Three Irresistable Forces of Nature: Customs, The Weather and the Apple iPhone.

Atlanta to the Mexican border

Well the immigration officer is friendly. He writes me a restaurant recommendation for San Antonio on a visa waiver card and tells me to be careful in Mexico. Everyone tells me to be careful in Mexico. Stepping out into Atlanta's behemoth of an airport I am frisked and scanned yet again. I get my luggage for a few precious moments only to give it up to another security check and another conveyor belt. I follow the sign to baggage reclaim (slight return). It's at the end of a huge hall. That leads to an identical hall which as a sort of Escher homage leads on into an identical Danteian chamber. This goes on for a while until my feet are well and truly blistered. Turns out I could have got a train. Then I ask for 'Cargo Customs' as instructed by my shippers. Then ensues much confusion and blank looks and hold music until finally someone helpful appears and tells me I need to be back at the other end of the Escher picture. And I have to clear security again. This sort of blows my tiny jet-lagged mind. Much tedious queueing, scanning and frisking later (and a train ride) and I am back and a very aggressive man with a huge gun shouts at me "why don't you have a customs agent?" and says he can't clear my bike. It's now 5pm and all is shutting so I give it all up til the morning and get a taxi to my Hostel.I have a jetlagged and delicious meal at Mary Mac's Tea Room across the way. Country fried steak and gravy, black-eyed peas and fried green tomatoes...

Next morning I get customs' answering machine of course. So I head to the freight warehouse in an entirely inaccessible spot in the airport orbit. I am escorted to the train station by a homeless guy who tells me of his time in the army in Stuttgart in the 70s which got him out of Vietnam. An unfeasibly large woman is rooting through the platform bin. After a taxi ride that we both agree was an adventure I am at the freight warehouse and gape at the madness within - in a cavern the size of 6 football fields, dozens of forklift trucks buzz around packing-case artworks in a do-or-die frenetic pollination ritual. It's like dodgems on crack. An almighty boom as an outsize samsung hits the concrete. The driver grins at me as he levers it back on board.

I freak as I am told that customs need to do an inspection of my crate. This place closes for the weekend so that will be Tuesday before I can get my bike. Portia, takes pity on me.

She tries to get one of the 18 wheeler drivers to take me to Customs to grovel but I end up having to walk. Not having a car is akin to leprosy here. Blisters burning I cross the wasteland and after some anxious moments and stern words from Officer Price I have my 7501 customs golden ticket. All talk of inspections mysteriously gone. Before they can change their minds I exit and trduge back to the warehouse. Portia tells me I am blessed & my crate arrives on William's forklift.

Then I'm actually riding out into America.

Fill up for $12 - a third of the price back home.

There's a parade in Atlanta the next day as I head out. This results in me having a Police escort leapfrogging each junction so I can be ushered through red lights. It occurs to me I might not be supposed to ride down this road...

I hit Alabama back roads. Lovely forested hill country with junkyard yards with every kind of motorised apparatus imaginable. Cars built for soldiers, houses built for chickens. Rockers on ropes on stoops. A sign says 'Bad Dog'. It chases me down the road. I talk to a friendly firefighter by a tumbling red barn.

I find a track that leads to a forgotten graveyard.

Tank at Piedmont ("Peed-mont") and a guy tells me how he used to test-drive Harleys. His accent is butter and harder to understand than 2am Glaswegian.

Next morning at my motel in Gadsden, a guy called Peanut has a flat battery in his pickup and I get out the jump leads.

More crazy yards.

I stop to see 'Natural Bridge' - some pretty forest and a rock formation.

The weather starts to turn and by the end of the day I am driven into a motel at Batesville by the freezing rain. I might not have brought the right clothes...

I take advantage of the driving rain the next morning to sort out a weird flickering issue with my phone. This results in me losing all my photos and music. For a year. Love you Apple.

I buy some wax for my visor to give me some semblance of visibility in the rain but the next hour's drive to Clarksdale is still a hellish series of moments where I think I will be blown off the levee and into the flood plain below. I arrive trembling at Abe's on the famous junction of Highway 61 and Highway 49. Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil here for his guitar-playing skills. I would settle for a warm hearth. I get instead some amazing tamales in a blues-soaked old diner. I chat to Tack and Sammy - biker and auto-mechanic respectively and get tips on everything to do with music, their children's occupations, intimate personal ailments, the internals of the internal combustion engine and how to avoid the Cartel on a Harley. I check into The Shack Up Inn just oustide town on the Hopson plantation. Such a cool place to stay. I have a sharecropper's cabin stuffed with every kind of blues and civil-rights memorabilia imaginable. There's a HiFi complete with cassette and CD collection. Even a Fender Rhodes to play.

Betsy on reception paints lovely impressionistic canvasses of Delta landscapes. I like the fact that the owners are called Guy and Bill - my two forenames.
I toast my soaked clothes like marshmallows in front of the gas fire and head off to a show downtown. Hypothermic on the bike after dark and the club fails to materialise. Over a burger I watch incredibly Obese people making Xmas snacks from M&Ms. Such beautiful accents here.

Howling Wolf in on my cabin stereo next morning. I try unsuccessfully for a third time to get my Satellite Phone to work, eventually I find out that it won't work in the US - anti-terrorism it seems.

Despite buying the hotel's merchandise shirt, it's a losing battle against the elements as I struggle down the Mississippi. I'm sure the Delta was always HOT in every account I read. At 'The Port of Rosedale' I finally see the river in all its' swollen grey sombre. But the landscape is entirely lost on me as the temperature guage hovers just above freezing. Not forgetting the 70mph windchill, mind you. At Greenville I struggle off the bike, my vision actually distorting from the cold and suckle on hot chocolate. I try a Pizza to warm me up and have just sat down to eat it, when I see one of those goliath SUVs pile into my parked bike. The slackjawed bovine monstrosity in the driver's seat just says "I couldn't see it". No sorry. Maybe you should drive a vehicle you CAN see out of? I get her insurance details and take pictures. Both my panniers have taken a hammering and one is a Daliesque parallelogram. I struggle in the drizzling parking lot and manage to somewhat bend them so they will sort of close. Great. At least the waitress in the Pizza Hut is sympathetic.
Back on the road as the rain really starts. Steve Bonnar, the old Laika soundman always used to say kilometres are better than miles because they go down quicker and at no time is he more right than now. At Vicksburg I have halved the distance to New Orleans and I get into a Motel 6 bed fully-clothed and try to get circulation back into my toes.
I deserve the expensive meal I get at Walnut Hills restaurant in the pretty 'Gone with the Wind' antebellum downtown. Seafood gumbo, ribeye steak, pecan brown ale and key lime pie. To die for.
With a t-shirt as makeshift bandana and hoodie up under my helmet I am Michelin man as I head off down the cold highway the next day. It even starts to snow. I put on all my dirty laundry in the next stop. 3 pairs of trousers .

A beautiful stretch of Louisiana wetlands passes below the elevated highway as I approach New Orleans.

I plump for the only NO hostel whose reviews don't mention bedbugs - Jo & Flo's and head out into the French Quarter. It's pretty with wrought-iron balconies and tumbling flowers but no great shakes by European standards. Reminds me of Sydney mostly. I eat a peanut butter and bacon burger, local delicacy, at a bar called Yo Mama's. Relishing the novelty I smoke at the bar and figure that needs some liquid accompaniment. Wobble up to the Candlelight Lounge back in Tremé, near the hostel. I am the only white face and am chatted up by a geriatic hooker as the even more geriatric band do shots at the other end of the bar. When they eventually play, my whole trip is justified. With no amplification the Tremé Brass Band lifts the roof. The octogenarian witch doctor/drummer dances in a deeply lewd way with all the females present and trombones transport me to the beating heart.
I stagger back to my hostel to be roasted alive in the dorm. Gasping for air, I ajourn to the lounge floor which is a little cold and have a nightmare about being savaged by a goat.

Next morning Jarad from 'Gruntry' Seattle band Red Heart Alarm plays me his video made from his Dad's super 8 of his 1971 Vietnam service and invites me to his instore later. The voodoo Museum is fascinating as is the Ogden gallery - Dureau reminds me of Degas and Ashton Ramsey's art suits are stunning. I fall in love with some amazing depression-era photography of the South. Ernest James Bellicq 'Girl with Striped Stockngs' floors me. Ersy's constructions and shots by Clarence John Laughlin. Such a deeply inspiring place. So too St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 - the grave of Marie Laveau, the great Voodoo Queen, is covered in kisses much like Oscar Wilde's tomb in Paris. The Backstreet Cultural Museum is yet another treasure. The guy is a local photographer and has taken pictures of everyone who was anyone in the big easy and these two rooms are stuffed with all the memorabilia he received in thanks. Some eye-wateringly intricate Mardi Gras costumes and relics of local 'Pleasure Clubs' which are self-help for the local African-American community. The evening is a little less storming as I am the entire audience for Jarad's instore and fail to see the point in a Zydeco band in a bowling alley with its' boogie rock squeezebox and futile washboard scratching.
Drunk birthday boy Rafael is crashing from his Bourbon Street excesses as I get up to leave the next morning. "God Bless You" he texas-drawls before launching into a virtuoso snore symphony. I commence compressing my plethora of unwieldy possessions into their just-too-small receptacles and finally hit the road. Breakfast at Dot's Diner on Highway 90 provides definitive proof that Grits are Gross. While I spanner up my back wheel in Lafayette a guy in a neck brace who describes himself as a "Proud Cajun" tells how his daughter's boyfriend threw him down the stairs last night and now his brother is driving him to his lawyer. Another guy tells me he has proof postitive that the pumps in this gas station do not hold ethanol which is apparently an Obama plot to subjugate Latin America. I hammer the interstate to the Texas border and after tear-inducing jalapeno sushi collapse into a seedy motel.

A lot of Czech and German names as I blast through to Austin. A warming hot chocolate at Hruška's in Ellinger. The Texas State Museum is good and puts me straight on independence from Mexico. But why would you do that when the food is that tasy!? The salsas at Polvo's are sooo good... Check out Red River Street, the music artery of the town and a drunk soldier complains about Austin drinks "In Vegas the cocktails make the hair on the back of your neck stand up" an action his own legs are having trouble with.
Next day after tiptoeing past the comatose drunks in adjoining bunks I ride out into Texas Hill Country. To Dripping Springs and Pedernales National Park where the trees have black trunks, snow-grey braches and burgundy and rich green leaves. Like bones in fur. Makes me think of Tasmania. I get a Wendy burger at Marble Falls. Chase, in his red uniform and headset serves me and then his Grandma Marjorie gives me her unabridged life story in a seamless cafeinated flow. She gives me her beaming realty agent business card - one if several jobs she does since her ex husband tricked her out of her divorce settlement. She wants to get a Harley and follow me south. I freeze all the way back to Austin and eat at the flagship Whole Foods behemoth of wholesomeness in tribute to my friends James and Sarina who met working here as students. I spend a bleary few hours researching where might be the Mexican border town least likely to leave Emma and I riddled with bullets holes in a ditch and almost fall asleep just as silly cow in next bunk decides to grind up ice at 1am. Hostels..
It's raining as I hit San Antonio. I write my blog at a computer in a thrift store while my care-in-the-community neighbour makes odd snuffling noises perusing bus timetables. I take the socially-unacceptable measure of walking to my restaurant - American cities are deeply scary from a sidewalk perspective. At 'Green' the food is great though - Pecan humus, Mango Ice Tea and popcorn and kale stirfry wash away the interstate junk. Back in the No-Tell-Motel, my neighbours appear to be wrestling a fowl-mouthed buffalo in the room above.

Next morning is a foggy (!) drive to get my bike serviced. Ysidro, Billy and Jim are all lovely and I get some reassurances on Mexico and a chance to see under the valve cover at the cogs that keep me moving. They also point out the wear on my rear tire and front pads. I buy a long chain and padlock and spend most of the day printing copies of documents and buying Mexican insurance. Then off to the airport to pace like a pregnant father until Emma is delivered to me:)

Breakfast on landfill crockery again - why can they not just buy a dishwasher!? The clouds start to part with awesome god-rays as we bump down the interstate, the bike groaning with luggage now, and by the time we hit Laredo, it's touching 30 centigrade. We dine at a Denny's in the truck stop to end all truck stops - must be 1000 trucks here - and the waitress tells us stories of dismemberment at the hands of Mexican kidnappers. No tip for you, bitch!