Wandering Goo

Hasta Luego First World

2012-02-12T16:57:00.000-08:00

We are finally leaving the western world. The swarm of bodies at the Guatemalan border tells me so. About 10 of them jump into the road as we rock up offering their 'tramitadore' (helper) services. I am nervous about this first step into a developing country so I have decided in advance to enlist their help. I probably should have taken my chances with the officials but at least I have one very small Guatemalan called William to ask questions of as we do paperwork on each side of the bridge. He tries to get me to buy a permit for all the CA4 countries (Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama) for $250 but I resist and he eventually takes me to an official who sells me a Guatemala-only permit for 161 Quetzals (13 GBP). Then he wants $70 to jump the queue for the bank. We say no and suddenly it turns into Q200. He just hands the documents to someone halfway up in the line while we sit an eat a peanut ice lolly from a bucket. Q12 to fumigate the bike ie spray the wheels with a some chemical that probably violates several international conventions.

Volcanos burst through the lush green hills and elephantine leaves overflow the roadlines as we bounce on down the potholed roads.

We stop at a little graveyard.

Maps and GPS seem silly here so we just ask at each junction and are in Quetzaltenango in a couple of hours. Tiny Amanda at 'Don Diego' has tiny room for us and bizarrely there is great Indian food nearby. The ATM will only work if I lean on the buttons with my full weight.

Up through a cloud and then down down to Antigua. We are diverted by a parade and end up arriving via an alley no more than an inch wider than the bike. We take a room from David who describes himself as a greenbelly, meaning mostly Spanish roots, he has a stunning toucan called Bruno. It's a lovely colonial town with a labyrinthine market

and we spend a day wandering all the quake-felled churches and cobbles

and eating fresh banana bread in the main square while a bunch of 8-12 year-olds go through their breakdance routine. Strong cocktails at "Frida's". The owner and her friends spend hours on a lesbian dating site at the next table.

After a dusty and grimy ride to Chiqimula we hit the Honduran border. We buy lempiras from a guy in a cowboy hat wandering the carpark. The Hondurans appear to have something against trees as they send me off to get FOUR copies of ALL my documents. Of course the only photocopier is back on the Guatemalan side so I have to walk back through no-man's land and duck under the gate. Then I am treated to a virtuoso display of Zen typing - each keystroke of my details entered with deep thought and consideration. Then he writes it all out by hand again just for good measure. We talk about his favourite spots in Honduras, gender issues in Spanish, my Danish ancestry and the correct pronunction of the word "hot". Then he sends me back to Guatemala for more copies. By this time it's lunchtime and we have to wait for the bank to reopen. Eventually we are speeding on our way, or at least we would be if we weren't halted by a policeman who checks all our papers and a skinny man with a spray-machine to further disolve my wheels.

Bumpy and steep cobbles hit new heights in Copan Ruinas.

Such a pretty town and I have a good feeling about Honduras. Friendly, Beautiful and Odd. Although rule number 1 - never order nachos south of Texas - is flouted for the 2nd time this trip. We plead inebriation. What kind of human toilet bowls eat this agent orange cheese whiz?!

The ruins themselves are awesome and we commune with them for a couple of hours and watch the scarlet macaws in the trees in their jaw-dropping rainbow livery. Their screeches roughly translate as "help! I'm being disemboweled with a corkscrew".

A beautiful exhibit of glass-plate photographs from the 1890s shows how much the ruins have been restored. They were just random-looking piles of stones in the middle of the jungle back then.

Slightly disconcerting visiting an ATM here - there are guys across the street covering my every move from different angles with chunky shotguns. Standard practise across central america it turns out. Even pharmacies and restaurants have this kind of firepower on display at times.

Our hosts in Tela, on the Carribean coast are a Québécois ex-biker couple in their 60s. Tiny sun-leathered Nicole, her outrageous breast augmentation almost tipping her over, shows off her babies, a pair of white-faced monkeys. They wrap their soft tails around my neck and pull my hair petulantly when she won't let them eat the nearby tree's leaves. Sometimes she takes them for a spin around the town in a double pram that sits by the gate. She calls her husband 'Daddy' and he rustles up cold beers and a delicious breakfast while issuing travel advice through a nicotine-stained handlebar moustache.

The beach is smelly but the water is deliciously warm and there are locals splashing nearby as sharkbait. The town's dusty little streets feel vaguely threatening as it approaches dusk. We are not reassured when a truck towing three lions in a cage stops at the petrol station.

Getting to Trujillo is a ballet of pothole dodging but so worth it.

We stay out of town at Casa Kiwi which has that end-of-the-world feeling. Picking through the flotsam at dusk all you can hear is the gulping of the water and your sandy footfalls.

Various local characters drop in, one pair, with drop-dead-gorgeous Hondureña girlfriends in tow, do a great line in fishermens' tails over ron (rum) and offering diving trips providing we bribe the commander of the nearby naval base. José is another, he lets us zoom around on his slightly broken jetski.

Chaz, the Kiwi of the title, is lovely, she teaches us Honduran pool and serves up great food and cunningly crafted cocktails.

We take the bike, gloriously free of luggage for a spin around the Garífuna township. People call out friendly hellos but we are not quite comfortable enough to stop and chat. Too much bad-mouthing of central america rings in our ears. If we were traveling through a little more slowly it would probably be different. The sun melts into the palms as we head home along the sandbar.

Up at dawn to tackle the direct road to Tegucigalpa through Oloncho. 100 miles of dirt with all the delicate texture of a dried up creek, winding up and down densely forested mountains. I love it and the romance of such intense isolation but Emma is over the revving and dusty bouncing pretty quickly!

Halfway, at La Unión, we eat at a tiny comedor, I chat with the señora and her bright daughter about films as they flick towels at flies about our ears. If only my Spanish were better..

12km short of Valle des Angeles disaster strikes as the rear tyre deflates. I bless the pressure sensors which give me a few seconds to pull over safely. Still it's just getting dark and with the raucous cacophony of the jungle all around, I extract a huge nail and set to work by torchlight.

Complicated by the nail having gone right through and out the sidewall, it takes a couple of attempts but manage to gingerly roll the last few miles into town on the bodgy repair. The bored teenagers on reception have me drive right in up some steep steps, through the lobby and narrowly avoid the pool, invisible in the dark.

Having endured a tough day, Emma is not best pleased when the hot water doesn't work despite my protracted negotiations with the slackjaws. Her ice-cream is gross so I give her mine. Then the TV remote won't work and the bed is comically soft. Not our day.

I'm up at the crack worrying of course. Honduras is worst-case scenario for getting a new tyre. At least we are not far from the capital. A local mechanic gives me an address which may be able to help. I chat to a kid there having his moped fixed. Despite looking about 15, he turns out to be a 'secret policeman' he shows me a huge handgun in a shoulder holster. My dodgy repair gives out on the way to Tegucigalpa but after another sweaty grovel at the roadside

we make it to the tyre shop. The only suitable tyre they have is a bit small but it will have to do.

After a stopover in grim little Danli we are on to the Nicaraguan border. The Honduran side is a breeze and I feel smug as I brush aside the tramitadores and moneychangers. As a monument to Honduran roadbuilding, there is one final kingsize pothole right before the chain that separates Honduras from Nicaragua. A guy called Raymur comes and takes our picture for his motorbike magazine.

Then two official-looking guys with clipboards usher us to the fumigación and take our documents. Too late it dawns on us that they are tramitadores. On the plus side they probably speed the process a little. On the minus, they demand $20 'tip'. I refuse and they tell us to come to the police. We take a deep breath and just ride past them, having managed to retrieve our documents. They still get away with about £10 in overcharging for the fumigación and some change they don't return. Oh well. The irritation is washed away by pretty mountain scenery as we descend through Ocotal on roads that seem like rails after Honduras.

We fly along and lunch in Estelí. The bike gets even more attention than usual here. There's practically a queue outside the restaurant to point at it and I get wrapped up in two long conversations about it. In León, we put the pool players off when we ride right into the bar of Via Via to our room. Stunning building and a beautiful room.

I set about emailing about my boat across the Darién Gap which is prooving tricky as the one boat I can find so far doesn't leave til March 6th - a month behind my schedule - would dump me in rainy season in Colombia. We wander the pretty streets of the town

and take a ride to the beach at Las Penitas. We walk to the Guadalupe cemetary but some kids hanging around deter us from staying long. If it was SE Asia it would be different but here you always feel you have to watch your back. Shame. We find an amazing sushi bar with lovely panelled walls. The cocktails are so strong I have to water mine down!

A car goes by with the sound system to end all. Nicaraguan distortion would not be out of place on an MBV recording. The night ends over Nicaraguan rules pool back at Via Via with locals who take their game very seriously. I acquit myself honorably.

The new cathedral in Managua is pretty stunning. As if a lifelong multistory carpark designer finally got his dream job.

The old cathedral, and most of the downtown was razed by earthquake in 1972. We cruise around that area too - a weird sort of ghost-shanty-town of trailer homes and such.

In Granada, everywhere is lleno but we eventually find a room with a lady with a slightly disturbing 'strictly ballroom' standing-to-attention fringe and fastidiously plucked eyebrows. She has arranged the towels into the shapes of swans and pleated little loops over the shower curtain rail. The room is separated from the entrance hall by a flimsy curtain. The family sits the other side and watches soaps.

Having a band play at your table is possibly the most excrutiating experience in touristdom. We choose a table well back and avoid eye-contact but still a trio, in matching orange shirts, hunt us down. The song is mercifully short. The payoff is the people watching on La Calzada. A complicated little dance between a streetgirl, her pimp and her trick. Several nine-year-olds don doll costumes and, accompanied by drums and hoarsely yelled story crumbs, simulate sex on the cobbles.

One of the great pleasures of travelling is getting your hair cut by someone who doesn't talk to you. In the Himalayas they poke burning sticks in your ears as a bonus. In Cambodia, in the shade of a flame tree, you marvel at the scissors worn thin by 3 generations of sharpening. This octogenarian is all business in his little shop stuffed with yellowing memorabilia.

Without a word he wraps me up and spins me around and I am shorn and shaved in 3 minutes. Then a fistful of nameless glob from a plastic bottle and I am someone's husband from the 1950s. £1 time machine.

The view from the tower of the Iglesia de la Merced is a dreamlike walk across the tiles to Lake Nicaragua.

A hyperactive teenager springs up the stairs and grabs the ropes.

We stuff our fingers in our ears and survive the passing of the hour slightly shaken.

Best people watching of all is sitting barefoot on a crate in the market while the muchacho hunches over ancient tools repairing my sandals.

The moneychangers fanning themselves with giant wads of cordóbas. A lady looks pleased with herself as a grisly old man renews her fake Gucci handbag with bootpolish and a toothbrush.

At the quayside at San Jorge, granny sells us some pastries. They taste like granny. Out of her sight, we spit them out. A giant truck brimming with plantains stumbles off the ferry and the ferry sighs relief and returns to a safe buoyancy.

The bike is lashed down and what looks like a 5 minute trip is an hour across the lake to the twin cones of Isla de Ometepe.

A Brasilian woman reminisces how she used to be so skinny that her boyfriend once drove his motorbike 100km before realising she was still in the last gas station. An American backpacker scowls into her Lonely Planet and shows her ticket with a surly gesture. A cheery boathand strips to the waist, ties a fat rope around and swims to a buoy to fasten it. We cruise along the one figure-of-eight road on the island, across a little spit joining the two volcanos and head for Finca la Porvenir where grumpy Ereras feeds us a 3-day-old milkshake while we gaze at Volcán Concepción with its' fluffy little cloud toupée tugged off in clumps like cottonwool on the lee side but mysteriously never diminishing.

We make a circuit of the rougher-than-rough road around Volcán Maderas. Big smiles from the locals we pass. A downpour only makes everything look more evocative as we skirt the little beaches and dodge piglets. A horse bathes by an impossibly tranquil jetty.

A colourful cemetary dreams under steamy jungle slopes.

As dusk falls, my face is whipped by flying creatures and my eyes sting. While we eat, the palms are lashed by freshwater waves and our lips sing with lemongrass and steamed plantain.

Back at the plantation, Em finds a trashy Australian celeb mag and I continue my surreal voyage through Murakami's 1Q84.

This haven of eco-tranquility is less peaceful than advertised with an obnoxious French family talking loudly and slamming doors into the night. Their baby cries at all hours, presumably lamenting its' genes. The saving grace is a torrent of rain at dawn that pummels the roof and carves out a glittering morning.

On our circuit of Concepción, we spy a little park in Altagracia. There's a 4 metre high model of the island complete with baby turtles swimming in its' seas.

A lifetime from London, a truck is loaded with plantains and a bus slaloms the craters.

At Punta Jesus Maria the jetblack sandbar pokes out into the lake and we sway on a forgotten swing.

Very relaxing until an ant sneaks into my t-shirt and tries to gnaw my arm off. At 'Ojo del Agua' the ticketman tells tall tales - a bald man emerging from the waters looking like Bob Marley - but the water is from heaven at this little swiming hole.

We ride back to Mérida and, where a trail falls into the lake, catch a fishing family, sunset-framed, wordlessly drawing in their wriggling nets.

A comedor serves up Pollo a la Plancha in the howling wind. The Italian owner is waiting with rapt attention for the 'Camion de Cerveza' and playing flamenco. We sneak tidbits to the dog.

A herd of cows and a funeral make us late for the ferry. A tiny man called Zack in a huge ute with a glowering girlfriend invite us to stay with them in Gigante. We decline politely but it does make me head for this beachtown not listed in our guide. On the boat we try to ignore the still-revolving Jean-Claude Van Damme movie and the ominous creaking of the overloaded plantain truck. In Rivas, the comedor's baños are over in the corner of the plaza, through an obscure gate and in an outhouse across somebody's chicken-pecked yard. Gigante, at the end of a sandy road, is a forgotten little frontier, its' streets filled with errant livestock and the hopeful hammering of embryonic guesthouses.

A tattooed surfer-dude called Dustin is summoned and he shows us an empty room and assures us that a bed can be installed within the hour. The bathroom is a little lacking in privacy.

He says $20 is half the price of anywhere else. He and his mates are doing up the place while the waves are down. Lazily we take up the offer. The sea is a decidely non-paradisaical frigidity but the pargo (snapper) and lobster is delicious. The surfer-dudes promised us a 15% discount at this place. It morphs into 10% and then 0% when tax is slipped in. We find another bar. Their entirely finished rooms are $20. But the downside is being forcefed Pink Floyd and reggae. Back at our place our money is being put to good use. Two of the surfer-dudes emerge from the rusty toilet door sniffing cokey sniffs.

An icecream in gringoville San Juan and the backroad to Ostional has a police checkpoint and later an army one. They both warn of banditos on the road. I ask what I should do about them. They say drive faster. The army guy says there will be an Arrivada of the giant turtles maybe tonight and says we should come back at 9pm.

In sleepy little Ostional there is a power cut. We move the table in the comedor onto the side of the road and eat dinner under the moon while the family sits there and stares. We make a decent substitute for the TV it would seem. In the mangroves across the road the frogs gurgle and the rest of the ark hums along. We drink beer on the stoop of our cabaña and Alan, a Costa Rican next door tells us of his NGO work trying to foster sustainable fishing here.

In the morning we make for Costa Rica.

Twists and Turns

2012-01-08T15:58:00.000-08:00

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.

South = Warmer, right?

2011-12-21T18:18:00.000-08:00

Tex/Mex border to Guanajuato

It´s almost performance art how many wrong turns we make at the border. Wrong line on the US side so have to U-turn through intimidating "Severe Tire Damage" spikes and past bemused soldiers. Then on the other side of the bridge, optimistically in the "Nothing to Declare" line results in a border guard drawing a map to get through the Mexican town/warzone back to through the checkpoint to No-Man´s Land and we still have to tip one cheery guy $2 to open a special fence. That gets us to Kafka´s darkest architectural nightmare, Migración y Aduana. An epic queue dance ensues as we are passed from one window to another. One window, which we become very familiar with is the copy window where our various documents, once scrutinised are cheerily photocopied for 10 pesos a go. They don´t like my UK proof of ownership and it is weird that Brits only have a receipt, in my case written up on my laptop, to prove a vehicle is theirs. I am instructed to call a Tax Office back on the US side which the increasingly cheery copy girl happily charges me a dollar a minute for. Apparently I can get some kind of temporary title for the bike if I go there and pay some extortionate amount for it. Going there, however, means joining the despairing masses in a hellish queue back across the bridge that we can see gridlocked out of the window. There goes the whole day in potential wild-goose chase then. In a final desperate bid - and this is a rough birth for my Spanish - I try waving a last US import document in their faces and throw in a mixture of poker-face and sad-doggy-eyes. It works! Just 3 more round trips to the Banjercito cashier, the copy window Mr Aduana-bad-teeth-droopy-eye and a diploma first-class in cutting the line. A mere 3 hours and we are cruising into Nuevo Laredo. Well more like scurrying through like frightened minnows - these border towns have an evil rep for car-jacking, and on a bike you can´t roll up the windows.

A few heavily armed checkpoints along the way and we reach Monterrey, stop to check the map and within 2 minutes a car pulls up and a guy jumps out beaming. He dispenses with the traditional kidnapping formalities and helpfully gives us directions to Portrero Chico. As we skirt the skirts of this city of 5 million souls, a sort of well-heeled Cambodia is brought to mind. The make-do-and-mend in every object I can see. One pickup has the whole rear cut off, forming a sort of rustic Smart Car. Faces peer past clumps of crystal splinters masquerading as windshields. Dog-eat-Dog for Right-of-Way.

Bless that GPS. Today at least. We find ourselves at a sort of post-apocalyptic Butlins. Empty pools and roaming cats. The silence is a warm bath.

Portrero Chico is a climber´s Mecca in the shade of a Moominland mountain that no camera could capture. As night falls the absurd peaks are covered in a falling curtain of mist. We sit on the stoop and watch the credits roll.

Next day I make calls to get a new rear tyre in Mexico City. My Spanish is a disaster and Skype isn´t helping. We walk into the pueblo and find the Mexican version of Argos. No less than 6 people sell me a phone. Saleswoman passes us to Clerk to write a chit and take us to Cashier who gives us receipt to give to Dogsbody who gets phone from a backroom who leads us to Activaton Lady. Hers is the most demanding position and it takes her a full 30 minutes of tapping buttons, sending for a second battery and printing of contracts to finally present me with my $10 mobile. We eat at a sort of garage-cum-drive thru and when we stop to buy beer at a deposito two large trucks full of heavily armed soldiers glide past in the gloom.

We ride for silver mining ghost town Real de Catorce. Mostly we want to find some of that elusive sun stuff. We rug up in the drizzle and promptly get stuck in a 30 min traffic jam on the Monterrey orbital. Kids walk among the cars asking for food. Then we climb into increasingly heavy fog and a slippery road. No fun but after Saltillo is behind us the clouds part and we are racing across grand sierra valleys to Concepción del Oro. It´s not all the grand name suggests and after some tasty frijoles by the roadworks we hit a real road.

Straight out of "My Own Private Idaho" and lined with millions of yukkas each a lunatic sculpture. A little cemetery marooned by the way catches our eye.

Then the turn-off to Real de Catorce arrives with the light statring to fade. On two wheels the slippery cobbled surface is unsettling and appears to lead nowhere but we make the tunnel by dusk. It´s sort of chewed out of the hillside and you expected to see pickaxes clawing at silver veins along the way but then we are spat out into the town and we soon plump for the most expensive hotel (850 pesos gets you boutique here) in town after a tiring 230 miles.

We hire horses to ride to El Quemado - sacred peyote hunting ground of the Huicholes Indians. The saddle is painful, the drops to the side are dizzying and the horses know full-well they are in control but we settle in and pass through ruins with an Arabic arch - from Roman times, our guide, José, says (!?) and then out into cactus-strewn hillsides.

We walk the final 20 mins up and this is when I really appreciate that we are close to 3000 metres up. I stop every 20 yards to wring oxygen out of the thin air. As a sort of party trick a friend of José gets a cigarette from me near the top and giggles as mine goes out after almost every puff. I pause for thought at the Huichole shrine, a set of concentric pebble circles with little offerings in the middle that brings to mind the Ovoo shrines in Mongolia.

Two Huicholes are crouched in a stone hut at the summit making bead bracelets by an altar and in amongst its´goat skulls and textile offerings a little stuffed winnie-the-poo smiles out at me. We reward our sore backsides with delicious gorditas at a stall in Plaza Hidalgo and wander the pretty church with its retablos to Francis of Assisi, each one a sort of child´s drawing of an accident or illness that Frank sorted. Then the mint with its´ century old photos of brass bands, work crews and stiff wedding poses. Then the old cock-fight ring

and walks along the steep cobbles set in geometric shapes.

Then burritos and bed.

After emails back home to photoshop my documents into a more pleasing shape for Guatemalan customs, we saddle up and cruise the cool tunnel and gingerly back down the cobbles to the scorching road.

Pollo a la Mexicana at a dusty roadside restarant with an absurdly large display of toy frogs and Grandma wishes us Feliz Navidad. The GPS dumps us in the most sketchy road imaginable in the ripped backsides of San Luis Potosi and I´m glad of those dirt tyres to get us back on course. I swear those were gunshots while I fumbled with the map but Em says they were fireworks...

Our hotel is right next to Plaza des Armas in the centre and the owner says we can park in the entrance way. A bit of wood and a few revs and we´re up the 3 steps and looking like a rather fine but dusty ornament to their lobby. In the plaza there is a very cool sound and light show projected on the church and we wander and watch a clown and a trainee fire-juggler (ouch) over Taco Rojos and Enchiladas Potosinas at a street stall.

A quick stop into the church on Plaza San Francisco to see its´stunning crystal ship "chandelier" hanging in front of the altar and a shoe-shiner works overtime on our roaddust.

Then a good ride that takes us through the chaotic ramble of a small town and on through the yukkas past a rusting basketball court a good 50 miles from the nearest sign of humanity and up into mountains and plunging descents. Guanajuato greets us with its´confusing 3D map of many tunnels bitten raw from the rock. Intersections in steep tunnels, one so slick with tunnel-drippings that I nearly lose the front wheel. I get Emma to walk that bit. After ages trying to park in this most car-unfriendly of cities we end up tying up around a tree on the sidewalk in front of our hostel and hope the police don´t mind. The town is stunning once we´re past that nonsense.

Winding tiny hillside streets where the houses nearly touch each other and compete for the title of most primary-coloured and a studenty, cultured feel. We beer in a cafe on a Venetian-style bridge and then settle in for more in Plazuela San Fernando and watch the lights come on.

The alcohol helps us sleep through the wee-small hour parties that assail from all directions back at the hostel.

A lazy day is spent wandering the sunny streets, climbing not so lazily up to views over the jumble of pantone houses and admiring Diego Rivera´s pictures in the house of his birth.

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

2011-12-01T15:47:00.000-08:00

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!