Twists and Turns

Mornings are a crime at the best of times but this morning I am at a copy shop trying to forge my border papers. The idiot teenager aiding and abetting me has forgotten to print them and so my deviant behaviour will have to wait for another day.

Death-defying is not a word you generally associate with British food vendors. They should be sent south of the border. Here in Mexico City they weave in amongst the maniac VW taxis and the rusting truck hulks on the Periferico. We are commuter fodder on this orbital hell that makes the M25 look like a quiet mews. Six lanes are not enough it would seem and they are building a first floor on dodgy-looking stilts above our heads.

I get my rear tyre changed in a dealership with a giant piñata and we head into downtown. Feels pretty safe - just a more worn version of any US city. We stay in Roma, an area that brings Brooklyn to mind with its´ middle-class warren of WiFi cafés and parking valets. A beer on a roof terrace and bed.

The GPS will be sent to bed with no supper if it continues like this. We set off, commando-style, with {gulp} no electronic guidance. The stone age is much more user-friendly than you might think. We are soon in San Angel with its´ cobbles and little markets. Diego Rivera´s house is in a very posh area. He built two studios linked by a bridge so he could pop over and visit Frida. When he wasn´t in her bad books for shagging her sister that is.

We wander the old town and the cathedral

A streetside sofa in Condesa beckons and we dissolve into a delicious white wine

Up to nearly 3000 metres on the quick hop to Malinalco. The last 20 miles are a gorgeous sway through cornfields and little pueblos. Friends have told us that this is a magical little town, an image slightly tarnished when we pass under a huge sign welcoming us to "¡Pueblo Mágico!" but it is lovely, all cobbles and crumbles, nestling under a steep bluff with prehispanic ruins looming over.

The ex-convent has lovely black on white murals around courtyard columns.

We wander a tumbledown area with Buenos Tardes all around

and drink a Michelada with gooey chilli sauce dripping down the sides. Em can barely wake me from the resulting coma and I stumble around looking for dinner but everyone is being a good catholic and obeying the Christmas Eve summons of the bells. The only place open is pricey but so worth it. I even write "my compliments to the chef" on the bill. Mexican wine rocks! At midnight, after another narcoleptic attack, I zombie around the streets ringing with bells and fireworks.

Christmas Day is spent wandering lazily. Well not so lazily up the very steep path to the pyramids on the bluff

but then sliding into a happy series of cocktails and nevermind the impossible to find Casa Limón and its´ liquid delights, we find an atmospheric derelict bullring and a vine-draped courtyard with cheap drinks, the only price to pay is a completist rendition of Celine Dion´s back catalogue.

Beautifully but slowly through the mountains

We lunch in Puebla and do a drive-by of the impressive cathedral and zócalo. Getting out is less easy. It seems that a nuclear bomb has obliterated much of the exit road and we are taken in ever-decreasing circles of desviacciónes into ever-stickier gridlock until finally, during one of my suave evasive manoeuvres we get rammed by a lead-armoured security truck. I stamp on the pannier in a gas station to reimpose an approximation of squareness.

We make the questionable decision to arrive in Oaxaca in the dark and the GPS turns homicidal, sending us up ever steeper and more crumbly backstreets until an almost vertical stretch defeats me and I must gingerly reverse back down while Em walks. It´s too dark, I´m too tired. We scan the Kindle in the headlight and try to pretend we are not about to get mugged. Several places we call are full which is a first for this trip but finally we find a place in the centre on level ground. We eat in the hotel restaurant, blearily eyeing the TV which shows bizarrely awful concerts from the millennium. Eurhythmics with Pavarotti anyone?

4.40am. Something has escaped from the soundtrack of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre". "Vomiting" gasps Emma and returns to snogging a plastic bag. I look after her as best I can. The day is spent slowly. A little girl selling Chicles sits and draws pictures of animals in my diary and teaches me the Spanish names.

A Marimba with an unusual sound entrances me and then the spell is broken when they launch into a Coldplay number. Laryssa would have a field-day...

People take portraits of each other at the beautiful windows looking over the botanical gardens in the interesting but British-Museum-epic Cultural Museum

Monte Albán is rammed.

One retarded American family has printed up t-shirts that say "Robinson Family Christmas Holiday 2011". What thoughts go through the mind of a teenager that actually agrees to wear such a thing? The 1500 year-old ball game court is like Real Tennis but with the added spice of human sacrifice.

Teotitlán del Valle is a famous textile village. Em considers lurid bags for her mum and we sip beer in a stall in a completely deserted market. The local catholic church has prehispanic carvings in its´ walls and a backyard full of parade mannequins.

The Mercado del 20 Noviembre has delicious hot chocolate with a butter bun.

And seeing as this is the part of the world that gave us the gift of chocolate I feel obliged to buy a few highly concentrated blocks. My heartrate quadruples, soon to be halved by a to-die-for smoky mezcal on a rooftop. Eat your heart out Laphroaig.

150 miles to the coast takes 7 hours and takes us from arid desert with twisted cacti to alpine pine forest heights where artisans make wooden toys and then down to steamy jungle with bulging bananas and coconuts. Mazunté is not the quiet little backwater of our tips. Heaving. I narrowly avoid running over a circle of lotus-position hippies give tag-team massages in the middle of the sandy road to the beach. I consider looping back to finish the job. All is lleno and all we can find is a cramped tent pitch in the front yard of a nice lady called Dominga. The night is so airless and hot you can´t bear to touch anything and resounds with parties to all points of the compass. Arseholes come back to their tents singing songs about tequila. A dog, clearly in the final stages of lung cancer, snuffles around the guyropes. Cars rev. The piece de resistance is a child playing the recorder and never quite finding the critical notes for "Silent Night"

Priority numero uno is a better sleep and by a miracle we find a room in a lovely hotel on top of the hill with a great ocean view.

There is an incongruous graveyard, our favourite kind, just nearby

The bathtub warm sea and copious cocktails are the perfect balm to a sleep-deprived mind.

NYE is all hammocks and books. A jiggle and a giggle to a band and then the beach at midnight among a hundred shadowy bodies illuminated by hot-air lanterns climbing a starry staircase and homemade fireworks. A kiss and it´s 2012.

A hot ride to Salina Cruz

and we find tacos at a stall on the buckled, windswept streets.

The wind gets stronger as we approach Juchitán. Here in the Istmeño (Isthmus), the Gulf winds take the path of least resistance to the Pacific and it tries to blow us over. We avoid tripe tacos and people-watch in the plaza as the wind blows the bunting.

The wind is like a rowdy moshpit as we head for Tuxtla Gutierrez. I have to slow right down and put on my hazards. Then coming out of a hillshadow it goes into overdrive. I slow to a crawl and then finally a standstill and am treed for a few minutes - it´s all I can do to stop the bike being blown over. Trucks hurtle by and on the other side is a steep dropoff into a swamp. The crocodiles watch as I struggle and finally manage to edge the bike back to and into a small turnoff. Even with the bike facing into the wind I have to brace it with my whole body to keep it on its´ stand. Clearly onwards across the plain, with its´ grass blown completely horizontal, is not an option and we know that the next town is ominously named "La Ventosa". We know the weather report predicts the wind to actually increase so with no little effort we retreat to the previous junction and head north. Not much less windy and now cold and wet with half-finished roads, lines and checkpoints to contend with, by Acayucan I am ready to throw in the towel. A one-eyed man at a crossroads gives us directions to a hotel in town. As said town recedes behind us I question the wisdom of this approach. I swear he winks at us as we pass the second time.

We sit behind a military transport even more tooled-up than usual as we ride the seafront streets of Coatxacoalcas. They eye us through their balaclava slits and flex fingers on their artillery wondering why we are so interested in abandonned buildings.

The wetlands to Villahermosa are... Wet. Barely able to see through the visor by the time we wring ourselves out in a cafe there. The waiter is so pleased to have us we want to parcel him up and take him with us. They have a crucifix made from cutlery.

The storm is blown out by morning and we contemplate blue skies from our breakfast in bed. A couple of hours puts us in Palenque and we bed down in "El Panchál" on the "road to ruins". Said ruins are all about labouring up sadistically steep steps to peer at all-but obliterated carvings.

Back at the ranch, some stringer murders "House of the Rising Sun". A thousand tiny fish lie in aquatic gridlock on the bed of a stream nearby, waiting for food to arrive in their mouths. We are less Zen. We order pizza.

I am up in the night emailing my dad about the legal letter he is arranging for me for the bike. My Kindle comes to the rescue here. No internet, no phone coverage but I can still get online and it´s free. My fingertips are raw from the silly little keyboard mind you.

We head down the gloriously empty Carreterra Fronteriza. The woodsmoke and thatch of the little villages transport me to rural Cambodia. As does slaloming around potholes on the spur down to Frontera Corozcal. I haggle with a lanchero and he cycles off frantically in front, leading us first to his friend´s eatery and then on to the river to cut a V in the dark waters, dense jungle both sides. Yaxchilán is in a riverloop, surrounded by Guatemala and the howler monkeys put on an aerial display as we ponder the glyphs and labyrinths of the temples, which we have almost entirely to ourselves and which the mile upon mile of jungle seem ready to reclaim entirely any day now.

The Dawn chorus begins with a blend of roosters and howler monkeys. Howling? More like self-conscious snoring. A chuckle of chainsaws joins with the counterpoint of a miandering megaphone extolling the joys of tacos.

I joke that breakfast is one of the cat-sized guineapig-things we saw in the jungle yesterday. Em is not amused. As we eat the mystery meat Tepescuintle, a kitten stretches in the sun and a pair of piglets amble across the road.

The road is thick with military checkpoints now we are in the Zapatista heartland. We pass an accident that looks staged. No way we are stopping, this road has too bad a rep. The turnoff to Las Nubes is half-finished and I am obliged to teeter along thin concrete rails. We hold our breath til the village arrives. Belying the thundering falls backdrop, the town is dry but a girl surreptitously sells us beer in a black bag. Ecotourism? I thought you said Alcotourism. Emma teaches me to mini-Salsa.

We breathe out and watch the fireflies from our stoop.

A dawn ascent along a slippery and vertigo-challenging path through the trees past ruined cabañas and cacao trees to the mirador where the San Domingo bursts out of a gorge and helter-skelters across the plain to a painted on misty mountain backdrop.

The song is Dionne Warwick´s "Don´t Make Me Over" as we skittle through the luxuriant Lagunas de Montebello

and Calexico takes us to the plains. Sincronizadas in Comitán and Denis at Hotel Gite del Sol, a Quebecois welcomes us to his lovely place in San Cristóbal de las Casas. Hope he doesn´t mind I bent his grating with the bike stand.

We luxuriate in WiFi, amazing Italian food and bustling winebars and dodge backpacker accents while brewing up film script ideas on pretty streets. Is that the altitude or the hangover making the steps to Cerro de Guadalupe so steep?

The highlight is the Na Bolom house, all flowers and courtyards, which belonged to a Danish-Swiss anthropologist couple whose Biggles-style expeditions into the jungle are documented in gorgeous 50s photographs of the Lacandón people.

 The Zapatistas campaign on the plaza

We lose 1500 metres in less than a hour´s ride to Chiapa de Corzo. Each restaurant by the river has a Marimba band and they combine to form the soundtrack to David Lynch´s worst nightmare. We escape on a boat to the Cañón del Sumidero.

A crocodile slides out of the water but the vultures seem unconcerned.

 The Christmas Tree rock formation is pretty incredible

as is the quantity of plastic bottles and toothpaste tubes that we navigate

The lanchero stops 50 yards short of the shore to hand around a cap but we resist the blackmail

The candyfloss sellers in the main square set the controls to warpdrive creating airborne spiders´ webs of cotton candy. I reach out and pluck a sugary mouthful.

We are hoping for the Fiesta del Enero to put on cross-dressing dances in the plaza but we get too tired and flop.

The Zoo in Tuxtla Gutierrez is inexplicably closed and we are soon stuck in a sweltering traffic jam and the new road has a disagreement with my map, the net result being that we are starving by the time we get to Ariappa. Grandma shouts to the kitchen "¡Gringos!" and we are soon well fed. A guy chats at the gas station and whistles when I tell him we just passed 8000 kilometres.

We find José´s place down a crooked street in the curiously dead seaside pueblo of Puerta Arista. We drink and eat in various highly capacious but deserted restuarants and wonder if we have missed a nuclear alert. A beautiful sunset over the sea and a quadbike races across the sand. José warms up with a few beers and he tells stories of bad acid, crocodiles and a golf tournament he won back in Ontario.

Hot. Very Hot. As we arrive in Tapachula a ´helper´ tries to help me sort out my customs papers but we have to get my letter from the UK first and he skulks off. I spend the evening chasing the letter from pillar to post office but FedEx have screwed up and it is still in Mexico City. First they said Post Restante was fine, and now they can´t cope with it. I spend the evening in a huff. Emma has something approaching heatstroke and a sore throat. The situation worsens next day when it becomes apparent that I won´t get the letter for a week. Em is a sweet calm despite being ill. I put on my assertive head despite the horrible Skype line but it does no good. Until a couple of hours later I get a call and despite their earlier claims that there were no airports in Chiapas, they have magicked up a plane to get the package to me in 3 days. Could be worse I suppose. I spend the rest of the day in communication nightmares with places in Honduras, trying to obtain an address to forward a revised version of the letter (it´s missing a fairly vital detail - I am crossing my fingers that I can still get through 2 borders as is though)

In amongst all the stress, I manage to leave my bag under a table at a restaurant on the Plaza. I sprint back when I realise - all the vital and expensive contents flashing past my eyes. The waiter smiles as I arrive and I sigh a huge sigh of relief. I consider myself warned.

The rest of Tapachula is chilling out and catching up with chores like changing the brake discs on the bikes and getting Emma well again.

Time for a new country.