For Bernadette, my love, my strength, my wife – and for Wei-Ming Ang, best of companions on the road.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1: The Boys on Bikes

Chapter 2: Goodbye Dallas

Chapter 3: The Road to Oaxaca

Chapter 4: Oaxaca

Chapter 5: The Monk and Mister Big

Chapter 6: To Antigua

Chapter 7: Rio Dulce

Chapter 8: Café Conversation

Chapter 9: Flores to Copan

Chapter 10: Honduras

Chapter 11: Nicaragua

Chapter 12: Costa Rica

Chapter 13: To Almirante

Chapter 14: David to Panama City

Chapter 15: Colón and Portobelo

Chapter 16: Holiday Cruise

Chapter 17: Colombia

Chapter 18: Ecuador

Chapter 19: Peru

Chapter 20: Onward through Peru

Chapter 21: Bolivia

Chapter 22: Argentina

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

Why would a reasonably sane man in his seventies ride the length of Hispanic America on a small motorcycle – a man who is overweight, suffered two minor heart attacks and has a bad back? Stupidity comes to mind … And flippancy is easy camouflage …

Age has much to do with it. My wife is younger by almost thirty years. I feel old. I suspect that our teenage sons find me an embarrassment; their friends mistake me for their granddad – or an old tramp.

So, yes, age.

And anger.

Though I have lived abroad much of my life, I am very English, probably something of a Blimp. I believed that honour was intrinsic to being English; in public service, we behaved better.

Then came the Iraq War, the disclosure of Abu Ghraib.

None of my honourable English compatriots resigned, not a Minister of the Armed Forces, not our Ambassador in Baghdad, not a senior officer serving in Baghdad, not the Head of Military Intelligence nor any of his senior colleagues.

They were complicit in Abu Ghraib. So am I. That is the strength of Democracy: the Government is ours; each one of us is responsible for our Government’s actions; each one of us is equally sullied.

The alliance to which we are committed is intent on nation building in Iraq … and Afghanistan. The US has been nation building in Hispanic America since President Quincy Adams’s declaration of the Monroe Doctrine (1801). In travelling, I may discover how successful the US has been and discover what opinions the people of Hispanic America have of their neighbours in the North.

US citizens possess an absolute certitude in their superiority. Canadians are poor cousins. Those south of the border are wetbacks, greasers, Latinos – inferior beings. Good ones make good house pets.

Surely we Brits know better?

I visited three high schools in my native Herefordshire. I asked fifteen-year-olds for their image of a Mexican. All gave the same answer: fat, sweating, big hat, drooping moustache, comic accent.

And those from further south? Central and South America?

Drug dealers or crooked cops, corrupt officials.

Such is cultural colonialism – so much is absorbed from Hollywood.

I wondered, as I listened, what those South of the border, the Spicks and greasers, thought of us Brits? Do they imagine that we wear bowler hats, carry umbrellas and drink endless cups of tea? Or that England is a land peopled by football hooligans?

Do they differentiate between Britain and the US?

My wife said, ‘Find out. Ride a motorbike. It’s something you’ve talked of doing as long as I’ve known you.’

‘I’m too old,’ I said.

‘So? Get young again. Get out from behind your desk. Show that an old man can make it. And don’t dare write a polemic’.

Polemic is wifely code for obsessive and boring – our sons are more forthright.

And my wife is correct: I have been behind my desk for too long. Writing fiction, I have been seeing through my protagonists’ eyes, living their traumas. Time has come to raise and risk again my own head above the parapet, see with my own eyes, experience my own adventure. Latin America is tempting. I am obsessed by its history.

I wrote the best part of two novels in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. Two 16th century mansions form the Hostal San Nicolas de Ovando. The manager set a trestle table in the tower. The river lay below. I would imagine those first tiny Spanish ships lying at anchor. I would imagine sunlight flashing on breast plates and helmets, the strike of steel-shod boots. They were small men, the Conquistadors. Most had little education. They were filled with superstitions. How could such men in such small numbers capture vast Empires? I have read modern historians. I find them wanting in explanations. Though what do I know? I’m a high school drop-out. And I admit to prejudice. My great grandfather was a famous Spanish terrorist – El Tigre del Maestrazgo. His mother was executed by firing squad. He conquered much of Spain.

Cortés set out from Veracruz and conquered Mexico. I intend to travel all the way south from Veracruz to Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego. Cortés rode a horse. A Honda 125 will do me fine. All I wish to conquer are my fears. I have faith in the bike. I am less sure of my heart. Will it cope with the rigours of the Altiplano?

More positively, I may lose weight.

Chapter1
The Boys on Bikes

1906: My father sits beneath a thorn tree in northern Kenya. He and his business partner Jack Riddle have been in Ethiopia buying horses. They travel with sixty porters and livestock. Jack is scouting ahead for water. My father writes in his diary a reminder to order a new dressing case from Asprey, a Bond Street purveyor of luxury goods – hairbrushes, clothes brush, beaver-hair shaving brush, cut-throat razors, all with ivory handles. My father will supply the ivory.

2006: I buy a used green shirt and Clancy Brothers sweater at the Age Concern shop in Hereford. My wife asks whether I plan auditioning for a job as a garden gnome. I retort that I am flying to Boston with Aer Lingus and hope for an upgrade.

I fail with the upgrade. However, the immigration officer at Boston’s airport is Irish American and appreciates the sweater. He asks what I plan doing in the US. I plan travelling by train to Dallas, crossing into Mexico by bus, buying a motorcycle in Veracruz, Mexico, and riding to Tierra del Fuego. The immigration officer is two years short of retirement. He checks my date of birth.

‘You’re seventy-three.’

‘So?’ I say.

‘What type of bike?’ he asks.

A Honda 125.’

‘For real? A 125?’ He grins. ‘That’s a pizza delivery bike. You think you’ll make it?’

I have doubts but what else should I do with the last years of my life? Sit at home and watch TV?

The immigration officer stamps my passport. ‘What does your wife think?’

‘She’s pleased to have me out from underfoot.’

My ex is more concerned. We have been separated for twenty-five years. She collects me from the airport and drives me to her home in Providence, Rhode Island. In the car, she says, ‘This thing you’re planning is really dumb. I’ve been talking with people. They all say it’s dumb. I mean, going through Colombia and places. And the roads, the way those people drive. You’ll get yourself killed.’

I take the bus next day to my adopted daughter’s home in Duchess County, New York. Anya reiterates the imagined dangers. I have a history of heart attacks. Why deliberately put myself at risk?

‘It’s a man thing,’ I explain.

And why take a train south to Dallas? No one takes trains.

I am about to write about the Americas. I need to see the US rather than fly over it at comfortable bombing height.

Dallas, Friday 28 April

My forty-eight-hour train journey from New York ends late afternoon in Dallas, Texas. I have slept in a chair the past two nights. Don Weempe collects me at the Amtrak station. Don and Jane and their daughter, Elspeth, are old friends who visit England regularly. I haven’t visited Dallas in eight years. Dallas is a great city and the Weempes are generous and considerate hosts. So why does Don plot my death?

Don is a heavy-built six-foot-four-inch good ol’ boy, third-generation Dallas, a graduate of Texas A&M University. He makes his money spreading concrete over Texas. He and three friends plan leaving tomorrow at five in the morning on a bike trip. Texas is big and Texans ride big bikes – too big for an old Brit, even a Brit preparing to ride from Veracruz, Mexico, to Tierra del Fuego. In Texas, a Honda 125 doesn’t rate as a bike.

I am to follow the weekend bikers in Don’s Hummer with their gear. The Hummer is in Don’s front drive. It looks huge. It is huge. Back home I drive a fourteen-year-old Honda Accord. My sons are ashamed to be seen by their friends in what they describe as a ‘Granny car’. They tilt the seat flat and pretend to be reading a newspaper. Now I lie awake worrying that I won’t be able to handle something as big as the Hummer. I worry that I won’t be able to keep up with the bikes. I know that Don has a Harley, leather seats and studs. I’ll meet the other three riders in the morning.

Texas everywhere, Saturday 29 April

Five in the morning and Don reverses the Hummer out of the drive. I climb in behind the wheel. Big! Wide! Scary! Home in England, my sons tease me endlessly for driving slowly and holding up the traffic. Now I must follow Don on a Harley and Jack, an airline pilot, on a BMW GS 650.

Rain falls steadily. I hope it will slow the bikers down.

It doesn’t.

I follow their tail lights onto the freeway. We speed through Fort Worth and halt for breakfast around seven. Paul joins us, a lawyer on a vast Honda cruiser with a seat the size of a sofa. The bike is a recent purchase. Paul has all the kit: suit with armour plate, million-dollar boots. Unfortunately his boots have filled with water.

We turn off the freeway onto country roads wide enough to be motorways back home. No cops, and the speed edges up. The bikes out-accelerate and out-corner the Hummer. I lose a hundred yards or more on each bend and have to work at catching up. The speedometer touches eighty, eighty-five, ninety miles an hour. My sons won’t believe me. Fifty years at the wheel and I was hit with my first-ever speeding ticket the month before leaving England: thirty-three and a half miles an hour in a thirty zone.

A couple of hours at the wheel and I am almost confident. The Hummer is rock steady. I am familiar with the controls. The rain has ceased, the sun is bright and the satellite radio is tuned to Nashville. I risk taking my eyes off the road. Cattle graze vast paddocks. A brace of wild turkeys scurry off the verge and hide in the mesquite.

I follow the boys on bikes into the town of Turkey in mid afternoon. ‘Town’ in west Texas is fifteen houses and a store that closed in the sixties. We are in Turkey for the annual Bob Wills memorial concert. Bob Wills was a country and western singer. He and his band, The Texas Playboys, topped the charts back in the forties.

The memorial concert is in a dirt field beside Turkey’s disused redbrick high school building. Tents and RVs and trailers are parked among the standard farm mishmash of new and disused agricultural machinery – abandoned pickups and rusted metal stuff that even the manufacturer wouldn’t recognise. Texas machinery is big. The driver climbs a ladder to reach the controls – no place here for a man with vertigo.

The Bob Wills memorial concert is true west Texas. Three plank-and-scaffolding stands face a stage that is as permanent as anything is permanent in west Texas. Swallows or house martins have nested in the ceiling. The Texas Playboys are up there doing their stuff – those that are still alive, that is. Practised? They could play in their sleep.

Three or four generations of the same family lounge in folding chairs between stands and stage. Stetsons, blue jeans and boots are obligatory for the over-twos. The MC is a local doctor. He knows half the audience by name and knows at whom to direct his quips. Local girls collect dollars for the museum’s upkeep. Jack buys a Bob Wills memorial hat while I write my name in the visitors’ book and that I come from England. If there is another tourist, he got lost.

I remark on the quantity of old people’s transport: electric invalid chairs and golf carts. I am driving a Hummer! This is fun. My mistake is not buying a Bob Wills memorial hat. A Bob Wills hat would have protected me all the way south to Tierra del Fuego – or at least to the ranch down in Argentina where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hid out for a few years.

I have sinned. I have been overconfident. Pride comes before a fall. I am about to plummet from fearless driver of the Hummer to trembling Brit on the sidewalk. Disaster hits on the freeway into Amarillo. The boys on the bikes thread the traffic. One minute I am tapping along to Garth Brooks on the radio. Next minute I am in panic. The boys on the bikes have gone.

I drive a further ten miles with my gut in a knot. Too late, I spot a biker pulled in at an exit. Is he one of my bikers? Has he seen me?

I take the next exit. A biker races by on the freeway.

What should I do?

Help!

I don’t know who to pray to. Saint Anthony is good for finding car keys. I need to find three bikers. Bikers are bigger than keys. My address book is back in Dallas. I don’t have a mobile telephone. I don’t have a number to call Don. I am a Brit with a Brit’s driving licence. I am in a Hummer without car papers. I imagine bad-ass Texas cops ramming guns to my skull, hacking my feet apart. One wrong word and I’m dead.

I pull in at the parking lot of the Bourbon Street Café (live music Saturday night and all the shrimp you can eat for just over ten dollars). Two young women in long dresses sweep in through the entrance. I follow timidly. The restaurant lobby is dark and romantic. I have been outside in late sunlight and am momentarily blind. A friendly female voice enquires whether I have a reservation. I blink a few times and an attractive young lady materialises out of the gloom. She is Texas straw blonde, wears an off-the-shoulder evening dress and stands behind a wooden lectern that supports her table list.

I am probably sweating. I fidget my hands. And I am immensely British. ‘I am so sorry to bother you,’ I say. ‘I’m in a real mess.’

Why does she listen? Why doesn’t she call security?

‘I’m lost,’ I say. ‘I was following three bikers. Friends. I lost them. I’m really stupid.’

The lady is curious as to what I am and listens patiently.

I confess that I don’t have Don’s telephone number and that I don’t have the name of the hotel we’re booked into. Meanwhile I am blocking guests waiting to be assigned tables (smoking or non-smoking?).

I apologise for being a nuisance and, being a Brit, repeat my apologies again and again. If I could call directory enquiries? Except that I don’t have a phone. Nor, if I did have a phone, would I know how to call directory enquiries.

The lady calls on her mobile and obtains Don’s home number. She gives me the number and hands me her mobile. I explain that I am unfamiliar with mobile phones. Added to which, I am old and more than a little deaf.

She calls Don for me and we get an answering machine. I leave a message. Minutes pass while I wonder what to do next and while the lady wonders what she can do next (other than assign tables).

Her telephone rings. Don’s daughter, Elspeth, is on the line. I try not to sound panicky while Elspeth’s response is that of a calm mature woman aged eleven going on thirty. She consoles me. She gives me Don’s mobile number.

The lady calls Don, who is surprised at a woman calling. I am saved. And I am deeply, deeply grateful to the Angel of the Bourbon Street Café. I try to imagine the same scene in England at a popular restaurant on a Saturday evening.

I’d still be there, out on the pavement, lost …

Don leads me to the hotel. We shower, change and head for dinner at the ultimate Texas tourist restaurant. Call for a reservation and the restaurant dispatches a white courtesy car with cattle longhorns bolted to the bonnet. The building is a fake barn with dead deer heads mounted high on the walls. Right by the door there’s a steak on display the size of a pair of bricks. Eat the steak and they feed you free for a year. (Eat the steak and you wouldn’t want to eat for a year.) We are shown to a table beside a dais on which sits a competitor for Cholesterol Man of the Year. He already has a serious weight problem. He is midway through the two-brick steak. He is sweating and wears the defeated look of a foot soldier on the fourth day of the retreat from Moscow (take your choice – German or Napoleonic).

The maître d’ shows us to a table right beside the glutton dais.

Don says, ‘Great, so we have to look at that while we eat.’

We eat mini-steaks the size of quarter-bricks.

Don and I share a hotel room furnished with twin king-size beds. Midnight and a fourth biker joins the party – Eric, a forty-plus photographer who chews tobacco and rides the same model BMW GS as Jack. Eric bought his bike in the past few weeks. Jack bought his bike in the past few weeks. I guess that these two are competitors in some type of interpersonal rivalry as to who can be the hottest forty-year-old teenager on the block.

Eric unrolls a sleeping bag. I warn him to spread it the far end of the room because old men have to get up in the night and I don’t want to fall on him.

The king-size bed is comfortable. We have travelled 600 miles. I have driven a Hummer at ninety miles an hour without fear and am feeling confident as to the morrow.

Sunday is the day of rest. We have miles to cover and are up at seven. First stop is a farm twenty miles out of town. The farm grows Cadillacs. The Cadillacs are planted in a straight line out in the middle of a vast field that may stop at the horizon but probably doesn’t. The field is as flat as a skating rink. The Cadillacs are buried nose down up to their windscreens in the earth. Most visitors bring cans of spray paint. The graffiti is interesting. This is a sculpture both impressive and delightfully weird.

Our next halt is in nowhere. This is the Texas panhandle and Galileo was talking nonsense when he said the world was round. The world is flat, believe me. The road runs straight for thirty miles: not a house in sight, no animals, not even a tree. Telephone and power cables that have nowhere to go weave pointless patterns across this vast expanse of nothing. The boys on the bikes ride in a bunch. Travelling a British country lane the boys and I would be big. We would fill the road. Children and old ladies walking their dogs would find us threatening. In the panhandle we are minute pieces in a board game. The sun sparkling on bike helmets is the controlling ray operated by whoever plays the game. Reach the end of the board and we fall off.

Mid-morning we enter the Palo Duro State Park. Palo Duro is Spanish for ‘tough stick’ and the player of the board game has gouged a stick viciously across the board. The result is ripped red canyon country out of a Hollywood Western.

We stop. I take pictures while Eric and Jack strike attitudes at each other and exchange bike seats. Jack’s is a custom seat three inches lower than the standard model. Jack has long legs that have been cramping over the past day. I have watched from the Hummer as he wriggles from side to side and stands on the footrests or stretches out his legs beyond the engine.

Eric has the standard seat and has shorter legs. He claims to be comfortable with Jack’s seat. I suspect Eric would claim to be comfortable sitting on six-inch nails.

The road we follow from Palo Duro back to Turkey has humps and corners and views forever. Eric and Jack lean into the corners and are gone, chasing each other round the school yard, speedometers registering 120 miles an hour. Don sits on his Harley, solid and sensible as a granite Texas rock. The Harley thunders and competes in vibration with a pneumatic road drill. Only a rock could survive.

Meanwhile, Paul, the lawyer, cruises to the rear cradled in the leather upholstered luxury and law-office silence of his Honda Monster. And I bask in the massive comfort of the Hummer.

Saturday was country and western. Sunday started with Swan Lake turned up high and crystal clear on the satellite radio as I swooped across the void. Now I have Beethoven’s Eroica ramming me through the curves and over the low hills.

My sons would be listening to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. But a big Hummer? And the Texas panhandle? Believe me, whatever the music, this is serious bliss.

Midday and we have circled back to Turkey and are filling our tanks. This is the third time the Hummer has required gas. The tank takes thirty-five gallons and filling the tank takes a while. We are in a dry county. The help at the gas station reports that we must drive sixty-five miles in one direction or thirty-five in the other to refill the beer cooler.

The Sporting Club is across the street from the gas station. Complete a membership form at the club and you can order a beer. The big square dining room with its high ceiling is delightfully cool. The decor is dead heads on the walls together with framed photographs from the good ol’ days of old-timers crouching over dead meat on the hoof (even here, in west Texas, dead Indians are out of fashion – although a dead Mexican might pass muster).

A buffet is set up in the next room: a dozen different salads; fried chicken, grilled pork, broiled silverside, all the vegetables; custard and apple pie. I have the beef. Delicious. The service is typically Texas friendly, full of smiles and goodwill how-are-yous.

A party of freshly barbered weekend Harley riders occupies the next table. They ride top-money bikes with all the fixings: matching luggage, satellite radio, central heating, shoe polish and gold-tap toilets. They travel in company with a Harley support team hauling a Harley trailer behind a three-quarter-ton Ford truck.

Our route onward is a zigzag in search of corners to excite the kids. Paul, the lawyer, tends to hold back a little on the curves. He has ample power and acceleration to catch the pack. Keeping pace in the Hummer is less easy. Hummers aren’t designed for road racing. Beer is legal at our next gas stop, although drinking on the premises is forbidden. Eric finds a patch of grass to sprawl on the other side of a telephone post that marks the forecourt boundary.

Next stop is a 500-acre play ranch that Paul and Don have bought. The ranch is off a dirt county road. The BMWs gambol in the dirt. The Harley irons the dirt flat. The Honda is a little skittish and Paul is a little anxious. I drive the Hummer with the windows down and blast Texas with opera.

Texans like to hunt. Don is a leading member of the Dallas Safari Club. He has shot game in about every country where there is game to shoot: Alaska for bear, Argentina for dove, England for pheasant, South Africa for whatever has big teeth, and all the way to New Zealand for a mountain something-or-other. He and Paul purchased the ranch a few months back as a hunting reserve. They will install a weekend trailer home next month.

Don and Paul transfer to the Hummer for the drive to the trailer site while Eric and Jack scatter dirt competitively with their rear tyres. The site is on the crest of a bluff and has views for miles over what, in Africa, would be called ‘bush’. Texas bush is mostly dwarf cedar and mesquite. The bluff forms a hook and falls away steeply, right below the site to a fifty-acre patch centred on a spring-fed pond. Thin the mesquite and scrub cedar and you could watch the game come to the water – a Texan version of Kenya’s Tree Tops Hotel.

Paul isn’t a hunter. He wishes to sit out on the deck of an evening, sip a cold beer with friends and watch the animals.

Jack imagines mounting a twin-barrel heavy machine gun on the deck so he can blast anything that moves.

We drink beer while Don drives us round the property on the ring road they’ve cleared and down a track that twists between the trees to a second pond. Jack is searching the track for hog tracks. Hogs are domestic pigs gone wild, some twenty or thirty generations back. Jack has a hog obsession. He guns down a hog. He imagines he’s masting an al-Qaida bomber. Wasting is Jack’s solution to most problems and he enjoys a fine turn of phrase.

We leave the ranch around five p.m. and are faced with a four-hour drive home. We are 200 miles short of Dallas on a stretch of road under repair when Don hits a hole and bottoms his oil pan on a rock.

So now there are three bikes and Don drives the Hummer. I shift to the passenger seat, watch the country fly by and pester Don with endless questions. We have travelled 1200 miles of Texas in two days. We have enjoyed ourselves the way boys do. I have met extraordinary courtesy, kindness, generosity and good humour in every place we stopped. We have burnt enough gas to raise the planetary temperature a couple of degrees. And I have been saved from disaster by an angel: she of the Bourbon Street Café.

Chapter 2
Goodbye Dallas

To Mexico, Tuesday 9 May

I leave tonight by bus for the Gulf of Mexico port of Veracruz. I have done in Dallas what a visitor should: watched a baseball match (my first), admired the play of light on the glass facades of Pei’s magnificent tower, and glutted on Tex-Mex and barbecue ribs. Today I am invited to an executive breakfast club on the twenty-seventh floor of a downtown office building. The hundred or so members are white and male. Latino waiters serve a vast buffet. When introduced, I mumble a few words of gratitude for Dallas hospitality.

The day’s guest speaker has published the history of the United States flag in verse. Each verse faces a full-page illustration of an American family: Mom, Pop and two kids – white, of course. General Tommy Franks has penned an introduction.

Only the army and the Church stand between America and chaos. The flag is their symbol and the speaker is campaigning to have his history distributed to every primary school. He warns us of the 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, every one of whom is taught from birth to hate and kill Americans. Hindus, Buddhists, Asiatics, Africans and Arabs are equally dangerous. A passing joke at the cowardly French raises a titter.

A member whispers to me in Spanish that not everyone present would agree with the speaker.

My bags are in the Hummer. Don drives from construction site to construction site. His workers are Mexican. I listen to the radio and watch the construction of a freeway overpass. Thirty or more huge trailer trucks queue to unload enormous concrete girders. Three cranes swing the girders into place. Trucks feed a concrete mixer the size of a European factory. We pass by the gun shop and eat steak.

Late afternoon we visit a friend of Don’s who leases mobile road barriers, traffic cones and road signs. He and his father share a 7000-acre hobby ranch in Oklahoma. The ranch is ringed with deer fencing and they’ve sunk a million dollars into damming a creek. If they were British, they would have bought a holiday apartment on the Costa Brava.

Don and his friend drive me to the bus terminal. They make jokes at my bravery in travelling by Mexican bus. Mexican buses fall over cliffs. This is Texas. What cliffs? The road is straight. The land is flat. Nightlife is sticky doughnuts at an arc-lit service station. Lights glimmer dimly in trailer homes and in homes indistinguishable from trailers. I have a double seat to myself directly behind the driver. He drives with one hand while eating a half-pint tub of caramel ice-cream.

Entering the US is tough. Leaving is easy. The bus cruises through customs and immigration. I have a moment in which to note a queue several hundred metres long of aspiring Mexican immigrants. Then we are at the Mexican border. I still have my US entry card. I have no exit stamp in my passport. I have left the US illegally.

The Mexican immigration officer asks how long I will be in Mexico. I explain my trip and make a guess at four weeks. He examines me with interest and issues a visa valid for three months.

Dallas is twelve hours and forty-six dollars away from Monterey. The border region is as dry as Texas. The only hills are of dead cars heaped in junkyards. Finally, real hills appear. The highway dips into a narrow valley and Monterey surfaces from within a pale haze of exhaust fumes. The driver pulls into the depot and rushes me across to the bus company that makes the run to Tampico. A morning bus leaves at ten. This bus is new: seats tip all the way back; seatbelts are easy on the shoulders; Kung Fu movies play on the video screen.

I doze on the road to Tampico and wake to my first palm tree of the journey, sisal fields, jacarandas in flower, a flame tree. We pull into the Tampico bus depot at four p.m. Buses leave for Veracruz every hour. I find a trucker’s restaurant and eat steak ranchero with fresh corn tortillas and red and green chilli sauce.

I call the Ampara Hotel in Veracruz and book a room. This bus is the most comfortable yet. Again I sit directly behind the driver and watch the speedo. Night falls and we crawl through hill country on a double-lane highway behind a convoy of tanker trucks. Mexico is the US’s largest source of oil. Gas torches flame beside collector tanks.

The bus pulls into Veracruz terminal at five the following morning. I have travelled 1214 kilometres at a cost of 115 dollars. Veracruz is hot. The Amparo Hotel is a block from the central square. I have a room with a shower and a ceiling fan. The hotel is clean. My room is quiet. Two windows open on to the central well.

Moto Diaz is the main Honda agent in Veracruz. I had emailed Honda Mexico from the UK. My bike is waiting – a white Honda 125 Cargo. Honda advertises the model as a workhorse. In truth, it is a pizza delivery bike. It has a one-person seat and a large rack for the pizza box. A serious grey-haired mechanic is preparing the bike for my journey. The mechanic assures me that the bike will carry me to Tierra del Fuego sin problemas. No problems. I buy a removable rack box and the Honda agent presents me with a smart helmet. Tomorrow I queue for registration plates. I am warned that this may take all day. This evening I celebrate my purchase with a dish of devilled prawns and a bottle of Mexican lager.

I discover a small square around the corner from the hotel, where the middle-aged and elderly play chess at a pavement café. I sip a beer and watch the games and am drawn slowly into conversation.

Veracruz, Friday 12 May

Just before seven I am the first to queue outside the vehicle registration office – a privilege I relinquish to a woman who arrives a minute later, thus I have someone to follow. Doors open at eight. First disaster: all vehicles must be registered at a domicile. A hotel is not a domicile. Although motherly, the counter assistant is insistent. I am instructed to consult the department’s director. The director is both patient and sympathetic. He will accept an electricity bill as proof of domicile. He instructs me to find an address, any address. Surely I have a friend in Veracruz? In Veracruz everyone has a friend.

He produces his own electricity bill as an example of the proof he requires, lays the bill on his desk and transfers his attention to an assistant. An hour later the bike is registered and the plates are on the Honda. Mechanics and sales assistants watch as I mount and wobble tentatively round the parking lot. I will take the bike out properly tomorrow, Saturday, when (I hope) there will be less traffic.

Veracruz is tidy for a Mexican city. Trees shade street after street of small shops (how do the proprietors earn a living?). Small restaurants are common, as are ice-cream parlours and mini-cafés that serve a table or two on the pavement. Street vendors don’t nag, are happy to give directions and welcome conversation.

In search of riding goggles, I navigate, on foot, the narrow lanes of the market district. Dallas was foreign territory. Here I feel at home. The pace is Mediterranean. So are the chatter and leisurely human interplay. I ask directions and walk pavements striped with sun and shade. My goal is a row of kiosks where bike tyres and inner tubes hang on wooden shutters. I peer into gloom at shelves packed with spares. Most storekeepers are women – or instinct steers me to stores run by women. One advises me that goggles with glass lenses are too expensive – more sensible to buy plastic safety glasses at a hardware store.

I read in a guidebook that Veracruz has a strong black influence. I haven’t seen a single black person. The standard skin colour is a rich pale golden mocha – imagine a good sun tan without the red. People are good-looking, particularly the younger generation. For men, long trousers are obligatory. Young women show their tummies. Given the heat, this seems an unfair advantage (not that I wish to display my own gross wobble).

I have taken three cabs. The first driver opined that Veracruz is a disaster. Politicians have stolen everything. Working people can’t afford to eat.

The second driver was a sybarite. He boasted of Veracruz cuisine and instructed me to eat at any one of the small restaurants upstairs in the fish market.

The third was elderly and teaches English to his granddaughters. His own English is pedantic and he is contemptuous of North American English. He said that in Veracruz I can walk at night in safety, but in Mexico City I would be murdered.

I am less panicked now that the bike is registered. A cool evening breeze blows inshore. I stroll the streets and actually see the city for the first time (you can walk for miles without actually seeing anything).

So what have I seen now that my eyes are open? A castle built in 1660 and so small it could be a giant’s toy – every boy’s desire. A ramp leads to a drawbridge and a gate in fierce walls mellowed by age; a lookout post that resembles a pepper pot surmounts a square keep, and a further pepper pot crowns the far corner; cannon defend the battlements. The whole is the perfect size for a TV makeover programme. Imagine the dialogue between the two presenter-designers.

The central square, Plaza de Armas, is pleasant rather than great. The cathedral occupies one side. It has a simple interior lit by chandeliers and is small enough to feel intimate rather than overbearing. The cloister of the city hall runs at right angles to the cathedral; there is a plush hotel opposite. Palm trees shade pavement cafés. Almond trees surround a central stage and bandstand.

I sit in the Plaza de Armas and order a cold beer. Up on the stage, folk dancers stamp their heels. The women wear full floor-length dresses of white cotton gauze; the men white shirts, white cotton pants, high-heeled boots and those hats worn by scouts and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The dance is a Mexican version of flamenco, equally haughty and yet less fierce than the gypsy original. (I recall Cuban flamenco dancers being too soft and pliable.)

In the final dance the women carry trays of lit oil lamps on their heads. They glide and spin across the small stage with the charm and grace of women from a bygone era. A near-full moon, its light softened by humidity, floats above a palm tree at the corner of the city hall. Lamps on tall, elegant lamp posts illuminate the cathedral’s facade. The temperature is perfect. The beer is cold. This is bliss.

The folk dancing ends and I stroll to the small square by the hotel for a final coffee – prices are lower here than in the Plaza de Armas. A chess player beckons me to a vacant seat.

Veracruz, Saturday 13 May

I wake in the night and lie in bed unable to sleep. I must ride the bike today. My fears surface. I am crazy to attempt this journey. I should be safe at home weeding a flowerbed and preparing for the hereafter. Or cooking a lasagne for my wife Bernadette and our two sons Josh and Jed. I miss them. I miss my one-month-old grandchild, the divine Boo.

I am not superstitious.

That today is the thirteenth seems unfair.

Unable to sleep, I sort my possessions. How much space do I have in the bike box? Barely enough for my laptop and reference books. I can buy clothes. Books are irreplaceable.

Moto Diez is five kilometres from the city centre on a six-lane highway. I am nervous. I mount the Honda and practise turns in the car park. Mechanics watch. They wonder why I don’t ride out onto the road. Fear stops me from riding out onto the road: fear of falling off, fear of panic, fear of being hit by a truck. And there is a further and greater and growing fear: the fear that the mechanics will suspect me of cowardice.

This is the fear that forces me to the car park slipway. Trucks and buses thunder through a fog of blue exhaust fumes. I edge out gingerly onto the highway and stall the motor. I remain astride the bike, kick the starter and almost overbalance. The mechanics have come out of the yard to watch. My palms are slippery and sweat stings my eyes. I dismount at the curb, find neutral and kick the starter again. The engine fires. I mount, open the throttle and engage bottom gear. The bike bucks. I close the throttle. The engine stalls. I long to hide my face in my arms and weep. A small crowd has collected. My ears burn with shame. I dismount again, kick the starter and ease forward along the curb. I keep in bottom gear for the first hundred metres and then move into second. I am still in second when the bike stops. I have ridden 300 metres.

The temperature is in the mid-thirties Celsius. Pushing the bike back to Moto Diez would kill me. I park the bike outside a store that sells plastic pipe. My reappearance at Moto Diez is met with consternation. Have I crashed?

No. I’ve run out of gas.

The mechanic apologises and rides me back on a scooter with a gas can. He tips the gas into the tank and we repeat our goodbyes. Off he goes. I kick the starter. The engine won’t fire. Kick, kick, kick …

This entire project is insane. I can’t cope. I contemplate suicide. The storekeeper (a woman, naturally) suggests I try turning the ignition key. Dumb, dumb, dumb …

I am facing out of town on a very busy six-lane highway. I don’t have the courage to pull into the outside lane to make a U-turn. I ride (crawl) a while behind buses that halt on every block. I take a right down a minor road, then left and left again to an intersection on the highway controlled by traffic lights. I take a left at the lights and am heading back into town. Is this comprehensible?

A six-lane highway is not the best learning terrain.

I stall a couple of times. Manic cab drivers and bus drivers thump their klaxons. I miss a red light. Bikers hurtle past in search of death (memories of the Dallas BMW boys). I crawl. I make third gear. I make fourth. For a short stretch – five metres – I make fifth. I’ve been riding bikes for years. I’ve ridden bikes in seriously weird places. So I was younger. What has changed? Modern bikes are easier to ride; brakes function; cubic capacity is harnessed more effectively.

I ride into the city centre. I ride around the city and all over the city. I even have to warn myself against overconfidence. I am in search of a solution to my baggage. I ride from bike shop to bike shop. I examine plastic panniers and leather panniers and leather bags coated with studs. All are both too big for the Honda and too expensive.

I park the bike in the hotel garage and walk two blocks to the fish market for a very late lunch. The market is on the harbour front. Stalls on the ground floor sell fruit, vegetables, fish and crustaceans. The restaurants are upstairs, with concrete worktops, gas rings, and plain plastic tables and chairs. Choose a dish from the menu and the cook screeches at a boy to run below and find the freshest relevant fish.

I order devilled prawns (I always order devilled prawns) and orange juice. The prawns are perfect. So is the fresh juice. I am overweight and this is my one meal of the day. I have cut down to fruit for breakfast and in the evening. But what fruit!

I walk a while, checking out luggage stores. I am looking for two small waterproof school satchels. Cheap is important. Later in the evening I visit the chess players. A four-piece band plays in the square: a singer taps a gourd with an ebony stick, and there are two guitarists and a drummer. United by years of practice, portly couples in late middle-age glide joyfully and with rhythm. A show-off forties accustomed to wealthier territory calls to the musicians and holds centre piste with a late-twenties blonde from the US. He wears a wedding band. She doesn’t. They argue between dances, she giving him a hard time. Summoned by his mobile, he takes the call around the corner away from the sound of music. His wife?

Plastic tables and chairs belong to the two cafés each side of the plaza. A row of wrought-iron benches on the pavement are city property. A young courting couple, dressed neatly, share a bottle of water on one of the benches. They dance on the pavement, shy with each other but gaining confidence. The girl’s high heels are new or nearly new. Seated again, she surreptitiously scratches her ankle. That is the staple of the tropics: there is always one mosquito.

Four young male Brits dressed in grubby shorts, T-shirts and designer stubble stumble down the pavement to a vacant table. Already a little drunk, they slouch in their chairs, legs spread, and order litre bottles of beer. They talk loudly among themselves and drink directly from the bottle. They aren’t pretty.

Veracruz, Sunday 14 May

Every bike has its foibles. There is a knack to starting a bike first thing in the morning. Think waking a teenager on a school day. I fail with the Honda and am helped by a young man down from the capital who has the same model of bike back home. I head out of the city on the freeway. This is easy. Confidence grows. I am on the inside lane. Weekend divers hurtle by. A deep hole gapes dead ahead. Swerve or emergency brake? I go for the swerve. A klaxon nearly blasts me off the road. I pull into the curb and calm myself.

The freeway leads through a rolling countryside of paddocks and clumps of big trees. I turn off the freeway towards Antigua – the site of the original Veracruz founded by Cortés. This is a toll road and bikes and cars pay the same charge: three and a half dollars seems exorbitant for twenty kilometres. Sunday drivers hurtle past. Nervous, I grip the throttle tightly. My hand cramps and I prise my thumb back. Both hands are cramping by the time I reach Antigua. I have ridden thirty kilometres. My backside hurts and my thighs ache. An entire continent separates me from Tierra del Fuego. I am too old. Failure seems certain.

Antigua lies a few kilometres inland on the banks of a muddy river. It is a village of cobbled streets, tall trees, a few ruins and a few houses destined for ruin. The roofless ruin of Cortés’ first house occupies one corner of the church square. Banyan roots throttle the walls; an unlikely cannon guards what was the entrance. Children gambol in the square on swings and a slide. The church is charming from the outside. The inside is wrecked by pallid statues of saints in coarse horsehair wigs. One saint lies on his back in a glass case. The sculptor has given him a huge beak of a nose and fake eyebrows. Moths or mice have chewed bits of his hair and his face is chipped and discoloured. A normal child would think vampire rather than spirituality. The final awfulness is the vases of dusty plastic flowers within spitting distance of flamboyant trees and frangipani.

Launches take Sunday trippers downriver to the beach. A fisherman lands his catch and I follow him to a restaurant on the riverbank. Twenty or so tables are arranged on a concrete floor beneath a thatched roof. The kitchen is indoors on the other side of a dirt road. I celebrate my mobility with a shrimp cocktail and one of the fisherman’s catch fried in crisp, wafer-thin cornflour batter and bathed in a green chilli sauce (à la Antigua). Add two large glasses of fresh orange juice and, at ten dollars, this is my most expensive meal since leaving Dallas. A three-piece marimba band sets up: two men play guitar, and a schoolboy plays drums and a gourd. One musician is probably a minor official in real life – blue shirt, pressed jeans, spectacles. The other has a girth problem undisguised by a flowered shirt. People in the US get fat all over. Mexicans appear to restrict fat to the belly. Why?

I am in Antigua because I intend following the route Cortés took in conquering Mexico. My bible is Hugh Thomas’ history of the conquest. Cortés led his army across the Cordillera. The head of the pass is 3200 metres above sea level. From the crest, the Spaniards looked down in amazement at a city far larger than any in Europe. I open the book on the table and try once again to marry the indigenous names on the map of the conquest to a present-day road map. The names have changed.

I glance up at the musicians. The boy on drums has a Tintin quiff and seems embarrassed to be here – replacement for an uncle who got drunk last night? The belly musician is a latent anarchist. Every few tunes he make a run for freedom, breaking out of the routine dadedaddada with a fast riff and intricate flourishes, before surrendering to the reality of a hot midday Sunday on a riverbank with an audience of six, only one of whom is listening – me.

I feel on familiar territory. I recognise the trees and the humidity and the scents and the people taking their time at doing whatever they are doing. I’ve never enjoyed cities much. In London, we lived out in Kew, which has a village atmosphere. In Cuba, we lived fifteen kilometres out from central Havana in Santa Fe. And our home in England now is the perfect village setting, with the garden backing on to two cricket fields and not a house visible beyond.

Veracruz is famous for the friendliness of it people. The musicians join my table between sets. I discover that the gourd the kid scratches and taps is called a guiro. The musicians study the place names on the old map and confess their ignorance.

I return reluctantly to the city. Keeping my grip loose stops my hands cramping. Sixty to seventy kilometres an hour is a comfortable cruising speed. I will need to stop every three-quarters of an hour to avoid cramps in my thighs. I can’t envisage riding much more than 200 kilometres in a day, maybe 250. How far is Tierra del Fuego?

Central Veracruz is thronged with happy people in shorts and short skirts back from the beach. I fall into conversation with a Mexican businessman in his late forties. He has visited Europe a few times and is amused at the envy for other people’s lives that tempts so many northern Europeans to move to Mediterranean countries. He loathes the term ‘Latin America’, preferring ‘Iberian America’. He is contemptuous of Hugh Thomas’ history of the Conquest – he read a couple of chapters and chucked it in the bin. I suspect that he was incensed by a Welshman daring to interpret a Spaniard. His jaundiced view of the US is typical of most Mexicans with whom I talk.

I quote my friend Don to him: ‘Everyone is trying to get here …’

‘No one with any choice,’ the Mexican retorts. As to his own people, ‘The only pure bloods are horses. Everyone of us is a mixture: Indian, black, Spanish. We are all mestizos.’

I have been told that Sunday evening at the Café de la Parroquia is a tradition among the bourgeoisie of Veracruz. I hope for an ancient building on the harbour front. I discover a modern caféteria. Fortunately the ambience is excellent for people-watching. A few tables are occupied by elderly Spanish émigrés. The women are anaemically pale and have thin lips, thin hair and narrow chests. They sit somehow folded in on themselves as if nervous of being contaminated by the touch of a sexual deviant. For ‘deviant’, read ‘voluptuous native’. Watching them, I am reminded of the leftover French colonials at a café in Tangier where I interviewed Paul Bowles years and years ago. In Tangier we ordered chocolate cake. The Café de la Parroquia is so clean that I risk a lettuce and tomato salad.

Later, I watch a charming programme of 1930s dancing in the Plaza de Armas and then attend a sung mass at the cathedral. Lit by chandeliers, the cathedral enjoys a tranquil beauty. The congregation is a mixture of holidaymakers and the resident sedate. Men and women are in equal numbers. Many are young. Communicants worldwide wear the same gentleness of expression.

Veracruz, Monday 15 May

Baggage Day: I’ve bought a small backpack and two satchels at a luggage store. Admittedly, one satchel is dark green, and the other dark blue: they were on special offer. I require a metal sheet to be cut and bent to keep the satchels off the chain and rear wheel. I have directions to an alley of metalworkers. A ragged awning shelters the narrow entrance and I miss it a couple of times. I wheel the bike over the pavement and have the choice of twenty or so small, open-fronted workshops. Artisans in whatever country always know best. They don’t listen. I am a foreigner; foreigners, by definition, are short on sense. Work ceases in the alley while the metalworkers argue between themselves as to what I need. I know what I need and what I want. I have drawings. I am surplus to the discussions. Finally one of the artisans confronts me with a drawing. It differs from my drawing by half a centimetre here or there.

A few workers return to their own shops. Most remain as onlookers, all voicing opinions of the work and of my proposed journey and why I should or shouldn’t take a particular road.

Cost of the metalwork plus satchels and backpack is fifty-seven dollars. Any solution from a bike shop would have been double. I am well pleased. I shall miss the unfailing friendliness of the Veracruz people – and the food. Veracruz University is my sole disappointment. A history department existed in ancient times. History has been replaced by computer sciences.

Veracruz shuts down for luncheon and siesta. Only the cops stay open. The federal police are equivalent to Spain’s Guardia Civil and the most feared of Mexican police forces. Few people voluntarily visit the Federales. The Veracruz HQ is a modern building at an intersection on the fringes of the city. My arrival is a surprise.

Mexican police in Hollywood movies are invariably criminal types, small, swarthy and scruffy. The duty officer is six foot two and blond. His uniform shirt is starched. He wears riding breeches and his boots gleam.

I have with me Hugh Thomas’ history and a road map. Surely a federal policeman would recognise the ancient place names? The Fed stands and spreads the map on the desk. Only then do I fully realise his height – big and a cop, the very essence of authority I feel reduced to the status of a small schoolboy – a curious feeling for a man in his seventies.

The Fed studies the place names on Cortés’ route and points to their equivalent on the modern map. He examines me with interest. ‘You wish to take this route? On a motorcycle? Tell me, when did you last ride a bike?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes, you do.’

‘A while ago.’

‘How much of a while ago?’

‘Well, I rode a scooter in Havana. That was in the nineties.’

‘Not a scooter. A bike.’

‘Something like thirty or forty years.’

‘Which?’

‘I’m not certain.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘Well, forty … more or less.’

The Fed is satisfied: ‘Forty. And why do you wish to ride this particular route?’

‘When Cortés reached the top of the pass, he looked down on what is now Mexico City. He went on to conquer Mexico. I thought that if I could reach the top, I could go on to reach Tierra del Fuego.’

‘The south of Argentina?’

‘Yes.’

‘All the way on your small motorcycle?’ The Fed studies my passport. ‘Cortés commenced by marching north. Aged seventy-three, is it sensible to commence such a journey by riding in the opposite direction to your destination?’

The Fed traces the route up the pass on the modern map: ‘Much of this is a dirt track. It is probable that I could find fanatic bikers among the transit police to accompany you at a weekend. In all probability you would fall off – many times. Were you to reach the summit, you would see nothing of the capital. The capital is hidden by pollution.’

The Fed traces an alternative route south along the coast. ‘This is a good straight road with little traffic.’

The following day I should turn inland. I will encounter little traffic in the morning. Only later will I be on a trunk road. On the third day I will climb a pass. I will cross the mountains at the same height as the pass that Cortés crossed. I will do so on a good surface and meet with few trucks or cars. Rather than north, I will be travelling south towards my eventual destination.

‘In the evening you will reach Oaxaca, a beautiful city – a city that is not dangerous.’ The Fed folds the road map, hands it to me and shakes my hand: ‘Please, in Oaxaca telephone that you have arrived.’

I thank the Fed for his counsel and speed back into town. This is my final day in Veracruz: one more dish of devilled prawns at the fish market. In the evening I enjoy the company of two Mexican businessmen and a recent Cuban émigré. One of the Mexicans, small, intense and with a habit of leaning into you when he talks, is determined to discuss the Falklands/Malvinas war. How could I defend Britain’s colonial seizure of Argentine territory on the far side of the world?

I ask how he can defend permitting a bunch of particularly unpleasant fascist generals a military success that would have kept them in power for a further ten years. Would that have been preferable for Argentinians?

The Cuban is vague as to the location of the Malvinas. He dreams of being reborn English or German (a citizen of the United States is third by a distance). The Cuban gives as his reason for wishing to live in England or Germany his desire to live where everyone is white-skinned and has blue eyes and blond hair. Imagine his surprise were he to visit London or Hamburg.

The second Mexican prefers discussing food. So do I. I have no desire to be the spokesman for British foreign policy. The Iraq war is universally unpopular here. Oil is believed to be the reason for the war. Britain is denounced as subservient and obedient to the wishes of the United States (in return, the US helps Britain in big brother/little brother fashion – just think of the Falklands).

Enough of politics. I bid my farewells and sip a final coffee at the chess players’ café.

Chapter 3
The Road to Oaxaca

Veracruz, Tuesday 16 May

I have travelled much of my life. A day or two in any one place and I begin to nest, even in a third-rate room in a third-rate hotel. I set photographs of my family on the bedside table, arrange books and papers beside the laptop, buy flowers. Walking the streets, I imagine how my life would be, which part of town would I prefer, what house or apartment building. Un-nesting is a wrench, particularly today. Veracruz has become familiar. I have my routine: fruit salad for breakfast at the restaurant across from the hotel, late luncheon above the fish market, evening beer in the Plaza de Armas, last coffee at the chess club café. Such habits are comforting. I feel safe. Meanwhile Mexicans have competed with my Dallas friends in warnings of the dangers ahead, of precipices and bandits and insane drivers. My own fears and doubts concern my physical capacity.

I make a bed of rolled chinos and long underwear in the base of the rack box to cushion the laptop. Next comes the leather folder of family photographs and waterproof plastic envelope containing bike documents, health insurance certificate and medication prescriptions – heart, cholesterol, blood pressure, water tablets. My green-cord long-sleeved shirt and a short-sleeved jumper go on top. Map, guidebook, small towel, washbag and rain slicker go in the backpack. Further books and clothes fill the satchels. I present the hotel staff with two small wheelie suitcases, tartan flannel pyjama trousers and the bulky Clancy Brothers jumper.

As a departure gift, I treat myself to an early breakfast at the swish air-con café on the Plaza de Armas frequented by the business elite. A tall man enters: early fifties, perfectly groomed and beaming an all-encompassing smile of good will to all men. He is a pleasure to watch as he circles the tables, a soft squeeze of the shoulders for those he knows, a word here, a word there, each greeting gilded with such absolute sincerity. I have seen Tony Blair perform in exactly this way – although Blair has never managed to appear elegant. Blair’s suits are never quite right and his walk spoils his performance. You know – the Australian dive master’s walk, elbows spread as if by a massively muscled chest: Hey, I’m a real man’s man. George W. Bush has the same walk. Watch them stroll together across the White House lawn or at Camp David.

I imagine, as I watch this gentleman in the café, that his sincerity is too slippery to remain in place; a moment’s inattention and it will slide down his perfectly creased trousers to form a little puddle round his immaculately polished shoes.

Mexican elections are on 2 June. A truck with a speaker system brakes alongside me at a traffic light on the way out of town. The speakers blare a chant of ‘Vote for … Vote for … Vote for …’ to a sell-soap-powder jingle. The side of the truck displays a poster of the candidate: the gentleman in the café. Delightful to have judged correctly.

I am escaping from Veracruz in rush hour. Drivers of short-haul buses are either paid by the kilometre or are holidaying race drivers. Most of them trained on fairground bumper cars. I ride timidly. I stall a couple of times at traffic lights and suffer the screamed insults and klaxons of those behind.

The road runs along the coast. A chill blustery wind blows off the sea – riding a light bike is interesting. The engine has settled or I am more confident; we cruise at eighty kilometres an hour on the flat. My grip is relaxed, no cramps in my hands. My only suffering is a numb bum. At first the road crosses flat ranch land. Cowboys herd cattle into a corral. Further south the road swoops and climbs over what were once the dividing dunes between sea and a vast lagoon. The dunes are cloaked now with tall tufts of dry wispy grass. I follow a truck up a blind hill marked with double yellow lines. A speeding white Chevy Suburban overtakes.

Federales wave to slow us on the next down-slope. Tipped by the wind, a lorry piled high with sugarcane lies on its side and almost blocks the road. The driver of the Chevy Suburban must have wet his pants.

Occasional tyre tracks lead down to the beach and a parked jeep or pickup. I take a break and munch an apple. The sea is grey beneath low cloud. I watch two fishermen bundled in parkas struggle to cast bait against the wind.

Early afternoon and the road dips down towards a river. Armed with rifles, soldiers or police officers guard each end of the bridge. I stop at a restaurant (tin roof, twenty tables on a dirt floor) to the right of the road and order black-bean soup and bottled water. Three six-seater 4x4s pull in, election posters on the doors: a local senator and his entourage. The senator wears a pale grey safari suit, silk socks, lizard-skin loafers, fat gold wedding band and a slim gold watch on a gold wristband. Why do I notice the socks?

The senator’s local representative takes the lead, ordering beer, glad-handing the restaurant’s owner. The owner, a plump, dark-skinned woman, mid-forties, is unimpressed. The local rep invites me to join them in a beer. I am a real live tourist, proof of something or other that could be beneficial to the senator. The rep wants a threesome photograph: senator, restaurateur, elderly Brit. The restaurateur retorts that she has no interest in photographs – better they pay for the beers.

The senator and his party leave. The woman brings coffee and sits at my table. ‘It’s the only time we ever see them,’ she says of the politicos, ‘when there’s an election.’ She is an incomer. Her husband is local and well respected: hence the senator’s desire for a photograph for the local newspaper. She and her husband have two children. ‘They’ve been promising to build a new school for the past ten years.’

Infrastructure alone won’t cure the ills of the system. I tell her of our local high school in Ledbury, Herefordshire: the new sixth-form wing, the splendid new sports hall and all-weather football pitches. Unfortunately some of the teachers are abysmal.

Yes, teachers are often incompetent, agrees the woman – incompetent or uninterested.

If only parents and students had the authority to grade those who teach. However, that is a different obsession.

The road climbs beyond the river into hill country that guidebooks refer to as the ‘Switzerland of Mexico’. The hills are steep and green; fat dairy cattle graze paddocks studded with huge shade trees. Two hundred kilometres is far enough for my first day and I ride into San Andres de Los Tuxtlas in mid-afternoon.

San Andres is mostly modern and pleasant enough, although not worth a detour. I find a hotel that could be charming with a minimum of thought and effort. I park the bike in the courtyard and a young man shows me a room on the first floor with a view over tiled roofs. A kinder person would have helped carry my bags upstairs. I manage the rack box and the backpack and then return for the two satchels. I shower and change into clean chinos and a clean sports shirt. A bootblack on the square polishes my shoes. I have only the one pair: Church’s good brown English leather.

I find a unisex barber upstairs in a mini-mall. One of the two chairs is occupied by a young woman having the lights in her hair brightened. Her friend, an older woman, shares a sofa with two men. One of the men is advising the other on debt-collection strategy:

‘Go when you know he’s not there. His mother-in-law is always home. Give her the impression that whatever is between you and her son-in-law is a secret. Say you’ll come back the following evening. She’ll have a whole night to get out of him what you want. You know what she’s like – a real demon. She’ll make life hellish for him. He’ll be happy to pay.’

A second barber trims my beard while the others discuss provincial cuisine. The barber and the debt adviser boast of a local fish stew. They accompany me to a street-front open booth staffed by a round-bodied grandma. Walls and floor are tiled in white. There are three gas burners, a fridge, four sets of plastic tables and chairs. The stew is a deliciously rich mix of spicy shrimp, prawns, crab and octopus. We split a couple of beers and pay four dollars each.

Later I find an internet café close by the hotel. One side of the café is divided into private cabins occupied by shrieking teenagers, mostly female. I can’t post pictures – the connection is too slow.

Catemaco, Wednesday 17 May

I get up at six. I ride south over beautiful green hills to a magnificent lake set against a backdrop of mountains. The movie Medicine Man with Sean Connery was filmed in the nearby ecoreserve. I eat breakfast on a lakeside terrace among old friends from the flower and bird kingdoms. Bougainvillea shades the terrace; there are orchids and bromeliads, egrets, herons, cormorants, a bad-tempered roadrunner up a palm tree. One bird insistently calls weeah-weeah-weeah; another, peepee-peepee; a third imitates a cat’s meow.

Out on the lake men dive from row boats for tegogolos, a type of freshwater crab. Sun breaks over the water. The mountains are a smoky blue. A cool breeze blows off the water. Total joy. Except for the tasteless coffee.

I ride back through San Andres to San Salvador Tuxlas. San Salvador is a small, clean, pretty town of low single-storey buildings set on a river. The largest known carved stone head from the Olmac period sits in a small temple in the middle of the central square. The massive sculpture depicts a deeply depressed gentleman – perhaps he received his tax bill in the morning post. A small museum on the square displays superb ceramics. I sign the visitors’ book.

The curator notes my nationality: ‘The English invented football.’

‘No,’ I reply. ‘The English invented rules.’

Out in the square, an early-thirties Mexican rides by on a gleaming quarter-horse. Bridle and saddle are true Mexican finery. So are his riding chaps – carved leather. Turquoise studs the silver band on his Stetson and the silver circlet on his string tie. He sits upright as a bronze statue, raised right hand drooping the reins loose. This is his town. He knows how good he looks: the equestrian equivalent of a pimp in his pimpmobile.

The horse is gorgeous.

I pass nothing but fat horses and fat dairy cows for the next eighty kilometres. The road follows the river through rolling hills. The land flattens and farms change from grass paddocks and clumps of woodland to fields of pineapple. Hitting federal highway 175, I turn north to Tuxtepeca. I flinch and the bike trembles as convoys of big trailer trucks thunder past. Drivers are kindly and allow me ample space. The country is flat and drier. Vast fields of pineapple seem sucked into the distant heat haze. Huge trees shade patches of water.

I rest at a fruit-juice stand run by a plump, good-looking woman in her early thirties. She drops a whole pineapple into a press operated by a long handle of galvanised pipe on which she thrusts her full weight. She asks what country I come from. I drink juice to the Beatles (‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’) played loud on a small CD player.

The woman is single. She tells me that Mexican men are too machisto. She dreams of living in Canada and marrying a man who treats her as an equal. She plays ‘Yellow Submarine’ as I remount. Two more hours to Tuxtepeca.

Tuxtepeca is a modern agro-industrial city of no great interest. However, I find a good folding knife for a few dollars, a spoon and a small plastic bowl to make my own fruit salad of enormous grapes, mango and crisp apple. I have completed 470 kilometres since Veracruz on thirteen litres of gas, or roughly a hundred miles to the gallon. More important is the freedom of being on a bike, taking whatever road I wish, stopping where I want and for as long as I want. Tomorrow is the big one.

Tuxtepeca, Thursday 18 May

Cortés first saw what is now Mexico City from the head of a mountain pass at 3000 metres. Ahead of me lies a pass of 2900 metres. Cortés rode a horse. I ride a 125 cc Honda. Cortés was the boss and could commandeer a fresh horse from his companions. I can’t change bikes. Cortés went on to conquer Mexico. Reach the top and I will have conquered much of my fear of this trip and may go on to reach Tierra del Fuego. This is not so grand an ambition, but I am not a great man. I am merely a writer of moderately mediocre novels.

Tuxtepeca is sixty metres above sea level. I leave at six in the morning. For the first sixty kilometres the road follows a wide river valley between fields of sugarcane. The mountains ahead are hidden in cloud. The valley narrows. I top up the gas tank and add my long-sleeved cord shirt over a sports shirt and thermal vest.

Up, up, up. The road is carved out of the mountainside. Rainforest blankets the almost vertical mountain face. The road twists and turns and twists. Many bends turn the road back on itself. Cloud and mountain hide the sun. I shiver in the chill morning mountain air and stop to add a second thermal vest and a second sports shirt beneath the long-sleeved shirt.

Up. The climb is endless. I overtake a bus. I pass an abandoned pickup. I am in second gear, sometimes first. Fear for the bike, for the engine, is paramount.

Up. The pain in the right side of my chest could be a muscle twinge. It could be my heart. I recall being felled by pain in my chest and arm and crawling across the floor in my hotel room and begging for a doctor. That was fifteen years ago in the mountains of Guatemala. It is extremely foolish of an old Brit on heart medication to be on a tiny bike on a Mexican mountain pass. I am scared that I won’t make it. I take deep chill drags into my lungs, testing the air for oxygen. My fingers are numb (cold or tension?). I stop and wave my arms around to restore the circulation and put on a third sports shirt and my short-sleeved jumper. A gap in the undergrowth shows the clouds way below. I take photographs. I remount the bike. My legs feel weak. Turning downhill, I jump-start the engine before continuing the climb.

Up. A lone pine appears among the broadleaf canopy. A further five kilometres and the pines have the victory, the road twisting up through an open forest carpeted with small feathery ferns. The clouds are way down where they should be when you look down from an aeroplane. From an aeroplane, clouds look soft and fluffy and beautiful. From way up here on the mountain road, they are a frightening reminder of how far you will fall if you make a mistake.

Up. The cramp in my left side is fractionally more intense – or is this pain the product of a fiction writer’s over-vivid imagination?

I have neither passed nor been passed by a vehicle in thirty minutes. I am alone, totally alone.

Up. The sun hits the pines and I inhale the familiar tar scent of childhood Scottish summers. The trees thin. The summit must be close. The road follows the crest of a ridge. For the first time on the climb I see down to both my left and my right. I stop in the sun to take a photograph. I don’t dismount and I keep the motor running. The bus that I had overtaken earlier creeps by and stops. The driver and another man jump down to ask whether I need help.

I long to know how far we are from the summit of the pass. Instead, I play British and say that I am just fine.

Up the last few hundred metres, and then over the brow and halt at a café on the right side of the road. My legs tremble as I dismount. The driver and passengers from the bus gather round. One of them asks, ‘Hey, grandfather, how old are you?’

I tell him and another asks where I am going.

‘Argentina,’ I say. ‘Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego …’ For the first time, I truly believe that I can make it.

The woman of the café brings coffee and sets a chair against the wall in the sun. I sit and absorb the warmth while the bus passengers ask questions as to my true intention and where I come from and does my wife approve of my absence and how many children do I have and what do they think of my travels?

I answer with what has become my standard reply: ‘What should I do with the last years of my life? Sit in front of the TV?’

‘No,’ They all agree. ‘It is a good thing to travel, to meet different people.’

The woman of the café shouts at her daughter to check the hens for fresh eggs. I eat the eggs scrambled with spicy chorizo, a side serving of refried beans and warm tortillas. The fresh orange juice is perfect. Unfortunately, the coffee is watery and tastes of mud. For once I don’t give a damn. I have climbed 2900 metres. The sun is warm. Ahead lies that queen of Mexican cities, Oaxaca, and then country after country, pathways to the romance of exploration and experience.

The road down is equally steep and serpentine. I have to remind myself continually to sit back and not put all my weight on my hands, otherwise my fingers cramp. The valley into which the road descends is dry and dusty, the trees scrappy, the greens of the vegetation lacking the voluptuousness of the northern face. Road signs are immaculate, black curves hand-painted on a yellow background. Each sign is an attempt to portray the road ahead. Common is a broad squiggle rising to a strong arrowhead. There is the tight bend and the right-angled bend and sometimes a double right-angled bend. Most serious is the written warning of a dangerous curve – a curve tighter than a right-angle, that turns back on itself. The boys on bikes would have a ball.

I rest halfway down at a café opposite a primary school and drink fresh orange juice. I chat with the café owners. They have a son in El Norte – the North, the United States. A US flag hangs on the wall. The road climbs again through dry, dusty mountains. The pass is lower than the first. I am more confident.

Finally I arrive in Oaxaca. I have ridden 230 kilometres. Apart from the first short stretch and the immediate approach to the city, I have encountered no more than two straight stretches of road of 200 metres or so.

My intended hotel has disappeared since the publication of my guidebook. I find another, shower and hunt a shoemaker to replace the leather soles on my only shoes. I sit in the shop and chat to the woman owner for an hour and a half. I then stroll in re-shod splendour to the zócalo, the central square, in front of the cathedral. On the way I spot the Hotel Central on Independencia, possessor of a charming patio, and book a room for the following night. In the zócalo, I sit at a café, order a cold beer and chat to my neighbours at the next table. Rain spatters the square and I delay leaving. The rain only strengthens. Suddenly very tired, I walk the few blocks in the rain to my hotel. It isn’t there. Stores are closing. Everything looks different in the dim light of the few street lamps. I walk and circle and retrace my steps and begin again. The rain has become a torrent. I can’t see through my spectacles. My feet hurt. Everything hurts. I spot, through an open doorway, an obvious foreigner, a young blonde woman, writing emails at a computer. I circle the block once more, the rain ever heavier. I return to the young woman, an American, explain my idiocy – that I can’t find my hotel and don’t recall its name – and ask whether she has a guidebook. She has the Lonely Planet. My hotel isn’t listed. I try one last time to find it and then return to the Hotel Central. I feel immensely foolish as I explain my predicament and lack of luggage and ask for a room. I drop my soaked clothes on the floor and crawl into bed.

CHAPTER 4
Oaxaca

Oaxaca, Friday 19 May

The Hispanic buildings of Oaxaca glow a soft rose in the morning sun. The Hotel Central is a resurrected Spanish colonial townhouse two blocks from the zócalo. My room is furnished with period copies: bed and bedside cupboard, wardrobe, table and an upright chair. A simple cloister surrounds three sides of a flag-stoned patio where a neighbouring restaurant serves breakfast and light meals. Comfortable benches stand against the cloister wall; there are tubs of red hibiscus and jasmine.

This morning I dress in wet clothes and go in search of my bike and luggage. I find the hotel immediately. It is where I knew it was. I searched this street in the rain again and again last night. Fatigue must have left me confused. I need to be more careful. Hence my decision to enjoy a day of rest – although first I will leave the bike at the local Honda agent for its first service.

Mid-afternoon and I work at an internet café without the coffee and a connection that takes forever. In San Andres Tuxlas, I spent an hour trying to post photographs. No hope. Oaxaca is as bad and the mouse has a habit of sticking.

In the evening I sit on the steps in the zócalo and watch a poorly attended political rally. The speakers are drowned by a twenty-piece dance band playing outside the cathedral. A schoolteacher tells me that there will be a strike tomorrow. He asks whether I am an American. I answer that I am English and he sits beside me: ‘That ignorant Bush. All the hypocrisy of celebrating the fall of the Berlin wall. Now he’s building a wall to keep us out. For us the border is meaningless; we all have relations on both sides.’

Oaxaca, Saturday 20 May

Oaxaca, city of churches. The exteriors are uniformly simple and beautiful. As to the interiors, my prejudices are in good shape. I find the interior of the cathedral abysmal; railings enclose the central aisle and great iron gates forbid entrance to the side chapels. Sinful to chop such magnificent space into tiny pens.

In San Felipe Neri, the vast altarpiece reminds me of the worst excesses of Ukraine’s Orthodox decor.

And yet, professing to love simplicity, why am I overwhelmed by the beauty of Santo Domingo’s interior with its voluptuous basting of gold leaf? To see this one great church is worth the trip to Mexico.

Most touching to me is the Church of the Society of Jesus. A side chapel is dedicated to the Society’s martyrs. I read their names and dates written on the walls and am welcomed by familiars of my Catholic childhood: Edmund Campion, Hugh Walpole, Edmund Arrowsmith. Such English names. I sit in the peace and quiet of the chapel as if among old friends. High above the arched entrance to the chapel is an inscription: Compañeros de Jesus, amigos en el Señor. In the chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary is written in thirteen indigenous Mexican languages and in both Spanish and English: ‘Am I not here for I am your mother …’

The Catholic Church in the USA, Ireland and England may be disgraced for its shielding of sexual predators, but in Mexico the Church is very much alive. These churches are the temples of today’s Mexico. Services are full. At any hour you find a scattering of people at private prayer. Watch people cross themselves as they pass on the pavement. The one danger to the Church in Latin America is that a reactionary pope will enforce its withdrawal from the active struggle for social justice.

A day of sightseeing and I retire in the evening to a café on the zócalo, order a bowl of soup and people-watch. Mexicans of all classes dress smartly for Saturday evening in the city. A group of US students stride at speed diagonally across the square. Unbrushed hair, shorts and T-shirts, sandals, sleeveless tops: these young seem to me so untidy and disrespectful of local mores.

Disrespectful or uncaring? Theirs is the ascendant culture.

Oaxaca, Sunday 21 May

I attend Mass at the first church built in Oaxaca – San Juan de Dios: simple in decor, white altarpiece decorated with eight big vases of white dahlias. My travels are solitary and I recharge my human contact batteries by shaking hands at the end of the service with neighbours in the congregation.

Later I visit a small orphanage run by two nuns, one Mexican and the other from Chile. My companions are a paediatrician who gives his free time to the orphanage, his architect wife and their few-months-old daughter. Our arrival coincides with the children’s midday meal. The children range from six to eighteen years. Not all of them are true orphans; some have only one deceased parent. However, all come from a background of crippling poverty. Some have suffered permanent brain damage inflicted by long-term protein deficiency. Others are openly intelligent.

I congratulate the Chilean nun, a woman in her early sixties, on the extraordinary peace that reigns in the refractory. ‘La lucha,’ she replies. ‘La lucha.’ A daily struggle.

So comment Cubans on life under Castro, El Commandante en Jefe.

A six-year-old holds out her arms to me to be lifted, then buries her face in my shoulder. Later, a small boy installs himself on my lap as I chat with fourteen-year-old Theodora who has ambitions to be a secretary and, as she admits shyly, a writer.

Boys, four to a room, sleep on the ground floor; girls are upstairs. The older girls share with the younger ones, as mother substitutes. Toy rubber and plastic animals stand on the dividing walls between the girls’ showers. This is a gentle place for kids to grow, gentle and filled with love – so unlike those erstwhile Irish orphanages in which generations of children suffered abuse.

I am told few foreigners frequent or know of the restaurant where we lunch. We eat at a table in the garden. I blanch as the paediatrician orders cockroaches. Thank God ‘cockroach’ is the local slang for crayfish tails grilled on charcoal. And thank God (or the generosity of the paediatrician) that I never see the bill – I suspect that it would have been more than I usually pay for my food in a week.

Conversation turns to politics. Mexico was ruled for decades with enforced corruption by the Party of the Institutionalised Revolution (a splendidly Orwellian name). In the present election, presidential candidates from the ruling conservative PAN and the socialists are abreast in the opinion polls. The paediatrician expects and hopes for a socialist victory. He is dark-skinned, from a peasant family and worked his way through medical school. He was expected to practise as a state-employed GP out in the country. In studying to become a specialist, he was handicapped by racism among senior doctors in the hospital. Nurses were instructed to report him as drunk if he came to the hospital at night to visit patients. He talks of the countryside and a system of land tenure instituted by the revolution, which condemns the peasantry to poverty. Often they are better off selling their land to big landowners and working for wages. They are victims either way. Many leave to find work in the city. There is no work. Few Mexican manufacturers can survive competition from China and its cripplingly low labour rates.

Oaxaca, Monday 22 May

A day of expectations: I am due to talk to students at two public high schools. I rise early, brush, shower and shave. Clean shirt, clean trousers. My shoes were polished yesterday evening. I breakfast on the patio with two Chilean diplomats and watch a hummingbird poke his beak in the red hibiscus. I wheel the bike out to the road. Teachers within the Oaxaca state system have come out on strike. The teachers are heading for the city.

I visit the most prestigious of Oaxaca’s private schools, Blaise Pascal. While waiting to be interviewed by the headmistress, I sit in the shade of a jacaranda tree outside the school caféteria. Mid-morning break heralds the any-school-in-the-world charge. In Herefordshire, students demand bacon butties. Here, the favourite is stuffed tortillas. Dress is less formal: jeans, trainers, school sweatshirts.

The paediatrician asked yesterday whether I found Mexico racist. I replied that it was difficult for a foreigner to be sure, that I believed it was less so among the younger generation. Now I watch the younger generation in their break. At my age, so much is a reminder of the past. I spot one splendidly sulky, heavy-jowled Catalan matron of fifty going on seventeen. A group at a table are identical in gesture and in the way they laugh to my son Josh and his friends. I see no demarcation by colour. Do I know how to look?

Two teachers have called in sick (the strike?). The head of the English department, an Englishman, is delighted to inflict me on his students. A young Mexican American is in charge of my first class. This is her first day teaching at the school. Classes are conducted in English and she asks me to speak to the students in English. Most of the students are sixteen. I relate a little of my background as a writer and the purposes of my journey. I search faces for irritation, boredom, contempt.

I ask in Spanish whether they understand, more or less.

These are teenagers. Naturally they respond with silence.

‘More?’ I ask.

More silence.

‘Or less?’

This raises a shy laugh.

I ask for questions. From teenagers? Stand out from the group? Am I crazy? They will keep their questions for each other out of class.

So I ask the questions. How many have relatives in the north – the US? Four raise their hands. What do they think of Bush planning to build a wall?

‘Stupid,’ a girl says, and the class nods.

They know of Condoleezza Rice?

Yes.

She made a speech in Europe stating that Americans never torture. Do they agree?

Nobody moves.

Have they understood? I rephrase the question. ‘How many of you believe that the American government condones torture?’

Serious stuff is embarrassing. They whisper to each other. One raises his hand, then another, then all together – although no more than shoulder height.

I ask what differences exist between their parents’ generation and their own.

‘The way we think,’ a girl answers to general agreement.

‘Think in what way?’ I ask.

‘You know,’ accompanied by a teenage shrug that I recognise from home as a definite end to the conversation.

I try a different tack. ‘I have sons. Jed is sixteen, Josh twenty. If I asked them the same question, they would say that I wouldn’t understand. That’s what you tell your parents, right?’

Laughter.

A boy asks, ‘What do you think the differences are?’

This seems of general interest – or it gets them off the hook of being required to supply answers themselves.

I say that that I made my first trip through Mexico in the early eighties. I don’t recall ever seeing young people kiss on the street. Now it is moderately commonplace.

‘What else?’ a girl asks.

I think, what the hell? Go for it. I tell them of the paediatrician’s accusations of racism – that I had been watching them at the canteen.

They wait.

I say, ‘I’m a foreigner. I can’t tell. I don’t know how to look – although it seems to me that, if racism does exist, it is less common among your generation.’

These kids are from wealthy families, pale to bronzed. Many glance involuntarily at a dark girl in the front row. What would she say? And will they discuss the subject among themselves after class? Or will they dismiss me as a silly old foreign fool?

I take two more classes of the same age group, the last on the approach to midday break. Students are keen to get out of class. I stand by the door and slow them by relating, as a lone traveller, the warmth of companionship I feel when shaking hands after Mass. The students shuffle into line. Although embarrassed, they are generous of nature and smile as they clasp my hand. A few even mumble one of those monosyllables that pass among teenagers as conversation.

I have one more class for a full fifty minutes in the afternoon. These are final-year students. Three of the male students make it clear that I am a nobody and talk instead to their girlfriends. One of the girls asks permission to visit the bathroom. I say that I am not a teacher – that whether she goes to the bathroom or not is her decision. A second girl asks and I give her the same answer.

Three girls in the front ask me about writing and what books I read and what I know of Latin American writers. Great. We form a foursome and leave the other students to their own devices. I am delighted that they discuss only Hispanic American writers. Having just read Like Water for Chocolate earns me a little street cred. Two of them are admirers of the Márquez/Allende brand of fantasy/mysticism. I suggest Salman Rushdie as Márquez’ equal and more directly political. The third girl is more taken by reality and politics.

I end by telling all those that remain in the classroom, the conversationalists who have ignored me (those that haven’t gone to the bathroom and stayed there or wherever they stayed), that I had been asked by the first class what changes I saw between theirs and their parents’ generation. I had seen four male students enter the headmistress’s office wearing baseball caps. None of their parents would have been so ill-mannered.

Striking teachers have been arriving in Oaxaca all day. They stretch tarpaulins across streets in the city centre, and make beds of flattened cardboard boxes on the pavement. Hundreds sleep on footpaths and in the centre of the street. They lie curled on their sides and they lie on their backs. Some, accustomed to good mattresses, can’t sleep. Tourists duck under the tarpaulins as they wend their way to and from the cafés on the zócalo. On each street and square, small groups of union officials gather in conclave.

The Chilean diplomats and I talk until late on the hotel patio. Chile has a new president, Michelle Bachelet, a socialist and a single mother. Her father was arrested for opposing the US-backed anti-Allende coup and died in prison. Both the new president and her mother were arrested and tortured.

Richard Helms was the CIA director.

Henry Kissinger was US secretary of state.

Richard Milhous Nixon was US president.

Helms and Nixon are dead. Kissinger is revered as an elder statesman.

The Chilean diplomats find it ironic that so many socialist governments have been elected in Latin America during George W. Bush’s neocon administration. Add the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, and Bush, by his own conservative standards, is the most unsuccessful president in US history.

As to Britain, the Chileans are disgusted that Tony Blair, a professed socialist and leader of a Labour government, should have enslaved himself to US neo-cons.

Road to Tehuantepec, Tuesday 23 May

Seven in the morning and the ten central city blocks of Oaxaca resemble a refugee camp and already stink of human urine and faeces. Imagine if the strike continues for a week, or even a month – as it has in the past.

This strike is an annual affair and coincides with the run-up to final exams. The exams are cancelled, with all students given a fictitious pass grade into university. Universities then have no idea as to the true achievements of their entry students. Meanwhile hotels and small shopkeepers despair at the loss of tourist income.

How will the strike affect the presidential election on 2 June? Mexico’s TV commentators are invariably white and right. In the past week, a vituperative press and TV campaign (financed by the oligarchy) has put the PAN (Conservative) candidate marginally ahead of the centre left.

Oaxaca has been good to me. The Hotel Central, its staff and its lovely patio provided a home from home. The owners were immensely kind and hospitable, and both informative and intellectually provocative. All but four of the students at Blaise Pascal were courteous and patient. The kids at the orphanage were loving and deserve to be much loved. The church congregation blessed me with their companionship. Now back on the bike.

I take the road to Mitla. The ruins at Mitla are ancient. I try to find them interesting. My imagination won’t function. My guidebooks ignore the road northeast from Mitla towards Zapotec so I take it out of cussedness. The road climbs for eighty kilometres. The ascent is more gradual than the ascent from Tuxtepeca. I feel fine. However, I am growing familiar with the Honda’s performance and I know that we are well above 2000 metres. This is a dry country of thin soil and dust and rock. The mountains seem endless. Cactus forest gives way to conifers. Branches are tipped with flared bunches of bright green needles, looking like something between a bright-green lavatory brush and the grass skirt of a whirling ballet dancer.

For the traveller, the views are magnificent. However, real people inhabit the scattering of villages that cling to the mountain, with lives of a terrifying harshness.

I pass through a small town. Election time and an obvious politician (white, naturally) waves and wastes on me a dentifrice smile as I bump over a sleeping policeman. He is playing at being one of the boys for the day. He stands beside a gleaming double-cab pearl-grey pickup. I buy a bottle of water at an open-fronted stall and watch a while as he glad-hands the townsfolk.

A vast building is under construction above the town. On flat land you would presume it was an aircraft hanger. I ask a middle-aged male passer-by and he tells me it is a conference centre. Here? Up a mountain? The entire population of these barren mountains might fill half of it.

The man grins and says, ‘Algo politico’. Something political – magnificently visible proof of a politician’s interest in his electorate – what North Americans refer to as ‘pork-barrel politics’.

I ask how people survive.

Every family has members in El Norte.

‘Ilegales?’

‘Claro.’ Clearly.

Near the top of the pass, the road surface changes from tar to dirt. A road sign at an intersection names places that I don’t find on the map. I haven’t seen a car or a truck in the past half-hour. Vultures and buzzards float far overhead. I’m a little nervous. Nervous? Frightened? Yes, a little frightened. The space is overwhelming. Such emptiness.

An ancient pickup pulls alongside. The radiator belches steam. Both the driver and his companion are darkly featured. Raggedy parkas puff them up so that they seem square – memories of the dwarfs in Snow White. Neither man has shaved in a while. The driver has long hair. I don’t have much confidence.

I ask which road leads to Zapotec and how far.

‘Very far.’

‘Is the road dirt all the way?’

‘Yes, dirt all the way.’

‘Good dirt?’

The driver shrugs. ‘Some good, some bad.’

‘Very bad,’ confirms his companion.

The driver rams the pickup into gear and lets out the clutch.

Would retracing my route be wise or cowardly? Fear of seeming cowardly has dumped me in many a catastrophe over the years. I am older and wiser – or older and more cowardly. Either way, I turn and swoop back down the mountains and take the Pacific Highway to Tehuantepec. The highway follows a river, the river escapes, the road recaptures it. The road surface is excellent. I make good time. The coastal heat beckons. Vast trucks creep upwards or race past on their descent to the port at Salina del Cruz. Coaches gleam in their livery.

I stop for a juice at a roadside shack. The woman owner is thrilled that I am a Brit. Her daughter, Patti, is learning English at high school. Patti is shouted for. Patti has fled. She is captured and returned to a table in the shade at the side of the shack. She is a shy girl with a sweet smile and a few last remnants of puppy fat.

The mother waits expectantly for her daughter to speak English. Patti looks glum. I imagine doing the same with Jed if a Spaniard passed by. Jed would kill both me and the Spaniard. Patti, thank God, is a pacifist.

A car stops and Mum leaves to serve the driver and passengers. Patti and I speak in Spanish. Patti says that she has learnt a few English words and can write a little but has no practice in speaking.

Jed and his friends would say the same of school French – although, as with Patti, they would probably succeed in conversing if left alone with someone of their own age.

Mum returns and I assure her that we have been speaking English.

Mum beams.

Patti looks grateful. I give her one of my visiting cards: El Viejo y Su Moto. The old man and his bike.

A further fifty kilometres to the coastal plain: the Honda kicks up its heels. We speed at ninety kilometres an hour. Ha! to Jed and his friends who mock that I even delay other oldies when driving our ancient Honda Accord back home.

Tehuantepec is a small town, peaceful after Oaxaca. Most houses are single-storey. Good signposting leads me directly to the central square. A heavily built townsman is parking a big Nissan. I ask directions to an economical hotel and find myself a block away at the Doraji. The hotel has a welcoming central patio and a large café. I take a spotless single room with fan and functional bathroom on the top floor.

It is late and most restaurants are closed. Fortunately the café around the corner at the Hotel Oasis is open. I eat devilled prawns (yes, once again). And so to bed.

Tehuantepec, Wednesday 24 May

Tehuantepec is home to a tribe of Boadiceas. For the ignorant, Boadicea was a Brit queen reputed to have minced invading Roman soldiers beneath scythes attached to the wheels of her chariot. Tehuantepec’s Boadiceas stand in the back of moto-caros – small three-wheeled trucks based on a motorcycle and always driven by men. I haven’t seen these elsewhere in Mexico. The women wear long dresses and appear imposingly fierce. I avoid being minced and discover the Caféteria Pearl on the street opposite the Hotel Oasis: excellent breakfast – eggs, ham, juice.

I return to the hotel and brush my false teeth. Idiot! I drop them on the tiled floor. The upper plate snaps in three places.

The concierge at the Doraji directs me across the church square to an orthodontist. The orthodontist, Fernando, is dark-skinned and medium rotund. He has ambitions to be a writer. I sit at his desk and read a polemic. Here is deep anger at the PAN (Conservatives), the oligarchy and their servants in the media. Fernando has no expectations that the candidate of the PRD (centre left), Obrador, can cure the ills of Mexico. But at least Obrador would try.

So much for politics. We progress to Fernando’s first novel, almost complete. We discuss personal loves. Fernando recommends the Mexican realists (Jose Emilio Pacheco: Las Batallas en el Desierto).

My teeth are fixed. Fernando drives me to his home. We drink beer. Fernando’s wife Elena serves us enough nibbles to feed an army. Their sons arrive: Juan Pablo, eighteen, and young Fernando, almost sixteen. The boys have a band. They won a national youth competition with their rendition of ‘Californication’ by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers – my son Josh’s favourite group. Josh has seen them live twice.

The sitting room is uninhabitable, every chair and sofa covered with assembled and disassembled and partially assembled pieces of sound and recording equipment. We sit in the dining room. Out come electric guitars. Juan Pablo sings Pink floyd – Josh’s other favourite. We drink more beer. Elena places more food on the table. Young Fernando fails to connect to my website: while downloading music, they have infected their computer with a splendid array of viruses. Their father keeps his laptop locked in his office. The sons protest that they need a new computer. This computer is six months old and already an antique. Where have I heard this conversation? Guess. We are in Old Home Week!

Fernando insists that I must see a side to Tehuantepec no foreigner visits. Juan Pablo accompanies us. Young Fernando has school in the afternoon. Elena owns a mobile phone store and must attend to business.

I should have guessed from Fernando’s girth that he wishes to show me a restaurant. The restaurant is on the banks of a canal ten kilometres out of town. The family swim in the canal on Sundays before and after eating. Today Fernando orders monster shellfish cocktails of shrimp, baby octopus, oysters and crab in a hot sauce. A dish of grilled crayfish follows. And we talk.

Young Juan Fernando is off to university in Mexico City this year to read history and intends to be a research historian. We discuss Bush and Blair and an ignorance of history that has led them into the Iraq war. We discuss the border that is not a border. They refer, as do most Mexicans, to ‘El Norte’ rather than ‘the United States’.

Fernando has brought a bottle of Terry brandy. We discuss the European Union. Then racism.

My doctor friend from Oaxaca suffered from racism at medical school and while working as an intern. So has Fernando. Fernando wonders at the Islamic ghettos created in English cities. He asks how he would be treated in an English taverna – a pub. Would he be mistaken for a Muslim and be in danger?

More probably a West Indian, I answer, and no, he wouldn’t be in danger.

I am seated across the table from Fernando and his son. Beyond them are the canal and a line of great trees shading the water. This is one of the most pleasurable meals of my life, both in food and in conversation. I am incredibly fortunate and deeply grateful.

Back in town I duck into Elena’s shop to offer thanks for such hospitality. Elena gives me a medal of the Virgin of Guadalupe to watch over my travels. I leave her store. The steel security shutter isn’t fully raised. My forehead crashes into its edge. Blood flows down my face. Rather than display the Virgin’s failure, I stride off across the square. Elena must think me exceedingly rude for not turning back to wave goodbye.

The concierge at the hotel finds disinfectant and a plaster. She and a maid and I sit in the lobby and watch a Mexican TV soap. All the characters are white or whitish. Certainly none is indigenous. The maid and the concierge are medium dark. Wine and Terry brandy have made me mischievous. I ask the concierge whether the soap is Mexican.

The maid giggles at my stupidity. ‘Of course it is Mexican.’

‘But the characters: are they Mexican?’

‘Of course they are Mexican.’

I admit to being confused. ‘From which part of Mexico do they come? Is there a province where all Mexicans are white?’

How could I believe such nonsense?

‘But look at the soap,’ I say. ‘Even the servants are white. Everyone I see on television is white – except on the news programmes. Although the presenters are always white.’

The concierge says, ‘It’s true.’ And to the maid, ‘Yes, it’s true.’

They were content watching the soap. I have made them uncomfortable. The job of a writer is to provoke thought – particularly uncomfortable thought. I wish that I were a better writer. What is worthy in a good writer is merely arrogance in the mediocre.

Chapter 5
The Monk and Mister Big

An idyllic beach, Thursday 25 May

Be patient. This chapter concerns a small Mexican village on the Pacific coast, a community in which the villagers take turns collecting garbage, being police officer or whatever requires doing. The community is under threat.

I heard of the village from a delightful young Irish traveller in Oaxaca, Eoin Hennessy. Eoin was flying home from Mexico City after exploring much of South and Central America. Eoin was the first person with whom I had talked in English since boarding the bus in Dallas. He suffered my verbal diarrhoea patiently, learnt of my interest in students and told me of a Korean American teaching at a school in a village on the Pacific coast: surely a curious and unique combination? The village is 145 kilometres north. I should head south to Guatemala but the temptation to investigate is too strong.

What a morning! A heavy rain fell in the night and you can taste a sharp fresh cleanliness to the air. An excellent highway unwinds through hills speckled with the white blossom of frangipani trees and trees that resembles wild figs. There are sudden patches of deep-rose creeper and startling blue. Vultures and buzzards hang overhead on dawn patrol for whatever has been squashed by the night’s traffic. Between the hills, I catch glimpses of the sea and miles of deserted beach. I rested yesterday. My bum has un-numbed. This is biking at its best.

A short stretch of newly laid concrete track leads off the coastal highway. The concrete ends at the crest of a ridge. I ride cautiously downhill on powdery dirt to the village. I park at a home on the square opposite an obviously official building and enquire of a man seated in one of those bought-on-sale white plastic chairs whether the building is the school. He asks why and I relate my search for a Korean American teacher.

‘Sit a little,’ he invites and introduces himself as Eduardo. The Korean (no villager refers to him as ‘the American’, not even ‘the Korean American’) doesn’t teach at the school. He gives private lessons. He lives in a house nearer the beach. At this early hour he will be watching the surf through binoculars.

Eduardo will lead me to the Korean’s home. In a short while Eduardo will collect the village garbage in the black Ford pickup that he has driven home from El Norte. Collecting the garbage is the time for Eduardo to show me the house that the Korean occupies. Meanwhile I must give an account of myself and why I wish to meet with the Korean.

Children surround us, a small tribe, the elders perhaps listening while the young giggle and shove each other. Eduardo is in no hurry. I must adjust to the slow tempo of his investigation.

I recount my journey and that I am a writer, an Ingles.

‘Inglaterra? Is that close to El Norte?’

‘Not close,’ I say. ‘In Europe. In the north of Europe.’

Perhaps satisfied, Eduardo relates a little of his own life, of the three years in Taos where he worked as a roofer for a gringo, a good employer who insured his workers, even the ilegales – fortunate, as Eduardo injured two fingers while on a roof.

In turn, I speak of my father-in-law, a fine, dearly beloved Irishman. He came to England in search of work as a labourer and his arm was trapped in a cement mixer while he worked alone on the roof of a tall apartment building.

My father-in-law and two of his brothers came to England on the false promise of well-paid work. Eduardo paid a smuggler 1500 dollars to lead him across the frontier. Later Eduardo saved the same amount to have his wife brought across. A daughter was born in El Norte and has papers.

Eduardo intended returning to Taos in June. He is a good worker. His gringo employer keeps a job open for him. Now there are new laws in the north, and greater difficulties and dangers in crossing the frontier. Eduardo is unsure whether crossing is possible.

The economy of his family depends on his going. These are anxious times.

‘Do many villagers go to the north?’

‘Many,’ Eduardo says. ‘To Taos, alone, more than one hundred.’

‘Do they return?’

My question is stupid. Naturally people return. This is their village. Although now, those that are away will be afraid to return home. The new conditions will force them to stay in the north to be sure of sending money home. How could families survive without money? Here in the village there is no work.

Then, almost casually, Eduardo mentions the torneo.

In June an international surfing tournament will be held on the village beach. Outsiders are organisers of the tournament. The tournament will be shown on television and reported with photographs in magazines and newspapers. The village will be famous. Many people will visit.

‘More money will come,’ I suggest.

Eduardo agrees, although he seems uncertain, hesitant.

‘The value of property will rise.’

‘Yes,’ Eduardo says. ‘Yes, many people will wish to buy lots.’

I tell him of the early days in Ibiza, the fifties, and that all the young men were friends. We, the few foreigners, together with the Ibicencos, partied together. We went to the beach together, went fishing. Twenty years later my first wife, Cate, and I returned to Ibiza and dined at the Olive Tree in San Antonio. The owner was one of those young men.

‘How is Paco Tuels?’ we asked. ‘How is Juan Jesus? And Antonio of the Ferry?’

The restaurateur’s replies were non-committal. Later, when the rush had cleared, he sat at our table and we drank brandy together and he told us, sadly: ‘In the days you remember, we were all friends. Now we are business competitors.’

I follow Eduardo through the village and wait while he loads garbage from other families. Many of the homes are in that curious and very Mexican condition of waiting for more funds to be extended or finished or painted. It is a small village, at most a hundred houses, and easily swallowed – a small mouthful to a rich, powerful investor with the right political links. This was the story of Ibiza.

The road to the beach is gated. The village commune charges visitors an admission of ten pesos. Eduardo enquires for the Korean. The surf is good. He went to the beach an hour or more ago.

Eduardo stops my hunt for change. For me, entry to the beach is free. Thus I am placed under an obligation of friendship to the village. This seems to me to be quite deliberate. I am, of course, a writer, and possess a writer’s imagination.

The dirt track to the beach has been graded. A rich irrigated vegetable garden – huerto – of papaya and citrus lies below the track to the left. The huerto ends in a lagoon that fills at high tide and is flooded with fresh water when there is heavy rain. The track leads to a sand parking lot shaded by a few small trees. A concrete hut houses clean lavatories and showers – his and hers. A big palm-thatched hut, a palapa, shades a bar and kitchen and a score of standard white plastic tables and chairs. A few hammocks swing in the shade of an adjoining palapa. A steep hill hooks round the right end of a gently curving mile of perfect sand. The hill jabs a point of massive boulders into the sea. Waves break at the point. The surf is vertical and forms a perfect barrel again and again and again … and again.

The palapas belong to the community. Two young women tend the bar. One is remarkably pretty. An older woman is the cook. She should be described as the chef. The snapper she grills for me is perfect, skin crisp, flesh moist, a touch of garlic. But I get ahead of my story …

I ride into the parking lot and spot the Korean crossing from the palapa towards a 4x4. He is unmistakable. He possesses the perfect body of a movie Kung Fu warrior. He wears a towel draped over his head as if he were a monk striving to concentrate on his breviary or merely exclude the distractions of the outside world. The villagers call him ‘the Korean’. I prefer ‘the Monk’ – although I doubt that he is celibate.

I said, ‘I think I’ve come to see you.’

Even monks can be surprised.

I explain my mission – that a young Irishman had told me of him and that he teaches English at the village high school: that I have already learnt that this is incorrect, that he gives private lessons.

Much is happening in the village and the Monk is suspicious of my sudden appearance. He asks where I learnt of Eoin’s mistake and how I knew where to find him. I reply that Eduardo of the garbage informed me and add that this is a small village and that most villagers must know the Monk’s movements – certainly those who are interested.

The Monk admits this truth. However, he remains suspicious and excuses himself. He has students in the afternoon and must prepare.

‘Perhaps later,’ I suggest.

Yes, perhaps later – although he is unenthusiastic.

I order a beer in the palapa and watch the surfers out at the point. Later, I notice the Monk in conversation with a tall young blonde woman under the second palapa that shades the hammocks. The towel is up, protecting the Monk’s privacy.

A loud confident voice heralds the arrival of four men and a young, tall, good-looking woman, perhaps a gringa. The voice is a big burly man overaccustomed to dining people on a corporate expense account: black hair streaked with silver, clipped moustache, fleshy sensual ears. Confident of his power, he wears shorts and a T-shirt; the other three men are uncomfortably warm in slacks. One wears a long-sleeved shirt and round-lens spectacles and carries a briefcase. The gofer, I calculate, as he crosses to the bar to order. I catch his attention. We find that we share Cuba as an experience, he having studied tourism in Havana for two years. Now he is an official at the Department of Tourism.

‘The torneo,’ I presume – as if fluent in village happenings.

‘Yes, the torneo.’

Mister Big represents the money, the sponsors. He lays plans and papers on a table and does all the talking. I am at the far end of a double table and am unable to overhear. Frustrated, I order the grilled snapper at the bar and then return to the end of my table closest to the money group and can hear much of Mister Big’s discourse. The plans for the torneo show where marquees must be sited, new palapas, judges’ stands.

The gofer is a non-contributor – at most he holds a watching brief. Of the remaining two men, one is quiet and yet clearly necessary and in need of persuasion. Later I discover that he is the president of the community. The other man is also of the community. I will call him Mister Keen. He wears a shirt with no sleeves and a baseball cap and, in eagerness, leans across the table to hungrily inhale the big city power emanating from Mister Big. The woman interjects the occasional remark and orders watermelon from the bar. (Is she with Mister Big? Related to the sponsors? Or a TV company?)

Listening, I wonder what Mister Big really wants. Unbelievable that those behind him would fund, out of the goodness of their hearts, an international surf torneo on an unknown beach that possesses no infrastructure. I look down the perfect beach with the perfect surf and imagine the apartment blocks and the hotels and the swanky surf club at which the villagers will be servants. It strikes me as intolerably sad. Yet this is the perfect moment for the money men to make their move. The villagers fear a future in which passage to the north is closed. How many will reject alternative blandishments? How many can afford to resist?

I imagine that Mister Keen is already mounting the yes campaign.

And the president of the community? He seems bewildered, and as much by the physical force of Mister Big as by Mister Big’s fluent exercise of the language of persuasion.

The discussion ends. Mister Big rolls his plans and passes my table. He is professional in his attention to detail and has noticed my conversation with the gofer. Could I be influential in even the smallest way?

Am I being cruel, vindictive? Am I demeaning a decent man, a man who is naturally friendly (although friendliness is also his stock-in-trade)?

He delights with the open warmth and charm of his greeting.

‘How’s it going?’ I ask with equal warmth.

‘Difficult, although we’re giving them everything they ask for,’ he says – then dismisses the weight of difficulties with a lift of those powerful shoulders. ‘I’ve had easier tasks in the capital on major projects.’

‘In the capital you know who to pay,’ I say.

‘Precisely.’

My understanding is proof that we are on the same side – whatever the side is. He is employed by a company of lobbyists, men who know the right people, the movers and shakers who can make things happen. He writes his address and his email in my notebook. We shake hands and I watch him lead his group back to his outsized 4x4. He has a powerful walk and meets the world square on. Be crushed or move out of the way. And I muse sadly that the teeth are already here, the teeth of the mouth that will devour a community.

The staff of the palapa have observed Mister Big stop at my table and our conversation. Now they watch me, perhaps waiting. I worry that I am arrogant in judging the best interests of a community of which I know so little. What is now a simple surfer’s paradise is possibly a purgatory of penury for the villagers. And yet …

I order a fresh beer and sit at the table closest to the bar with my back to the sea and address the women. The torneo – what do they think?

They answer with small shrugs of uncertainty.

‘We will see,’ the pretty one says, and the others nod. Yes, they will see.

Yet it seems to me obvious that they have no concept of what they might see. I recall for them my first visit to Flores, a small town on a lake near the wondrous Maya site of Tikal in Guatemala. Thirty or more years ago the women of the town met at a different house each night to arrange the flowers and decorate the church. A mere ten years later, television had reached the town. I found only three women arranging the flowers. The rest were at home watching TV. The companionship of those evenings had been killed. The rich sense of community was dead. Nothing remained that would tempt their children to return.

The older woman, the chef, is the first to nod. I ask where I can sleep and the women direct me to a row of small wood-walled palapas by the entry gate. The owner was the first of the village to reach Taos. In Taos, he was legal and had his own business. He has returned for good. What does he think of the torneo?

‘We will see.’

I unload the bike, shower, change into shorts and return to the beach. The Monk is reading at the centre table beneath the palapa. The towel protects him.

Brave, I approach. I ask whether he is free. Might I sit with him? So we begin what quickly becomes a friendship to be treasured.

The Monk went to the US when he was eleven years old. He recounts his schooling in the US: of scholarships to private school in California, Berkeley and grad school at Harvard. He interspersed his later studies with spells in the world of banking. He was respectable. He did the right thing. He wore the right suit and the right shoes and the right tie. And sometimes he surfed.

Harvard Business School undid him. He was studying finance with grad students from similar money-management backgrounds. He discovered something missing in them. They had no fixed beliefs. Their judgement of right and wrong depended on the situation. These were the future leaders of corporate America. The Monk envisaged an endless parade of Enrons, of small investors bankrupted or robbed of their pensions. At first he was merely uncomfortable in their company. Perhaps he became nervous of infection. Perhaps he became nervous of his father’s judgement (his father is a famously crusading and respected newspaper editor back in Korea, a poet, a writer of important books). So the Monk loaded his surfboards on his truck and drove south and discovered a beach with the perfect wave.

Only later, and little by little, did he discover a community that was self-protecting and to which each member contributed. Teaching English is the Monk’s contribution. He teaches both children and adults. This seemed to him sufficient contribution until the torneo surfaced. He finds it remarkable that I understand the threat and that we share a near-apocalyptic vision. He suspects that I am an investigative journalist. He hopes that I am an investigative journalist.

I confess to being merely a mediocre novelist.

But I will write of this?

Certainly.

Will I write that Mister Big and his backers are paying the community 450 dollars for the use of the beach – that the community is to volunteer an unpaid workforce of 200 men to complement the 300 that Mister Big will import?

That the community has accepted so small a fee confirms the menace.

Mister Big must be licking his lips at such innocence.

For the moment, no land can be sold to an outsider without the community’s agreement. That could change. For the right people, political pressure is easily acquired – such is Mexico’s history. A major tourist development must be to the nation’s benefit (the developers’ benefit being synonymous with that of the nation).

The Monk’s nightmare is not the destruction of his perfect beach. It is that these people with little experience or understanding of the outside world, people who have welcomed him warmly, will lose the very special dignity that accompanies their independence; that they will be dispossessed and become servants in their own homes.

Already Mister Keen is working on their fears and tempting them with profit. Others have approached the Monk for advice. The Monk was a banker. He understands the worth of holding a torneo. So he advised them and was summoned by the representative of those with power and warned that, in interfering, he endangered himself.

Threatening the Monk is an error. He is his father’s son. He marshals his forces.

We share a simple dinner in the evening on the terrace of the local store. Light is by Coleman lantern. We drink cold Corona beer and listen to the quiet anger of the storekeeper: 450 dollars – so many children in the community and no health centre. A health centre should be the first of their demands.

The Monk and I are careful not to peer into the surrounding darkness. We sense the presence of other villagers listening, men and women hidden by the night.

I pay the vast sum of three dollars for six beers and a plate of meat-stuffed tacos.

And I ignore, with good humour, the belittling of my Honda by a chemically recalibrated surf addict mislaid by California who has joined us. The surf addict insists that 200 kilometres is the furthest I could ride the Honda in a day and that so small a bike is incapable of crossing the Altiplano.

The surfer has lived between Mexico and Central America for years and has been enlightened by the herbs and mushrooms of the region. He states as fact that corpses of seven-foot-tall aliens have been discovered in stone sarcophagi unearthed from the burial chambers beneath Central America’s pyramids. A friend of his witnessed the opening of a sarcophagus.

Later, in bed, I consider the senators and members of Congress in Washington – the decisions they make concerning the frontier that is not a frontier and of how little interest or understanding they have in the destructiveness of their decisions. Their one desire is to keep their snouts in the pork barrel. What value has a small community in Mexico? Let it die in the name of progress.

Pan-Americano, Friday 26 May

I am tempted to stay in this small village, to record the happenings. But I am committed to writing a different book, the book of my journey. This village is only a chapter. Let this be clear: I am totally unmoved at the mockery of my Honda and of my own stamina as a rider. The reader would be ridiculous in suspecting that I would be so adolescent (in my dotage) as to rise to the challenge of a hallucinating near-fifty (yes, all of that) surf addict. Never. Yet I find myself on the road at seven this morning and determined to reach Tapachula – 500 kilometres.

The coast road is glorious. Trees are in blossom and the Honda slices through fresh perfume. A freeway bypasses Salina del Cruz and Tehuantepec. I stop for breakfast at a roadside palapa. At the state border an official welcomes me to Chiapas.

‘To Argentina? Patagonia? Bravo!’ He shakes my hand and claps me on the back.

The Chiapas littoral is mile after mile of magnificent green paddocks. Cows and horses graze in the shade of trees that would dwarf the tallest oak in an English park. Cloud blankets the forested mountains that rise directly behind the ranches.

So my bum is numb – this is a countryman’s visual heaven.

I pause for cold water and a packet of nuts at a tiny roadside shack with two white tables and six chairs. A man in uniform is the only customer. The earth crumbles beneath the Honda’s stand and the bike tumbles sideways. The man in uniform attempts to save the bike and burns his palm on the exhaust. He holds ice in his hand and boasts of the beauty of Chiapas and enquires of my journey and what I will write of Mexico.

The owner of the shack and her daughter listen, as does an old white man with pale blue eyes and a grey bristle-beard who has shuffled across the highway from a five-hut village.

‘That Mexico is an immensely rich and beautiful country with many poor people,’ I answer.

My listeners murmur their assent. Despite my protests, the man in uniform and with the painfully burnt hand insists on paying for my water and the packet of nuts. Mexican generosity is inescapable. There is a moment in which I consider turning back to the village on the beach and writing the book of the Monk and Mister Big. Instead I ride on into the evening and Tapachula and am caught in a deluge as I attempt to decipher the guidebook’s directions to a hotel.

Who writes this stuff? One block from the central square? A square has four sides and is more than one block long and all streets are part of an incomprehensible one-way system.

A kind young man wearing jewellery suggests two hotels. He assures me that both are clean, cheap and comfortable. His directions are precise. I find without difficulty the Hotel Cavatina. Saintly staff hike the Honda over the high curb and wheel it to the far end of an entrance lobby that runs the full depth of the hotel. I take a room on the top floor, with a double bed, fan, bathroom and the best, biggest, thickest bath towel I have yet experienced.

I work an hour at a pleasant internet café peopled by a bunch of students with whom I chat before being directed to an old-fashioned café, dark wood panelling and wood-bladed ceiling fans. I drink cold beer and eat liver and onions with chilli and a flan.

Writers write. They also suffer painful cramps in their thighs at night if they are old and dumb and feel challenged and ride a small motorcycle 500 kilometres across Oaxaca and the Chiapas littoral in one day. The Honda was mocked, not the man. The Honda remains victorious.

And there are no seven-foot-tall aliens in Central America, in or out of sarcophagi.

Tapachula, Saturday 27 May

I breakfast outdoors on the central square. The electricity supply has been cut at the internet café that I used last night. I find an alternative that is more comfortable and run by equally pleasant people. Bringing my writing up to date takes ten hours, with only a break to fetch my laundry and eat a fruit salad. In the evening I people-watch on the central square, drink a beer and eat a steak. My last meal in Mexico.

CHAPTER 6
To Antigua

Talisman, Sunday 28 May

Today I cross the first frontier of my bike journey. Guidebooks recommend Talisman as the least difficult crossing for motorists. However, writers warn of delays, illegal charges, swindling money changers, robbery in the public lavatories – and the necessity of an international driving permit. I don’t have an international permit. Mine is the standard piece of plastic issued in the UK.

I am anxious and sleep badly. Rising early, I ride through empty streets. The sun rises as I leave town. The first rays pierce the trees and the wet tar glistens. Frontiers make for profit and I pass big houses set back from the road. I brake at the border behind a pickup. A stocky fifties wearing a white Stetson thrusts a wad of grubby banknotes in my face. ‘Change. Change money.’

I take the excess Mexican pesos from my shirt pocket. The Stetson whips the bills from my hand. Shove and I’ll tumble sideways. The bike will pin my leg. I picture the Stetson disappearing into the jungle.

The Stetson taps numbers into an adding machine. The figures are less intelligible than a Thai movie. ‘Good journey,’ he says, hands me a few Guatemalan banknotes – quetzales – and transfers his attention to an approaching bus.

Trees drip on a huddle of low, tin-roofed timber buildings. The buildings need a paint job. The national flags are wet and droop dispiritedly. A Mexican cop says, ‘Hey, old man, where are you going?’

‘To the south.’

‘Where in the south?’

‘Argentina.’

‘On that small bike? Never.’

A Mexican immigration officer and two customs officials come out to investigate. They are small men of mixed race, neat in their uniforms. They ask whether it is true that I intend riding to Argentina.

‘On this bike, all the way? For how many days will you travel? What opinion has your wife of your travels?’

Had I enjoyed Mexico? What did I enjoy most?

They laugh when I answer, ‘Camarones a el diablo’. Devilled prawns.

A customs official prods a saddlebag. ‘Where are the locks? You must have locks. The south is peopled by thieves and bandits.’

‘Even Guatemala. Guatemala is dangerous. Ride only in daylight.’

I have armed myself with photocopies of the bike’s registration, purchase receipt, passport, driving permit. I stop a couple of minutes at the Guatemalan sanitation post – mostly we joke. To the Guatemalan customs officer, I apologise for an obvious incompetence in the completion of forms. He tells me not to preoccupy myself and completes the paperwork himself. In all, I am thirty minutes at immigration and customs. The three customs officers come out of the office to wave me on my way.

I seem to have developed an addiction for mountains. From the border I head towards Quetzaltenango. The easier route keeps to the Pacific littoral. I branch left on the RN1. A little beyond the intersection, an extraordinary building has been under construction for the past twenty years. I am told that it is a private house; it is the size of a hotel. It stands on the side of a hill behind iron gates decorated with lions rampant. It is part eighteenth-century French chateau and part Moghul palace. Those whom I ask are either ignorant or reluctant to tell me anything of the owner – although I gather from the interplay between my informants that they believe him more than eccentric, a little crazy.

I pause for an excellent breakfast at the entrance to San Paulo at the Rancho de los Sora. I count the quetzales given me at the border and scribble sums in my notebook. The Stetson was honest.

RN1 climbs over the flank of Ajumulco, 4220 metres, the tallest volcano in Guatemala. Coffee plantations cling to the slopes. The views are superb until I hit the first cloud strata. The road climbs through the cloud into a thin layer of clear air before entering higher strata of cloud. The upper clouds are wet. I freeze and drip and am totally miserable. I picture myself in the eyes of a sensible hotelkeeper – an aged tramp on a small bike. No, not a good prospect.

Quetzaltenango has cobbled streets and a one-way system that is bewildering seen through drenched spectacles. Wet cobbles are as slippery as ice. I slither downhill into the Parque Central, with a cathedral across the square, take a right to escape the traffic and spot Hotel Kiktem-Ja. The hotel is on a one-way street. Continue half a block beyond the square and the hotel is on the right. Drive into the courtyard: a good bed, plenty of blankets, excellent hot water in the bathroom. The hotel would be more welcoming if the owners repainted the floors and ceilings – black is not a lively colour. But at least geraniums cascade from the gallery surrounding the upper floor. The room costs more than I need to pay, but I am tired, wet and cold and the receptionist doesn’t quake at my appearance.

I work at an internet café until nine and catch up with correspondence. The owner of the café is a biker. His big BMW dwarfs my Honda. Mario directs me to a waiter-serviced caféteria. I eat a thick, tough, overcooked steak with guacamole and refried beans. Tomorrow I’ll try the stew.

Quetzaltenango, Monday 29 May

Before leaving England, I discussed my trip with students at two local high schools. The British Council runs teacher and student exchange programmes. ‘Runs’ is a misnomer. The Council has brochures and a website advertising the programmes but little finance to implement them. I had a meeting in London with Dominic Register, an official at the British Council. Dominic suggested I publicise the programmes on my travels. I did so in Oaxaca. Now for Quetzaltenango.

I dress as smartly as my limited wardrobe permits and have my shoes polished by a bootblack in the Parque Central.

Students at my first port of call, a private school, are occupied with exams. My second visit is a sixth-form technical college. The students are too old: I wish to make a comparison with the students of a certain age who I interviewed in England. The principal warns against my visiting state schools where teachers are underqualified and English is taught from a dictionary. She suggests I try a second private school that employs teachers from the United States. To reach the school, I navigate a series of empty lots strewn with builders’ rubble. An armed guard opens solid iron gates set in a high wall. Statues of the Virgin and of Christ dominate a patch of neat lawn to the right of the gate. Walls and gates are the norm in Guatemala. Foreign-run schools in Guatemala are always financed by a church. No statues and this would be evangelist territory – unsafe for a Catholic, even a lapsed Catholic. The Virgin of Guadalupe pin gleams in the collar of my green-cord shirt – green for Ireland, Ireland for Catholicism. I am shown into an office. A young lady sits behind an imposing desk. Her card states that she is a licenciada. Licensed in law or philosophy? I outline my purpose and hope to be offered a whisky mac by a priest from County Mayo.

The licenciada is a daughter of Guatemala’s vicious clandestine war. Murder, execution, assassination or fatal accident were the rewards for harbouring the wrong political thoughts.

The manner in which she fingers my card saps my confidence. She asks what questions I intend to ask the students. She will peruse my website before discussing the possibility with the principal. Will I call her in the morning?

‘With pleasure,’ I say, while mentally reviewing my site. The one piece of fiction is moral. It is humane. Would the licenciada be shocked at discovering that sexuality is its subject?

Should I cut the piece? Can I reach an internet café before the licenciada reads it? Why am I even thinking of cutting it? It is what I do best – or believe that I do best: portray characters in moments of intimacy.

The piece remains on the Web. I call the licenciada in the morning, only to be informed that the principal wishes to examine my work before reaching a decision the following morning.

What can I say, other than wonder weakly whether an elderly English writer could corrupt students of a good school in a mere thirty minutes? I thank her kindly and excuse myself. I have an appointment on Lake Atitlan.

I take the road down to the Pacific littoral. Recent torrential rains have swept bridges away. A truck and trailer have slipped off a corner on one of the dirt-surfaced diversions. Retalhuleu is well worth an uninteresting cup of coffee. The mountains are cloaked in coffee. Coffee is Guatemala’s biggest export. Why does the coffee served in cafés taste of mud?

From the coast I take the main highway towards Guatemala City (very busy), and then turn off towards Lake Atitlan on a narrow paved road that first crosses fields of sugar before climbing though cattle ranches and rubber plantations to coffee plantations and on into clouds in which Friesian dairy cows are barely visible in mountain paddocks.

I drove this area in the final years of the clandestine war in a borrowed car saved from the scrapheap. I recall mist and visibility down to a few metres and the pop of the rear tyre bursting. I got out of the car and walked round the back and looked at the tyre. I recall that I was on a ridge with pine forest on the left of the road. Four men appeared out of the forest. I write ‘appeared’ because they made no noise. They wore woollen ponchos and felts hats pulled low to hide their eyes and they carried machetes. They looked at me and they looked at the burst tyre.

One said, ‘The tyre has burst.’

I said, ‘Yes,’ and the others nodded in agreement.

One said, ‘Do you have a jack and a spanner?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

‘Then we should look.’

I fetched the keys from the ignition. One of the men took the keys and opened the boot. He passed the jack to one man and the wheel brace to another and lugged out the spare tyre.

The men changed the wheel in absolute silence. They replaced the tools and the punctured tyre in the trunk, closed the trunk and handed me the keys. Then they vanished with equal silence back into the forest.

I remember sitting in the car for a while, shivering and semi-paralysed while the mist condensed and formed rivulets on the windscreen.

The cloud is as thick today and turns wet as I cross the shoulder of the volcano. I shiver and freeze in light rain on the descent towards Panajachel on Lake Atitlan. I ride down the main street and turn right at the pink-walled bakery to a small hotel within gates. I bargain a good room with an excellent hot-water shower down from one hundred to seventy-five quetzales. I walk towards the lake and the Hotel Dos Mundos. The Dos Mundos is beyond my present budget. Palm trees surrounding the pool have grown in the past ten years. I find room 12 and sit on the steps. Here I suffered my heart attacks. Ten years ago I crawled in agony out of this room and begged for a doctor. The doctor arrived on a trial bike and jammed a needle in my butt. I don’t know what else he did. I blacked out. The doctor worked at the state health centre up the street. He was training to be a heart specialist. So I survive. Back home in Havana none of my medical friends believed that free medicine and state-employed doctors existed outside Cuba – particularly in Guatemala.

I ask at the health centre and am told that doctors usually stay only a year. Nor can they put a name to my saviour – sad, as I am in Panajachel specifically to thank him.

Stalls selling clothes and rugs and blankets woven in brilliant colours by upland artisans are interspersed with mini-restaurants on the main shopping street. The street is narrow. On my first visit it was little more than a dirt track. Now it is tarred. Rain buckets down and the street becomes a river. Unable to escape, I order vegetable soup at a tiny six-table restaurant. The soup is good and freshly prepared. I know because I wait half an hour to be served. Trapped by the rain, I read the newspaper. The front-page photograph shows a car pockmarked with bullet holes: driver, wife and three children are dead. A leading article quotes a police report of 1200 armed attacks on buses in Guatemala City over the past five months.

Thunder explodes through much of the night. Meanwhile an equally noisy French group in the next room sort and pack their market plunder in preparation for an early bus.

To Antigua, Wednesday 31 May

I leave Pana at nine o’clock on the steep climb towards Guatemala City and am rewarded for the misery of yesterday’s descent with wonderful views of the lake and of the volcanoes rising beyond the far shore. The volcanoes wear raggedy miniskirts of pearl-grey cloud. I halt near the crest and watch a launch, made tiny by distance, drag white vees across the water. The vees seem tired and soon collapse to leave the lake calm and unmarked. The weather stays dry and I enjoy a fine run across the crest, with splendid views of forest way below. The great cone of Ajumulco dominates the horizon.

The road crosses an upland plateau of small farms. Curls of colour in the fields are Maya women stooped to harvest cash crops of salads, garlic and spring onions. Ancient pickups with bent chassis crawl crab-like past heavily laden donkeys.

When riding, I smile at everyone. In Mexico I became accustomed to smiles in immediate reply – cops included. Guatemalans are slower to respond or more cautious in responding. Perhaps these Maya peasants of the uplands have less to smile about or are unused to people smiling at them. Or do the scars of the clandestine war hamper their response – a war in which some 150 000 indigenous Guatemalans were butchered?

I ride into Antigua in early afternoon. I had expected this jewel of Spanish colonial architecture to cast its usual magic. Much has changed in ten years. I recall shops and cafés and guesthouses sprinkled among private homes. Now there is only commerce. Magnificent sixteenth-century doorways and passages to inner patios have been desecrated with kiosks in the scrabble for each extra dollar. The central square is backpacker territory. Maya women seem interlopers. Humble, they crouch as the backpackers hunt for bargains among the bundles of hand-woven clothes and blankets.

I search for a room within my budget and am shown a series of windowless cupboards attached to dank horrors that I am assured are bathrooms. Finally I strike lucky, both in hotel and in owners, who drop the room rate for an old man.

Charming young English honeymooners are fellow guests. The honeymooners have four months of travel in which to decide what to do with their lives. They find Guatemalans friendly and eager to talk. However, their smattering of Spanish limits conversation to the likes of ‘Have a good day’.

I miss the openness of Mexicans. With the election imminent, every Mexican, peasant or plutocrat, discusses politics. Guatemalans are cautious.

I find an internet café and call my friend, Eugenio, by telephone. Guatemalan Eugenio owns a teak and rubber plantation and a small resort and marina down on the Rio Dulce. He forbids me to ride through Guatemala City and is driving up to Antigua in his double-cab Ford pickup. I had thought, when planning this journey, of Eugenio’s home as an oasis. Now I am nervous. I am twenty-five years older than Eugenio. He has married and has a baby son, Andresito. Will his young wife think of me as an intrusion, an aged ghost emanating from Eugenio’s bachelor past? Or simply a boring old Brit?

In the evening I visit the home of an acquaintance, an elderly Guatemalan. A wealthy businessman, he lives in a gated community on the outskirts of town. Antigua, City of Eternal Spring, is 1500 metres above sea level. Days are warm while evenings are chill for thin blood and old bones. We enjoy our wine in front of a wood fire. My host talks of Bush and company and his loathing of their ignorance of history and of the wider world. He recounts that his younger brother, an architect in the northern US, begs him to be circumspect when telephoning, as all calls from abroad are monitored. The harnessing of fear to impose draconian laws heralds a rebirth of fascism: the conqueror wears the clothes of the conquered. As it was under Mussolini and in Nazi Germany, so it is becoming in the United States.

I report the views of two elderly respectable conservative brothers. The wine is good. I listen to my host without comment, enjoy the warmth of the fire and relish the change from bike seat to well-upholstered sofa – and, yes, the familiarity of fine European furniture and paintings and Persian rugs. Ease is easy. So is silence. My silence at the Dallas breakfast club has left me uneasy, ashamed. There too I was a guest.

I ride back to town in moonlight. The three volcanoes that overhang Antigua are massive monuments against the night sky. Jasmine scents the air. Antigua remains full of beautiful buildings. I ride with care on the cobbles and ask of myself, as always, who were the architects? Did the Conquistadors number camouflaged Muslims among their numbers? We know of three recursos (Jewish ‘converts’ to Christianity) among Cortés’ followers. Cortés’ neighbours back home in the Extremadura of his childhood were Islamic owners of a vineyard. I imagine myself a bright Islamic kid of the period. Banned from Spanish universities, where would I have studied? Perhaps at that great centre of learning, Baghdad. Returning home to Spain, I would have been faced with the bigotry and zeal of Christendom. What then? Surely I would have been tempted to change my name to José Jesus and venture a future in a New World.

Antigua, Thursday 1 June

Ten years have passed since my last visit to Antigua. Of my friends, all but a Guatemalan painter and her Frenchman have abandoned the city to commercialism and moved to gated communities on the outskirts. I recall eating dinner in this house on my last night in Guatemala. We sat in front of a wood fire and drank rum and discussed a future of hope that accompanied the peace process.

Today, the artist, a liberal educated at university in Europe, talks of the nihilism that drives the country’s urban youth to kill for a few quetzales and ape the most extreme details of the sexual act as they dance the raegeton.

The artist’s son was twelve or thirteen when I last visited. Now he is a six-foot-six Adonis back from college in Colorado. He guides tourists up volcanoes and teaches rock climbing. He is exceptional in having returned. The majority of his generation, the offspring of my Guatemalan friends, are in Spain, Canada, El Norte, even England. Do they sense, if only subconsciously, that they have no future in Guatemala? Or that Guatemala has no future?

Eugenio arrives to collect me in his pickup and I meet his wife, Monica, for the first time. She is young and dark and classically beautiful. Their son, Andresito, aged twelve months, is a darker replica of Eugenio. The Honda is loaded onto Eugenio’s pickup. We drive down from Antigua into the capital and lunch on a delicious lasagne at the apartment of Eguenio’s mother. Parents and grandmother play with Andresito while I make notes in my journal of a conversation earlier in the morning.

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