Bang Bang Bang! It´s a puncture

So following on from our encounter with seeing dead people, drving in to Sallinas, I hear a repetative noise coming from my bike. Thinking its a bit of rubbish, I pull over tothe side of the road to have a look and find to my horror a bloody 6" nail sticking out from my brand new rear tire- Bollocks! As I´m thinking how best to tackle this, a guy in a car on the other side of the road starts shouting ´peligro´(danger) and waving his hands about like a madman. As I´m not actually on the road but to the side of it, I just shrug and get on with worrying about my rear tire as he speeds off.

A few seconds later, a guy on a little motorbike stops next to me and starts repeating the same hysterical warnings, however this time he makes his right hand into pistol shape and adds a few ´bang bang bangs´as an interesting sound effect. Hmmm. I´m now thinking that there´s maybe something in this ´danger´malarky after all, however as I attempt to point out the bloody 6" nail sticking out of my tire, he dissapears in a cloud of dust. I look around for the dangerous bandits that will shoot me and steel my bike but I just see locals getting on with their daily business.

I look at the nail and know I need to pull it out, and as I do, the resultant hiss of my tire going very quickly flat also slightly depresses me. As Captain Mannering used to say, ´don´t panic´ but just at that moment a knight in shining armour turns up, a copper on a motorbike! But even HE starts with exactly the same charade ending in the now all too familiar ´bang bang bang´sound effect, however I have to stop him right there and point out that actually, he´s got a bloody gun to which he responds with a sort of spanish ´oh yeah, so I do´.

So as I rather quickly start reading the back of my tire repair kit (which was thankfully included with my MotoPump as I´d used my only other tubeless repair back in Valdez), my new armed guard, well er, stands guard keeping watch for any baddies and restoring my faith in justice and all that while I get on with fixing the tire. Thankfully the hole is a breeze to plug and I immediately get the electric pump going. I´m trying to get the tire up to a nice 36psi and am regularly checking the pressure but my new armed friend is getting rather twitchy and has other ideas and more or less suggests I pack up now and finish this somewhere else. He actually waits while I get all my paraphanalia put away and get on my bike but no sooner have I turned the ignition, he´s also off like a shot (no pun intended) in a cloud of dust.

Anyway, nobody gets shot and we make it to the border and all live happily ever after. The End