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.