We’d decided to travel to Izamal by motorcycle. The town lay nearly twelve hundred klicks from Mexico City, near the northern end of the Yucatán peninsula, but I didn’t want to risk taking a flight into Mérida, the principal airport in the region. The Yucatán peninsula was the flash point of the civil war, and the Aztlan Armed Forces (yet another subdivision of Aztechnology Corporate Security) would be highly suspicious of "tourists" entering what amounted to a low-level war zone. Traveling by motorcycle offered us a lower profile. We could take the back roads and avoid most of the military checkpoints.