End of the road…

Final location: Recoleta, Buenos Aires

Total miles: 15,393

Appropriate tune: Ramblin’ man, by Lemonjelly

Secretly, and without telling anyone, I always hoped to get to Buenos Aires. And now I’m here it feels, well, weird.

After eight months, more than 15,000 miles, 13 countries, thousands of chicken pieces, several hundred fried bananas, a tonne of rice and one brand new tyre (thanks, Todd) I’m finally at journey’s end.

I think I started to get slightly sick of travelling somewhere around Colombia. It was not so much riding the motorbike – that remained a daily delight – but the constant checking in and checking out of some hotel or hostel somewhere, and unpacking and repacking all my possessions into three medium sized aluminium boxes on a daily basis.

Add in the frustration of having to navigate your way around yet another unfamiliar place and the sense of dislocation that comes from knowing nothing about it, and knowing no-one there, and you can see why I became fixated on the idea of being in one place. And logic demanded that one place should be my ultimate destination, Buenos Aires.

As a consequence I rushed through places I now wish I’d spent more time – desert Peru, for example, or Chile – as I was lured towards the nirvana of my final halt like some kind of moth towards some kind of flame.

No matter how much I loathed the limits set by those boxes you get used to the life you’ve made for yourself, even if it feels unpleasant. It’s what keeps us going to work everyday, after all.  And now that life has gone, I cannot help feeling like something is missing.

Everyday I get up and I’m in the same place – a pleasant apartment on the tenth floor of a modern building in Buenos Aires’ poshest barrio, Recoleta, home to ambassadors and most famous as the last resting place of the great and good of Argentinian society. The local cemetery contains the graves of independence heroes and presidents, authors, musicians, businessmen and one Eva Peron Duarte.

I don’t have to wrap my t-shirts in plastic bags and squeeze them into a metal box. Instead, like normal people, I can stack them neatly on one of the shelves of my built-in wardrobe. I don’t have to make sure I’ve got on enough layers on to cope with the penetrating cold. The only fuel I’ve got to worry about is coffee, and with at least 10 cafes within a block of my apartment I’m pretty confident I’m never going to go short.

There’s live coverage of the Tour de France on the telly every morning, and a proper pop-up toaster in the kitchen. There’s no need to consult a map before I leave the apartment, and no need to hunt down a bed for the night before it gets dark. And if I see something I like in a shop I can buy it. Unlike the panniers, I don’t have to worry about running out of space in the flat. There is a long, long way to go until I become a Mr Trebus of the south Atlantic.

Luckily, coping with the loss of my old life on the road is made considerably easier by the fact there is so much to do in Buenos Aires. And, because of the march of swine flu through the country, I’m one of the few people still doing it. While many people are staying at home trying to avoid their coughing neighbours, I’m doing my bit for the Argentinian balance of trade by continuing to visit the many excellent art galleries, museums, shops and cinemas in this outpost of Europe in South America.

To rip off Alex Garland’s novel The Beach, Buenos Aires is like a decompression chamber between Europe and South America. As a first destination on this huge continent for people from the Olde Worlde it’s pretty convenient. It looks like a cross between New York and Haussman’s Paris – broad boulevards with bellas artes architecture interspersed with grids of apartment blocks, small shops and cafes.

It’s got loads of pretty parks where the main activities are jogging, and walking dogs. Like Paris, the vast amount of dog crap on pavements is legendary. Like New York, the sound of fire engine sirens wailing around the towerblocks reminds you you’re a long day’s ride from the countryside.

And as a final stop before returning to Europe it’s pretty handy too. Everything functions. Shops and restaurants are open after 5pm. They’ve even got Starbucks, for God’s ‘s sake. Stepping onto a plane here and off in London or Madrid or Miami feels more like travelling from one part of a city to another, rather than crossing a vast ocean  and a couple of continents.

I don’t think this will be my final post on this blog site. I still haven’t told you what the journey was like, or what the best and the worst bits were. To some extent it’s bacause I don’t really know. I think it’s too soon after stopping to take it all in. It’ll take a few weeks – or months – to make sense of it all.

One thing I do know is that it was much more exhausting than I thought it could be. Since checking into my BA apartment I’ve probably spent more time in bed than in any other part of the flat. I’ve also reintroduced my body to the idea of exercise, to the shock of us both.

One other thing I know is that I’m in no rush to do it again. In a coffee bar yesterday a bloke asked me if I was going to ride the bike back to Miami. No fear, I said, without even thinking about it. Too far.

But do I regret it? No. When I was in Florida – which seems a lifetime ago now – I was listening to music on my laptop. At the end of the Laura Marling album Alas I Cannot Swim there’s a secret track (it’s after all the birdsong, you just have to persevere a bit – or be too lazy to switch it off).

Anyway, it’s got some appropriate lyrics, which I thought I’d share:

“There’s a house across the river but alas I cannot swim, and a garden of such beauty that the flowers seem to grin;

“There’s a house across the river but alas I cannot swim, I’ll live my life regretting that I never jumped in.”

I don’t regret jumping in, not one bit. At least now I know what the house across the river really looks like.

High Plains Drifter

Current location: Cordoba, Argentina

Miles to date: 14,943

I never expected that: Parrots in the desert

There’s a show on some cable channel or other – I think it might be the Discovery Channel – where, using a super slo-motion camera, ordinary events are replayed to the general astonishment of the watching public. The point the programme makers constantly reiterate is that even the most mundane of occurrences look incredibly different when slowed right down.

It’s a bit like ordering a coffee in a restaurant in Argentina. The process is familiar, although slowed down to such an extent it becomes fascinating, unusual even. This is a country where – unless you are behind the wheel of a car – it is definitely unseemly to rush about.

Lunch – usually some kind of slow roasted meat – is taken at a leisurely pace, and is promptly (if that’s the right word) followed by a siesta. And as for dinner, don’t expect to hear the gong much before 11pm. Invited to an asado – a traditional open fire barbecue – I was ready to knaw my own arm off by the time the first course of meat finally put in an appearance sometime just before midnight.

You can see why they like to take their time. This is such a massive country, something like the eight largest in the world, that the mere thought of tracking across its vast open spaces, with its endless skies and its far, far horizons, is enough to make you pull the covers a little closer to your chin and think “later, later”.

Legendarily, Ushuaia in the south of the country is closer to Antarctica than it is to the capital Buenos Aires. Or take the far north west. This is the point where Argentina bumps into Chile and Bolivia, huge salt pans and endless deserts making a mockery of the borders supposedly dividing the countries. Up here there are more llamas than people, and what people there are have a distinctly Andean look about them.

Sitting in a freezing adobe hostel at 4,000 metres, with frozen salt lakes outside and an endless chilly blue sky wrapped over you, the fashion boutiques and coffee houses of chic Buenos Aires don’t even feel like they are part of the same planet let alone the same country.

It is a land of high plains between the two ranges of the Andes, crossing from the world’s driest destert on the Chilean side of the mountains – the Atacama – to the deep red gorges and giant cactus forests on the Argentinian side.

The high plain has little vegetation – just some spikey clumps of grass that look a bit like spinifex – but it’s enough to support a food chain of sorts. More numerous than I’ve ever seen them are the protected vicuñas, small and skittish, like a cross between a deer and a camel. As well as grazing the grass, they also drink from what looks like tiny salt lakes, that is when the sun finally gathers enough strength in the middle of the afternoon to melt the top layer of water.

There is also a kind of fox in the high desert that looks more like a coyote with a brown underside and a dark, black stripe at the top of its coat. Somehow, ducks have found a way to survive on a thimbulfull of water up here and flocks of smaller birds, like sparrows, are constantly swooping over the road in search of God knows what to eat. It’s certainly too cold for insects.

No people can live on this part of the high plain. Agriculture is impossible and it is forbidden to kill and eat the vicuñas. Instead, from San Pedro de Atacama – an outpost of the Mundo Gringo with its internet cafes, tour companies and wholemeal bread – 160 kilometres to the Argentinian border post there is no sign of human habitation except lonely, windblown Ruta 27.

I don’t know what you have to do wrong to find yourself posted to the Argentinian border  but despite the fact it is clearly the Siberia of South America the people who work here are professional, polite and efficient. Getting into the Republica Argentina – as the countless signs, flags and paintings on the road tell you - is very, very straightforward. (Sensibly, the Chileans do all their border paperwork back in San Pedro. It’s weird being allowed free reign of a country having officially checked out but at least it saves a few customs officials from the most mundane posting of their careers.)

The first town in Argentina is Susques. Along its dry, dusty freezing streets it’s hard to see where the desert ends and the town begins. With an altitude more than three times the highest point of the UK – Ben Nevis – this is not a place for rushing about, either. Thankfully there’s nothing to do except put on every item of clothing you own and lie in your refrigerator of a room until it is acceptably late enough (8pm, in my case) to get under the covers and call it a night.

When the sun finally does rise, bringing with it no warmth, you’re reminded why this spectral, haunting landscape will stay with you such a long time. It’s hard to convey a sense of its majesty in mere words, but the effect of rolling along in this huge emptiness, like a tiny parasite crawling along the buttock of some mighty beast, is incredibly calming.

I arrived in Jujuy – no metropolis itself – feeling stunned by the emptiness I’d experienced, and overwhelmed by the traffic, the streets, the people. Luckily I snapped out of it soon enough on discovering that Argentina has not one, but a choice of chains all serving excellent coffee. Being a civilised country, it is usually accompanied by a small biscuit or cake of some kind, and a small glass of sparkling water, the Argentinians betraying their Italian roots.

And so it’s continued. Jujuy to Salta, on the advice of the man who looked after my motorcycle all night, was taken along Ruta 9 through high wooded hills and past lakes. As a counterpoint to the aridity of the desert, this fecundity could not have been sharper. Salta to Tucuman felt like driving in England in a particularly dry autumn, brown leaves burning at the side of the road and the last of the crops in the field just starting to dry out as they wait to be harvested.

And then Santiago del Estero, slightly derided in my guidebook but a place of immense friendliness among its modern grid of streets and some of the best food I’ve had since November. The fresh pasta lunch has won a place on the eating leaderboard to your right, but the selection of treats served up in the central market only did not make it onto the list because I thought it was unreasonable for one town to hog two entries. I might yet change that.

Last, but by no means least, Cordoba. A tough, chilly, windy, six hour ride south across deserts, salt pans, plains and low rolling hills it wears its title of Argentina’s second city lightly, and without the chippy scorn of the capital normally found in second towns.

Most remarkable, for me at least, is that about 300 kilometres north of here I passed a small, simple sign in the desert which read KM 1000. This means I am less than one thousand kilometres from journey’s end at Buenos Aires. In fact, I am going to Rosario tomorrow and this will undoubtedly by my final stop on the road. After 15,000 miles I’ll be calling a halt to this odyssey and resting up in Buenos Aires for a few weeks before returning back to Blighty.

Whatever else happens, I’ll be taking my time over my coffee once I’m in Buenos Aires. After all, there’s no rush, is there?

Just deserts

Current location: Calama, Chile

Miles to date: 13,826

Job I would not want: whoever arranged the rocks in the southern Peruvian desert into those straight lines.

Of all the terrible legacies left behind by the Spanish invaders – destruction of indigenous cultures, the imposition of a manifestly unfair land distribution system, the Inquisition – by far the worst is their casual approach to breakfast.

Hispanic cultures, whether back in the European motherland or here in the various countries of South and Central America, just don’t seem to have got the news that breakfast is The Most Important Meal of the Day.

Usually, you have one of two choices: an insubstantial cake of some sort or an over-substantial full dinner. Nothing could be less appetising at seven in the morning than the only-partly thawed meatballs I was served for breakfast once. Except the rancid turkey steaks I politely declined on another occasion. Apart from bacon, I just don’t do cooked meats before lunchtime.

Or there’s the cake option, which just feels wrong. Too sweet. Not filling enough. Just wrong. Now, to save myself having to read some smartarse feedback, I know there are honourable exceptions. In northern Mexico it’s possible to get avena, a nice porridge served with chopped banana and fresh vanilla pods, sometimes also with cinnamon. Mmmmm. They do something similar, but thinner, in Guatemala and Panama, and not just in the gringo places either.

But for the most part there is little that makes me feel more northern European (for the purposes of this rant, I’m including America in northern Europe) than the daily disappointment of failing to hunt out something filling and tasty before hitting the road for the day.

Of all the countries I’ve been to so far (11 and counting) Chile is by far the worst in this regard, having taken breakfast-disdain to new heights. Here, you’re lucky if you get a thin toasted roll – just enough to remind you how hungry you are – and a cup of instant coffee from your hotel. Forget trying to get anything on the street. Nowhere opens before 11am

This blemish aside – and I blame the Spanish for this, not the Chileans – Chile is a pretty sweet deal. Here, rather than trying to run you down Peruvian-style, taxi drivers stop at the pedestrian crossing and wait for you to cross. The first time this happened to me in Arica I assumed she was just trying to lure me into the road in order to give herself a better chance of hitting me.

Just 20 kilometres south of the Peruvian border, Arica makes quite a contrast with its northern neighbour. Ordered, polite and relatively expensive the great traveller’s cliche is that Chile – and to a greater extent Argentina – is just like Europe.

It is most emphatically not. Chile maybe one of the richest countries in South America but its GDP of $13,900 in 2007 would still leave it some way short of the European average. According to my guidebook an estimated 22 per cent of the population lives in acute poverty.

There are more signs here of a middle class than in other Latin American countries – white people with dreadlocks – but that does not make it France, or Germany or Latvia.

Then there’s the landscape, which is about as far from Europe as it’s possible to get, my part especially. When you come from a pokey, cloudy island off the north west coast of the continental mainland two things immediately strike you about Chile: it seems permanently sunny, and it is vast, at least in the deserts of the north.

First, the sun. Chile is home to the driest desert on Earth – the Atacama – and the driest town on Earth, Quillagua. Ironically enough for a town famed for its lack of water, Quillagua has plenty of the stuff. I was expecting a parched, windblown stretch of desert full of people with tongues lolling out, thirstily begging water and fizzy drinks from passing motorists.

Instead what you have is brightly painted wooden houses leading to a sun baked little square, but surrounded by shrubs and trees. As its name suggests Quillagua has got something to do with water – it’s an oasis, although it is reached by crossing one of the most barren stretches of road I have yet travelled. None of its water arrives borne by English-style clouds.

If you click on the video above of the Panamerican Highway you’ll get some idea of what I’m talking about. Although that particular bit of the highway is in Peru, you’ll still be able to see it’s just a road and some desert and that’s about it (plus, the Pacific Ocean but let’s not quibble).

If I thought southern Peru was desolate little prepared me for just how empty a space northern Chile is. If you read my previous blog you’ll see I described some of the people who live at the side of the Panamericana, eking a living from whatever passing trade they can rustle up.

So although it’s a desert, and by British standards it’s a long, long way between stuff, there are still regular enough signs of human habitation from pueblitos, to fishing villages to roadside shacks, to make you feel you have not completely lost touch with the rest of the human race.

Northern Chile though…blimey. As it’s impossible to get maps of South America in South America I’ve been very much relying on the maps inside my Footprint guidebook. Not ideal, but needs must and all that. Poring repeatedly over that map, I couldn’t see any towns between Arica and Iquique, 300kms to the south.

I assumed this was wrong and that it was just one of the afectations of the guidebook that they refused to recommend any places to stay between these places. But the map – and the book – was right. You really do have to drive 300kms south of Arica to find the next town with a hotel.

Luckily, Iquique has plenty of them as it’s one of the premier seaside resorts on this stretch of the coast. Crammed onto a narrow strip of land between the mountains and the blue Pacific, it’s a place obviously trying to rediscover the grandeur of its heyday but wonderfully failing.

The principal street – and the one I stayed on – is Boquedano, which links the main shopping area with the beach. It’s a long, straight stretch of street which still has its old tram tracks, although they sadly no longer run. It also has kept its wooden sidewalk which creaks delightfully as you make your way out of the hotel in the morning, or back at night.

The street is lined with mansions built in thje early 20th century by people who made their fortune in the nitrate business, before synthetic alternatives made mining the stuff pointlessly expensive, leading to the collapse of the industry in Chile. Some of these mansions are well maintained, used today by hotels, art schools and government offices. Others are evocatively dilapidated, paint peeling under the twin onslaught of sun and seaspray.

In the desert surrounding Iquique are ghost towns like Humberstone, abandoned when the nitrate business folded and now refusing to wither away in the dry desert air. Some have become latter day tourist attractions. It’s a bit like sneaking through someone’s house when they’re not there.

Leaving Iquique is the same story as arriving. Quillague aside (no places to stay) there is very little to distract you as you travel down Ruta 5 the Panamericana until you reach Calama, more than 320 kilometres away.

Which leaves you plenty of time for ruminating on why it is Hispanic people don’t do breakfast, or why they don’t show that slightly racist Drifter ad any more (perhaps because it was slightly racist, or maybe they just stopped making Drifters), or whatever happened to Haircut 100.

Pointless ramblings aside, I have also reached a second milestone on this trip. As well as leaving the Banana Zone, I have also left the classic Pan American Highway, a road I picked up in Central America but have left to find its own way to the far south of Chile.

I’ve been heading south ever since I left Austin, Texas just after Christmas, down through San Antonio, across into Mexico and through Central America to Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. At many points I’ve either crossed the Panamericana, or have ridden along it.

But no more. This morning I left the Pacific Ocean for the last time and after lunch I similarly exited the Panamericana. I’m now on Ruta 24 through Calama and San Pedro de Atacama as far as the border. There, I’ll cross the Andes via the Jama Pass and down into my final country, Argentina, where the steaks are huge and Pampas are flat. Wonder what they do for breakfast?

You are now leaving the Banana Zone

 

Current location: Arequipa, Peru

Miles to date: 13,097

Thank you: Yes, I know my frikkin’ lights are on. They are hardwired on.

I can’t tell you exactly where it happened but somewhere north of Lima I stopped getting fried banana as part of my daily set lunch. Significant? You bet. And here’s why.

Everywhere from Chiapas in southern Mexico to the border between Ecuador and Peru, the fried banana (and before you write in, I know it’s probably a plantain) is as predictably part of the set lunch menu as  the mound of rice and the chicken leg.

I’ve probably had at least one – and often more – fried banana on a daily basis. So its absence feels like a Big Deal. Chiapas, the southernmost part of Mexico and on the border with Guatemala, is the start of the Banana Zone. Unlike the rest of Mexico it is not brown, arid and dusty. Rather, it is lush green and tropical, humid at the lower elevations and orientated more to the Mayan heartlands of central America than the rest of the Aztec Mexico to the north.

Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama are also all definitely in the Banana Zone. Green, hot, humid, jungly. And so is Colombia and – to a lesser extent – Ecuador. But crossing the border into Peru by the Panamerican Highway marks a significant change not just in the menu but in the landscape and climate.

Very quickly, Ecuador’s verdant hills are behind you. The landscape flattens out and the roads straighten. The green vegetation disappears pretty dramatically and within a few miles you are crossing the Sechura Desert where the landscape is more akin to Oaxaca or Zacatecas or Chihuahua in Mexico than any of the many countries in between.

And so this is why the disappearance of the banana is significant, for me at least. I seem to have emerged from one large and important part of this journey and gone into another, final, part. From here to Chile and over the Andes into north western Argentina it’s going to be types of desert all the way. And although there are still a lot of miles between here and Buenos Aires I cannot help feeling I’ve entered the last leg of this trip.

But it’s still a hell of a journey. Piura and Chiclayo, the two most significant towns in northern Peru, are colourful and lively oases. By contrast, between them is the Sechura Desert, as lonely a stretch of  road as you are likely to come across. They also both have attractive colonial centres and some of the worst driving I’ve yet been the victim of. After the sanity of Ecuador, it’s like trying to ride a bike through the dodgems at the fairground.

The weapon of choice for the Peruvian cab driver is the Daewoo Tico, a small metal box painted bright yellow. I don’t know whether they come ready supplied with dents from the manufacturer but I didn’t see a single one that did not have all its panels knocked out of shape by a driving style that does not recognise lanes, lights, junctions or rights of way. As a bike rider you feel especially vulnerable. It’s a relief to make it to any hotel in one piece.

Jewel in the crown of these northern colonial oases is supposedly Trujillo but I could not get out of their fast enough. Despite its well maintained main square – always called the Plaza de Armas in Peru – and its collection of cobbled streets and brightly-painted houses I always think Trujillo has a slightly manacing, unfriendly air. And it’s not just the cab drivers, although I did have to add another dent with my motorcycle boots to one particularly irritating taxi monkey who thought it was acceptable just to drive me off the road.

The real problem with Trujillo is that it feels like a rip off. The hotels are overpriced and undergood. You always have to check your change (in one place, they tried to give me Colombian colones) and you’re never quite sure if what they are telling you is correct.

But there’s one good reason to praise Trujillo: the weather. South of here is one of the most unpleasant meterological phenomenons (try saying that after a couple of beers), the garua. This is a blanket of low cloud and fog that obscures the sky for eight months of the year and keeps temperatures unpleasantly low, and makes driving through it hazardous.

Not only do you have the depressing daily sight of grey skies – I had enough of that in London – but its much chillier than you have any right to expect from a desert. It makes the journey south from Trujillo for 1,000 kilometres an unpleasant grind. Here the Panamericana follows the coast, sometimes in sight of the Pacific, sometimes not, through what is rightly known as the coastal desert.

It’s a lonely, windblasted place of dunes, rock and rubbish. Not only are plastic bags blown freely around in the wind but for three metres either side of the road, virtually along its entire length, is a collection of plastic bottles, crisp packets and used nappies jettisoned from many of the passing buses by passengers too lazy to bother looking after their own country. If the grey, freezing mist were not bad enough, the sight of all this idly-tossed crap is a depressing spectacle.

Astoundingly, many people choose this stretch of road to call home. Scattered along its length are squat dwellings, usually what looks like floor matting converted into walls and held together with black plastic sheeting and hope. There is no running water. There is no electricity. People in these shacks subsist by providing all the services you’d expect to the transient population of bus passengers and truck drivers from food to all other human needs. Outside one, through the mist, stood a woman of a certain age, overdressed for the time of day and underdressed for the weather. The service she was providing was obvious, but weird in the middle of a desert.

Halfway through the grey soup is Lima, capital of the nation and scene – according to the local paper – of 64 per cent of the country’s car accidents last year. I could believe it. Where other towns have poor drivers, Lima also has poor drivers, but a greater volume of them. It was not a place I was looking forward to but surprised myself by staying in the middle class enclave of Miraflores, a pleasantly upmarket part of the city with not one but two – heaven’s be praised – branches of Starbucks.

They don’t do Starbucks in the Banana Zone but here the familiar green, white and black logo was a guarantee that whatever else might hapen to me in Lima, at least I’d be able to wash it down with decent coffee. On one afternoon the sun finally broke through the garua so it was possible to sit watching the Pacific crash on the shore, sipping a cafe del dia. Almost civilised.

Thankfully, two hundred kilometres south of Lima the sun finally wins the battle and the garua is left behind. It’s still the same coastal desert – with still the same piles of roadside rubbish – but somehow the bright blue sky and the warming sun meant it was all a bit easier to live with.

In this desert is one of the nicest oasis towns I’ve been to. Huacachina looks more like the middle east than middle Peru. Basically a collection of hotels and restaurants overlooking a small lake, it’s surrounded by huge dunes – one of them in nearby Ica, at more than 2,000 metres the largest in the world – which it is possible to climb up and sandboard down, if you’ve got the energy. After six months of sitting on my backside on a bike I did not have the energy.

And finally Arequipa, which rivals Cusco for the title most complete colonial town in Peru. It’s certainly got better weather than Cusco – 365 days of sunshine – and a more stunning setting, with snow-capped mountains and a volcano visible from the Plaza de Armas. Having been to both I reckon Cusco has the edge in the colonial competition but in the bright morning sunshine and with nothing on the agenda more dramatic than a bit of wandering, some photographing, and lunch it’s a pretty good place to wile away a day or two.

I’m not expecting fried bananas. That’s all behind me now. In front is more desert, then Chile, last country on my journey south before I take a sharp left and head over the Andes to Argentina, assuming the roads are not blocked by snow. Not quite journey’s end, then.

Middle-earth

Current location: Chiclayo, Peru

Miles to date: 11, 878

Song of the day: Horse with No Name, America. (Go on, download it now while no-one’s looking.)

After a while, the more you travel the less you actually want to see. Especially if it takes any kind of effort to see it. Week One and the prospect of getting on a bus for 16 hours to see a series of small stones in a field outside some far flung mountain village – a significant pre-Columban site although no-one knows what the hell they mean – fills you with delight.

Week Twenty Four and unless that World Heritage Site is literally in the foyer of your hotel, you’re not sure you can work up the enthusiasm to take a look as you cross from the stairs to the breakfast room. Great Wall of China? Whatever. Taj Mahal? Do me a favour. Machu Picchu? Can’t we get a cab there instead?

Some of this is understandable Travellers’ Weariness, a disease that even the most enthusiatic globetrotter falls victim to from time to time, a kind of numbness that develops after an oversupply of new experiences. Like some kind of Victorian opium addict you need increasingly large doses of stimulation to recreate the initial response. 

And some of it is Travel Guide Syndrome, a manmade affliction brought on by constantly being told by your selected book that something cannot be missed, only to discover it can be, and if you’d been thinking straight, should have been.

Take here in Chiclayo, for example. It’s a nice colonial town in Peru separated from Piura to the north by the Sechura desert, a windswept plain of dunes and low trees where sand is blown across the road like snakes and up into your face, stinging your eyes.

Although it’s a nice enough town Chiclayo is most famous for the archaelogical sites that surround it. Of these, Sipan is the most celebrated. It’s the site of a huge pre-Inca civilisation noted for the richness of the finds unearthed when the pyramids were opened sometime in the 1980s. Only it’s a bit difficult to get to.

From Chiclayo, you have to take a bus  for an hour. And to get the bus you have to go to an out-of-town bus station, in such a dodgy part of town that even the tourist information office – the people paid to put a positive gloss on the city  - says it’s too dangerous to walk on a Sunday morning. So now it’s two forms of transport (eg four times the hassle), and you’ve got to give money to a cab driver. Who can be bothered?

(Also, the whole giving money to cab drivers thing is enough to put me off on its own. I’ve no wish to turn this blog into a rant but suffice to say I’ll do almost anything to avoid getting into a cab.)

The exception to all this weariness, however, is Ecuador. Even to the most jaded travel palate, Ecuador is one hell of a tasty morsel.

Whereas Colombia is the obvious and noisy elder sister, an empty-headed worshipper at the temple of music and dance, Ecuador is the dark and brooding younger brother, given to long bouts of introspection and self-doubt. And it’s all the better for it. Ecuador’s charms are revealed subtly and slowly.

In Ecuador, you are not constantly being offered tours to second-rate destinations, or to have your shoes shined, or to take a taxi or any of the other myriad annoyances that the countries to the north and south of Ecuador specialise in. In Ecuador it’s possible to wander about and be ignored. Great – just like home.

This is a place of great depth. And great height. Strung along it’s central spine are any number of peaks above 4,000 metres, with the likes of Chimborazo and Cotopaxi reaching a sky-scraping 5,000 metres plus (for feet, multiply by three and you’ll get a rough idea).

Not that you can appreciate this great altitude all that often. Because of their height, these volcanoes are ofter shrouded in low cloud, obscuring their snow capped summits, but making the few times they are fully visible all the more rewarding. I’ve been past them three times now and have yet to see them. I guess I’ll just have to keep swinging by, just in case.

For me, Ecuador started well and just got better. My guidebook warned me that getting your own vehicle into Ecuador was a nightmare. Having endured the grind of Central American border crossings (some of the pain was admittedly self-inflicted) I expected the worst.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find myself sipping my final weak cup of Colombian coffee-style drink in the border cafeteria less than an hour after first turning up. Both the Colombians and the Ecuadoreans could not have been more efficient or polite.

Then Otavalo. This is a town famed for its Saturday market, for the most part a vast array of llama-themed tat knitted in the kind of scratchy wool last seen being pressed onto the bodies of unwilling conscripts in the Great War. It is modern. It is supposedly gringo central. I was expecting the worst.

But I don’t know whether it was the sunshine, or the morning’s brilliant border experience still fresh in my mind but I could not help falling for the place. True, it’s pretty modern. But not in a God-this-looks-a-bit-like-Hatfield kind of way. More in a clean-streets-and-stuff-that-functions-kind-of-way.

After Otavalo I was lucky to find a chilly mountain retreat just south of Quito, allowing me both to avoid the capital (I’ve been there before and had no desire to be stuck in a traffic jam for hours) and to carry on my mountain hideaway theme.

I was also able to visit – en route – my third “real” equator. I don’t know why crossing an imaginary line elicits such childish delkight, but it does. There’s something about being in middle-earth that is just fun.

Then Baños, a town which specialises in chewy toffee -stretched to an edible state on the doorways of the many sweetshops in town – and thermal baths. Somehow, I managed to overdo it lying in hot water watching the nearby waterfall crash into the river. I’m really going to have to do something about my fitness levels when this is all over.

From Baños the next stop south is Cuenca, by far the prettiest city in Ecuador. It’s also one of the most easy going. But of all the great places Ecuador has to offer – and I haven’t even been to the beach or the jungle – there’s somthing about Vilcabamba that tops the lot.

It’s a small town which radiates out from a perfect colonial square: red tile roofs, columns, raised walkways, church, cafes. It would not look out of place in a spaghetti western. Indeed, plenty of people still ride their horses to the centre of town in the evening to enjoy a drink as the sun goes down.

Vilcabamba has close to a perfect climate – between 17 and 26 centigrade daily – and is surrounded by attractive, green hills. It’s supposed to be the place where the fountain of eternal youth is mythically located. I don’t know about that, but I can see why the people who live here want to cling onto life as long as possible because it’s pretty sweet.

For those suffering from Travellers’ Weariness it’s the perfect bolthole. There’s absolutely nothing to see (not even the fountain of eternal youth) and absolutely nothing to do. Except to do as I did. Lay in my hammock under a blue sky, daydreaming and hoping one of the football-sized advocados from the overhanging tree did not drop on my head.

No museums to traipse around. No series of small walls to marvel at. No ancient cultures to try an unravel. No-one bothering you. Perfect.

Chicken feet soup and the Nazi-themed clothes shop

Current location: Otavalo, Ecuador

Miles to date: 10, 936

It’s a National Disgrace: the state of Colombian coffee.

Back in the day (I’m trying to appeal to a younger audience here), when I lived in London, my idea of going off road with a motorcycle usually involved something extreme like bumping up the kerb outside my local Waitrose to park while I nipped in and got something for tea. I may also have ridden across a gravel car park once, butI wouldn’t swear to it.

The only river I ever crossed was the Thames – daily – but there was little chance of getting my feet wet as I used Westminster bridge going there, and Blackfriars bridge coming back. In short I’d never really ridden anywhere challenging unless you count south London. And if you’ve got any sense you’d never count south London.

But here in the Americas riding off road is not a choice you can avoid because at some point even the best road a country has to offer will suddenly and unannounced turn to dirt leaving you with two choices: turn back to Florida (tempting, but a long way) or grit your teeth and press on.

Take the Pan-American Highway for instance. If you’ve never strayed into this part of the world you might fancifully imagine smooth two-lane blacktop stretching to the horizon, delivering you effortlessly from World Heritage Site to National Park. You couldn’t be more wrong.

For much of its length, south of Mexico at any rate, the Panamericana is a single lane in either direction, often rutted, bumpy and poorly maintained, the habitat of homicidal maniacs in cars and all those buses and trucks banned from the roads of Europe and North America when emissions standards required drivers not to poison children.

But for many countries with more pressing priorities than maintaining the Panamericana for the convenience of the passing Gringo (me), this road is the best they’ve got. And anyway, challenging road surfaces are part of the reason I went for a Kawasaki KLR in the first place. It practically thrives on them, even if I don’t.

However, if I thought the Panamericana was bad little prepared me for the hell that was the Mocoa to Pasto road, except the hell that was the Popayan to St Agustin road. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. First, Popayan. According to my guidebook, Popayan is one of the must-sees of Colombia (when will I ever learn?).

And, right enough, after Cali it was a pleasant enough colonial diversion. (Then again, after Cali, Baghdad is a charming desert town, and the Swat Valley a peaceful rural retreat.) But one of the must-sees? If it wasn’t on the Panamericana going south I would not recommend going there. It’s the town for which the word “meh” was invented.

However, once bitten…I was prepared to be bitten again. Over the hill and far away from Popayan is the archaeological site of St Agustin. According to my guidebook (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) this is one of the must-sees of Colombia. All I can say is that it is the archaeological site for which the word “meh” was invented.

The carved stones are nice enough. And they are prettily arranged. They’ve built a gravel path. And you can buy rather nice sugar cane juice there. But worth a 100 kilometre torture ride across a muddy, rocky road and through freezing, high altitude paramo? I think not. No amount of bumping up kerbs at Waitrose prepares you for this.

And then you have a dilemma. From St Agustin you can either go back the way you came, through the freezing mud and rain, or you can press south to Mocoa and then back over the Andes to Pasto taking the southern route, hoping that this road is better than the one you’d just travelled on.

I decided to chance it. From the look of the map,  the 129 kms from St Agustin to Mocoa were half tarmac, then half dirt but along a valley floor so no chance of high altitude testicular challenge. Then up the mountain on more dirt before reaching tarmac somewhere around the summit, from where you roll smoothly into Pasto.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. It all started so well. The road to Mocoa was a delight. Nice quality tarmac, very little traffic and just enough twists to stop me falling asleep across the handlebars. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. I’d taken on the map and I’d won, celebrating with a some hot coffee-style water and a slightly stale cake, the quintessential Colombian panaderia experience.

But coming up the hill out of Mocoa I asked the police at the checkpoint – while they scrutinised my bike papers – how much longer it was to Pasto. The cop sucked his teeth. At least five and a half hours, he said. For 139 kms? That meant I’d be averaging less than 30 kms (20mph) and hour.

As it turned out that was an understatement. From the checkpoint the road climbed. And climbed. And climbed. As it entered the cloud it became narrower and wetter. It was rock and stone, coated in places in slippery mud. Rivers ran across it from high altitude waterfalls. To the side, a sheer drop off hundreds of metres into the valley below. There were no crash barriers, no-one to hear you scream if you went over the edge and no emergency services within a four-hour drive.

Crash here and you’re on your own. This was also, in the past, prime cocaine growing territory. Although nominally under the control of the state, the distances between police and military checkpoints were huge and the jungle vast. Thankfully the road was so poor it took all my concentration, leaving me little available brainpower for worrying about being kidnapped by FARC guerillas or narcotraficantes.

I wish I could say something inspiring like sometimes the worst journeys take you to the best places, but the only place this journey took me to was miserable self-pity. I cursed the rocks, swore at the mud and generally called for divine intercession to get me the hell out of there. It didn’t happen. Instead, I continued to slither along for hour after miserable, uncomfortable hour.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse it did. Generally, trucks operate on the pinciple of might is right, especially if they’re coming up hill. They make no attempt to accommodate you on the road. If you don’t get out of their way, tough. Especially if you’re driving something smaller.

Coming up the road to meet me was one such truck. There was no room for the two of us. I tried to push the bike back uphill in the mud but, as anyone who rides a bike will tell you, this proved impossible. Instead, when he moved forward, I saw there was just enough gap to inch past between him and the deadly descent into the valley below if I carefully walked the bike along the road edge.

And so I did my own version of the high wire act with a 230kg motorcyle, feeling my way along the cliff edge and not daring to look down. At one point, impatiently, he started to move off, the side of his truck scraping along my bar end and threatening to tip me over. Thankfully he heard my shouts to stop and waited for me to clear the rear of his truck before moving off in a cloud of choking smoke. Don’t bother thanking me, mate.

The adrenalin was enough to make the next couple of miles fly past but then it was back to the high altitude grind. I got a break with a bit of tarmac through two villages, where I stopped for some food, but it wasn’t until the outskirts of Pasto that I could finally put my mountain nightmare behind me. In the end it had taken six hours, and I vowed I’d never turn another wheel on anything but tarmac for the rest of my life. Or at least until the Panamericana turns unexpectedly to dirt again.

Pasto is a modern city but has a sprinkling of older buildings, churches especially, to give it quite a sophisticated air. It was also the first place in Colombia that was decidedly Andean, nodding more to the cultures of the south than to the north. The people look like Ecuadoreans, small and dark and indigenous. In town I saw my first statue of Atahualpa the great Inca king. And what with the guinea pigs being spit roasted at roadside restaurants I really felt as if I’d left Colombia behind and arrived in the kingdom of the Andes.

Colombia, with its apology for coffee and its daily diet of chicken feet soup, where bingo seems to be a national obsession, at least if the number of games I saw were anything to go by. It’s a strange place, at once modern and backward, with some of the best infrastructure – and most exhorbitant supermarket prices – I’ve seen.

But perhaps the strangest thing about the place is the Nazi-themed clothing chain called Secret Society. The “SS” of their name is written like the “SS” of Nazi stormtrooper fame. You can buy SS t-shirts which sport the same logo last seen on young men haring across Poland in September 1939 in an open-topped tank.

But more tasteless than this, they even have a clothing range called Übermensch. This was the bedrock of the Nazi ideology, the idea that because aryans were superior to other races exterminating six million Jews, as well as millions of Slavs, was somehow excusable.  Is 70 years after the end of the Second World War too soon to try and reclaim some of the imagery of the Third Reich? Yes, I think so.

But that’s Colombia for you, Nazi-themed clothes shops and chicken feet soup, terrible roads and even more terrible coffee. Ecuador might even seem a bit tame by comparison.

Cheesy balls

Current location: Popayan, Colombia

Miles to date: 10, 476

Theme tune: Highways of my life, The Isley Brothers

There’s nothing quite like the feel of a throbbing beast between your legs. I am, of course, talking about a motorcycle. In this case my lovely Kawasaki KLR 650, who I enjoyed a tearful reunion with at Bogota airport after what seemed like months but was just five days, long enough to make me remember why it was I chose to use a motorbike to get around Central and South America as opposed to relying on public transport.

Not that the public transport in Colombia generally is particulary is bad. The Medellin metro, for example, is good. Quick, clean and modern. Just like the London tube system, except it’s quick, clean and modern. It’s only that with public transport, as opposed to jumping on your own bike, you’re entirely relying on someone else. And I’ve realised that after six months of coming and going as I please, I’m even less patient with public forms of getting around, particularly buses, than I was before.

Here in Colombia the buses have two speeds: maniacal or glacial. Maniacal is reserved for mountain hairpins, where the existence of double yellow lines, blind corners and trucks coming the other way are no barriers to getting your foot down. Glacial, of course, is strictly town-style, a slow crawl necessary to fill your bus as full as possible with passengers to maximise your potential profit. How many Colombians can you fit into a rusting, dented minibus? One more. An even better variation of the glacial style is if you can block the road while squeezing a few more in. The downside is that it stops all other traffic getting past you. The upside? You prevent your rivals from picking up the passengers waiting just down the road for the first bus along.

For me, the bus from Medellin to the airport at Rionegro was a particularly fine example. Crawling through Medellin’s morning traffic, while the bus driver trawled for passengers, I could see the chances of actually getting to the airport in time for departure getting further and further away. The consequences of missing a plane are not even remotely serious, but if you want a definition of frustration then it is being crammed on a stifling minibus while all your travel plans are in the ponderous hands of a chubby man with a roll neck sweater and a public service vehicle licence.

Remarkably, though, and thanks to a high speed canter through the mountains to the airport, I was there is time not only to check in but to enjoy one of the greatest treats Colombia has to offer, the buñuel. These are small, doughnut-like balls of dough, lightly fried. They come in various sizes from cricket/baseball (again, delete as culturally appropriate) to ping pong/table tennis ball. The flavours also vary slightly, but my favourites are the lightly cheesy ones. The good thing about them is that before the first bite you never quite know what you are going to get.

They are usually eaten around breakfast time, although they are available to snack on all day, and are washed down with a cup of tinto. This is the standard Colombian coffee, hot, weak and black, and always served with four sugars. Whenever I refuse my sugar, I’m always asked if I’m sure and then looked at with the kind of pity reserved for disabled children. For people who like coffee, tinto will just about do the job in the absence of anything else. But for a country that produces vast amounts of the black stuff, and jealously guards the reputation of fictional figurehead Juan Valdez, it is extraordinarily disappointing. Hot, coffee-style water served in a tiny plastic cup designed to scald your fingers.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, getting a cup of the stuff in the first place is much more difficult than it should be. You’re in a coffee shop. There’s a limited menu. You ask for something that sounds like “tinto”, and yet the number of Colombians who look at me blankly and then say they don’t understand is disturbingly huge. I’m under few illusions about my Spanish. It isn’t what it should be. But after nearly five months in the Spanish speaking world I like to think I’ve at least got the basics mastered.

Yesterday, in an internet cafe, I asked – in Spanish – for a “machina”, the standard Central American word for a computer. The man looked at me uncomprehendingly. Then he asked me if I spoke Spanish. Clearly, as I’d asked for a computer in Spanish but had used the wrong technical word. He explained I should have asked for a computador. Yes, yes. But I’m in an internet cafe. There’s only one thing I want, and it’s not a horse, or a glass of water ot the collected works of William Shakespeare. A bit of prononciation on my part would help. But a bit of creative thinking on the part of my Colombian hosts would not go amiss.

Anyway, the plane ride from Medellin to Bogota is just 30 minutes. Long enough to be served a cup of tinto (thankfully, I didn’t have to ask) before it’s wheels down and you’re out into a drizzly Bogota morning looking forward to getting back on the bike. “Tourism Information” at the airport was spectacularly unhelpful. All I wanted was directions to the cargo airport but despite saying “carga” several different ways the young girl working there got no closer to what I wanted. She gave me a map of the national parks, which I promptly threw in the bin.

However, it turns out the cargo part of the airport is just outside domestic arrivals, so ten minutes after chucking my national parks map I was in the Copa Airlines office being stung for another $50 to actually collect my bike. Quite why I’d want to send my bike all the way from Panama City and then not collect it, I don’t know. But it was a particularly unpleasant form of usuary, especially as I checked several times in Copa’s Panama office that I’d paid everything up front. The woman in Bogota may not have understood a word I said, but she understood my anger. I think she thought I wanted a tinto.

Outside, however, all the frustrations of language, coffee, cheesy balls and public buses quickly melted away at the sight of an apparently undamaged motorcycle waiting for me. All I had to do was re-attach the battery and I was mobile again to my immense relief. Even the drizzle, the lack of signposts and the large number of taxi drivers trying to kill me could do little to assuage the sheer joy of being back on not just any motorbike but my motorbike. A friend e-mailed me recently to ask if I was bored of riding a bike yet. Not by a long chalk, was my reply. And I meant it. Whatever other rocks life might strew in your path there’s nothing quite like getting on a motorbike for getting over them.

After Medellin I decided the last thing I needed was another city so, for the second time in my life, I limited my experience of Bogota to the airport. One of these days I might actually make it into town. Instead, I headed for the small colonial town of Guaduape, nestled in mountains to the west of the capital, and the delightful Hotel Colonial, so close to the church in the main square that I could practically hear them lighting the incense of an evening.

Then two days in Ibague, a kind of Colombian Hatfield but with one of the best places – the Hotel Boga – I’ve ever stayed in, and finally Salento. High up in the mountains at the edge of the cloud forest, it’s an incredibly restful colonial retreat, favoured by Colombians seeking a simpler rural life and becoming increasingly popular with gringoes thanks largely to the work of Plantation House, a hostel that manages to be restful and tranquil and a good base for trekking and mountain biking.

I was very torn about leaving Solento, especially as the view from my window of the green mountains stretching into the distance was so spectacular, but felt an urge to move, not least because – reunited with the KLR – I now had the opportunity to do so easily. It was a big mistake. Cali, Colombia’s third largest city, is a hot, humid, mosquito-infested, traffic choked mess. After the peace of the mountains it felt like I was being assaulted. I could barely stand one night there. “What’s your rush?”, Gunter the chubby German hostel owner asked me the next morning. “If you have to ask, mate, if you have to ask…” I thought, as I launched myself back into the traffic the next day.

Which brings me to Popayan, a slightly shabby colonial town rebuilt in Andalucian-style after a devastating earthquake in the 80s. It’s nice enough, and a good base to launch yourself towards the archeaolgical site of San Agustin and the Ecuadorean border to the south. Outside town, and all along the roads to Popayan are military checkpoints, mostly staffed by bored teenagers with big guns. Yesterday, I was stopped and quizzed – politely – about where I was going and why. I was also subjected to a thorough scrutiny of both mine and the bike’s papers.

It’s easy to see these checkpoints as a burden, and unnecessary. For the most part, I don’t mind and think I’d rather have checkpoints than no security, a point rammed home by the overnight news that eight soldiers were gunned down by FARC guerrillas in the southwest of the country on Saturday evening. Hopefully, this does not herald the start of some sort of security problem in Colombia because for all its language challenges and crazed bus drivers this is a brilliant and beautiful country to travel, with some of the warmest people I’ve met. And where else can you guarantee cheesy balls every morning? Nowhere but Colombia.

Mind the gap

Current location: Medellin, Colombia

Miles to date: 9,978

Location of bike: Hopefully Bogota airport (hopefully).

Those of you with sharp eyes might have spotted something. No, it’s not the video of me squinting worriedly into a cloudy Costa Rica day (which I recommend you watch, even though I clearly cannot pronounce “Orosi”).

Scrolling down a line you’ll see – school atlases at the ready – that I am no longer in Central America but have crossed the Darien Gap into South America, Colombia to be precise. In fact, I’m in Medellin, last in the news when Pablo Escobar was still dealing coke with his left hand and drug-related slaughter with his right.

There are those here who mourn the passing of everybody’s favourite 80s drug overlord, claiming – like some latter day Al Capone or London’s own Kray brothers – he kept the streets safe for ordinary folk as he disapproved of the kind of small scale crime that blights poorer communities, and made sure it did not take place.

True or not, modern Medellin is hard to reconcile with the drug-fuelled hellhole of legend. The city nestles attractively in a steep valley, surrounded on all sides by green hills over which snake low, white clouds. Every afternoon at this time of year these turn threateningly black before delivering some of the most impressive thunder and lightening shows I’ve seen.

The centre of the city is a blend of modern office blocks and colonial churches, with the usual gruesome array of Christ figures being bloodily tortured, their real hair plastered to their plastic faces by an oversupply of fake blood. It’s a chaotic cocktail of street peddlers and cheap clothes over which floats the modern metro system, an underground that flaunts convention by sticking resolutely overground.

After the chaos, grime and heat of Panama City I decided to forgo the dubious pleasure of staying in the heart of the melee, and have chosen a hostel up the side of one of the hills in the decidedly more tranquil and middle class district of El Poblado. Up here it’s all overpriced coffee shops and polished shopping malls with clothes priced high enough to make my eyes water. Without a functioning drug trade it remains a mystery to me how Medellinos can afford to shop in these places, even those who call El Poblado home.

It is a dramatic departure from Panama City, not least because it is a minimum ten degrees cooler during the day and distinctly chilly at night. In Medellin air conditioning is a pointless extravagance. In Panama City it is a necessity, at least if you have any illusions of sleeping through the night.

The biggest surprise – for me at least – is just how close Panama City is to the light blue beauty of the Pacific Ocean. Approaching the city from the west you cross the lofty arch of the Puente Americana which needs to be high enough to allow the ocean-going ships of the Panama Canal to pass easily underneath. Its height allows you to see the modern tower blocks of the numerous bayside
developments curving east towards the airport. Just the place to seek sanctuary if you’re on the run from a canoe-related insurance scam.

After the low-rise disappointment of the other capitals of Central America, Panama City seems to gleam with architectural modernity. From a distance at least. From ground level the city is slightly less impressive, with mildew-blighted buildings lining a central shopping street groaning with market stalls.

But within walking distance of this urban blight is the Pacific, stretching blue towards the far horizon. For years, Panama seems to have turned its back on its nearby coast. Now, however, the seafront is undergoing a development that will turn it into a destination in its own right, for better or worse.

Despite the varied charms of Panama City I was keen to leave. Plan A had been to fly with Girag to Colombia, but a $900 plus price tag was enough to put me permanently off the idea. Plan B had been to drive along the Panama Canal, through the jungle to the Caribbean city of Colon and from there to sail to Cartagena.

At least, that was the plan. Riding by the canal was interesting, and through the jungle a delight. But the cracks in Plan B started to appear – along with the cracks in the road – the closer I got to Colon. If Panama City felt hot and chaotic when I first arrived, Colon made it seem like a Cotswold village.

It also has three or four ports, and no apparently easy way to book a ship across the seas with passage for me and my bike. Mythically, there exists a ferry where you can just roll on in Colon, and roll off in Colombia. There was no sign of it while I was there.

What there was was a sweaty, desperate looking South African biker and his Brazilian travelling companion who’d just made the journey in reverse. Their advice was clear: fly.

It was what I wanted to hear. So it was back to Panama City, racing against the clock to reach the offices of Copa Cargo before they closed for the day to see if it was possible to fly to Colombia for anything like a reasonable price.

And it was. Copa can get you across the Darien Gap to either Medellin or Bogota for $640 all in. Even adding the cost of my flight, it still worked out less than flying Girag. All I had to do, I was told, was turn up the next day with my bike and I’d be good to
go.

So I booked a flight for me to Medellin, reasoning that a smaller city would be easier to manage getting the bike through customs. Then I packed everything onto the bike, thinking I’d only be without it for the 50 minutes or so it takes to fly from country to country. Plan C seemed to be working out just fine.

Until I turned up at the airport. Sadly, the Medellin flight was cancelled. So while I was flying there, the bike would be (hopefully) on its way to Bogota. It should be there now, waiting for me. I’ll find out tomorrow. After four days of using public transport in Medellin – albeit excellent – I’m looking forward to being under my own steam again, and exploring a whole new continent.

I fought the law

Current location: Panama City

Miles to date: 9, 771

On my radio: The Clash

Switching from country to country you’re always looking for a dramatic change when you cross a border to mark the fact you’re in a new place. And for the most part you’re disappointed.

For example, despite its much-vaunted higher state of development, I was surprised to see - shortly after I’d crossed into Costa Rica – exactly the same small, wiry, men in thin shirts driving ox carts along the road I assumed I’d left behind in relatively-poorer Nicaragua.

As I’ve now crossed seven international land borders on this trip, you’d think I’d get used to the idea that life one side of the line is much the same as life the other side. Change, when it comes, is slow and is not always easy to identify. You can feel things are different where you are from where you’ve been, but you’d be hard pushed to identify exactly where this chage took place.

Except Panama. The change from all other parts of Central America to Panama is immediate and dramatic. Not in the landscape. Panama has the same tropical vegetation as Guatemala and southern Mexico. It has the same humidity as Nicaragua and Honduras. And it has the same cloud-draped mountains as El Salvador and Costa Rica.

But what Panama has, setting it apart from all its Central American neighbours, is roads – and good ones at that. Riding away from the border crossing I was amazed to see not one but two lanes of well-maintained concrete stretching eastwards the 425 kilometres east to Panama City.

Not only that, but the speed limit was a nosebleed-inducing 100 kilometres and hour. I felt like one of the scientific naysayers of early train travel, all sideburns and scepticism. Is it possible for humans to breathe at such unnatural speeds? There was only one way to find out, and that was to open the throttle and see what happened. Tentatively at first and then with abandon.

The only thing stopping this nascent attempt on the world land speed record on a Kawasaki KLR 650 was the inevitable military checkpoint. Just as inevitably the soldiers were much less interested in the quality of my paperwork than the cost of the bike, its top speed, what distance I got out of a tank of fuel and how many hours I rode for each day.

Curiosity satisfied, I was free to resume my own round of the moto GP. To understand why this was such fun you have to understand (a) why riding a motorcycle is enjoyable and (b) why this was such a novelty.

If you’ve never ridden a motorbike it’s hard to explain. Like a dead leg or chicken curry it’s something you just have to experience for yourself. But if you’ve even ridden a bicycle downhill without touching the brakes, while slightly fearing for your life, you’re in the right region (to motorcycle riding, that is. A dead leg is completely different. And as for chicken curry – not even close.)

Or like one of those days when you’re skiing, when every turn is perfect and you swoop down the mountain like some latter day Franz Klammer or Peekaboo Street. Exhilerating? Why yes. Slightly risky? That too.

It’s not a feeling you get too much in Central America, and that is usually because the roads are such poor quality (Honduras, Nicaragua) or so twisty (Costa Rica) that the chances of getting up beyond 55mph (about 90kph) are very limited.

But suddenly, here you are on Panama’s open highway. You’ve got your motor running. You’re certainly looking for adventure, or whatever comes your way. It’s almost like you were born to be wild. The sheer novelty of being on a road that is far too fast for the bike for a change would make wreckless speed freaks of the sanest of men.

All of which background goes to explain why I found myself ruefully stopped on the side of the road, staring at the shiny boots of a Panamanian traffic cop while he tried to explain the road laws of his country to a gringo who had clearly broken many of them. He’d been lurking in the shade of a tree, speed gun in hand, waiting to see what came over the hill.

To be fair to him, I was doing nearly twice the speed limit and had overtaken a particularly slow (but legal) pick up truck gasping black smoke on a double yellow line. To be fair to me, it was just too tempting.

I’ve written before about how bureaucrats take pity on my pathetic, flabby, office-tanned face. That, and the fact I refused to speak any Spanish seemed to do the trick. He looked at my passport, looked at my driving licence, sighed and with a barely noticible wave of the hand, sent me on my way. Clearly, the amount of paperwork required to get me fined in two languages was just not worth it. Reason again to praise my ignorance of Spanish, and my lack of pride in being prepared to display it publicly.

Thankfully for me, the road quality declined dramatically after this particular village so the chances of me breaking any laws were, like my speed, dramatically reduced.

And having had one brush with the law I started noticing them everywhere. If there was a bit of shade there lurked a traffic cop. Many of the cars roaring past me were seen later by the side of the road getting a ticket and a ticking off.

The reason for my rush was partly the road and partly a desire to get to Panama City, which was to have been my last destination in Central America. Like any journey coming to its conclusion, you just want it to end. If you’re not familiar with travel in this region you might be tempted to ask why I’m ending my journey midway through Panama and resuming it again midway through Colombia. The answer is the Darien Gap.

If you look at a map of Panama the Pan-American Highway, which goes all the way from Deadhorse in Alaska to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina, seems to peter out somewhere east of Panama City. In fact, you can get a couple of hundred kilometres east of here on a combination of tarmac and dirt, but not further. Before reaching the border the road ends, and resumes again somewhere in Colombia.

This lack of road is something to do with a history which, inevitably, still resonates loudly in these parts. Panama was at one stage a province of Colombia. That is, until the Americans took over the building of the canal and encouraged Panamanian independence. A fractious relationship with their southern neighbour means the Panamanians have done little to improve road links to Colombia.

Getting across the so-called Darien Gap is a big problem for all overlanders. You can cross by canoe and on foot through the jungle but it is dangerous, mosquito ridden and uncertain. The area is a popular haunt of narcotraficantes and guerillas. Or you can take a boat to northern Colombia. Or you can fly to Colombia or Ecuador.

I was intending to catch a plane from here to Colombia, loading the bike on another plane to be reunited at Bogota airport a couple of days hence. Although this sounds expensive, according to all the reports I’d read it was not that much more expensive than taking a boat, and certainly less complicated.

That is until I went to the Girag office at Tucumen airport today. According to the Adventure Motorcycling Handbook (2005 edition), shipping the bike air freight should have cost about $350. The most recent figures I’ve seen online are in the region of $500. But the real cost, quoted by Girag today, is more than $900. That’s just for the bike. It’s another $900 for me, according to the cheap air fare websites I’ve checked.

All of which suddenly makes air travel unviable. So instead of travelling by luxury jet across the Darien Gap to Colombia I’ll be putting myself and the bike on a boat and sailing to colonial Cartagena instead. Which means leaving Panama City tomorrow and, via the canal, travelling north to Colon from where the boats to Colombia depart.

I’m told the road to Colon is good. Fast, modern, well-maintained. I, of course, will be sticking resloutely to the speed limit and observing all traffic signs. Having got away with it once I don’t want to push my luck. Not, at least, until I’m in Colombia…

Being boiled

Current location: Orosi, Costa Rica

Miles to date: 9,183

Why, that’s the equivalent of: driving to Perth (Australia, that is, not Scotland).

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned the heat to you before but I will now. It’s hot. Back-wettingly, forearm-sweatingly, clothes-drenchingly, crack-itchingly, tar-meltingly, temper-stokingly hot.

Every day starts very warm and then burns with greater intensity as the hours drip slowly by. There’s no relief at night. In the wee small hours you wake up bathed in sweat with the thin, dirty sheets of whatever hotel you’ve found yourself in stuck to your back.

It’s an unremitting, unrelenting, remorseless lesson on life in the tropics. There is no let up. Even when a breeze blows, it rarely brings anything like relief. Instead, you simply swop life under the sun lamp for life in the hairdryer. And with each passing day it gets just a little bit worse, the successive hours of burning sunshine followed by nights of poor quality sleep, piling one layer on top of another to push your tetchiness to record levels. I have felt like I was being slowly boiled alive.

Why the people of Central America are not fighting each other in the street as temperatures reach their most testing in the middle of the latest roasting afternoon, I have no idea. They certainly have much greater reserves of patience than me. Or maybe heat-induced inertia means they feel angry with their neighbours but can’t be bothered to do anything about it.

My journey into the bowels of Hades started a couple of weeks ago. Descending from the mountains on the El Salvador border I was plunged into the furnace that is lowland Honduras. Unfortunately for the perspiring gringo, the topography of Honduras (in brief, hilly) means the main routes across the country follow the valley floors, skirting the sides of the mountain chains. To ride through Honduras is to ride through a microwave on maximum.

It’s no better in Nicaragua. Here the countryside is mostly flat, punctuated by two great lakes, with the odd volcano dotted along the side to break the monotony of the horizon. Esteli in the north of Nicaragua is hot. Leon further south is extremely hot. Managua, the world’s dullest capital is very, very toasty. And Granada? See the mercury burst through the top of the thermometer.

All of which is a great shame because I was really looking forward to Nicaragua. Its tragic history. The resilience of its people. Its legendary landscapes.

But what with the food poisoning and the heat and the humidity and the drunks knocking me off my bike I could not get out of there fast enough. If it wasn’t for the Easter holidays, and the delicate state of my weakened stomach, I would never have spent even five days in Granada despite its genteel colonial appeal.

It’s been so warm that I started to fantasise about being cooler, and plotting ways to bring the temperature around me to an acceptable level. This has mostly involved crossing the border into
Costa Rica where the existence of high mountains brought with them the promise of chillier times to come.

The first town I stopped in, Liberia, felt little better than Nicaragua or Honduras. In among its modern grid of streets with its 70s-style cathedral dominating the central square, the sun still burned hard during the day and my equanimity was still tilted too far towards “irritated”. You know it’s time to get out of the heat when you find yourself getting angry with a parking attendant.

By the time I reached San Ramos things were getting better. It sits among high hills, where coffee is the chief product. A cooling breeze blew through the town after the sun went down. There was a blanket next to the bed that hinted at – delights – a chilly night to come. And then I arrived in Orosi.

The Orosi valley lies about thirty miles east of the capital San Jose. To find it, my best advice is to do as I did: go to Cartago and get lost. It’s like Brigadoon. If you look for it you’ll never find it, but as you stumble through a nick in the mountains suddenly a fertile, lush valley opens up below you.

On either side of the road are coffee trees, the precious bean protected and shaded by the broad green leaves of the interspersed banana trees. Almost unbelievably, pierced by the high mountains that ring the valley are clouds, some of them rain bearing. As I rode into the valley – and for the first time since December – a gentle rain fell, forcing me to take shelter in a restaurant for an early lunch of grilled chicken with all the usual trimmings (rice, beans, salad) and a drink that looked like frogspawn in a glass.

For the first time in what felt like and age but is probably more like three weeks – among the longest three weeks of my life – I felt cool. I could breathe the air. I didn’t feel like I was going to melt simply walking across the restaurant car park.

So I think I’ll stay in Orosi a few days, revelling in its coolness, enjoying the unexpected feel of falling rain, walking without expiring and generally re-acquainting myself with life outside the oven. I know it cannot last because from here I’ll have to head south to the border with Panama. But between there and here there’s the delights of high altitude cloud forest and a 3,000 metre mountain pass. It”s supposed to be especially cold up there. I cannot wait.

Bedbugs and broomsticks…

Now, those of you that know me will probably know there’s something about me that biting insects cannot resist. Whether it’s the highland midge, the common sandfly or the tropical mosquito they just love feasting on my pale, European skin. In fact, I’m sure they only bite me with such gusto because they know my reaction is so extreme. It’s their ironic little joke. But if there’s one thing to bring me out in extreme itchy weals then it’s bedbugs.

I’ve had them before, of course. A perfectly good hostel in Bolivia had to be abandoned because of them and a room change was necessary for the same reason at an otherwise very nice hotel in Siem Reap, Cambodia. I’ve even had to change carriages on the overnight sleeper from Scotland to London because I found them crawling on my arm and, when crushed, spurting with my blood.

Not pleasant, I’m sure we’d agree. Mentally, I’m prepared for bed bugs in poorer parts of the world so it came as a bit of a surprise to be rudely woken from watching the inevitable game of American football (I like it – but every night?) on TV by the familiar line of itchy mounds grouped closely together and the equally familiar sight of an engorged critter heading back to it’s mattress hideout full of my blood.

The outcome is that as I’m sitting here typing this it’s taking an effort of Herculean proportions to stop me from scratching both elbows and some of my upper arms to a weeping pulp.

Which is a shame, because it slightly ruined what had been a pretty fine day. It started off with a cafe con leche and one of the world’s biggest and densest croissants at the excellent Taystee Bakery in South Beach followed by the inevitable two-hour bus/train/jitney (it’s a type of minibus) ride to Hialeah to pick my bike up from Palmetto Motorsports.

After some careful packing to ensure the panniers were properly balanced and that there was not too much weight in the top box (it makes the bike unstable) I was pretty much ready to hit the road. No backing out now. Just a last gulp of soothing coffee before finally having to do what I’d blithely told people I was going to do. Why is it that expectation is so much better than execution.?

First off, the bike is bleedin’ huge. I’m no giant but I can just about get my tippy toes on the floor without forever jeapordising my chances of fathering children. Secondly, the handlebars are so wide it’s like steering a boat. Third, I’ve never really been a fan of the sit-up-and-beg riding position. Too windblown. Then add the weight (of the bike, not of me) and you can see it’s all pretty much a recipe for instability.

Which made the thought of the Palmetto Expressway (it’s not called an expressway because people take it easy) a little bit sphincter tightening. But, as I could not really spend the next six months camped in the Palmetto Motorsports’ car park it was a quick few warm-up laps of the industrial estate and then out onto the open road, objective the Florida Keys.

Eddie Martinez’ last words of advice had been to keep some small bills separate for the toll booths. I, of course, ignored him and lived to regret that decision every few miles as I tried to fish my wallet out of trouser pockets pulled tight by my high saddle while using my free hand to balance the gondola as a queue of car drivers sat slowly stewing behind me. I now have separate bills for toll booths.

I also have a snazzy pair of Oakley goggles (I’m hoping if I mention enough companies enough times they will start showering me with cash or free product. It would help if you wrote to them and told them you were going to start using their stuff as it’s been recommended by me.) as it is the law in Florida that you must wear eye protection when riding a bike. You don’t need a helmet, or even insurance (true) but you must have eye protection, so thank God for Oakley and their excellent products (you can probably google their address – I’m not saying you have to write a letter – a grovelly e-mail would probably do the trick). You can also use a phone while driving. It’s not just permitted – it seems compulsory to have a mobile clamped to your ear while not concentrating on the road.

After getting slightly lost (I think I was on the Dolphin Expressway at one point) I eventually found Highway 1, for Key West, more by accident than design. A quick turn down US1 and then, south of Homestead I swung off onto the alternate Card Sound Road as recommended by the guys at Palmetto. I’m glad I took their advice. It was here that I had my first Ewan ‘n’ Charley moment blasting along the concrete through mile after mile of mangrove with very few cars in sight and with the setting sun casting appealing shadows around me.

By the time I checked into the motel I was convinced I’d made the best decision of my life. And it’s funny how quickly that can start to unravel. After a night sleeping on the bathroom floor to avoid the bed bugs, the ride down to Key West was the grim opposite of Card Sound Road. No grinning from ear to ear here as I was merely hanging onto the handlebars being buffeted by incredibly strong winds and trying not to be blown off (and not in a good way).

I can’t tell you much about the countryside on the way down as I was concentrating too hard on not being blown into the face of oncoming traffic. I did eventually get to Key West…and what a disappointment that turned out to be. Keen students of 80s pop will, like me, always have had a soft spot for the place since Sade warbled on about it in Smooth Operator. All I can tell you is that the reality is very different.

I found the place so phoney and so twee you could develop adult onset diabetes from the overdose of saccharine in the place. If wacky t-shirt shops and overpriced restaurants are your thing then Key West is for you. Personally, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough and was delighted to turn the wheels around and leave.

And that, my dears, is the essence of motorbike travel. If you don’t like it, shove off. And the next place I’ll be shoving off to is the Everglades where I’m looking forward to being bitten by regular old mossies for a few days. Make a nice change from bed bugs.

(incidentally, there are no broomsticks. I just thought it made a better title.)

el poderoso

The bike, the Everglades, the open road

Egrets, I’ve seen a few

Current location: Naples, Florida

Miles covered: 705

Alligators seen: three

Minutes before I heard my first Bob Marley song in Key West: 29 (approx)(ooff)

Talk about your chalk and your cheese. If the Keys had all the authentic charm of an outlet village in the West Midlands (what is it about a hot sun that seems to bleach all the culture out of a place?), the Everglades by very sharp contrast enjoy an oversupply of fascinating sights and sounds to anyone who has even a passing interest in the great outdoors.

The trip to the Everglades starts in the most promising of fashions with a Starbucks at the corner of US Highway 1 and Route 9336 in Florida City, the gateway to the Everglades. Of all the great American inventions like the lightbulb and internet porn (I may have skipped a couple in the middle there) nothing beats Starbucks. With all due respect to my hosts, for the most part the coffee you are served here lies somewhere on the flavour spectrum between dishwater and rainwater.

But Starbucks, at least, delivers flavour so reliably that I’ve developed a sort of weird obsession with the place to the point where I would rather ride miles thirstily in search of one than take the risk of paying for the pint of coloured water that for the most part masquerades as coffee in this country (the exception is the genuinely strong brew served in Cuban cafes but they’re getting a bit thin on the ground here in chi chi Naples).

At the Starbucks in Lincoln Road, South Beach they also have an incorporated music store so you can sit at the breakfast bar, suck down a few cups of the good stuff, browse through their music catalogue and even burn CDs of anything that takes your fancy while you decide if it’s too soon to order another hit of brown (coffee that is, not heroin). If they’d allowed me to move my sleeping bag in there I would probably never have left. (Incidentally, I know I mentioned free stuff in my last post. Sadly, Oakley have yet to come up with the goods. So there’s still plenty of opportunity for Starbucks to mail me a gift card – let’s say $100, I’m not a greedy man – as recompense for all this good publicity.)

From Starbucks the route gets a bit complicated. Despite the fact this is a world famous natural landscape, and one of the true must-sees of the United States, the signage to get there is absolutely lousy. If it wasn’t for the Rough Guide helpfully telling me to take a left at the fruit stand called – strangely – “Robert is Here” I’d have probably given up and headed back to Starbucks.

But persistence paid off and I soon found myself going past the Dade Correctional Facility (wasn’t that in the film Out of Sight?) and the Ernest F Coe Visitor Center and, for a bargain $5 for motorcyles found myself inside the Everglades National Park. It didn’t take me long to stop for my first picture opportunity and, frankly, I could have filmed the whole thing and still not been bored.

One of the best pieces of advice the Rough Guide gives you is to take the road to Flamingo very slowly. This turned out to be very sage. Racing along at 55mph, eyes glued to the road, I’m sure you only get an impression of what the Everglades is like. But trundling along at 30, one hand on the tiller and looking left and right, you get a much better feel for just how impressive this place is.

From the road you could confuse it with Africa – flat, expansive, big sky, trees in the distance. It’s only when you look a bit more closely that you realise this is not savannah; just below grass level it is covered with water. And that has led to a very special collection of plants, like sawgrass, royal palms and pines, that are adapted to spending a large part of their life standing in water. One of the most striking of these plants is the bald cypress, a tree that looks to all intents dead but which sheds its leaves in the dry season as a means of conserving energy.

But if the plants are interesting the wildlife – and birdlife particularly – is unbelievable. The birds you notice most predominantly are waders like spoonbills, great blue herons, storks and egrets, who stand out white against the green of the grass and the blue of the sky. Soaring above it all are the raptors using the updrafts to hunt for snakes and small mammals on the cut grass at the roadside. Then there’s the black vultures hanging about the marina car park with the crows, looking for a handout.

In other parts of the park I saw birds more closely associated with woodland than swamp like a woodpecker, tapping rhythmically on a tree side trying to drill out insects.

There are many paths leading off into woods or beside lakes and ponds in the Everglades and the park rangers have thoughtfully provided raised wooden boardwalks. These make sense not just to keep your feet dry but to keep you above Gator height. They may look half asleep but considering just how much insects consider me fine dining, I’m taking no risks with a seven-foot lizard.

The only downside of all this standing water is that it is a perfect breeding ground for some of the most aggressive mosquitoes on the planet. Even wearing plenty of mosquito repellent proved only a delaying tactic as they still tried to bite me through me shirt, jeans and the fog of chemicals around me. It was a relief to be able to take refuge inside the mosquito net of my tent.

It was worth every bite and itch to spend a couple of nights in the old thousand star hotel, looking up and the night sky and waking up to the azure beauty of Florida Bay.

Sadly, though, lack of decent coffee and lack of strong repellent eventually forced me back into town and I spent a couple of days in Fort Lauderdale,  partly for a change of scenery from South Beach and partly as a jumping off point for what is supposed to be the biggest outlet shopping centre in the world.

I’ll never learn with these places. Despite the fact that every time I visit one I feel I’ve given away a piece of my soul I keep on making that pact with the devil and heading back to see if I really can save $5 on a pair of jeans. Needless to say Sawgrass Mills was not at all worth the time and effort expended to get there. Also travelling by motorbike – with its limited storage space – even if I did come across the bargain of a lifetime I’d have nowhere to put it. Will I never learn? No.

Which almost brings me to here. Friday, the bike went back to Palmetto Motorsports of Hialeah (for all your touring motorcycle needs) for a first service and an adjustment of the suspension to cope with the extra weight. With no more work for them to do and no initial problems with the KLR it’s time to cut my ties with the Miami area and hit the road. This is where the phony war stops and the touring starts for real.

And it doesn’t get more hardcore than lovely, ordered, antiseptic, middle class Naples. It’s like I’ve been parachuted into the Truman Show. The sky is a perfect blue and the beach, like the inhabitants, are a perfect white. There’s a large branch of Barnes & Noble and there’s even one of those expensive whole food supermarkets. All is well with the world.

I may scoff, but when I’m trapped in some cockroach infested hell hole I’ll be looking back on Naples and thinking “Was it all a dream? Did they really have tarmac and running water? If only…”

Join me in the Everglades

A particularly stupid piece of one hand riding to bring the beauty of motorbiking through the Everglades to a computer near you. Survive? I barely deserved to. (It was fun, tho’…)

Damper in Tampa

Current location: Tampa, Florida

Miles covered to date: 938

Hard to avoid: that Pink song about being a rock star; roadside raccoons (not sure if the two are related).

At this point you might want to get yourself a strong cup of tea, maybe put on some melancholy music but certainly sit down because I have a sad announcement to make. Yesterday, it rained.

And I’m not talking that cissy, hardly-makes-you wet English rain. I’m talking face-stinging, jeans-wetting, am-I-going-to-survive-this Florida rain that makes your motorbike handle like a Penny Farthing on ice.

It was doubly galling because, by rights, I shouldn’t even have been on the road in the first place. Having rocked up in Vanderbilt Beach and found myself in The Lighthouse Inn, and having slightly made fun of the place (see last post), I belatedly realised it had everything I was looking for: great weather, a huge white beach, a supermarket within walking distance, and a branch of Barnes and Noble with its own in-house Starbucks.

I was staying in what’s called an “efficiency”. Basically, it’s like a bedsit with all amenities – kitchenette and bathroom included – in one living space. It’s like having your own caravan on the first floor. Genius. And instead of a view of Clacton’s miles of shingle, drizzled-on condoms, and plastic bags blowing around pensioners’ legs in the wind you’ve got the white sands etc I’ve already touched on above.

Any sane person would not have left it until an hour before check out to see if they could stay another couple of days.

Which is why I found myself racing up the Interstate (a kind of motorway, in this case I-75) regretting my lack of organisation and slightly wondering where on  earth to go next. Thankfully, the rainstorm answered that question for me – straight to the nearest shelter which, this being America, was a shopping mall.

(That’s not to decry either America, or shopping or malls; I’m fond of all three.) With time to kill I went into JC Penney to look enviously at dry jeans while my own were undryly chafing my crotch. This was the first rain in  two weeks (yes, it’s been two weeks already) and shook me from my American reverie back into Brit mode. If it’s rained once it’s probably going to rain again – better find a place to hole up for a few days.

Tampa was the nearest town, and so Tampa it is at least until the huge block that is Thanksgiving is out of the way. For those that don’t know, the last Thursday in November is Thanksgiving,  when Native Americans warmly remember the gift of smallpox from their European visitors and other Americans reciprocate by watching football (not real football) and drinking beer. And eating Turkey.

It’s hard to overstate what a big deal Thanksgiving is to Americans. This maybe because it is the only celebration that is uniquely their own, and that is actually fun. Christmas, New Year and Hallowe’en they inherited from us (and we nicked them off the pagans), Martin Luther King Day and Columbus Day are a bit po-faced and Labor Day is no fun because it marks the traditional end of their pitifully short holiday season. But Thanksgiving owes its history to the American continent alone. There’s no particular person you have to say nice things about, and the following day is generally a holiday too.

It’s also non-religious so everyone can take part, except Native Americans who are treated as a quaint and unreasonable minority by the local news media, what with their air of ingratitude and their “actually, this is our country” viewpoint. (God, you can virtually hear the news anchors sighing, let it go – and be thankful we gave you the rights to gambling.)

Shops and restaurants either work shortened hours or don’t open at all (even McDonalds is only open at breakfast time) and people generally go home to their families, or at least don’t go into work. But, by God, do the shops make up for that brief hiatus.

The day after Thanksgiving is traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year known, counter-intuitively, as Black Friday (in this case, a good thing). It’s when shops start their pre-Christmas sales and the canny shopper will be out and about trying to snag a bargain. And they’ll have plenty of opportunity. Many stores are opening at 4am on Friday offering early bird deals for those insomniac enough to care.

And for those, like me, with the worthless British Pound in my pocket and barely enough room on my motorcycle panniers for an After Eight mint, I can only look on with envy.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

Jesus: a public apology

Current location: Gainesville, Florida (not pictured; that’s Tampa)

Miles to date: 1,173

Sweets I’m most enjoying: The Butterfinger (mmmmm….)

If you’ve been following this (and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t, it’s not like you’ve got anything better to do) you’ll have noticed two things (wake up there at the back).

Thing number one is that I have now passed the one thousand mile mark. If I was doing this equivalent journey in Europe it means, having left London, I would have passed Amsterdam, Berlin and Warsaw and would currently be well on my way to Moscow. (FYI unless you’ve got some kind of fetish for people being rude to you, I don’t recommend Moscow. Or Kiev, but that’s another story.)

Thing to notice number two is that I appear to have deviated from my path and rather than sticking pretty much to the Gulf of Mexico I’ve diverted inland to Gainesville, home to America’s second-largest university. (Go onto googlemaps if you don’t believe me; I won’t mind and it’ll look like you’re working.)

Gainesville is named after that hero of the war of 1812 General Edmund P Gaines, and owes it’s existence to the fact the railroad company chose to ignore the old county town, forcing the good people of this part of Florida to build a new town closer to the railroad.

And what a neat job they made of it. Like a lot of planned cities, especially in this part of the world. Gainesville is a tidy grid of interlocking streets bracketed by a couple of major highways and with its own small airport. It has that sleepy, bookish air of a town dominated by a university with that slightly menacing undertone common to cities of this type, like Oxford and Cambridge. You know this is a university with a town added, and not the other way around.

The town is most famous for its college football team, the Gators, and the drink invented to refresh them between downs, Gatorade (now inexplicably brewed in Chicago). Like a lot of towns and cities in the US it also has an incredibly low building density, almost shockingly so. Instead of being shoved in together like battery hens people here have room to breathe. There are actual gaps between houses. You’ll come across empty lots all over town, even in the middle of downtown, with little apparent pressure to fill in the gaps between properties before spreading out into the suburbs.

To anyone with European ideas of geography, the layout of American cities is confusing and takes some getting used to. Back home, most of the main shops tend to be in the centre with everything radiating out from a defined core. By contrast, many of the towns I’ve been to seem almost like loose conglomerations than identifiable urban centres in the European sense. Development spreads along highways. The centre does not dominate either the commercial or cultural life of a place. The setting for shops makes no sense, unless you have your own transport.

And while that kind of linear development is not going to win too many design awards, it sure makes life easy – as long as you have your own wheels. Missed Walmart? Don’t worry, there’ll be another along in a minute. Looking for a Wendys, or a Mcdonalds or a Burger King? There’s three at the next intersection, and three at the next one after that.

It was on just that kind of highway – US 19 -that I found myself racing on Sunday morning. I’d reached New Port Richey the night before and was looking to make an early start. I was looking forward to writing this blog, too. That’s because, like all Europeans, there’s always something happening in America to make us gasp, in a slightly superior and mocking way.

I was looking forward to telling you about the woman whose blender shot out salsa onto her kitchen wall, which she claims resembles the Virgin Mary. Rather than wipe it off, the Salsa Stain Mary has become a shrine. Or the other side of Black Friday where shoppers in Nassau County, New York, were so desperate to get into their local Walmart at 5am that they trampled a store worker to death in their rush for bargains, then rioted when staff tried to close the store.

Or, closer to home, the Walmart store in New Port Richey with its collection of religious-themed t-shirts. Somewhere between Brandon and Land O’ Lakes I passed an invisible boundary. Beach-orientated sun-loving Southern Florida disappeared to be replaced with a more rural, God-fearing version of America. Witness the t-shirts. I bought one that says Real Men Love Jesus, my intention to wear it in a knowing, mock-ironic way.

Anyway Jesus, or maybe his Dad, took a rather different view. Somewhere about Otter Creek (not so much a town as a crossroads) I got hit with the fiercest rainstorm it’s ever been my displeasure to ride a motorcycle in. The rain was coming down so hard it was running down the inside of my trousers and into my motorcycle boots. When I stopped to empty them out, and get a breather from the pounding, I felt a scraping beneath the bike which turned out to be the standing water on the road.

Eventually I found a disused petrol station to shelter under while the storm passed. There, under a wooden bench, lurked a frog. OK, so it wasn’t actually raining frogs but I can take a biblical hint from the Big Guy: don’t be messing with my boy.

Which is how I ended up in Gainesville. As anybody who watches Ray Mears will tell you, your body loses warmth 25 times more quickly when you are wet. So wet, cold and miserable I decided to cut and run to Gainesville – the nearest town of any size to Otter Creek – and to book into the first motel I saw. Forty-eight hours later, and my boots are only just drying out.

So I’d like to make a public apology to Jesus, and his Dad. Please restore the sunshine. This is not nearly so much fun in the rain.

Life on the road

This gives you some idea of the kind of places I’m staying, in this case Inn Paradise in Panama City Beach, Florida.

Days like these

Current location: Pensacola, Florida

Miles to date: 1,705

Attempted religious conversions: one (and it wasn’t even one of the good religions; but then, if it was any good, they wouldn’t need to try and convert people).

I know it’s hard but tear your eyes away from your computer for a second and look around you, but indulge me. Is there nowhere else in the world you would rather be right now than right here? Chances are, if you’re at work, you can think of a thousand places.

And the chances are, especially if you’ve read the Rough Guide to the USA, you may not have chosen to be transported to the land of your dreams in Panama City Beach up on the Florida panhandle, epicentre of the so-called Redneck Riviera. (This rather dismissive name stems from the proximity of this part of the Gulf of Mexico to the deeply southern Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. It’d be like calling Southend the Costa Councilhouse, or the Playa de la Pikey.)

The Rough Guide calls the area an “orgy of motels, go-kart tracks, mini-golf courses and amusement parks…the whole place is as commercialised as can be”. Not exactly a ringing endorsement and normally the kind of description that would have me pressing on, not pulling up. But after involuntarily veering inland for a few days due to act of God/inclement weather to Gainesville and then Tallahassee, I was in need of seeing the coast again and Panama City Beach came with a recommendation from a native Floridian, Rich Finkel of Palmetto Motorsports. Could he know something that the guidebooks don’t?

I don’t know what it is that makes you like one town and not another, especially when they are superficially similar. More often than not it is your small experiences in a place that make your mind up for you, rather than the grandness of the architecture or the significance of the history that sways your vote.

In fact the more I travel the more I’m unimpressed with the great sights, and get much more surprise enjoyment out of a one horse town from which I’m expecting nothing. (I’m going to start a website called actuallyitwasabitshite.com. Taj Mahal? Overrated. Great Wall of China? Not that great. Feel free to suggest your own world famous tourist sights that made you yawn in the box below.)

Tallahassee for me will forever mean nearly getting knocked off my bike by a woman who decided she wanted to turn left out of a car park, but didn’t want to bother with all that looking and signalling nonsense. Similarly, Apalachicola will always be associated with Frosty the Sales Assistant in the Tourist Information Centre who, when I asked if there were any places to stay for less than 90 bucks a night, looked at me as if I’d requested a half-hour of sexual congress with her teenage daughter.

But Panama City Beach? Things did not, I’ll admit, look that promising as I turned off highway 98 and into downtown Panama City. For a start, there did not seem to be any beach let alone the 28-miles of sugar white sands mentioned in the books, and motels were notable mainly for their absence. Right enough I’d crossed into another timezone (I’m now six hours behind London, and one hour behind Hialeah) but I thought I only had to set my watch back an hour, not fifty years.

But wait, I’d committed the cardinal American geographic sin of assuming that the beach area of Panama City and Panama City Beach were one and the same. They are not. In fact, they are a full 15 miles apart which, in English terms, is a days’ drive.

It was at this point I remembered that America is the worst signposted country in the world. When you pass a sign on the highway at 65 miles an hour saying Post Office, they don’t mean next right. They mean right here, as you see it receding in your wing mirrors.

I’m amazed the Pilgrim Fathers ever managed to find the place. (“Well, we went straight past Ireland like you said then hooked a left at Iceland but we still couldn’t find it so we came back to Plymouth. Are we too late for the witch-burning?”) A quick consult of the map, a fill up of gas ($1.65 a gallon – not a pint – at a place that also sold fried chicken? At that price I’m going to let some of it run on the floor for a bit, just because I can…) and I was on the road to the right town.

And yes, there are go-kart places and if you really want to play mini-golf you can but I’m happy to report that Rich’s assessment was much closer to the truth than the Rough Guide’s. For a start there’s that beach…it really is 28 miles of sugar-white powder, sloping down into the azure of the Gulf of Mexico. And, true, there is commercial development including some chains of 25-storey mega motels blocking the view of the beach to passing motorists.

But there’s still plenty of charming, human-scale, family motels to choose from, like Inn Paradise which, if you play the film below, you’ll be able to see in all its technicolor glory. The whole area had a brilliant out-of-season melancholia about it that made staying there a guilty pleasure, like sneaking off from work for the day and doing something fun instead.

Even the thought of having paid $6 to see what must be the worst film on general release at the moment – Nobel Son, which is such a turkey they made sure to put it in cinemas after Thanksgiving, it deserves to be plucked, stuffed and roasted – couldn’t dent my enthusiasm for the place especially as I had a stomach full of what must be one of the greatest burgers on the planet, thanks to Five Guys.

Which brings me to my rather-not-be-anywhere-else, days-like-these moment sitting on the beach in my Real Men Love Jesus t-shirt*, with the sun beating down and a warm wind wafting over me, sea lapping at my toes, music on the headphones and a machine full of coffee and an unopened packet of Tim Tams waiting for me in the room.

On days like these I’d rather not be anywhere else. Except where you are, of course.

*Jesus-spotting update. You may remember in my last post I mentioned His mother had been spotted in the salsa, well it appears He’s been getting around, too. In September He was seen on the ceiling of the One Stop Body Shoppe in Arkansas City, Kansas; in August he was on the body of a moth in Pittsburg, Texas; and in July He made two appearances first in the facial fur of a family cat in Indiana and second – bizarrely – on a Cheeto in Missouri. Just last month He was seen on a slice of french toast in Pompano Beach here in Florida. (Spots courtesy of Pensacola’s In Weekly newspaper).

Nawlins Callin’

Current location: New Orleans, Louisiana

Miles to date: 1,944

Best TV show: Cash Cab. I demand a British version of this programme is put on telly in time for my return.

Those of you with an interest in geography (and if you’re not interested in geography you might want to ask yourself why you’re reading a travel blog. Unless you’re an eccentric millionaire philanthropist in which case welcome) will have noticed that I’m no longer in Florida.

Sadly, after four weeks and nearly 1,800 miles it was time to say goodbye to the Sunshine State and hello the great unknown. There’s always something slightly daunting about crossing a border, mostly related to the fear of what lies beyond. What will the people be like? Can I drink the water? And – mainly – will they have Starbucks.

(Incidentally, I’m yet to hear from the Starbies hierarchy. Either you people are not contacting them singing my praises or they have decided they cannot afford to sponsor me. What with Honda pulling  out of Formula One and Subaru leaving rallying, I’m guessing Starbs are out of the commercial sponsorship game. Plus they’re probably thinking I’m good for a least $1.72 a day so why pay for what they’re already getting for free?)

As if to ease the pain of separation, Florida decided to put on a show for my last couple of days in the state and produced some of the fiercest rain I’ve ever seen. I swear I saw animals lined up two by two on the interstate, looking nervously at each other.

Sadly, I was slightly trapped in Pensacola. Assuming I’d be in town for one night tops I booked into a motel that was big on moving-on  convenience but low on sticking-around amenities. Except the road, the only things you could really walk to were the McDonalds across the car park and a Greyhound coach station. As I didn’t want to get a bus anywhere, and am now in daily fear of coronary heart disease as a result of my diet, I was trapped like a wasp in amber when the rains came down and made motorcycle riding marginally less attractive than a weekend in Josef Fritzels’ basement.

After 36 hours of solid downpour, enough of a chink appeared in the clouds for me to make a break for the Alabama border so I quickly grabbed the panniers and the motorcycle gear, opened the throttle and I was soon rattling along I-10 towards my second state of the tour. I don’t know what I expected but the border was something of a disappointment. Just a small green sign saying “state line” and it was goodbye Florida, hello 1861.

Like most right-thinking people I expected Alabama in general and Mobile in particular to be populated with gap-toothed simpletons, sittin’ on the porch with a bottle of corn whiskey in one hand and their teenage daughter in the other. Sadly, my prejudices were not confirmed. Mobile turned out to be a rather lovely southern town, with an attractive city centre and quiet residential streets lined with appealing wooden houses and moss-covered live oaks. The whole place has the air of someone relaxing on a Sunday afternoon after a particularly satisfying lunch.

I stuck around Mobile – always pronounced in the French fashion Mo’beel, and not in the English fashion like the portable phone – for long enough to take a small part in the social life of the town, once right and once terribly, terribly wrong. First the good, in the shape of probably the friendliest cinema it’s ever been my pleasure to visit, the Crescent Theater at 208 Dauphin Street. Not only did they have reclining armchairs at the front of the theatre, but they also had a good film (Religulous, with Bill Maher) and free coffee. I’m amazed I could be persuaded to leave the place.

Having succeeded so spectacularly on day one, I thought I’d push my luck on day two. I’d seen a couple of posters around town for a girl ‘n’ guitar concert in a local coffee shop, so I turned up expecting Alabama’s answer to Laura Marling or Feist. What transpired was much more horrific. Spotting an unoccupied table near the front I took a prominent seat directly in the line of sight of the performers, who turned out to be a slightly tone deaf 85-year-old woman jazz singer and her off-key trumpeter.

I’m not a huge fan of jazz at the best of times but if there’s one thing I especially loathe it’s jazz singing. I don’t mean the Louis Armstrong type of melodic recitation that most of us would recognise as a tune, but the Cleo Laine kind of jazz singing where the object seems to be to make as many random noises unconnected with the actual song as possible. This self-indulgent nonsense is not singing in the traditional sense but The Voice As Instrument.

By the time the old girl got onto track three (Summertime, inevitably) I was wondering how much longer I could survive without making a very public bolt for the door. Luckily I was saved by an old couple clearly looking for somewhere to sit down and so I was able to save what was left of my soul and appear generous by offering them my table. On the way out one of the organisers said to me: “You don’t have to leave.” How wrong she was, how wrong she was.

After that narrow escape I decided my luck had run out in Alabama and, before finding myself facing a trumped up murder charge with only my cousin Vinny to defend me, chose to cross my second state line in three days and head for Mississippi.

My original plan had been to spend a day in Britney Spears’ favourite resort, Biloxi, but the sight of all those casinos and all that post-Katrina rebuilding made my heart sink so I pressed on nearly missing Mississippi altogether and only ensured I spent one night in the state thanks to a setting sun, a plunging thermometer and some sharp application of the brakes. This part of the Gulf Coast was completely flattened by 2005′s Hurricane Katrina, more famous for laying waste to New Orleans, and it’s only just beginning to take shape again. While the beaches look fantastic, and Highway 90 is close to completion, the evidence of the destructive power of Katrina is everywhere from the stumps of trees to the levelled homes. There’s a huge amount of land for sale along this coast, presumably by people unwilling to invest in the idea that it won’t happen again.

My one night in Mississippi brought a reminder of just how embittered a people who consider themselves disenfranchised can be. I visited Dixie Outfitters, a shop dedicated to the memory of the so-called Lost Cause, the slave owning Confederacy that was comprehensively defeated militarily, if not spiritually, in 1865. If ever you want to see for just how long people can bear a grudge I recommend a visit to Dixie Outfitters, with it’s hate-filled bumper stickers and its one-eyed view of history. Are they really saying slavery is compatible with the modern world? And if it wasn’t defeated in 1865, for how much longer should they have been allowed to practice it before it withered away? By comparison, at least Walmart’s collection of redneck t-shirts poked fun at no-one but themselves.

So I wasn’t exactly gutted to cross the beautiful, slow Pearl River into Louisiana to be greeted by an apparently dead brown forest stretching in all directions into the overflow of the Pearl. America’s motorways specialise in spectacular views thanks to the predeliction for building swooping concrete bridges high above ground level and it was from one such that I was treated to the distant sight of downtown New Orleans’ high rises across the reed beds fringing Lake Pontchartrain.

If I thought the greater Gulf Coast had suffered at the hands of Katrina nothing prepared me for the dilapidation and degradation of the Treme district between the interstate and the adjoining French Quarter. It was always reputedly the poor relation of its more tourist-friendly neighbour but whatever differences there were previously have become a gulf. Its housing is shattered and what is left occupied exists behind steel bars. You could be forgiven for thinking the hurricane was last week, not three years ago. It’s hard to believe these two districts could belong to the same continent, let alone be separated merely by one street. It gives the French Quarter – undeniably appealing – the feeling of Baghdad’s green zone.

As long as you do as I’ve done and stick to the museum district, and the bohemian Marigny and tourist central French Quarter you could kid yourself that all is well with Nawlins, and that all hurricane Katrina did was add another layer to the exotic veneer of the legendary city on the lake.

And legendary it is. From the sleazy, frat boy friendly strip and beer joints of Bourbon Street to the paddle boats of the mighty Mississippi River nearby there’s plenty to keep a person interested . The French influence is clear from the Catholic church, the morning cafe au lait and the huge amount of dog shit everywhere. And then there’s the food, which even by gargantuan American standards is served in portions so huge it’s barely digestible. A local speciality is the Po-Boy, which is a French stick loaded with meats, cheeses and salad. Served with chips, for those who don’t think there is such a thing as too many carbs in the diet. And finished off with beignets, deep-fried donuts in the French tradition but dished up in a minimum serving size of three. Ooofff.

My next stop is Cajun Country and the bayous of south Louisiana before pushing onto what will probably be my last US state, Texas. At least there they do modest, understated portions in that modest, understated way for which they are famous, don’t they? ‘Cos I’m not sure my stomach can take much more of this.

Houma, Humility, Humanity

Current location: Abbeville, Louisiana

Miles to date: 2,212

On my radio: Duellin’ banjoes

There is nothing worse than bitching from people who clearly have nothing to complain about, you know along the lines of “my wallet’s too small for $50s” or “my diamond shoes pinch a bit” so if the following sets your teeth on edge, I can only apologise and suggest you read through to the end because it’s really not as self-indulgent as it first appears.

Travelling, you might be forgiven for thinking if you read the colour supplements, magazines and blogs, is one long party – fantastic meals interspersed with amazing life-affirming experiences and chances to really get under the skin the locals.

Except it isn’t. A lot of it is boring, and some of it is difficult, and the truth is most of it is much like being at home in Blighty only without the rain and the bad teeth. Plus, you have added dilemmas, like where you’re going to stay each night.

Now this might sound like no big deal, and even strike you as a bit like the diamond shoes difficulty above, but actually it can be pretty stressful setting yourself adrift everyday from whatever community you’ve temporarily joined and trusting to luck, instinct, the Rough Guide and your copy of the local Roomsaver coupon book.

(I know it’s also part of the joy of travelling; the feeling that if you don’t like a place you can simply get on your bike and, as we Francophones say, frappe le rue.)

The reason why it’s so stressful is that accommodation is a major percentage both of your budget and of your sense of well-being. Get the accommodation right – for example, the Inn Paradise in Panama City Beach – and everything else that may be a bit crappy about a town simply does not matter. Get it wrong – for example, bed-bug ridden Islamadora – and you could be in the greatest city on earth but you won’t enjoy it.

And part of the thing that definitely lessens your enjoyment is the feeling you’re overpaying for what you’re getting. In Nawlins, in the French Quarter, I paid the beautiful Hotel Provincial just $49 a night for one of the nicest places I’ve ever stayed. And talk about convenient. I could have thrown a stick at Jackson Square from my window.

By contrast, the night before in Mississippi I paid one dollar more for a room with a sticky carpet, dirty towels and all the charm of a South Yorkshire abbatoir. At least it was close to the road.

So accommodation, I think we’ve agreed, is important. And getting the right accommodation relies on a bit of forward planning, a bit of luck, but most of all arriving during the daylight so you can see what you’re getting yourself into. Part of the reason I ended up in a craphole in Mississippi was because it was late, I was tired and, most crucially of all, it was dark by the time I checked in. Quite frankly I would have slept anywhere.

Leaving New Orleans, I was already racing against time. Due to thick fog bringing visibility to zero on some roads I decided on a leisurely breakfast before heading south to look at the bayous. Then I got talking to an Aussie bloke about motorbikes so, by the time I’d finally clipped on the last of the panniers it was already 11am.

Bayou Coquille is only something like nine miles south of New Orleans but it is a world away. It’s part of the Barataria Preserve, one of the parks in the region dedicated to preserving the unique culture and landscape of the Cajuns. For those that don’t know, “Cajun” is a corruption of Acadian, the French-speaking people who arrived in Louisiana in the eighteenth century having decided to quit Canada to escape British dominance.

They found a home among the swamps, mosquitoes and alligators, the inhospitability of the terrain and the geographical isolation helping to preserve a culture of unique language, food and most of all music. Today’s Acadia is under threat and ironically it’s partly the fault of one of America’s greatest Presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

For a start, he set in motion the process of Anglicising the Cajuns, putting their language at risk. And, as part of his programme of public works designed to pull the US out of the depression of the 1930s, he allowed the building of levees along the Mississippi River. Although its aim was to protect farmland by stopping the annual flooding, in the long term it may be one of the things that puts the viability of this part of the delta most at risk.

For thousands of years the floodwaters brought fresh soil deposits to the Mississippi Delta not only providing fertile soil for anchoring plants like reeds, but replacing soil that was being undermined by the action of the sea in the nearby Gulf of Mexico. The effect of the levees has been a double whammy: no new top soil to replace that which is being washed away, no anchoring plants to prevent erosion be sea.

It’s estimated that an area the size of a football field is being transformed from land to water every 40 minutes. That’s not even including the effects of global warming. At the present rate it’s believed that in ten years, the Barataria Preserve could be underwater.

Which would be a catastrophe. Outside the Everglades you’d be hard pushed to find a more beautiful or tranquil place, richer in wildlife. In my two hour stroll along the bayou I saw snowy egrets fishing, blue herons, kingfishers, countless lizards, yellow and black snakes, squirrels, a rabbit, and – most beautiful of all – cardinals, with their distinctive red feathers and blackened eyes.

If you’re reading this in the US you must visit this region before you lose it forever. And while you’re there you’ve got to visit Frazier’s Connection, a restaurant on Barataria Boulevard on the left hand side as you drive south. Forget about the over-hyped food of New Orleans – this was the real deal (I even got introduced to Mr Frazier himself, to congratulate him on the excellence of his stuffed bell peppers).

By the time I’d left Frazier’s and stopped for a coffee at Starbies it was well past three o’clock and I’d already decided I was going to stay in Houma, which looked roughly midway to Lafayette according to the official state map I’d picked up in the visitor centre.

US 90 might be quick, and the KLR happily cruises at 70mph even with a stomach full of stuffed bell peppers, but there’s not a lot you can do to slow a setting sun. By the time I arrived at Houma city limits it was already getting dark and, this being closer to the equator than the arctic circle, the sun dropped out of the sky like a tin falling off a shelf.

Now, as well as being poorly signposted, America is also badly lit. Rather than putting up streetlights many US towns rely on the light emitted by roadside billboards and fast food restaurant signs to enable drivers to see the way. Not ideal, especially when you’re arriving in a place you’ve never been before, and you’re not really sure where the motels are.

Plus I was tired, my backside was numb, I wanted to go to the toilet, I was running out of petrol and engine was getting very hot having been run along the highway, then plunged in to rush hour gridlock. Oh, and it was roasting.

Having suffered snow last week, this part of the country is enjoying a heatwave with winter temperatures (winter temperatures) of 78 degrees plus. The first motel I went to wanted $85 for one night, plus tax. No way, I thought. I’m not going to be ripped off, no matter how tired I feel.

After getting lost, getting stuck in traffic for what felt like forever, and trailing around all the motels in Houma with both me and the bike getting increasingly hot and bothered, and with the tension gathering in a knot at the back of my neck, I ended up back at the first motel I’d originally rejected. Turned out it wasn’t a rip off, but Houma’s best deal.

They had one room left – freezing cold, smelling of cigarettes and just about as miserable and soulless as a place could be when you’re feeling sorry for yourself on holiday. When a chance remark gave me pause for thought.

As I checked in the woman on the front desk said they’d been busy “since the storm”. What storm? I thought. A quick check online and it turns out Houma was landfall for one of the most destructive hurricanes of recent years, Gustav. Suddenly I felt pretty small. Here’s me bitching about spending one night in a motel I don’t care for and for some families, this is home. Later I noticed people had pinned Christmas cards to their doors in an attempt to humanise the anonimity of the place.

Just to twist the knife a bit more, the next day I met Frank Ford of Cycle World in Houma. I’d only popped in to get some chain lube but got talking about where I was from and what I was doing. Frank not only suggested a good route to take to Texas, but printed me a map and even got me a couple of long sleeved t-shirts as, he said, it’d be cold where I was going. It was an incredibly touching gesture, the kind of small act of kindness that makes you think long and hard about your own contribution to the world. When he said if I needed anything I should contact him, I didn’t doubt his sincerity.

That’s travelling for you. On minute you’re down, and the next you’re soaring along the interstate mulling over the nature of humanity and your place in it, flying on the wings of an individual act of kindness.

Yesterday in Lafayette I saw my first cowboy. He was a gentleman of a certain age, still able to carry off a western shirt, slender wranglers and a pair of cowboy boots. Right enough he was only riding a shopping trolley but it was a reminder that Texas, my final US state, is mighty close.

Tomorrow I’ll be following Frank’s map and taking the 82 west from Abbeville, Louisiana, to Port Arthur, Texas, along the Gulf of Mexico. Frank’s warned me to look out for alligators crossing the road but secretly I hope I see at least one, from a safe distance and not too hungry.

‘Merican telly

Current location: Austin, Texas

Miles to date: 2, 856

Number of sporks bought: Two. I accidentally left one in a motel in Florida, and so had to go back to Walmart for another.

As you drive through the US you can’t help noticing one thing – they’re a little bit more religious than people back in Britain.

For a start there’s any number of TV channels featuring men in pimp suits with fake teeth and over-dyed hair telling the audience they are about to die (hang on a sec, isn’t vanity a mortal sin?).

Then there’s the otherwise sane-looking people who unabashedly bring religion up in conversation. In the food court of a shopping mall in Houston a man told me in between mouthfuls of bourbon chicken he opposed abortion on religious grounds, and asked my opinion. It’d be harder to think of a more calamitous social faux pas in London, except standing over somebody in a pub with your penis in their pint of beer.

And in Panama City an elderly gent tried to convince me to become a Jehovah’s Witness in Starbucks. From the look on the face of his long suffering, and virtually mute, wife this was not the first attempt at a Cappucino Conversion.

(Incidentally, of all the Popular People’s Front of Judea-style micro cults in Christianity, the Jehovah’s have got to be one of the most self-defeating. According to their particular brand of latter day bible interpretation, only 144,000 people in total will get into heaven. Assuming God’s got one of the seats, and Jesus and the immediate family have secured their spots, plus various apostles and saints, that’s not a lot of room. If I was Jehovah member 144,001 I’d be pretty pissed off.)

But from bumper stickers, to roadside signs to the holy t-shirts worn by the righteous, by far the most popular slogans at this time of year refer to the place of God among all the bacchanalia. For example, I’m often reminded to Keep the Christ in Christmas. Or that He is the Reason for the Season. We could argue about that but, given my previous experience of Jesus-baiting I’d rather not go there. (Mind you, if there really are only 144,000 real Christians I reckon I could dodge most of them especially given a fast motorbike and an open prairie.)

So without wanting to incur the wrath of either elderly Jehovah’s, or a Jealous God, we all know the real reason for the season: shopping, eating too much, arguing with relatives and watching telly. Sadly, three out of four of these holiday traditions are out of the question for me this year due to my current status as an internationally displaced person. For example, I can’t do as much shopping as I’d like due to space restrictions imposed by a motorbike and panniers. And, try as I might, I can’t really argue with my relatives as the nearest of them is 8,000 miles away.

I already eat too much so that only leaves telly. ‘Merican telly is one sphere where the quantity-versus-quality debate has been comprehensively resolved in favour of quantity, mainly consisting of 70 channels of people shouting at you. Whether it’s sportcasters during a football game (I refuse to watch basketball on the grounds that any game where you can score 100 points is too easy; they should make the hoop smaller than the ball or something.), or newscasters, weather forecasters, or entertainment reporters the idea of the delivery seems to be to bludgeon you over the head verbally so that you’re left too exhausted to press the remote.

If anything, the adverts are worse. Here, there is nothing below fever pitch. From miracle cloths that can hold twice their weight in water to books revealing the secret of how to be a real estate millionaire, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been shouted at in the last seven weeks with the offer of $100 value for $19.99 (and, if I call in the next 20 minutes I’ll also get free shipping and handling).

And there is no dysfunctional or physically curious group left in the country that does not have its own show. From midgets (small people in a big world) to skanks (the execrable charm school) to celebrities (small and skanky) everyone has their 15 minutes of shouting at the viewing public. I’m thinking about selling my own show to the networks, Meal or No Meal, in which homeless people open a series of boxes containing either nutritious scoff, or a pea.

The only channel where they could actually do with a bit of shouting to liven proceedings is c-span, the politics channel, whose main raison d’etre seems to be to make people less suspicious of federal government by boring them to death.

But I don’t really begrudge the midgets their place in the sun, or the trailer dwellers the opportunity to parlay their 15 minutes of national notoriety into a short-lived spot on local TV followed by four decades flipping burgers in Jack in the Box. Fame, after all, is fleeting. I don’t even mind advertisers popping a vein while trying to shift their Snuggie’s (it’s a fleece blanket – WITH ARMS). After all, we’re living in tough economic times and they also have to put food on the table.

No, the people who I really object to being shouted at by are the people from the professional media who should (a) know better and (b) make at least some pretence that they are unbiased. And I’m not talking Fox News here. I expected that to be awful and, to be honest, it’s not as bad as I’d hoped.

My real ire is reserved for the unloved child of CNN Headline News. Quite what an otherwise respectable 24 hour news broadcaster is doing giving access to the airwaves and, by extension, my motel room to the people of HLN I have no idea.

My two favourites are Robyn Meade, who presents the morning show in the style of Playboy TV, and Nancy Grace. For those that haven’t seen her, Robyn is a pneumatic brunette in a tight sweater who probably thinks gravitas is an aftershave. She blasts through all the death ‘n’ politics ‘n’ stuff so she can get onto the cute animals, or the heartrending tales of Everyday Folk. You know, little people (and I’m not talking telly-midgets here). Her show is addictive.

But by a country mile the single worst broadcaster in America is Nancy Grace. Her evening show takes the form of a witchunt in which judge/jury/chief prosecutor Nance rounds on some unfortunate somewhere too poor or too witless to fight back. Currently in her sights is a young Florida mother accused of killing her child.

Unlike harmless, thick Robyn Nancy’s is the sort of show that makes you feel like a hot shower afterwards. I only hope I can get it in Mexico.

And that is rapidly becoming my next destination. After dodging the Christmas bullet by holing up in Austin for five days I’ll finally be on the move again tomorrow. With the wheels pointing south it’ll be San Antonio next, possibly an overnight near the border and then Mexico, land of tacos, sombreros and – hopefully – a bit more sunshine.

How’s my driving?

Current location: San Antonio, Texas

Miles to date: 3,016

Song in head: Can you hear the drums, Fernando?

“What do you think of American drivers?” asked Chris as we both checked into the maximum security motel we’d chosen separately, lured by the advertised low price.

It’s the sort of question it’s always best to duck. No matter how terrible the drivers are in any particular place the last thing the people of that country want to hear is some foreigner slagging them off. So I mumbled something uncontroversial about how they’re not the worst I’ve come across (also true – the competition for the world’s worst drivers is an equal tie for last place between the Indians and the Kiwis).

Chris was much more forthright and left me in no doubt he finds the general standard of driving not to his liking. I believe the phrase “motherfuckers” was deployed at one stage. And he should know. By his own confession he’s on the run from the people who sold him his white VW Golf, touring the interstates of the south and staying in a succession of motels outside his home state of Georgia so he can continue not making payments on his car.

My own view – for what its worth – is that the standard of driving is not that bad, once you get over the idea of someone sitting behind the wheel of a half-ton truck at 80mph while on the phone. But there are certain local foibles that take a bit of getting used to.

Like the fact the speed limit signs are clearly advisory, as opposed to mandatory. I’m usually the only one driving at the speed limit whether it’s 70mph on the interstate or 20mph in town. And from the death-stares I get from other drivers as they roar past spilling their coffee on their khakis I assume I’m about as welcome on the road as an invalid carriage.

Also, signalling is not only rare, but is seen as an act of aggressive intent by other road users, like flicking two fingers at them/flipping them the bird (delete as culturally appropriate). I’ve lost count of the number of times people have actually speeded up when they’ve seen me signalling in preparation to change lane. The local style is to leave it to the last minute and then wrench the wheel as hard as you can, mouthing “fuck you” in the mirror to the bloke behind, braking hard.

As anyone whose ever ridden a motorcycle will tell you, being on a bike makes you feel especially vulnerable, something which I think is lost on the people in those boxes. It’s all about consequences. The consequences of crashing a Dodge Ram is maybe a bit of scratched chrome. The consequences of crashing a bike are much more personal.

But if you think riding a bike is enough to give you an inferiority complex, try walking. Unless you’re Mexican, there is absolutely no reason to walk anywhere in the US. Roadsides are notable for their lack of pedestrians, and lack of sidewalks. In Florida, I came across a campaign against installing a pavement. At one shopping mall I went to they had a golf cart to carry you from your car to the shop. At another, the local supermarket had a conveyor belt service. You put your shopping on one end then drive your car to the other. Admittedly, you still had to walk to your car but at least you didn’t have to push that heavy trolley, too.

(Don’t worry – this isn’t going to turn into one of those predictable rants about fat Americans. For a start, we Britons cannot talk as we are the fattest nation in Europe. And for another thing it amazes me not so much that people here are podgy but, given the ready availability of vast amounts of food, that not everybody is fat; they’ve got more self-control than me.)

I’m sure the driving style stems from a culture in which self-reliance and rugged individualism are highly prized strands of the national story. As long as you think you are the most important person in the world, it’s hard to share the road with other people and not see an attempt to cut in front of you to turn off as anything other than some jerk trying to stop you from getting something that by rights is yours, in this case the road.

And nowhere is that sense of a chosen people, living in a special place, and deserving every bit of it more keenly expressed than here in Texas. They’ve got the succession of wars to settle their national boundaries (against the Indians, against the Spanish, against the Mexicans, against the rest of the US). They’ve got the brief period of independent government (ended, expediently, for economic reasons). They’ve even got the tragic military defeat – the Alamo, 1836 – to unite behind. That’s right. The Texans are the Scots of America.

And like our friends in the frozen north, the history is not quite all they’d like it to be. For example, more people describing themselves as English (11) died at the Alamo than people describing themselves as Texan (10). I’m sure there are good reasons for this.

Also, I’m no conspiracy theorist but the three most prominent of the Alamo dead – Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and some other bloke – were all freemasons. Now, this might be a classic example of thje masons claiming these people posthumously but I’m not sure I’d want to base my national myth on all the great things the masons have done for us. (In one ironic twist of fate, Crockett, Bowie and the other bloke were re-interred in the Catholic cathedral of San Fernando in San Antonio. As supposed representatives of a staunchly anti-catholic organisation they must be turning in their marble casket.)

And let’s not forget the Alamo was a defeat. By the Mexicans. The people they are currently building a 600 mile wall through national wildlife preserves – among other places – to keep out. So far, from the evidence here in San Antonio, they are failing spectacularly. Maybe it’s just because it is school holidays in Mexico, or maybe it is because the border is only a couple of hundred miles away, but in San Antonio I feel I already have at least one foot south of that border.

Sure, there were Mexicans in Austin, standing on street corners all day, every day looking for work. But here in San Antone the Mexicans aren’t just a presence at the traffic lights, they seem completely settled. All public signs, and most supermarkets, are bilingual. You’re as likely to hear Spanish spoken on the streets as English. It’s estimated that by 2050 the US will be a predominantly Spanish-speaking country. I’m guessing it will be by 2015 in Texas.

All of which makes Mexico feel incredibly close, like a scent carried on a summer breeze or the thump in your chest of distant music getting slowly closer, louder and more distinct. Can you hear the drums, Fernando?

New year, new country

Current location: Eagle Pass, Texas

Miles to date: 3,282

Best critter to date: A road runner by Black Hills Ranch, Texas. I dare you to see one and not say “meep, meep”.

Unbelievably, after two months, more than 3,000 miles, five states, countless climactic changes, hundreds of motels and enough fast food to keep a moderate African country fed for a year, I’m about to leave the warm and comforting embrace of the United States.

I couldn’t be in a more appropriate place, perched high above the Rio Grande in the city of Eagle Pass, Texas. To my north, the endless scrubby mesquite of south Texas, the cities of Houston, Austin and San Antonio and the world’s largest economy.

Below me to the south lies the twin city of Piedras Negras, my point of entry into a totally new country, and who knows what else. Danger? Corruption? Tamales? Certainly, the majority of people I’ve met in the last few weeks have advised against travelling to Mexico, most citing the murderous narcotraficantes, roaming kidnap gangs, highway banditos and corrupt cops.

It’s enough to make you want to stay at home. But if I’d done that I’d have never been to Hialeah, never met the Palmetto boys, never camped in the Everglades, never incurred the wrath of Jesus somewhere south of Gainesville, never nearly got run down in Tallahassee, never seen painful jazz in Alabama, or eaten great food in Louisiana.

Right enough, I’d probably be 50lbs lighter but I think I’d be a whole lot poorer. And if those first settlers had not crossed the land bridge across the Bering Straits or got in their ships in Spain, or emigrated from Scandinavia and Ireland and Greece all those years ago the US would look very different than it does today.

It could, for example, have been discovered by the French. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

I know I’ve talked about this before but whenever you leave a place you feel a tremendous nostalgia for it to the point where you almost fear leaving, coupled with trepidation about what lies ahead to the point where you almost fear arriving.

Even with its huge size, America is a very easy country to travel around especially if you have time, cash in your pocket and your own wheels. In those circumstances, travel in America is no more demanding than rocking up in some town and heading for the first motel that takes your fancy. Or the second – there’s always plenty of choice.

Just like there’s always a huge TV, an in-room coffee maker, fridge, microwave, clean bathroom with hot water, heating, an ironing board and a bed large enough to land light aircraft in an emergency. Here at the Eagle Pass Inn I’m going out on a high as I’ve got all the above, plus a sofa to lounge on, a table to write at, free local calls and HBO, a jacuzzi (if I need it) and an HEB (see the film above) just across the car park. Quite frankly, I could stay here until my money runs out.

But like those people crossing the land bridge to see what’s beyond the hills, or the blokes in tights setting sail to the edge of the world hoping they don’t fall off, I can’t help myself from thinking ‘What’s over there? Looks close, I could be there in 20 minutes…’

I also know that, where I’m headed, I won’t be able to take hot water, warm rooms, cheap fuel and good roads for granted.

There are also some things I won’t miss, and I’m hoping the Mexicans won’t have them. For example, the frikkin’ Progressive insurance ads. If there’s one woman I’d like to see in the trunk of a car at the airport, it’s the doofus that presents for Progressive. I also won’t miss Tyra Banks, Nancy Grace, Charm School with Sharon Osborne, or – pass the sick bag – the Cosby Show (didn’t they cancel his ass yet?).

Apart from that, most everything else has been pretty sweet. You even get used to the shouting after a while. But there is one single thing that really gets up my nose here in the US. It’s a small thing, but then it’s always the small things that trip you up. When they set their car alarm, the car horn sounds. For the first five weeks every time I walked across a car park I couldn’t understand why people kept angrily beeping at me. Fix that, and you’ve got a pretty good country.

As for Texas, what can I tell you? It’s been a bit of a disappointment so far. Houston was a sprawling mess, with the single most intimidating interstate system in the country, with multiple death coming at you from all angles. It was also very, very cold. Austin seems to have read a pamphlet about itself, but I was underwhelmed. I very much liked San Antonio, especially its downtown, which, despite being Texas tourisms epicentre has an authenticity about it unfound elsewhere.

I was just about to completely give up on the state when I enjoyed a hot afternoon’s ride through hill country. If you ever need to get from Bandera to Utopia turn off Highway 16 and take any of the smaller farm roads that snake across the low scrubby hills hereabouts. It reminded me of Andalucia. Parched ground, winter evergreens, aloes and cactuses all framed by a cloudless sky with the sun burning through my jeans.

Utopia was a particularly nice evocation of the kind of small town America I’ve been looking for, and you won’t find on the interstate. And just in time as, barring a huge change of heart, this will be my last American town for a while.

Eagle Pass, with its Walmart Supercenter, Valero gas station, Applebees, Sears and JC Penney, is about as American its possible to get in a town where everyone speaks Spanish and I’m pretty much the only Anglo.

Eagle Pass, home to the world’s least scary indians. Apache? Comanche? Don’t mess with those bad boys unless you want an arrow in the ass. But the Kickapoo tribe? They didn’t get a name like that scalpin’ and fightin’.

For me, it’s Eagle Pass no more. I’m told they have Kickapoo south of the border too. Let’s hope they really are peaceful, or I’m in a lot of trouble.

In The Zone

Current location: Hidalgo del Parral, Chihuahua, Mexico

Miles to date: 3,937

Put it another way: London to Chicago, or London to Karachi

How different can two places be? Especially two places with a shared history, with people from a similar cultural background, who look and sound alike and who were, until relatively recently, part of the same country?

Just take a walk across the International Friendship Bridge separating American Eagle Pass from Mexican Piedras Negras. Who would have believed a few hundred yards of dust, some reed beds and a slow moving river could mark the boundary not between countries, but between worlds.

(Only, if you do please remember not to leave your passport safely locked inside your motel room. But for those understanding folks at US Border and Immigration, I’d have been starting the Mexican leg of my journey much sooner, and without the bike.)

Coming off the bridge into Mexico for the first time is to immediately realise you’re not in Miami now, tonto. First up, the traditional greeting every guest receives when entering a new country. “Taxi?” Followed by the pained expression they must teach in Taxi School, as if you’re the first person to have rejected them that morning.

Everything is different about Piedras Negras. The smell. The crumbling edges. The dog boobs (how do dogs in the developing world get nipples that long?). After America’s wide open spaces, where you need a car to get from Wendy’s to Starbies, it came as a shock to be able to walk not just from shop to shop but pretty much around the whole centre of town. It’ll never catch on.

As a test run for travelling in the country it was pretty successful. I managed not to get robbed, or kidnapped, or beheaded by a drug gang (their current modus operandii). Instead, all I managed to get was a rather nice fruit shake from a man on a market stall. So far so normal.

What with annoying the Kickapoo, and getting on the wrong side of Jesus, this was a happy portent. Leaving the US was now officially A Good Idea. I had one loose end, however. In a fit of New Year optimism, I’d ordered Footprint’s Mexico and Central America Handbook 2009 from Amazon. And in a fit of cunning to rival Baldrick, I’d asked for it to be delivered General Delivery to Eagle Pass.

For those that don’t know, and have had no cause to use it, general delivery is a means of getting post when you don’t have a door to put it through, or a mailbox to leave it in. Rather, you have it shipped to the nearest post office and, with a flash of the ID, you get your post. That’s the theory, and it had worked perfectly well once before in Tallahassee.

Not so in Texas. Monday, not there. Tuesday, still not arrived and they suggest I contact UPS, who deliver items for Amazon, if they have it. In fact, the Post Office man tells me, they never accept packages from UPS. Wednesday, I’m back after UPS say they don’t have it. Oh no, the man from the Post Office says, I gave it back to the UPS guy. Wednesday night I speak to the UPS delivery man himself who is adamant he dropped it off, and was not handed it back.

Somebody is not telling the truth, and I suspect the UPS guys have more credibility. Thursday, having waited five days in Eagle Pass at $70 a night in a motel for a $18 book the truth transpires.

The post office had it all along. Only, they hadn’t been prepared to hand it over as UPS hadn’t paid them to deliver it to me. The man from the post office – tanned, smug, moustachioed – is prepared to stand there with my book in is hand and tell me I cannot have it until I persuade UPS to hand over $6.80 in postage. He must know as he says the words that this will be impossible.

There’s no pleading, no begging, no persuading, no appeals to his better humanity. Just $6.80 or nothing. I look in my wallet. Six bucks. I rued the extra dollar I decided to leave for the cleaning lady as I would not need it.

Don’t ask me why but this show of intransigence really got to me. Standing in Eagle pass post office, zipping and unzipping every pocket of my motorcycle jacket looking for a spare dollar, I couldn’t prevent the tears from streaming down my face. I wept for his lack of humanity. I wept for the small lies they’d been happy to tell me for four days in a row. I wept for my failure to persuade him to do the decent thing. I wept that my last memory of the States was to be this pathetic defeat.

And so, red eyed, I crossed the border. Leaving the US with a passport was much easier than trying to get in without one. Through the chaos of Piedras Negras, with a last coffee in McDonalds, and I’d swopped Highway 57 for Ruta 57 south.

Border formalities entering Mexico don’t take place at the border but 50 miles south at a combined bank and military checkpoint where I got my passport stamped, paid a fee, and got a temporary import permit for the KLR which includes a sticker and a promise not to sell the bike in Mexico.

So far, I’ve been the perfect guest by sticking to my side of the bargain while the Mexicans have been the perfect hosts. Curious, friendly and helpful on my first night in industrial Monclova the hotel owner parked my bike beneath one of his CCTV cameras.

On my second night in Cuatrocienegas, they wheeled the bike into the hotel to keep it free from prying eyes and the gathering dust storm. Here in Parral, the bike is in an underground car park. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence but my room overlooks it.

There are three things I’ve underestimated about Mexico. First, just how good the food is, especially if you like it a little bit spicy. Even in the humblest place great care is taken to ensure the food is as fresh and as tasty as it is possible to get. Everything is made on the premises from the salsa to the tortillas, and all dishes are prepared for you. The portions are also of a size my stomach is thanking me for, too.

Second bit of underestimation is just how beautiful the countryside can be. I confess an interest here – I’ve always been a sucker for desert landscapes and so the parched, stark beauty of northern Mexico’s deserts are right up my street. This is the Mexico of dreams, of Pancho Villa, of Carranza and the revolution.

Third, I’ve underestimated wildly just how vast this country is. Looking at a map gives little idea of the sheer monumental scale of the place. Travelling south along Ruta 30 through the desert took nearly five hours between major settlements. In that time I saw two wild horses, a group of three people in front of a dust blown shack, and a vaquero on a horse, who raised his hat to me from a distance.

In two days I’ve done the equivalent of London to Inverness, but have just exited the edge of one state and barely entered the edge of another. All this emptiness and isolation does weird things to a mind, and I admit to being a little freaked out in the desert as I suddenly became aware of my insignificance as I crawled across the face of the earth. This is the famous Zona del Silencio, a place as eerie as the name suggests, a kind of inland Mexican Bermuda Triangle.

I’ve never been so relieved to see the signs of human habitation, in this case the “desert bloom”, plastic bags caught on a fence and flapping in the breeze.

There is no cure for isolation quite like a Mexican town. Everywhere I’ve gone people have been interested in where I’m from and what the hell I’m doing riding a motorcycle through their backyard. It has been a warm but frustrating experience and the sooner I get my ass to Spanish lessons the better.

That will have to wait at least a couple more days, however, as tomorrow I head to one of the truly world class sights of Northern Mexico, the complex of mountains and ravines known collectively as Copper Canyon in English, Barranca del Cobre in Espanyol. After the Zona del Silencio, I only hope it can survive the hype.

Ah Chihuahua

Current location: Durango, Mexico

Miles to date: 4,714

Song in head: Theme from The Big Country

On the number plates in Chihuahua State a figure sits astride a rearing  horse,  reins in one hand and cowboy hat in the other. This could of course be any old cowboy, or it could be the legendary Francisco “Pancho” Villa.

Either way it’s a wholly appropriate choice, not least of all because the figure is picked out in the kind of dusty light brown that you find hereabouts, blown into your eyes, your clothes and all over your motorcycle.

Chihuahua is cowboy country. If you’ve ever wondered what the wild west was like, wonder no more because you can experience it here, today. Chihuahua is the state Texas may once have been and likes to think it still is, a big empty where it’s possible to ride all day without seeing another human being.

Wild. Vast. Rugged. And lawless. Of the 5,000 murders that took place in Mexico in 2008, more than 1,000 of them took place in Chihuahua. On the local television news last night it revealed that 56 per cent of all kidnappings that took place in Mexico happened – you guessed it – in Chihuahua. It is, in the words of the local paper, a state “sin ley”, without law.

It is Mexico’s largest state at 244,000 square kilometres, with a comparatively tiny population  of just three million or so. About one million of those live in Chihuahua City so you can imagine the rest of them are pretty thinly spread.

Which makes it’s criminal efforts all the more incredible. That’s a lot of murders for a population less than  half of London’s. The average is helped by the mayhem at the border with the US where the narcotraficantes make a daily point of just how little they value life. It’s no surprise that the border drug war is one of incoming president Barack Obama’s top three priorities.

In fact, it’s so high on his list that he made a point of seeing Mexican President Calderon before his inauguration on Tuesday.

Sadly, it’s not just the border towns that are suffering from this tidal wave of killing. Even tiny Creel, 2,300 metres up in Chihuahua’s pine clad mountains, has been subject to its share of the tragedy. Outside the town hall are 13 mock coffins, commemorating the 13 members of the same family who were gunned down on one particularly bloody Sunday last August.

As a family party was in full swing in the main square, masked and armed men in pick up trucks arrived and started shooting. Among the 13 dead was a one-year-old boy. Posters above the coffins ask how much longer the dead are going to have to wait for justice. From the look of the counter, changed every day, justice is going to take a little bit longer yet.

It all adds to the impression that Chihuahua is still in the grip of cowboy fever. In Hidalgo del Parral, the dress code of choice among the men is the pointiest cowboy boots known to man (you could certainly pick winkles out of a jar with those bad boys), western shirts, denim jackets and stetsons (actually, that should be Stetsons. I never knew that, like Hoover and Tannoy, it’s a trade mark that’s become synonymous with the product).

Many a time I’d be riding along some dusty plain when a brown arm, clad in plaid, would wave from the open window of some aging Ford – possibly all the rage when Henry was still alive – to signal me past.

In Guiachochi, high up in the mountains, the only thing missing from it’s wide streets and compact buildings is the tumbleweeds blowing down Main Street and a clock showing High Noon. Tarahumara Indians squat in the dust, oblivious to the effect the dirt is having on their brightly coloured shawls and skirts.

Men in padded coats, to keep out the cold once the sun dips behind the mountains, maintain a watch from street corners as you ride into town.

In San Ignacio, chickens and turkeys scratch about in the dust as the corn, gathered by hand from the small patchwork of fields outside each wooden shack, dries in the tree branches. Here, people still live in caves and withdraw safely behind their front doors as I walk past.

And in Creel, which looks as if The Man With No Name left on the 11am train, the mock coffins are lined up in the street.

You can still see men on horseback driving cattle through the scrub to vast ranches on the horizon. Further south, where the golden prairie permits agriculture, the land is clearly worked by hand. The haystacks here have not been produced by a combine harvester. This is a land still worked by the sweat of the human brow.

But the thing that strikes you most, especially if you’re from pokey, crowded London where you spend half your life jammed up against someone else’s armpits on the tube, is just how empty it all is.

You can ride for nearly 160 kms – about one hundred miles – through the forests of northern Chihuahua, carried on the scent of the pines without seeing more than a dozen other people. It’s possible to visit vast canyons like Sinforosa and be the only one there.

Often, the only other human beings you encounter are the heavily armed teenagers at military checkpoints. It’s the sort of sight that makes you realise the wild west is no joke here. At dusk, armed pick-ups still leave Creel only this time it’s the Federales dressed from head to toe in black going out to patrol the nearby mountain passes. Rather them than me.

Despite all these gloomy portents I was truly sorry to leave Chihuahua, which is achingly beautiful. And despite the crime stats and the local newspapers and the checkpoints and Dodge’s crammed with Federal police, I didn’t even get overcharged for coffee.

So it was a slightly bittersweet crossing into Durango State, where the wild west theme continues in the guise of a film industry which used – and uses – the state as a backdrop for westerns. You can visit the sets, including the place where the Mask of Zorro was shot, or the mountains that John Wayne liked to pretend were the American west.

But there’s a change that happens in Durango. Somehow, the America of years past is replaced, thanks to its Sears and its Burger King and its McDonalds, with a more contemporary version of the US. There are fewer men in Stetsons, and no indians.

The architecture is changing, too. The centre of Durango is dominated by the Cathedral built in the Mexican baroque style more reminiscent of colonial Spain. This, and Zacatecas to the south, my next stop, were the heartland of the colonial Spaniards who came looking for gold in the 16th century and found silver.

Unsurprisingly for a place so comprehensively plundered by their colonial masters, this region was eventually central to the Mexican revolution that threw out the Spaniards.

Principal, and controversial, among those revolutionary figures is Pancho Villa hero to some, common criminal to others. In Parral, where he was gunned down in the 1920s while driving his Dodge to the bank, the local museum shows a video on a loop of a corpulent man with a droopy moustache enduring a long night of the soul, agonising before his assault on the US.

Unbelievably, Villa attacked Columbus New Mexico in March 1916. Quite what he wanted to achieve is unclear. But the US reaction was to send an invasion force of 10,000 south of the border led by General Pershing, later to find fame as an intercontinental ballistic missile, assisted by the man who was to become General Patton.

That they failed to find Villa is no surprise to anybody who has spent six hours on a motorbike without seeing anyone else. These guys were on horses. I think I would have given up at the first cantina.

But like Pershing, it’s south I must go and tomorrow I’ll be hitting the road again for Zacatecas state, bidding a final and fond farewell to the wild, wild west. I’m hoping to do some Spanish lessons in what is, by all accounts, a jewel of the colonial heartland. I think the first phrase I’ll learn is: “Hands up, everybody. This is an invasion.”

Staring Death in the face

Current location: Guanajuato, Mexico

Miles to date: 5,262

Number of wizened old men seen astride burros while wearing an oversized sombrero: one

The thing with travelling around Mexico is that, sooner or later, you are destined to stare death in the face. And not the European “he died peacefully in his sleep while surrounded by his immense wealth” kind of death. The kind of death that stalks the wide open plains of Mexico is up close, personal and all-too painful.

Some of this is a consequence of riding a motorcycle. Half the time, I might as well have a target painted on my back because bikes are clearly fair game for anyone too stupid or too impatient to wait in a side road for me to go past or overtake where it’s safe.

Having ridden around this country for a few weeks Í’ve come to the conclusion that road signs have a purely decorative value. I’m assuming they are part of some kind of government job creation scheme. They’ve paid people to paint them, so they might as well stick them on the side of the road and see what happens.

What happens is that they are ignored. “Slow your speed”, “No overtaking” and “Don’t drive while tired” are pretty much there to give tired, speeding drivers something to read as they overtake on blind corners and the crests of hills. Most hilariously of all, some wag knocked out a load of “Obey the signs” signs. Oh, how they must have snickered as those went out the front door of the factory.

Not that Mexicans are bad drivers. Many of the actual rules of the road, as opposed to those painted at the roadside, are pure common sense with a healthy side order of self preservation.

For example, as long as you accept the fact that the speeding truck behind you is going to overtake no matter what, it makes sense to move as far over to the side of the road as possible to give him a clear path to his, and oncoming road users’, certain demise.

As the only person in the whole country who almost sticks to the speed limit, I use the clear-a-path-for-the-madman rule everytime I ride. So far (you can’t see this but I’m touching wood at the moment, which is not nearly as interesting as it sounds) I haven’t been mown down. But it’s not for lack of trying on the collective part of the drivers of Mexico’s northern states.

Another death in the face experience is the vast number of critters littering the roadway who were just not quick enough to make it across the tarmac before making an unexpected sharp left to meet their maker instead. In Britain, you’re lucky to see a dead hedgehog. And only then at certain times of the year.

America, on the other hand, had much more impressive roadkill. I’m sure I mentioned the squashed Armadillo. If I didn’t before, I am now. But American drivers are strictly little league when it comes to ploughing down wild creatures. The true masters of their art are the Mexicans.

Today, as well as the usual dogs (never cats – why is that?), cows, deers, sheep, birds of various types and racoons, I saw a skunk. I didn’t even know they had skunks in Mexico. Heaven only knows what it smelled like. I was going far too fast above the speed limit to get a whiff. We can only dream of killing skunks in Britain.

Also, just for the sport of it Mexico has bullfighting which, as in Spain, also involves the killing of the bull in the end. And they have cockfighting. (Which reminds me of a Mexican joke. How can you tell when there’s a Spaniard at a cockfight? He brings a duck. And how can you tell there’s an Argentinian at a cockfight? He bets on the duck. It may have lost something in the translation…)

So there’s the attempted killing of gringo motorcyclists, the actual but inadvertant killing of roadside ruminants, and the deliberate and sporting killing of bulls and cocks.

But it is with their own mortality that Mexicans seem peculiarly interested. As you may or may not know, I’ve spent the last two weeks at the excellent Fenix Language Institute in Zacatecas while Lolis Dorado has attempted to drum some of the Spanish language through my thick skull, and her husband Arturo has tried to explain the historical reasons for the state of modern Mexico.

I thank them for their efforts. Lolis, particularly, showed the patience that would normally set you on the path to sainthood while trying to impart the basics of Spanish grammar. Not unreasonably, my argument that it was illogical and therefore unnecessary cut little ice with Lolis. As she was too polite to point out, the Spanish language has served Mexico reasonably well for the last 500 years so they are not about to renegotiate the whole grammatical structure for my convenience.

Anyway, to get away from the hell that is impersonal pronouns I decided to head south from Zacatecas for the weekend and spend 48 hours in Aguascalientes. Never has a town promised so little and delivered so much.

Where Zacatecas is all petty bourgeois colonial charm, with brightly painted homes spread up and down the sides of a steep valley, Aguascalientes appeared squat, modern, traffic-choked and charmless. The more I circled round and round the centre of town in the vain search for a hotel, the more and more I wished I had stayed back in Zac.

But, with light fading and stomach grumbling (and bladder threatening) I saw what looked like an acceptable hotel and a passable street. How wrong I was. The hotel San Antonio turned out to be excellent, friendly and great value, while Zaragoza street was more like something out of South Beach, Miami, than south of Zacatecas. Also, the best coffee in Mexico was being served in the cafe next door.

If that was not enough, Aguascalientes is  also home to one of the most interesting and unusual museums I have ever been to, the National Museum of Death. For those that don’t know, Mexicans celebrate the first and second of November – the Day of the Dead – with an almost unholy glee. Talk about pushing your luck.

And the National Museum is a celebration not just of this day, but of all things related to karking-it both in pre-Hispanic and in modern Mexico. So amid the statues of tubby chihuahua dogs baring their teeth agressively and the masks (both real and imaginary) of people who have died and the skeletons in their street clothes summoning friends and relatives to the other side with a bony finger, is a real feeling of joie de vivre.

Ironically (or maybe this is the point) the National Museum of Death was one of the most life-affirming places I have been to. So bring on your kamikazee drivers, your road kill and your cock and bull fighting. I have already stared death in the face a hundred times over in Aguascalientes. And I have lived to tell the tale.

Hot, High, Huge

Current location: Mexico City

Miles to date: 5,612

Pairs of jeans successfully bought despite successive visits to shops selling jeans over a number of days: none (annoyingly).

“Don’t go to Mexico City. It’s dangerous there.” If had a peso for every time I heard those words I’d have enough for a delicious taco full of spicy pork, a refresco and possibly a cake afterwards.

And, yes, Mexico (which is pretty much how everyone refers to the city of the same name) can be a fairly dangerous place. According to one local newspaper it was the second most likely place in the world to be ransom-kidnapped in 2008. (Strangely, Phoenix Arizona was in unenviable first place.)

It’s the only place I’ve seen guards armed with shotguns inside Starbucks (presumably to stop people from taking too much complimentary milk). Over the weekend, the decapitated bodies of two women were found in the boot/trunk of a car. Their heads were in a cooler on the back seat. Drug dealing gangsters also continue do their best to keep Mexico’s population down. Just outside town, seven were killed when the ubiquitous men in sports utility vehicles randomly shot up the outside of a restaurant on opening night. Further afield, in Chiapas, 15 members of the same family were murdered when armed men attempted – successfully – to execute a policeman they did not like.

And it’s not just the sequestradores (kidnappers), narcotraficantes and head-removers you need to watch out for. Daily, the evening news brings us the death toll from the urban raceways in and out of the city. Then there’s the pollution, which gets so bad only cars with certain numberplates are allowed to drive around the city on a given day. The next day it’s the turn of the rest. (Incidentally, the traffic can be unbeleivably heavy – I cannot imagine what it would be like if they allowed all the cars owned in the city to drive on the same day.)

The smog is at its worst at this time of year, pumped into the still air by the cars, buses, trucks and industry that makes Mexico DF the industrial powerhouse of the country and trapped by the mountains and volcanoes that would attractively ring the city if only you could see them. You can feel it in your eyes and throat, and see it on your face towel at the end of the day.

It’s so bad the local government advises against any outdoor exercise. We’ve had three days of pollutants at very high levels with little sign of relief. Add to this the combined heat of the sun and the estimated 20 million people who call Mexico home (that’s roughly one-in-five of the total population), and the altitude, and you’d beforgiven for thinking the city had all the ingredients necessary for a man-sized portion of urban blight. Except it doesn’t.

In the week I’ve been here I’ve found the people friendly, open and welcoming. I’ve been engaged in conversation with the expectation of nothing more than a chance to practice their English. Nowhere have I felt unwelcome, and nowhere have I felt ripped off. Eating in restaurants, bakeries and street stalls I seem to have been charged exactly what people locally are charged. Which is not very much, at least by European standards. At my friendly local taco stall, they charge four pesos a pop for piping hot tacos served fresh off the griddle by a man with asbestos fingers. And today for lunch, as a change from industrial quantities of fried meat, I thought I’d try one of the two vegetarian restaurants I’ve spotted in the historc centre of town.

Sitting on a balcony in the February sunshine I was treated to mango soup (much better than it sounds), a vegetable course of potatoes, spinich and onions and apple gorditos. The last especially, served with soured cream and a sweet sauce, were outstanding. And all for 40 pesos. To put it into some kind of context, at the moment the peso – which suffered its worst single day fall recently – is currently trading at just under 15 to the US dollar, or just over 20 to the pound.

Despite the frenetic pace of the Centro Historico, it is also very easy to find a corner to relax and take it all in. Mexico may be the city of teeming millions but it is also the city of peaceful squares, quiet streets and oases of calm like the many excellent art galleries. Coyoacan, just south of the city centre, is a place with both. Walking down Calle Francisco Sosa, supposedly the first urban street laid out in the Americas, it’s hard to believe that it’s gated homes, colonial churches and tree-shaded streets are surrounded by three times as many people as London. It’s the ultimate urban village.

Coyoacan – whose name means place of coyotes – is the oldest part of Mexico City, and was the placed used by Hernan Cortes and his conquistadores to launch their muderously successful assault on the great Aztec capital on the lake. It was also the place chosen as home by Mexico’s golden artistic couple Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and the last place of refuge – and eventual grave – of Leon Trotsky, communist, hen-lover and enemy of Stalin. It was the latter that was to prove his undoing.

Walking around Coyoacan on a hot Saturday afternoon, dodging from coffee shop to art gallery, it’s hard to believe such a quietly prosperous part of town could be home to such a murderous history. But then, that’s true of Mexico City as a whole. It’s a place of incredible contrasts and it is from that it draws much of its energy and fascination. Like many cities it’s possible to shop in Bulgari and Chanel in one part of town, and see homeless people sleeping in subways in another. It’s home to the largest cathedral in the Americas and has hard core pornography freely available – and on graphic display – at the many corner newsstands or in the vast number of shops selling fake DVDs.

It’s a town where the rich take armed guards with them shopping and where, on Valentine’s Day, they set a new world record for the number of couples kissing at the same place at the same time. Like many of the great cities of the world, it’s a full on, 24 hour assault on all the senses. The combination of heat, height (it’s at more than 2,300 metres) and hugeness have worn me out. So it’s with a mixture of regret at leaving, but desire for a few days of peace and quiet, that I’ll be hitting the road tomorrow. I’ll be going south, first to Oaxaca and then to Chiapas.

Or, as the woman at my hotel puts it: “Don’t go to Oaxaca. It’s dangerous there.”

Yellow Fever

Current location: Oaxaca, Mexico

Miles to date: 5,961

Worst TV show: Hoy

“I feel sorry for the people stuck here,” the young man with the large stick in his hand practically whispered to me. “But what are we to do?”

What indeed. Two years ago while running for election, the party of eventual winner and current president Felipe Calderon promised the inhabitants of this tiny village high in the mountains outside Oaxaca City some tractors and a school.

Two years on and the PAN party (“Action with Responsibility”) has failed to live up to that election pledge. The village is still school-less and without tractors. And so, in true latin american tradition they’ve decided to block the road.

The bloqueado is the form of direct action most favoured south of the US border. While in Britain we might tut loudly, or send an angry e-mail to the Guardian, for latinoamericanos only direct, disruptive street protest will do.

On my first day in Mexico City a group of people from Chiapas blocked the road outside the Supreme Court protesting about the still unsolved killing of 45 people in Acteal in 1997. The accusation is that the deaths were the handiwork of militias tacitly supported by the then-governing party, the PRI.

A couple of days later the bus drivers went on strike complaining about the price of diesel (too high), blocking roads around the main square, the Zocalo. After that it was the turn of the dairy farmers, in town to blockade the agriculture ministry about the price of milk (too low). As well as blocking the Zocalo, they also released two cows to wander around inside the ministry. I’m assuming the cows took the opportunity to blockade something vital to the workings of the ministry, like the staff restaurant.

While on my way out of the city the road was blockaded again (“striking workers”, I was told). The great advantage of a motorbike is that a queue of standing traffic is the perfect opportunity to make swift, safe progress. So after pausing for a moment at the head of the queue to show my solidarity with my striking brothers, it was through the gap between the blockading lorries, past the man with the fearsome-looking machete in his hand and on my untroubled way along the now almost traffic free road to Cuernavaca.

But this bloqueado in Oaxaca looked a whole other level of seriousness. These were not just some workers blowing off steam but people with a much deeper grudge.

Oaxaca, like its southern neighbour Chiapas, is a largely rural, remote part of Mexico. They’ve long had the impression they matter little in the corridors of power in Mexico City and that their opinion is only sought when it comes time to vote. In the past this has led to violence. In the mid-90s, a peasant army, the EZLN, seized one of Chiapas main towns and fought a bloody and long-running war against the Mexican state, culminating in the Acteal massacre in 1997.

In Oaxaca, too, protest has turned to bloodshed. A strike by teachers in 2006 turned into a confrontation first with the local police and eventually with the army, with inevitable consequences for the strikers. A US journalist covering the story was killed. Given that history, I was not about to blithely ride through the lorries and cars slung across the road, even  if I’d been allowed to.

Arriving at the head of the queue of cars my path was politely blocked by a man with a stick. He was not alone. All the men had weapons of various kinds. None deadly, but enough to make you think twice before pushing your way through. I decided the best thing was to play ignorant and speak nothing but English. Luckily, I have natural advantages when it comes to these tactics.

After trying – and failing – to explain to me what was going on in Spanish, a young man who spoke pretty good English was summoned to do the job. “What’s going on?” I asked, and he explained about the school and the tractors and the Presidential promise.

“And how long will you be here?” I said. “Two days.” Even he winced as he replied, and described his sympathy for the people in the long line of cars and trucks stretching back towards the valley floor who’d be making a long and unscheduled stop unless they could find some way of turning around on the narrow mountain road.

“By the way, my friend likes your boots,” he said. I still don’t know whether it was the quality of my boots, my lack of Spanish or my general air of hopeless tourist but clearly I cut a pathetic enough picture to receive a special pass. After much discussion behind one of the lorries, and several conversations into walkie talkies, I was waved through. “Good luck,” I said as I rode up into the village. I meant as much me, as them.

The village, a strip of houses and shops either side of Ruta 190, was eerily deserted. Everyone was either manning the roadblock I’d just been through or the one I was coming to. While the first blockade was mainly trucks, the second was mostly taxis. Clearly something was deeply amiss if even the taxi drivers – normally the reactionary vanguard in any society – were prepared to go without fares for two days.

True to their word, I was also waved through the second blockade and so, like visiting royalty, I was free to progress onto Oaxaca with barely any traffic to slow me down.

Just as well, because the road was a twisting serpent through the mountains of Mexico’s semi-arid south. Rocks, dust and cactus seemed to be the most prolific crop although this is, apparently, one of the country’s most fertile areas. Although Ruta 190 was beautiful – and undeniably interesting – after a while I got tired of endlessly going around bend after bend and longed for some straight, or even straighter.

Salvation came in the form of the 135d, a toll road – or cuota as they call them here – which described itself as the quick road to Oaxaca. And, by God, it was. After hours of 40 kmh round the bends suddenly it was 110 kmh on a fast, well-maintained surface swooping through what remained of the desert. If ever I needed a reminder of why I ride, this was it.

In no time I was at the toll booth paying my 60 pesos for one of the best thrill rides I’d ever been on. Another 20 minutes in the blazing sun and I was rolling through Oaxaca’s ugly outskirts before being delivered to the door of the city centre branch of the Italian Coffee Company for one of their strong, dark americanos, and a chance to savour the last of the feeling of flying down a virtually new, virtually traffic-free road on a perfect summer’s day.

Oaxaca is rightly one of the jewels of the Mexican tourist industry. It is as becoming as San Miguel de Allende, without feeling as soulless. It has a superb climate, plenty to do, and on a hill outside town, one of the finest examples of Zapotec architecture at the ruined city of Monte Alban.

It’s a place you could easily spend some time. But after a couple of days I can feel the old yellow fever coming over me again (so called because the centre lines on roads in this country are painted yellow). I feel the need to move on. I’ll be heading towards the Pacific coast, before swinging north into Chiapas, my final Mexican state before crossing the border into Guatemala.

This area, where Mexico makes a dramatic swing around from being a north-south country to an east-west country, is properly called the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. It marks the geographical end of the North American continent. I’ll be following Ruta 190 as I head south. I only hope there’ll be no-one else to block my path.

Welcome to the jungle

Current location: Palenque, Chiapas

Miles to date: 6,502

On the radio: Guns ‘n’ Roses

At the risk of repeating myself, after nearly two months, more than 3,500 miles, something like 13 states, countless mountains, gorges, rivers, forests, jungle, cities, colonial towns and having consumed enough tortillas to carpet the average football stadium I’m about to bid a fond adios to Mexico.

Like its neighbour to the north, it really is a country on an epic scale. It is larger – and has a greater population – than all other Central American countries put together. It has an incredible variety of landscapes from the deserts of Chihuahua to the jungles of Chiapas, plus more coastline than one country should be decently allowed. It is possible to ride for hours on its roads and not see another living soul, especially in the northern states.

It has one of the biggest cities in the world in Mexico City, and innumerable small villages tucked away in dusty corners and on high mountain passes. It has some of the most beautiful colonial towns anywhere, which have managed to preserve their architectural integrity despite the march of time, and some of the ugliest suburbs this side of Slough.

Among this embarrasment of riches the stark beauty of the desert and the surprise of finding myself among the pine forests of the north will be memories I’ll long cherish. I’ve been alternately burned and frozen by the weather, but have only been rained on once. The food has been of a generally high standard, with even the humblest roadside comedor managing to rustle up something nourishing and tasty for the hungry, motorcycling gringo traveller. As I’ve said before it’s been like having home cooked meals specially prepared for me on a daily basis.

And, although it’s one of the hoariest of all travel cliches, the people really have been incredible. Almost unfailingly warm and hospitable, nearly nowhere have I felt overcharged or unwelcome. In every hotel they’ve made special provision for the bike if they don’t have parking. The only exception to the overcharging rule was the butterfly sanctuary where the price magically doubled between me ordering, eating and paying. Considering how many meals I’ve had in this country, one case of gouging the gringo is a pretty good percentage.

A much happier memory is the one I’ll take with me from yesterday. Riding from beautiful, cool, colonial San Cristobal de las Casas to the jungle heat and humidity of modern Palenque town was the usual four hours of twisting, sinuous mountain roads through villages where small, dark women in traditional dress herd small, brown sheep across the road oblivious to the encroaching traffic.

This is Zapatista country, and on trees as you enter villages are signs declaring continuing support for the EZLN army of campesinos, who tragically took up arms against the government in the mid-90s. Up in the mountains, among the maize fields, it is cool enough to feel chilly when the road takes you into the shade of an overhanging mountain.

But as you decline from more than 2,000 metres to just over 250, the vegetation changes dramatically. Gone is the dust and the cactus forests and the pale green agave plants, source of the local mescal. Suddenly, it’s palms and mango and banana trees, and coconut juice being sold at roadside stalls.

The pale subtleties of the arid and semi-arid majority of Mexico are replaced by a green lushness that seems almost shockingly fertile. And the temperature rockets. Not just the burning heat of the desert, like a lamp shined directly upon you, but the all-enveloping humidity of the selva which hugs at you and leaves you breathless.

It was into this heat that I found myself plunged, tired and hungry, after nearly three hours concentrating on the hairpins of Ruta 186. I’d stopped once, when a couple riding a home made trike expertly cannibalised from a Triumph 900 waved me down and we shared a refresco and swopped stories of riding from the US through Mexico.

With less than 60kms to go to Palenque I decided to stop for lunch. The last thing I wanted to be doing was looking for a hotel in this heat with a grumbling stomach. I pulled into a typical Mexican roadside restaurant, a couple of tables shaded by a large tree. As I drew up I could hear the people finishing their lunch exclaiming “gringo!”.

Inside, of the four dishes on offer that day, I decided to go for the chicken, which cost 45 pesos. “And what would you like to drink?” asked the waitress. I explained I had a 50 peso note or a 200 peso note, normally too large to change in these country places, so unless she had change for 200 I couldn’t also have a drink.

She seemed put out. Clearly, in the heat, drinking was not only enjoyable it was necessary. When she returned a few minutes later with the food she asked me again what I wanted to drink and I explained again about my cash dilemma. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, and 30 seconds later I had a cold Coke to accompany my food.

When it came time to pay, I asked her again how much it was. “Forty-five,” she said, with a smile. Clearly the Coke was on the house. In these parts, you cannot give people a meal without a drink, no matter what their circumstances. It was the kind of simple generosity from people who don’t have too much that I’ve got used to in Mexico, but have never taken for granted. It’s the kind of generosity that humbles you and makes you realise for all my fixed income penny pinching, I’m still riding a motorbike equivalent to one years wages simply for the fun of it. For most of the people I come across it’s an opportunity they will never have. Welcome to the jungle.

I was in this part of Chiapas for one reason – to visit the Mayan city of Palenque, abandoned to the jungle a thousand years ago and now doing service as one of Mexico’s top tourist attractions. Having been there, it’s hard to see what all the fuss is about. Almost any archaelogical site from the Roman baths at Welwyn to the great Inca city of Machu Picchu has the advantage over Palenque, a place which manages to be both anodyne and irritating at the same time. And it’s not just the grown men in the car park threatening to watch your bike, or the endless offers of guides or the man at the front gate advising me I was not allowed to take a crash helmet into the site (which he’d look after for a fee, of course). Somewhere along the line Palenque has lost its soul.

This was Mayan history as theme park. They’d be better sticking some rides in the place. At least that would be more honest. But I’m not giving up completely on Mayan culture. Tomorrow, I’ll be riding through the superheated flatlands of south east Mexico to Bonampak, so close to the border with Guatemala you could spit. Then it’ll be off to Tikal in the Guatemalan jungle to see if it’s me or the Mayans who have the problem. And from there I’ll be seeking somewhere cooler, where you’re shirt doesn’t stick to your back and where the slightest minor annoyance doesn’t have your thermometer blowing dangerously close to the red zone. And this time I’ll remember to take plenty of small change so that when I’m offered a drink I can buy my own.

Take me to the river

Guat’s all, folks

Current location: Panajachel, Guatemala

Miles to date: 7,153

Guatemala: Is the world’s biggest exporter of cardamom (apparently).

Sometimes you arrive in a town, city or country and immediately feel at home. Other times you get to a place and, although there’s nothing you can put your finger on, you struggle hard to like it. Sadly, Guatemala has been one such place for me. Not that there’s a single thing wrong with it, and the fault is entirely mine. But like a shirt you buy and immediately regret when you get home, Guatemala has just not fit right for me.

It’s not that I haven’t been to some brilliant places. The Mayan city of Tikal knocks Palenque, in Mexico, into a cocked hat. It is just how you imagine Mayan cities should be. Pyramids soaring above the jungle canopy, giving those brave enough to cling onto the rock face 55 metres up unrivalled views across the endless sea of trees to Belize, Mexico and beyond, and an unmatched feeling of their own human frailty if they glance down the steep, slippery steps.

Tikal also has jungle trails where you are the only person walking them and enough far flung monuments to separate you from even the largest and noisiest of tour groups. It has none of the hustlers of Palenque, none of the persistant guides of Palenque and none of huge crowds of trinket pedlars hawking all manner of Mayan-related crap in among the pyaramids and temples. In brief it is everything Palenque should be, and isn’t.

South of Tikal is the town of Flores. Nestled on every nook and cranny on a small island on a lake, Flores apparently has it all. An attractive town, a great location, and a world reknowned archeological site nearby. And south of both Flores and Tikal is one of the best places I’ve stayed so far. The Finca Ixobel barely gets a line in my guidebook but deserves a lot more, especially considering some of the miserable, freezing, fleapit’s they’ve “highly recommended”.

Finca Ixobel is like an all-inclusive holiday for people who hate the idea of an all-inclusive holiday. Once there, they can provide three meals a day for those too idle to walk the three kilometres into the nearest town, the improbably-named Poptun (me included). But it is much more. For a start it’s incredibly hospitable, and for another thing the food, eaten around a communal table in the evening, is unsurpassable. You can go walking in the local forest, visit caves or – as I did for the first time – ride one of their horses. These range from proper working animals to the sort of docile nag I got, who had to be constantly prodded to prevent him from stopping every couple of yards to eat the flowers. Definitely my kind of horse.

It also ticks a lot of the eco boxes. All food is locally grown and produced. Power is by candle in the rooms. And the showers use the natural current of the local river for power. But the best thing about the place is the tree houses where on an afternoon, between eating and horseriding, I could be found whiling away the hours until dinner in my hammock reading the motorcyling magazine kindly donated to me by Bill from North Ontario.

And if those two were not enough there’s colonial Antigua, capital of the nation until the late 18th century when an earthquake persuaded the Spaniards to look for a more stable place to call home. It’s now being rebuilt into the jewel of Guatemalan tourism complete with bagels, wifi and Subway. It’s an undeniably attractive place, all cobbled streets, multi-coloured houses and volcanoes which ring the city and are a visible reminder of the fault lines that made it a poor choice for capital in the first place.

Or here in Panajachel, on the shores of Lake Atitlan. It’s a couple of streets of shops and restaurants nestling on the shores of one of the prettiest lakes in the world where, when the wind gets up in the afternoon and the waves start pounding the shore, it feels more like the seaside, complete with the obligatory three volcanoes adding their majestic presence around the lakeside.

So what the hell, you might be asking, is wrong with all that? Sounds like some kind of paradise. I blame the Christians (when in doubt, always blame the Christians. It worked for the Romans). Not your everyday, I-can-relate-to-that, after-all-it-does-explain-a-lot Christians but the Taleban of Christianity, the Evangelicals with their narrow and unforgiving version of the bible and their stern disapproval of everything from indigenous culture to the modern world.

Here in Guatemala, in between exporting coffee and cardamom, something life 25 per cent of the population have given over their lives to various minute and spiteful evangelical sects. Across the Peten in the north, where architecture generally consists of wood and palm leaves, the evangelical churches are conspicuously the largest and most well-appointed buildings in many of the villages you go to. Even in the south, along the lush coastal plain, the evanglicals have put down firm roots among the fertile soil.

It’s hard to pass a bus, stay in a hotel or eat in a restaurant without getting a face full of evangelical sloganeering. In one hotel I stayed in at Rio Hondo, instead of room numbers the airless cells at roadside were differentiated by religious slogans (I stayed in Look to Jesus). Despite this more noble numbering system, the woman in charge still felt duty bound to overcharge me for the room. There is, after all, only so much that God will provide. The rest can be winkled out of tired gringoes too lazy to look for another hotel.

Buses and trucks almost always have Trust to Jesus, or Gift from God plastered on each side, just in case you were wondering who it was that stumped up enough cash for these people to set themselves up in business. (Sadly for the bus drivers of Guatemala City, God must be temporarily busy elsewhere as they are currently being murdered at the rate of nearly three a week by the organised criminal gangs extorting money from them as “protection” to drive their route.)

Even in this stuffy internet cafe, as I sit and type, I’m being regaled by some Christian soft rock. And yes, it is as painful as it sounds. I can’t remember who said it but someone, when asked the difference between Christian music and other types of music, said you simple replace the word “baby” with the word “Jesus”. Try it with a song you know and you’ll see what I mean.

So Guatemala definitely has a lot to offer, from it’s majestic ruins to its endless jungle to its volcanoes and lakes and mountains. But from tomorrow it’ll have to offer it to somebody else as I’m off to El Salvador. It’s only a couple of hours through the wilting heat of the south, past coffee plantations and sugar cane fields to the border of a country that, even by the extraordinary standards of central America, has suffered more than its fair share of misery in recent years but is now opening itself up to tourism.

My first port of call, literally, will be the coast as by some incredible oversight, I’ve yet to visit the Pacific ocean despite riding parallel to it for almost four thousand miles. I’m hoping El Salvador will fit. But if not there’s always Honduras. Or Nicaragua. Or Costa Rica…

Follow me

Current location: San Salvador, El Salvador

Miles to date: 7,678

You know things are getting desperate: When you watch all of Along Came Polly

As a former Office Monkey of some 10 years standing, I like to think I know something of the bureaucratic mind. The thrill of new stationary. The need to adapt your chair to your exact specifications. The fear and suspicion provoked by a ringing phone.

So I was not at all surprised by the look of glee on the face of the man at the El Salvador border when I presented him with a document properly signed, and covered with official looking stamps. I’d given him exactly what he wanted. I felt like Santa on Christmas morning.

You might remember me telling you, slightly smugly, about how easy it was to get into Guatemala. Getting out was to prove a whole different matter. This was some kind of karma. Some bad deed was coming back to haunt me.

When I crossed the border in the jungle at Bethel the official who stamped me into Guatemala could not have been less interested in carrying out a customs inspection or fumigating my bike against incoming pests. He didn’t even bother providing me with the paperwork necessary to drive in the country legally. He was more a jaunty-wave-and-back-to-the-cigarette kind of bureaucrat.

All very helpful when you’re trying to get into a place. All very painful when you’re trying to get out, especially when it’s hot and you’re getting bothered. I’d spent my last few days in Guatemala at enough altitude – first Antigua, then Lake Atitlan – to have a moderating effect on the temperature.

Coming down from the lake high among the volcanoes to the coastal plain, however, was a totally different story. This is sugar cane country. The roads are thick with the sweet, sticky deposits left by passing trucks overloaded with harvested cane. And the air is oppressively heavy with the tropical heat needed to grow the stuff in the first place.

Stopping for a cool coconut juice on the road, your first priority is to find enough shade to give you and the bike a break from the burning sun. And then your second priority is to peel off the protective motorcycle jacket that is sticking to the sweat on your bare forearms. It’s only when you’re moving that you remain relatively cool. The minute you stop the sweat starts to pop off your skin.

I’d decided to take the most southerly route in to El Salvador from Guatemala, highway Centro America 02, hoping that it would be easier and quieter than the busier routes to the north, and therefore less prone to hustle and rip-offs.

For the most part, the CA02 is in pretty good condition, flat and fast with few hills to make twists and bends a necessity. Without any kind of rush I’d got to within 50 kilometres of the border by lunchtime. I could have been across the same day if I’d wanted to, but instead decided to spend one last night in Guatemala for old times’ sake.

The border town of Chicimulilla is clearly not a place that sees a lot of foreign travellers. I stuck out like a big, white, sore thumb. Not that people were unfriendly, just that curiosity sometimes turned to staring.

My original plan had been to check out a few of the hotels, then make a choice balancing economy, comfort, security, insect level and all the other usual considerations. But it was so hot, I only looked at two of the available places (I’m not even sure there were any more) before deciding that taking off my motorcycle gear was a more pressing priority than saving ten quetzales.

The Guatemalan currency is named after the quetzal, the national bird endangered by shrinking habitat. Legendarily, it is impossible to keep the birds in captivity. And so it proves with the currency. It’s very hard to keep it in your wallet.

My guidebook claims Guatemala is the cheapest country in Central America. It certainly doesn’t feel like it. Food costs double what it does in Mexico, as does petrol. Accommodation is definitely less, but because of the checking-in dance, it always feels slightly like you are being overcharged.

I don’t usually mind paying a tax for being a gringo, within reason. I accept that one of the hazards of international travel is that you will rarely pay the same as people who live in a country their whole life. But sometimes it just gets on your nerves.

Like checking into the hotel here in Chicimulilla. I ask the receptionist the price of the room. There’s a pause while she assesses how much she can get away with overcharging me. Then she names her price. Seventy quetzales (less than $10). It’s a bit steep, especially as I’ve been paying 40 quetzales for the last couple of nights. But I’m too hot to refuse.

I spend the night sweating and swatting mosquitoes, the rhythm only broken by the seemingly spontaneous combustion of a car in the hotel car park at three in the morning. The flames blacken the surrounding trees and leave scorch marks on the back of the hotel. Why don’t they call the fire brigade? No point. There’s no water, as my subsequent attempts to flush the toilet and have a shower prove.

So the next day hot, tired, sleep deprived, unwashed and unshaven, I head for the border. For some reason the hotel has not taken any money from me and my attempts to find someone to pay in the morning prove fruitless. So the hotel didn’t cost 70 quetzales after all. It was free.

After about an hour I get to the border. As I don’t have any motorcycle paperwork I just go to the migracion window to get my passport stamped, and ride across the bridge into El Salvador, feeling pretty pleased with myself, in an unwashed sort of way. I’d beaten the system, and had an extra 70 quetzales in my pocket to prove I was an internationally-travelling god.

It’s always a mistake to feel too impressed with yourself. For the El Salvadoreans the equation is pretty simple. No Guatemalan paperwork, no entry into El Salvador. At first they want to send me back to Mexico. But after much behind-the-glass chatter, several conversations with the Chief and a lot of photocopying of my passport, driving licence and title documents, they relent a little. If I can persuade the Guatemalans to put a stamp on a photocopy of my driving licence, with a signature – any signature – they’ll let me in.

The Chief had hardly finished what he was saying before I was back on the bike, wheels pointed west from where I’d come.

“This is not possible,” said the woman at Guatemalan customs. “You’ll have to go back to where you came from and get them to provide you with the correct paperwork.” My karmic failure to pay my hotel bill that morning was coming back to bite me.

I don’t know if it was my particularly unwashed pathetic shape, my pleading that it was the failure of the Bethel border people that got me into this mess, or whether they had a sixth sense for a fellow bureaucrat in distress but after some more behind-the-glass mumbling – this time in Guatemalan accents – unbelievably they agreed to check me in and check me out of the country at the same time. They’re going to make an exception in my case. I’m profoundly grateful and feel like handing over my 70 quetzales for the staff Christmas party, only I know these kinds of gestures can go very,very wrong.

An hour later I’m back at El Salvadorean customs looking into the beaming face of a man I’ve just handed a fully stamped, fully signed, correctly completed and properly headed Permission to Drive in Guatemala. Not only does he whip me through the rest of he proceedings but he carefully explains – twice – that I don’t need to pay a single penny to anyone for the privilege of entering El Salvador. So when some old boy comes up to me in the car park and asks for $5, I feel I have the full authority of the El Salvadorean state to tell him to piss off, despite his laminated name tag. And so I do.

I don’t know what your idea of El Salvador is, but let me tell you it is stunningly beautiful at least in the coffee-growing highlands in the west of the country. Roads wind up mountains brushed with dramatic looking clouds, through forests and across volcanoes from where you can look across what appears to be a sea of broccoli.

It’s possible to ride from village to village, as I’ve done, sampling the different coffees like some kind of wine tour or whisky trail for the teetotal. And all along the people have set new world records for friendliness. I’ll leave you with this little illustration.

Maps, especially accurate ones, are very hard to come by in all these countries. At best you’re usually left navigating by a combination of the map in your guidebook and whatever large-scale places-of-interest map they give away free in the tourist information centres.

Allegedly they sell maps in petrol stations. I’ve yet to find one that does. Maybe I’ve just been unlucky. But in Sosonate, lost and trying to find the road north to Juayua, a man in a white van overheard me trying to buy a map with my fuel, and asked me where I was going. I told him. “Follow me,” he said.

And I did, as we wound our way through the backstreets of Sonsonate, around the one-way system and through unsignposted junctions. He stopped at the bottom of a hill and said: “That’s the road you want.”  He then did a u-turn and headed back to wherever his work was supposed to have taken him. And I just headed up the hill and half an hour later was sipping coffee in a little village just outside Juayua.

What does all this tell you? Always pay your hotel bills? Always follow men in  white vans? Always make sure you get properly stamped? I don’t know. But I do know that if El Salvador carries on like this, I think I might like it.

Election Fever

Current location: Perquin, El Salvador

Miles to date: 7,870

What’s worse: The Pan Pipe Beatles, or the Best of Queen in a mariachi style? You decide.

Does paint win elections? If ever a theory was put to the test then here in El Salvador they have found the definitive answer.

When I crossed into the country I could not help but be struck by the amount of red, white and blue paint that had been splashed around. Almost every hard surface, from roadside telegraph poles to walls, benches, rocks and doorways, were adorned with the colours.

Red, white and blue flags – a bit like the Dutch flag, or the Russian flag – flew from every pole and branch, while miniature red, white and blue penants fluttered everywhere in the afternoon breeze, strung across the road from house to house in the villages.

At first, ignorant of the real colours of the El Salvadorean flag (it’s blue and white; no red) I assumed it was some sort of fervent display of nationalism to mark El Salvador out as distinct and different from Guatemala. However, as the miles rolled on and the level of decoration showed no sign of diminishing, the real reason slowly dawned.

These were the colours of the right wing Arena party, locked in the final stages of a close fought election campaign against their only serious rival, the left of centre FMLN. Arena had never lost an election since the restoration of democracy in El Salvador in the mid-90s following an 11 year civil war.

And before that the same people who are now the backbone of the modern, democratic Arena party had run the country as their personal fiefdom through a series of increasingly poor quality dictators since the military first seized power some time in the 1940s.

They were in no mood to lose this election, either, at least not for the want of paint and posters. Like most right wing parties, able to draw on the resources of the upper echelons, they had plenty of cash for publicity and were spending it like drunken sailors about to leave port.

By contrast, and like most left wing parties, the FMLN’s spending was more modest, at least if the paint and the posters were anything to go by. There were plenty of cars and trucks with FMLN flags in the windows but nothing like the scale of the Arena attempt to repaint the entire country.

Back in the 1980s these were also the two groups competing for power. But rather than engage in a democratic rivalry the two sides were locked in  a bitter armed struggle.

Here in Perquin, high in the cool and pine-clad mountains that run to the border with Honduras to the north,  is a museum which explains the history of the armed conflict at least from the FMLN perspective. The reasons for taking up arms are simply explained: “We are poor”, says a poster from the 1980s as you step through the door.

A reprinted newspaper front page of the time says an estimated 50 per cent of Salvadoreans live in misery. And from the looks of the selection of photographs of dilapidated housing and the distended stomachs of malnourished children, they were not exaggerating.

The military governments had done little to address these social problems, even when pressed to do so by their own people. Marching students had been met with bullets. Eventually, disparate groups of leftist rebels banded together to take up arms against their government, launching what they called the war against the junta on January 10, 1981.

It was to be a period of intense suffering for the El Salvadorean people. For some, the answer was to take refuge in other countries like neighbouring Honduras, Guatemala or the US. Towns and cities emptied.

Suchitoto, now a pleasant colonial town nestling peacefully on the shores of a lake to the north of San Salvador, saw its population reduced by 90 per cent as lack of food, power, water and transport all took their toll.

The worst single incident of the war happened in the village of El Mozote in December 1981. In three days of concerted effort by the air force and the army an estimated 300 people, mostly women and children, were killed. Today in the village since rebuilt near the site of the massacre, next to the Catholic church with its colourful murals, is a mass grave for many of the children who were killed. The youngest was just three days old.

Incredibly, the two sides were eventually able to put their weapons away. After fighting each other to a standstill, a UN brokered peace was agreed in 1992 and since then democracy has reigned, and governments have changed at the ballot box only. The army has remained in its barracks, and the police force – which became a symbol of repression – was successfully reformed.

Even walking around a former guerilla camp in the mountains, with its displays of unexploded bombs, fragments of uniforms and tunnels designed to protect the people from air attack, it’s hard to believe this country was ever the scene of such a bitter and divisive conflict, let alone in reletively recent memory.

The countryside has an air of tranquility. Towns like Suchitoto and Perquin move at the stately pace required by the dry season heat. Life only briefly flares in the evenings when it is at last cool enough to sit outside a cafe in the main square and enjoy a drink.

Even in the capital San Salvador, the preoccupations are the same as they are all over the world: the state of the economy and its impact on trade. From the cramped, hot, noisy, dirty, polluted streets of the centro historico to the cool, leafy suburbs on top of the hill, with their air conditioned cinemas and US shopping malls, the civil war seems like a distand – bad – dream.

It’s only when you visit the likes of El Mozote where the older people still bear the scars of the conflict, that you realise it was true, and terrible.

All of which makes the election result even more remarkable. With just over 51 per cent of the vote, the FMLN has finally won the keys to the presidential palace. From June 1 – and for the first time ever – there will be a new party in charge when President Mauricio Funes takes over. As a man in Santa Ana – proudly sporting his FMLN t-shirt – said to me on the night of the election, when the result was becoming clearer, 20 years ago he would have been shot for supporting the FMLN. Now they were to be the  government.

And so like Britain before Blair and the US before Obama the country is set for a big change. The air of excitement is palpable.

Funes has got a difficult job. Reliant on selling its agricultural produce to the US, and on the remittances sent home by Salvadoreans working in the States, the El Salvadorean economy is hugely reliant on the health of the American economy. Time will tell whether the goodwill built up by the FMLN in the run up to the election can withdstand the very hard times to come.

But in the meantime, they have at least proved one thing. Paint – and posters – definitely, definitively and with all certainty do not win elections.

Hondurance test

Current location: Leon, Nicaragua

Miles to date: 8, 768

Tune of the day: Oops, I did it again.

There are places you can’t get over a bad start. If I’d had any sense I’d have turned around at the Honduras border and gone back to calm, cool, welcoming El Salvador.

As you may remember (or, if you’re too lazy to think just read the last post) I was up in the pine forests of northern El Salvador in Perquin, dividing my time between the hammock, the forests, the swimming holes and the museums. I have no idea what the afterlife will consist of. But if it’s something like Perquin I’ll be pretty pleased.

However, idyllic as it was I couldn’t stay. Originally, when I looked at the map of central America – and especially when I read other people’s reports – Honduras seemed like a country to skip through on the way to somewhere else. Not necessarily better. Or cheaper. Or more interesting. Just else.

But my plans were radically altered by the kind of offer you can only dream about. You may remember I bought the KLR from Palmetto Motorsports in Hialeah, Miami (again, if you’re having trouble with the whole remembering thing you could check out the side panel where it says “about the bike”; or you could seek medical assistance).

Anyway, Todd from Palmetto was going to be in the Bay Islands off the north coast of Honduras for a few days at the end of May. If I liked, he could ship down whatever parts I needed which we could then fit to the bike. At no cost to me. I don’t know what your dealer is like. But if they don’t give you a free rear tyre, with free fitting and a free Caribbean island holiday thrown in, then I’d seriously consider swopping.

After mulling the offer over for roughly half a second I decided to accept. Not only was it going to be good to get some grip from the rear of the bike again, but after nearly five months of being just another gringo passing through, it would be nice to see a familiar, friendly face.

So north it was. And from Perquin that means one thing, the border crossing at Marcala. On all the maps and in all the books this is marked as a regular crossing. Which it is, only without any of the tiresome paraphenalia of a the usual border crossings like guards and customs and some kind of pole to stop in front of.

Instead, there’s a road of solid rock with a camber like a camel’s back with about six inches of fine dust on top, perfect for crashing on as you try to turn around to take a picture of the “welcome to Honduras” sign, which I duly did, smashing my right wing mirror in the process. I wouldn’t mind but it’s not even that good a picture.

On the El Salvador side of the border is a shifty-looking bloke smoking a fag who waves you on, telling you the Hondurans will sort you out. Normally you have to sign out of a country or face a fine, so if anyone from the El Salvadorean immigration department is reading this please note I have left. I am happy to send you photos of me in Honduras to confirm this fact.

On the Honduras side of the border were two shifty-looking blokes. One to ask you questions, and the other to write your name and passport details and the bike registration number and model in an old fashioned ledger. No stamp for the passport (“We don’t have one”), no paperwork (“We don’t have any”). Instead it’s “Welcome to Honduras, don’t get caught by the police.” It was Guatemala all over again. I knew this would lead to problems once I tried to leave Honduras but for the moment all I could think about was a new rear tyre and that Caribbean sunshine.

After El Salvador, Marcala appeared dishevelled and dilapidated, little surprise as Honduras is one of the poorest countries in Central America. In the good old days when the Reagan government was illegally selling guns to Iran to finance a right wing insurgency in Nicaragua, Honduras benefitted as it made itself the funnel for weapons and troops. Roads were built, infrastructure improved.

But all good things come to an end. And with the demise of Reagan, and the failure of the Contras, the flow of cash to Honduras dried up. Now, those same roads are showing signs of wearing out under the combined strain of lack of maintenance and the very worst driving Central America has to offer. If drivers in other parts of the isthmus are simply reckless, the Hondurans are homicidal.

Add in the heat (day time highs in the 30s, humidity in the 90s) and Honduras was beginning to feel less like a holiday destination than an endurance test. How much pain can one motorcyclist take? And then you arrive in La Ceiba.

All ports are a little shabby. It’s part of their nature. They are, after all, dedicated to moving people and goods quickly from sea to land and back again. They are supremely practical. They are not designed to be gazed at longingly, except from the distance of a couple of miles of sea when they might almost appear attractive.

La Ceiba is no exception to this rule. It is dirty, hot and noisy. The hotel I stayed in had filthy sheets, a half-hearted shower and a karaoke bar next door in which murder was committed nightly to a number of songs ranging in style from extraordinarily painful to excruciating. Hilarious when you’re drunk, irritating when you’re trying to sweat your way to sleep.

The cafe opposite was full of bitter old men denouncing the modern world, or laying out their ludicrous conspiracy theories to the indifference of those unfortunate enough to be within earshot.

Getting on the boat to Roatan, one of the Bay Islands off the north coast of Honduras, was a mighty relief. The Bay Islands are rightly considered the crown jewels of Honduran tourism. They are everything the mainland is not. Tranquil, peaceful, ordered and largely English-speaking, thanks to the native Garifuna – descendants of slaves from other parts of the Caribbean – and the huge influx of Americans who holiday there or call it home.

It’s on the west end of Roatan that Todd has his home. It’s an incredible spot, close enough to the sea to be brushed by the turquoise waters with a wide, shallow bay next door full of tropical fish. It was like snorkelling in your own private aquarium. The house is surrounded by a quiet wood and tropical plants, through which a cool breeze blows in the afternoon.

The sheets were clean. The plumbing worked. The shower had hot (yes, you read that right) water. I felt like a medieval peasant suddenly transported to the 21st century. Not only that, but Todd seemed to have organised his own on-site mechanic in the form of his friend Graeme who has some sort of mystic, magic touch with all things mechanical. If I was any sort of man I’d have felt ashamed by my lack of practical knowledge in their presence.

They changed the tyre. They checked and re-insulted the electrics. They rebolted the exhaust muffler, and cleaned the air filter. They changed the oil (what do you mean, it needs changing after 8,000 miles?). All I can do is thank them publicly, and again praise my good fortune for choosing to ride the Palmetto way.

I was shown incredible hospitality by Todd’s father Cesar and Graham’s wife Ann but after a couple of days living the sort of lifestyle I can only normally dream of, realised I had to leave or start paying rent. So it was back on the early boat to La Ceiba, this time without stopping, and two days hard riding to get me close to the Nicaraguan border in the shortest possible time.

Outside the capital, Tegucigalpa, a rogue cop tried to “fine” me for not having the correct paperwork. When he showed me the handwritten “$50″ on his notepad I knew he was taking the piss. I was so shocked by the size of the figure that I indignantly snatched my licence back out of his hand, put my gloves back on and rode off in a cloud of dust. My first crooked cop in all the Americas and hopefully my last.

After a final and enjoyable night in Danli I was ready to tackle the Honduras border – paperless – with the memory of the crooked cop and his outrageous multa (or fine) still fresh in my mind. I got to the border and explained my dilemma to the young border guard. There was much sucking in of teeth. Entering Honduras illegally normally draws a $250 multa. Yikes. As soon as his boss arrived, he told me, he’d see what could be done.

After an hour in the shade talking bikes to a Costa Rican truck driver who’d been stuck at the border for two days because of incorrect paperwork, the young man reappeared. His boss was now here. It was to be a $250 fine. Could I speak to her?

I was ushered into the presence of a more superior customs official. “Digame”, she said. Speak to me. So I explained it wasn’t my fault, that I’m not Honduran and don’t know the system, that I have paperwork from every other country, that I’m an honest person. In the end I think it was the plethora of stamped paper from other, rival jurisdictions that most impressed her. She called her boss. And, as is the iron law of all bureaucracies, if you go up the chain high enough common sense will eventually break out.

I was to be fined $22 for driving illegally on public roads – paid to the bank for which I received stamped receipts – and allowed onwards to Nicaragua. From what I’ve read, this is less than it would have cost to enter the country legally. An hour and a half later, and armed with several more sheaves of stamped paper, I was in Nicaragua, legally.

Where I hoped my luck would change. Which it did, but slightly for the worse. If you’re unfamiliar with the road building system in this part of the world it goes something like this. Phase One is to remove whatever tarmac there is, exposing the rutted, rocky dust and dirt underneath. Phase Two should include some sort of re-tarmacing, but I can only assume that part of the plans got blown away in a strong breeze. In the meantime, half a dozen blokes in orange tabards sit watching the traffic roll slowly by while one man folornly waves a red flag.

Like the road from Esteli to Leon, which starts off OK but soon declines into a Phase One loose, gravelly mess. After ten miles of bumping and sliding along, a diversion took me off to the dirt at the side of the road for no particularly obvious reason, except to give the folorn man with the red flag something else to do. Here, in order to keep the dust down, the road had been liberally watered. All this does is turn a loose surface into a dangerously slippery one, as rocks and gravel are coated with wet mud like an unappealing chocolate topping.

It was rolling along this quagmire that I hit my first pedestrian, or rather he hit me. Too drunk to see where he was going at 11 O’Clock in the morning I was alongside him when he decided to lurch into my path. I braked and slid, and fell off into the mud. For the first time the drunk looked up. After struggling to get the bike upright I decided to get as far away from the man and his alcoholic breath as possible.

Not far enough. As I attempted to get back on he lurched at me again, once more knocking me and the bike into the dirt. No matter how much I shouted at him in Spanish and English he was too far gone to register. In the end, I thought actions would speak louder than words and so lightly shoved him in the chest to give me enough room to ride off.

He went down like he’d been pole-axed by Mike Tyson. Seeing a pensioner sprawled in the mud, looking for his cap and unaware of the process by which his world had turned upside down, and knowing you’re the person responsible for his demise, does not make you feel very proud. As he slowly reclaimed his hat and retained his feet I decided to make my getaway through the mud and gravel.

I don’t know how much you believe in karma but I was to pay for my assault on the pensioner in the form of food poisoning when I got to Leon, a greasy pork dish from a normally reliable streetside eatery reappearing in the toilet bowl several times over the next seven hours.

I hope I’ve paid my dues now, and that my endurance test is at an end. Tomorrow I’m heading for the capital Managua and then onto the safe gringo haven of Granada for Easter where hopefully there’ll be no crooked cops, no pensioners to knock into the mud and no greasy pork to leave me bedridden.