El Sauce bike tour

Karen, my bike tour guide, is a bit shy as we pedal through the morning streets past the municipal baseball stadium. Women in worn flip flops are outside sweeping away the night's dirt and tossing buckets of water to clear the area outside their doors of the street. Kellan gave Karen specific directions: Talk simply, use gestures and try whatever she needs to to communicate. Tours are geared toward tourists who speak some Spanish but not a lot, so I'm the perfect mock tour candidate. We're already thinking outside the box. Outside the old train station, Karen tells me about the line that used to run here. I don't know the word for train, but I get the gist. "Toot toot?" I ask her, pulling an imaginary horn. "Si! Toot toot" A shirtless man outside a horse and bridle shop hangs leather straps of orange and yellow outside the wooden front and dogs lope around sniffing the pavement. Outside of town we get on a trail that was once a train line, bringing cargo of chickens, cows, vegetables and many other things here. When the train stopped running, people took the tracks for use or to sale. Now it's a dirt path that runs north to south, lined on either side by banana trees and humble homes. The government provided land to homeless and very poor people and we are passing them now. The homes are extremely humble, made of adobe (mud, water and dung then dried), scraps of wood and sheets of plastic or sometimes all three. They have latrines with walls of plastic, outdoor adobe ovens and very few belongings. Everyone we pass smiles and says, "Adios." At a communal well, Kellan and Yacarely wash their faces and I spot frehshly-formed adobe drying in the sun. I ask the man to take his picture with his handiwork. I have never seen adobe before. On a bridge, a man is fishing with a net for dinner and often we stop to let other cyclists, women with bags and two young boys hauling a stack of firewood three feet high by. A boy on an ox-drawn cart rattles by, the oxen protesting in the heat. On the way back, we stop at the adobe man's house so I can see his homemade oven.