The Bicycles and Tricycles of Coba, Mexico

In 1980 the late great bicycling advocate and photography hobbyist Sheldon Brown visited Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula on his honeymoon. As he wrote on his website,

The typical Yucatecan bike is a 28″ wheel roadster with a coaster brake and double top tubes. Since the Yucatan is as flat as a billiard table, there’s no need for gears here, and lightness doesn’t count for much either.

He took the image above of a young cyclist riding past Lake Coba. Twenty nine years later, I was in more or less the same spot last spring with my wife and daughter, having lunch by Lake Coba as giant tour buses pulled into the parking lot of the Mayan ruins of Coba which we’d just finished visiting. And like Sheldon, I was seeing Coba as I had seen all of the Mayan Riviera so far: from the perspective of a traveling bike nut, one who’d been snapping photos of bicycle distractions all along the way.

We spotted this great homebuilt kid seat in Akumal.

Cobá was the dominant Mayan city of the eastern Yucatán before A.D. 1000, perfectly situated by three lakes. The ruin site is now a national park, and very large and spread out. Only partially excavated, it has kilometers of thick dry forest growing between the temple groups. When Sheldon was there the site was much more rustic and un-excavated, and much further off the beaten path. Today tourists come visit Coba by the busload, and to serve them inside the park there’s a fantastic system of rental bikes and tricycle pedicabs.

You can rent a one-speed bike and cruise the ruins and the lakeside at your own pace, with dedicated bicycle parking at every major temple complex. Or you can go in style in a three-wheeled tricycle pedicab.

We’re cheapskates and it was early and not terribly hot when we arrived, so we hiked the couple of kilometers to the Grand Pyramid, making several pleasant stops along the way to watch birds by the lake, inspect a ball court, and peruse other ruins. But we were kind of wilting in the heat by the time we had climbed up and down the Grand Pyramid’s 120 steps.

So from there we were happy to hire Jorge and his pedicab to take us out to the next cluster of ruins and then back to the park entrance.

En route our energetic young Jorge passed another pedicab and Lyanda yelled “We’re leaving you in the dust!” while I snapped their photo. I don’t think they were amused.

Back at the parking area we wandered to a restaurant to enjoy some mid-day shade, cold Cokes, and rice and beans by the lake. As Lyanda and Claire waited for the food, I spotted the little bicycle repair shop next door by its telltale rim collection.

I don’t speak much Spanish, but we shared the common language of bicycle-love, and the two fellows in the shop allowed me in to snap a few photos while they repacked bearings to keep their several hundred single-speed bikes rolling through the dust.

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As a side note, after a colorful life both online and off, Sheldon Brown was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, a condition for which he still managed to find the bright side. He died in 2008. The National MS Society runs a hundred local fundraising rides, with many of them coming up in late September or October. If you are riding in one, think of Sheldon. And if you have a friend riding in one, please make a donation to support them.

Sheldon Brown, 1980: "A self-timer shot of Harriet and me in the lobby of the hotel we stayed at near Chichen Itza."