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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.