I don't know. It almost seems I shouldn't go on holidays. Last year, I fell off my bike and landed first on my head, then in hospital. This time, this morning, I took a walk down Calle del Mar because the temperature had finally reached 18C, the sun was shining, and I sorely needed some exercise. I left home at 11:15 a.m., walked for about 20 minutes up the street toward Kino Viejo, passed one of many houses, heard a scuffling and barking, turned to see a dog bearing down on me - a black and tan, mostly tan, hound obviously intent on attacking me. Before I could do anything about it, not that there was much I could do, the dog bit a hole in my right calf.

Just then a garbage truck came along, and two men leapt out of the truck to come to my aid. They frightened the dog off, and then they hollered the house's occupant out.

There was a comic moment in which I stood talking to this man. It went like this:

S: Habla Vd. ingles?

Man: (silent, hangdog expression)

S: Hablas ingles, senor?

Man: Huh?

S: Do you speak English?

Man: Yeah.

S: Your dog just bit me.

Man: Where?

I showed him my leg, complete with puncture wound and blood. He asked (with a southern American drawl) whether I wanted to go to a doctor and have it looked at. I told him I wanted assurance that I wasn't going to catch rabies. Had his dog had its rabies shot?

Man: Which one?

S: Which one what?

Man: Which dog? I got two.

S: I have no idea which one. I only saw one. Do you mean one of them has had its shots and the other one hasn't? (I'm beginning to panic now.)

Man: No, they both got their shots - over in Hermosillo. They's both healthy dogs.

At that point the two dogs noticed what was going on, and they both came out barking. The man shooed them back in. The dogs didn't look at all alike, and I told him which dog had bitten me.

Man: Never had no problem like this before.

So I came home and R cleaned the wound for me, put some antibiotic ointment on it, bandaged it. Once in a while he double checks to see that it isn't inflamed. I don't know what else a doctor could do, short of putting me through rabies shots. I would like to believe the man who told me his dogs had had their shots, but the dogs weren't wearing any collars, thus no tags, and I don't know quite how to handle the situation. I have never been bitten before. I almost wish that the dog in question were an infamous cur that had bitten half the people on the street. I could count heads to make sure everybody it bit had survived. The fact that - at least according to its owner - this is unusual behaviour on its part is worrisome. I certainly did nothing to provoke the attack.

Anyway, that pretty well put an end to my adventures for the day. The water men finally showed up, so I've been consoling myself with green tea. The shrimp man came around again, as well, this time selling the great big prawns for 150 pesos a kilo. He didn't even tell me that this was the last day for prawns. He's slipping. We had fish and prawns and zucchini and noodles for dinner.

I missed a day. Sorry about that. Yesterday was a little strange. I slept in (until 8 a.m.!), then walked up the mountain*, carrying the camcorder. I took some footage of the osprey nests and their inhabitants, then proceeded up the hill. I stopped about 50 feet from the top and turned around so that my feet pointed downward at about a 45 degree angle. That was as high as I felt safe in climbing, given the terrain. I took some truly lousy film of the view toward Kino, toward Baja California, toward my feet. The ground up there is like crumbling brick, the drop to rocks and water is precipitous, and the wind was blowing, so I was not feeling very adventurous. On the way back down the hill, with the camcorder tucked in its case, I took a step forward and SPLAT! Out went my feet. Down went my bum. My hands were slightly scraped and my dignity was decidedly compromised, but the camera was unharmed. I was very glad that I hadn't gotten brave up at the cliff's edge.

I walked back into our village just in time to see Martin, the vegetable man, drive out of the park. Oh no. I ran down the street yelling Martin! Martin! Fortunately, he was stopping anyway, in front of a home just up the street. I panted up to his truck and started shopping for green chiles, potatoes, cilantro, tomatoes, apples, limes (oh, yes! limes. I'd been craving them.). R came up beside the truck and asked Martin to wait, said he'd be right back with some money. "Hola," I said, surprising him. He hadn't seen me standing there, and he was ready to do the vegetable shopping on his own. He added some tangerines to the haul, we paid our $65 (that's pesos, not dollars. The symbols are the same. Very confusing when you're doing business at the border) and we went home.

Back at the RV, R informed me that my front tire was flat again. I decided to go inside and ignore that problem.

I got out my handy little bottle of Microdyn and washed the fruit and vegetables. I roasted two of the green chiles, put them in a plastic bag to steam while I chopped tomatoes, cilantro, onion for pico de gallo. Then I peeled the chiles under cold water, chopped one of them into the pico de gallo, put the other into a frying pan with cooked beans and some more onion, producing the loveliest mixture to eat with my tortillas, which I warmed over the open flame. I carried everything to the table and had a feast. R said I adapt very well to different types of food. I said what do you mean? This is my native cuisine! R is adapting, though. He's eating tortillas now, doesn't even seem to be pining for sliced bread.

After dinner we played Scrabble, then Skip-Bo. What happened in between lunch and dinner, I honestly don't know. I think I went into some sort of blue funk because my bicycle was kaput.

This morning I suggested that we go all the way into Hermosillo because there were things like Wal-Mart there where, surely, we could find inner tubes and patch kits. We boarded the bus at 9:45 a.m. 131pesos for the two of us to get to Hermosillo. They were playing a movie called Two for the Money with Al Pacino and Matthew McConaughey. The dialogue was in English. I watched it for an hour or so, until we got to Calle Doce, which is about halfway to Hermosillo. At that point a young man - a teenager - got onto the bus, grabbed the remote, and changed the language to Spanish. Fair enough. R and I were probably the only Anglophones on the bus(there were only seven people on board for the first half of the trip, including the driver and the man who seems to ride shotgun), and I had been surprised to hear English. Also, the movie was rather predictable. I kept watching, and had no problem keeping track of the plot.

As we pulled out of the Calle Doce bus station after about a 10-15 minute layover, R said "There's a bicycle shop right there by the bus station."

We arrived in Hermosillo just before noon, asked the driver when we could catch a bus back. Once an hour. Uh-huh. When? Oh. On the half hour. Ah. Thank you.

We went to Wal-Mart. They didn't have any bicycle accessories. We wandered around the mall, bought an extension cord, a roasted chicken, a few other items. Famished, I bought a couple of corn tamales at a stand in the hallway. They tasted wonderful. R bought a slice of pizza. The long and the short of it is, we didn't find anything with which to fix my bike.

So we went back to the bus stop at 1:20 p.m. to wait for the bus. A man with a nice smile talked to me a little. He looked familiar. Buses came and buses went, but ours didn't show up until nearly 2 p.m. That was much better than the hour and a half we waited for it last year, when apparently the bus we wanted went roaring by while another bus was loading. Never mind, we were aboard. As it was last year going back to Kino, this bus was standing room only. We moved toward the back, and I saw the man I had spoken to. He was sitting at the back of the bus, waving at me. He had saved me a seat. I made my way back there and sat beside him, and as I sat down I realized that he was - at least I think he was - the same man who gave me his seat last year. We chatted as amiably as people who don't share a language can. A young man on the other side of him (we were on the long bench seat at the very back) joined in. Between conversations, I watched the same movie I had watched in the morning, this time all in Spanish. Matthew McConaughey still had great teeth.

When we got to Calle Doce, I considered making my way through the crowd, getting off, running over to the bike store, buying a patch kit, and coming back, but (1) I didn't want to lose my seat, and (2) Given that the bus was very late, I didn't know whether it would be hanging about - so I didn't. I could have. We must have been there at least 10 minutes.

We are seriously considering putting my bike up on the back of the rig and leaving it there until we drive out on the 18th. I'll just take walks, if this wind ever lets up - or I could stay inside where it's warm, making and eating Mexican delights, watching for Martin's truck to turn up.

*I use the term 'mountain' very loosely. It's really only a big hill.

I'm cheating here, because I need a nap. I posted this to one of the boards I frequent, and decided that I really don't need to type it all twice - so, AM, you've already read this entry!

R and I were going to cycle into Kino Viejo today to buy fish and tortillas, but it didn't work out that way. When I went outside, I discovered that my bike had a flat front tire, victim of a thorn that folks around here call a goat head. It's small, but it's mighty. It has two points, and either one of them will pierce a bicycle tire with ease. Apparently they've been known to pierce automobile tires.

(Is this where I back up and tell you that before we left Canada, I said "Don't you think we should go to Canadian Tire and get some spare tubes, and maybe a patch kit or three?" I was outvoted - did I think there were no bike repair shops where we were going, or what? OK. That was when I should have put myself in Ignore Mode, but I didn't.)

So. This morning we went looking for a bike repair place within walking distance. Nope. We inquired at the park office. There's a place in Kino Viejo. It's on Calle Puerto Vallarta, about two blocks from the park. R was feeling a little out of sorts anyway, so I left him here, caught the bus (6 pesos) to Kino Viejo, got off at Puerto Vallarta, and carried my bicycle wheel down and down and down the street, long past the paved part, until I was almost out of town again. Finally I found the little shop. There was a big gate, and I could see a man working on a bike way inside, beyond the fig tree. I called out, and he let me in. I sat comfortably in a plastic chair and watched the antics of a chihuahua, a Mexican hairless, something that looked like a chihuahua/pug cross, and a big yeller dog. A couple of pigeons joined the party at one point, but they didn't stay long.

There were actually four holes in the inner tube. The gentleman replaced the tube, installed the new one and filled it with air. Fifty pesos ($5-ish). I thanked him and headed for the tortilleria on Guaymas Street where I had been planning to go in the first place. I bought a kilo of tortillas, inquired about the bus back to Kino Nuevo. Could I catch it right out front? Yes - in an hour. So off I went, wheel in hand, walking to the fish market at the bottom of Padre Eusebio Kino Boulevard. I bought two kilos of some sort of filleted fish packed in lots of ice, shoved that bag into my backpack, put the bag of tortillas on top of it, grabbed my wheel and the book I could no longer put in the backpack for fear it would get wet, and headed for the little market where I shopped last year. There I bought a few bananas, a couple of green chiles, and a bag of cooked beans to eat with the tortillas. Definitely trudging, I went back to the tortilleria and waited for the bus, which turned up in about fifteen minutes.

An old hand now, I had my six pesos ready. This time there was a sorry-looking spaghetti mop propped by the door of the bus and a pile of newspapers wrapped with string next to the driver's seat, so getting me, my wheel, the book, and the now-bulging backpack onto the bus was a chore, but I did it, and I had a great trip home, resting my back, listening to the local radio station. When the driver let me off - right in front of the park - I staggered proudly home with my booty.

The upside of all this is that I now know where I can get my bike fixed in Kino Viejo. The downside is that the gentleman at the shop didn't have any extra tubes to sell me. When we go through Hermosillo, I think we had better hunt some up.