Read the book: «Old Man on a Bike»

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).