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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 (#ulink_b8d17df5-b5c2-5d71-96a8-3a47c1f5e758)
The Road to Oaxaca (#ulink_b8d17df5-b5c2-5d71-96a8-3a47c1f5e758)
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.
