will just skid out from under you.
But you cant use the rear brake if both feet are paddling on the ground...and so we have a problem!
The solution (learned from riding a super heavy touring bike through treacherously steep and muddy jungle tracks! :))) ) is to switch the engine off and leave it in gear. You then use the right hand on the front brake as usual but you also use the left hand on the clutch as a rear brake (though this hand has to work in the reverse sense to the right hand - squeezing in gives less braking not more).
Its a bit complex, but fortunately, you can go as slow as you want and work it out...which is what we did. None of the clients had any more than absolute basic motorbike skills (that I taught them when they first rented a couple of days before) and they all did fine...It took us about half an hour to get through the tricky section and then it was back to regular riding.
A good time was had by all :)))
So, now I am advertising for mini-Adventure Tours and we'll see how it goes :)
