News from Ted
G’day, everyone.
How are you this Sunday morning? Perhaps like me you start the day looking for good news and not finding any. Us humans having pretty much obliterated one small country and decimated its population, and done a similar job on 20% of another, much larger country, it looks like the only survivors in the long run will be the cockroaches and the arms dealers – see if you can tell them apart.
I will make two astonishing predictions. Elon Musk will never get to Mars, and Trump will NOT be elected president. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean he won’t be president.
Question is: Can the rest of the world get by without America (I mean the USA)? Very doubtful. What a relief, then, to get back to 1975 in Australia, the lucky country, when the future looked bright and we were ambling up the East coast, working it out as we went.
My naked notes, continued.
Wednesday 17th December. Leaving Brisbane
After running around in the city to get two withdrawal forms from Mercantile Building Society in Queen Street, on corner of George Street, we packed and left.
38 miles out, stopped for pineapple. Met couple in Land Rover, from Townsville.
“Glass House Mountains” visible from road – one conical, one a crooked finger from a fist. Continued through heat under cumulus, among pines, to “Sunshine Coast” – a great speculative housing scheme behind coast, Kawana Homes, 3 B’rooms at $25,000 up.
Stopped at Mooloolaba to swim.
Aussie phones in 1975. Press button B to get your money back. Swagmen did it in mild expectation.
About midday thought of paying $2 for a campsite between beach and road but talked out of it. Went on along Sunshine Coast looking for motels, etc. but nothing seemed good enough. Finally at Tewantin saw the Royal Mail Hotel, which reminded me of the good colonial hotels in South Africa. Carol went to see about price and came back with two old codgers in tow, Sammy and George.
Sammy was bubbling over with bonhomie and G was nodding his head and going “Yes, yes,” as S sold him the idea of putting us up. S was a Geordie. G was a Canadian of English parents. So there we are, set up in this “flat” – slightly grubby and with a succession of increasingly aged hosts a bit overpowering – and yet G and S a lot more alive than the McDonalds of yesterday [the couple from Townsville].
Tewantin itself seems a pleasant place; big fig trees on lawns by the river. But touristy, and always things here are costly. Was sucked in by hotel in the evening and spent too much on a mediocre dinner. Could have had as much for a quarter the price in the beer garden.
Thursday 18th
Spent day in George’s house writing my Oriana diary. Not quite finished.
Friday 19th
Spent another day to get work done on bike. George seems happy. A hot day.
Saturday 20th
From Tewantin.
Aussie poem:
I eat my peas with honey,
I have done all my life,
It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on the knife.
Riding through cool, overcast day. Occasional flashes of drizzle. Reminded of country in north of South America, of Tanzania, of Swaziland – beginning to feel the world’s scenery – but wait till we see the first kangaroo. Stopped for fruit after 95 miles. Bike is doing an incredible 66 mpg today. Met couple, American dental technician, English wife who read about my departure in S.T. but assumed I’d given up because nothing more got printed.
Found space among trees at side of a small dirt road – “real bad road.” Super rice and veg dinner. Put up awning and tent. Felt physically very uncomfortable. Sweaty. Upset Carol’s mood. Finally slept under net, under awning, alongside bike, over green bag and under sheet. Very sticky and sweaty at first, but slept well later.
[The “green bag” was a bed we designed and made in San Francisco. Made in segments with foam in tent cloth it folded up to make a pillion seat for Carol.]
Sunday 21st
Woke at dawn under the net. Patches of rosy light through heavy cloud on horizon, paled to whey. No kangaroos but a chorus of crazy birdsong, cackling, tinkling, burbling and hooting. Carol made ‘doughboys’ and eggs and coffee while I put away all the furniture, most unused. All this stuff to put away, but the awning really worked. Carol got into a mild state packing the kitchen – I’m trying to learn about giving her that space. Wind blew up from opposite quarter to last night. i.e… N.E. and seemed to be driving banks of heavy wet cloud before it, but no deluge yet at 6.30. On to road, meaning to find out about [illegible] Island. Took loop to Gladstone, a bleak, empty town on Sunday at 8am. Four boys stood on launching ramp. One was particularly bright, and independent, and told us there was no boat to the island on Sunday. We talked a bit and an older boy said his uncle had written from London to say in 30 years there wouldn’t be a Londoner left there – only them darkies. He had a knowing smirk on his face and I told him it was an absolute load of shit. “Well I’ve been there myself.” Then you should know better. “And me aunt has bin too,” but the smirk was close to collapse now. Painful to hear such stuff from a child. Aussie prejudices are strong and outspoken. Gladstone abandoned, we rode on to Rockhampton, where we didn’t buy lunch at an Esso restaurant. Pump man said prices were high because of wages. His wife worked in restaurant and brought home only $3 less a week than he did. And he was a tradesman.
On to the Mackay road, long empty stretches of narrow tar through range land, a mass of dead Brigalow trees killed by the poisoned axe. Just over halfway we cross a bridge with no parapets at Lotus Creek, and stop at a roadhouse the other side.
Phil Pilgrim, Triumph dealer in Melbourne, on a run with his Vincent. He helped me a lot back in the day.
Next Week: Rump steak and beer with the Truckies.
From the outset of my journey, I was very clear about several promises I made to myself.
First: I would do it in one single, unhurried journey and then write a book about it.
Second: It would be a complete journey, overland, uninterrupted, visiting as many countries as I could on the way round.
Third: I would travel as frugally as possible in order to get as close as I could to the indigenous people I was moving amongst. I would go as deep as I could into their lives, accept any invitation that came my way, and make myself vulnerable to whatever came along.
To make that possible my fourth promise was: I would always travel alone.
Two years into the journey, in November 1975, I was about to break that last promise. After several months living with Carol on the commune it became obvious that we should stay together. Our feelings for each other seemed as steady and solid as a rock. It became impossible for me to contradict her desire to travel on with me. She understood my purpose, she was powerfully independent, and I knew she wouldn’t shrink from any risk I felt like taking. So during the last weeks before I sailed away we rearranged things on the bike so that she could ride behind me, although there was no pillion seat. She was unable to get a berth on the ship. Instead, she would fly to Sydney and meet me after I got there.
So that is the truth about Australia and Me.
For six months Carol and I travelled together and I could not have asked for a more perfect companion. She humoured me in every way, and in the end, I found it impossible to explain to her or myself why, but it just wasn’t working for me.
In June I told her I had to go on alone. It was the most painful decision I have ever made. So that’s why, in Jupiter’s Travels, my account of Australia is the weakest part of the book, and she isn’t in it. At the time I felt I had no choice. I can’t second guess it fifty years later.
What follows is from my notebook after we met up in Sydney in December 1975. My notes begin after we left Sydney to move up the East Coast:
December 15
Caravan bed was very comfortable. No insects. Very musical bird in the morning, which changed pitch, or key. Heard nothing like it since the bottle bird [in Africa]. Gloria [our host] made grilled tomatoes on toast, made several shame-faced references to night before. [Don’t ask!]
Rode out along riverside where I photographed the aborigine family the day before – he swore at me profusely – “I’ll fucking toss yer in there,” indicating the river.
Another hot day. The bowls teams were out already – some women among them. Back to highway, the eucalyptus, to Macksville, Nambucca Heads, always broad rivers with banks of dense, dark green vegetation, willows etc. Tried to get lunch at hotel in Ulmarra – seemed like a pleasant, shady little town – but failed. Next town, Maclean, didn’t do so well in a café. Next door was a better place, not seen till later. The menus had articles about Australiana pasted on to them – early servant problems, the birth of amateurism in sport, theatrical history, a gold strike story.
Rode on to Ballina thinking it might be nice, but too busy, likewise on coast. Back on highway to Surfer’s Paradise – visible on horizon from Twerd Heads, Australia’s Miami Beach. Highrise hotels/apts. All the names borrowed from Miami, Vegas, Riviera, but seemed not to warrant staying. Began to think of getting to Brisbane and found Mike MacDonald’s name in my book. Phone engaged. Rode on busy hwy and lunched at road hse. 10 miles south of Brisbane, dropped bike. In Queensland now – no “schooners”, only “tens”, “sevens”, and “fives” [when ordering beer]. Got grilled barramundi. Talked to young Yamaha rider. Lots of nervous twitches, mannerisms, faded blue eyes. “Dja know abaht Mikuni carbs?”
Called Mike’s number again. His mother answered in a thin elderly voice, to say he was away on another trip in south-east Asia and wouldn’t be back till Jan.6th. Eventually she invited us to stay – and then repeated it, so we decided to go. Her house on the river at Brisbane – cool and very pleasant, but her husband senile and she a shrunken spirit, so hard to take. Perhaps alone I could have switched them off, but it’s not necessarily good for me to do that.
We rode into town to a carol singing in town square, with small redbrick church of Victorian mien, trimmed with white stone, squatting at the foot of high rise bank buildings. A tableau of angels and shepherds frozen on the balcony in a floodlight, but ugly amplification made “compère” running it like a night at the Palladium.
Most impressive sight in Brisbane, the bridges, two matching ones like Waterloo bridge. General feeling like, say, Port Elizabeth [in S.Africa] Tall modern office buildings dominate everything but few period buildings in the centre – one called Inns of Court, built 1916. 3 storeys each with balcony and canopy.
MacDonalds actually have a beautiful position by riverside, landscaped as park. House allows air to pass through and cool it. The father, Kev, has a snooker table in the basement and plays, or lies on a couch watching his portable TV set, which he also brings up with him at night. He won’t leave the house if he can help it. She’s sewing for a wedding. One wall has Chinese characters drawn, one on each brick. Mike plans to teach Chinese. It becomes harder and harder for me to place him now in my memory. All I recall is his shorts, and some kind of woolly hat he wore. His mother says she couldn’t remember me from the pictures, but she supposes that’s because she took me for an Arab.
Carol, on the road north from Sydney
Still following the story as it happened, my next stop had to be Australia. As idylls go, my idyllic time on the commune in Northern California lasted longer than most, but after almost four months I had to move on. The Sunday Times had engineered a free crossing of the Pacific for me and my bike on the P&O cruise liner SS Oriana. In return I wrote another in the series One Man’s Week (it was 1975: I don’t think they’d got around to One Woman’s Week).
Saturday
The great leap – more than 7000 miles across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Sydney, from winter to summer – begins tonight. It’s hard to grasp the size of the Pacific from the usual maps of the world. Only on a globe does one see it in true perspective and viewed in this way Europe and America seem to huddle quite close together. Friends from the city (now under a grey drizzle) have come to see me off on the SS Oriana. She’s one of the last great ladies of the ocean, a 42,000-ton steamship. I’ve never sailed like this and probably never will again. Not a time for half measures. We have champagne and the biggest streamers I have ever seen. Twelve of us packed into my cabin, laughing and crying, woven together in a cat’s cradle of coloured paper ribbon. When they leave, when I look down from the rail at their last laughing antics on the quayside below, the impending separation is a great hollowness inside me. After saying goodbye almost daily for two years I’ve become a connoisseur of farewells. A shipboard parting, I think, offers the sweetest sorrow of all.
Out of San Francisco at 6pm, under the Golden Gate (actually terra cotta) into a choppy sea. Try to get my own bearing on the ship and fail. She’s vast – an infinite progression of lounges, bars, dance floors and swimming pools. As a favour to help me on my journey P&O have given me a first-class cabin, which suits my taste better than my wardrobe. Now that the Oriana is a one-class ship, the only remaining privilege of we upper class passengers is to dine in the forward restaurant where we enjoy a more discreet atmosphere as well as the Captain’s presence. Ties and jackets, it seems, are de rigeur at dinner. My only jacket is leather, and I haven’t had a tie in more than two years. What am I to do?
Tuesday
It has taken all Sunday and Monday just to explore the ship. For all the sumptuous appointments, peculiar deck games, and opportunities for sloth and gluttony, no attraction is so splendid as the chance to fulfill childhood fantasies. There’s a fragment of some ancient newsreel that lodged itself in my infant memory – the launching of the Queen Mary perhaps. It was at about the same time that I saw the Princess Margaret Rose on her pony and planned to marry her. Anyway there were “socialites” in shining silks and tails popping off champagne corks and betting on horses in mid-Atlantic. The princess, alas, slipped through my fingers, but I shall at least get my mid-ocean horse race with bubbly. The horses (which nobody explained earlier) I now discover to be wooden. The jockeys are women passengers who sit at the wining post and furiously wind in their horses along wooden rails. I have the race card here and I see there are some very old chestnuts running. I shall put 10p on Faux Pas, by Remark out of Place, Mrs M.Polski up, and I shall try to nobble Miss N.Woodberry who is on Short Pants (by Runner out of Breath).
Dinner crisis partly resolved by Australian gentleman kindly insisting that I borrow his tie.
Thursday
I have cheated and skipped a week. We’re now eleven days out of San Francisco. (Last Thursday while I was ashore in Honolulu I went into a bookshop where the owner stared fixedly at my cameras and with virtually no preamble said “A good way to bring in cocaine is to stuff it into cameras. Have you got any in those?” I still wonder who he was working for.)
Today we came alongside at Suva in the Fiji Islands. Greeted by police band in skirts and sandals. I walk around the town and along the coast until it rains. See hardly any Fijians – mostly Asians, as in “Sunderjee’s Chinese Emporium: save more than ever before.” Come to small strip of beach where all the sea shells get up and walk away. Every one had a hermit crab inside. Yesterday never happened. We crossed the Date Line and I had to return all the hours I’ve been borrowing since I left Greenwich two years ago plus another 12 hours deposit as I proceed. So, no Wednesday.
Friday
This ship has two captains, Philip Jackson who wears four gold rings, and John Wacher who wears one very, very broad one. Since one very, very broad one beats four of a kind Wacher is boss and Jackson is deputy. No job I suppose carries greater prestige than captain of a great ocean liner but how one man can combine such wildly different roles puzzles me. Are you Captain Hornblower, or Chairman of the Board, or a Super Redcoat, I ask. He leads me briskly through the mysterious areas of the ship labelled Crew and Officers Only.
His pride in the ship could not have been simulated.
“Look at that!” he kept exclaiming as we rushed down through the bakery, past the master pastry cook, alongside the cauldron where the bone stock simmers for the soups, and further down still to the generators, the distilling plant, the refrigerating plant (all imposing enough, I thought, to drive the ship) and finally the vast boilers spewing steam into the two turbines at 800 lbs per square inch. “If that tube were to burst, we’d be cut in half. The men who worked down here in the war were awfully brave.”
Saturday
Today there is a glorious sun. A ship like this must attract a high proportion of elderly people, concentrated in the more expensive cabins, but there’s a vigorous band of young people on the lower decks. On fine days they burst up through the geriatric crust and overflow the ship. Golden Australian bodies everywhere with white triangles of zinc oxide on their noses. Action centres on the swimming pools, where they throw each other in, race with their left feet held in their right hands, retire for beer, and then repeat.
Hear of a stowaway who has been caught by a simple error. He tried to pay for his continental breakfast. Like the movies, and the tea and biscuits in bed, it’s free. Also hear that somewhere on the ship is a girl riding around the world on a motorcycle. Must track her down.
Sunday
Found her. She isn’t. Maybe I’ll still make the Guinness Book of Records. Arrive in Auckland.
New Zealand is a pretty, green old-fashioned English country. Everybody and everything seems correct, so it astonishes me to see a girl with naked breasts on a busy public beach and nobody appearing to notice, except me. Makes me happy for New Zealand. Not quite so happy with myself.
In July of 1975 I left Los Angeles with a fully functioning motorcycle (and the same silly paper air filter) and made my way to some new friends who lived south of San Francisco, and then, after a week or two, travelled North on Highway 101 to get to the commune that Bob and Annie had told me about. I lived on the commune for almost four months and halfway through that stay the Sunday Times asked me to do a column for a series they were running called One Man’s Week . I have no idea today how we communicated. No internet of course. I don’t think there was a phone on the commune. Probably it was all done through the post office. Today I would shudder at that prospect but in the seventies the post was really reliable. It had to be. There wasn’t anything else. So here it is ¬–
ONE MAN’S WEEK on a commune in California
Sunday
Have been living on this commune over two months now, introduced by two Americans riding a Norton whom I met in Ecuador (we both fell on the same bridge). It’s a ranch deep in the hills north of San Francisco – Gold Rush country. The dry, hot summer is over, and first rains came last week. I’m sadly aware that it will be soon time to move on.
Sunday is a day for doing communal jobs. Went down hill to the “Big House”, a ten minute walk past the rusting remains of a sawmill, a hayfield, a flock of peacocks acquired with the land (extraordinary exotica for this area) duckpond, corral, horses grazing in the meadow and Greta the Goat. About 20 people straggled in for breakfast from various improvised houses dotted about the land. Men and women, mostly in their twenties, who met during the great campus upheavals of the last decade. It’s an unusually well-endowed commune: 670 well-watered acres of wooded hill and meadow, with access to a fair amount of parental money to keep them well clear of the brink of survival.
Day spent digging a ditch to drain the hillside behind the house. My own idea, very satisfying after two years of moving to be physically involved in one place. Others are mucking out, bottling fruit, cleaning the septic tank, building, or simply (and acceptably) doing nothing much. No pressure, no contracts. This is a low-profile refuge from middle-class expectations. The important things get done, somehow, without rules.
Monday
People here do, clearly, love each other more than they would living conventional lives. No orgies. Fewer drugs and less promiscuity than in most London party scenes I remember. What nudity there is has more to do with sun, air and heat than sexuality so it’s scarcely even noticeable. A strong sense of family belonging. Much support for people in emotional turmoil. Little jealousy, if any. But it can be a frustrating place. There’s a real danger of stagnation. Private projects are not much liked. Communal projects are hard to get going. There’s growing awareness that some extra sense of purpose is needed now.
Logging is a powerful issue here. On the hillside above me one last stand of Douglas firs is about to get the chop. Loggers are clearing the road for the big trucks. The noise of the chainsaws and bulldozers, and the splintering crash of falling timber threatens the commune. The people here tried to stop it happening. They say it’s the last virgin fir in the area. The cabin is made of it – dense wood, often too tough for nails.
Tuesday
The Wild West show continues. Today met my first rattlesnake. Had been swimming in the Eel River. On the steep climb back left the path for a while. A sudden loud hissing and crackling stopped me short – an alarming sound like water falling on a red hot stove. The snake was a yard away. We both studied each other a while. At last, very slowly, it slithered off while I kept pace with it until it vanished among rocks. It was about three feet long, with a full rattle.
Travelling has made me much more curious than frightened with wild life. Until today, the only creature that has stood its ground was an elephant in Tanzania. The rest all galloped, leapt, flew, crawled, burrowed, swam or buzzed away.
Wednesday
Carol and I harvested lima beans in the vegetable garden – a big crop to dry out for the winter. The garden is really the heart of the commune; a ragged-looking acre at first sight, but tremendously productive. Was fascinated to learn how certain weeds and flowers (like Pigweed and Nicotinia) are used to protect vegetables and to draw minerals to the surface. No chemicals of course. Enchanted by a variety of small snakes, black and yellow striped, slithering about. They’re harmless enough, and God knows every garden should have its serpent.
Thursday
My day to cook dinner. Made a full-dress English trifle with sherry. The adults went berserk over it, but the two small girls refused to eat it saying “Yuck”. They invented a new name for me – “Slimey Limey” – which we played with for a while, but they’re remarkably good at not taking things too far. The motorcycle also has a nickname, the Green Chainsaw.
I’ve been getting my digs in too, at their California Space Language, a complete Hippy/Political/Commune vocabulary about heads, trips, spaces and places and getting it together. Can be expressive but very sloppy and they know it. I’m the only person here who usually completes a sentence. It charms them, but they have a general distrust if language and believe the most useful things can’t be said.
Friday
The big night out, to the theatre in Covelo, the nearest small town, an hour along the dirt road. A community of 2000 people full of cross-currents and contradictions. The Old White population lives mainly off ranching and logging (there’s a sawmill down there) but both activities are running down. There’s also a sizeable Indian population (Redskin, though their skins aren’t red) sadly inclined to get fat and drunk and live off welfare. Then there are the New Whites – hippies, communards, city people moving to the country, even an Englishman directing a garden research project. Some Indians have recovered their dignity and are trying to revitalise their community with help from the New Whites. The others don’t like it.
The theatre is the High School gym, an elaborate affair for a small town, and rather tasteless. The basket ball nets retract hydraulically like an aircraft undercarriage. The show was very enjoyable, though far too long. Stage swarmed with characters, all played with great gusto. In three nights they made 500 dollars.
Saturday
Just heard that I can get on the P&O liner “Oriana” from San Francisco to Sydney, so it looks like Christmas down-under. Very difficult to detach myself from this life here. It makes a perfect antidote to the blatantly extravagant life-stye of American cities. Communes may come and go, wedded to the strangest beliefs and populated by the weirdest people but the tradition of living simply on and with the land must not be lost. Those who choose this, I believe, carry a torch for all of us.
Dear friends and virtual acquaintances,
It would be nice to hear that you’ve had a wonderful few days or weeks of festive joy. I’ve certainly stretched my holiday out as long as I could, but I daren’t cut out any longer in case it becomes permanent.
When you last heard from me I was writing about my arrival in Los Angeles, and if I were to go on with these extracts and references to my notebooks, the commune in Mendocino County would come next. I wrote a piece about it for the Sunday Times and I could copy that off the cutting. But there’s something else on my mind – two things, actually.
The first is that I’ve just begun working on an account of my flirtation with agriculture. I burst onto the Organic Vegetable scene in 1986 and, in all innocence, seem to have achieved something memorable. It may turn into a book. I don’t know, but it might be a good idea to serialise it as I did with the Canary book. Would you like that?
The other thing on my mind is that it’s a lot of work keeping this sort of thing going, and although I am always glad afterwards to have done it, it’s often hard to get down to it. So this would be where you come in.
Of course my main practical reason for running a website is to sell books, but sales have been falling off for a while now, because all of you have probably already got Jupiter’s Travels, and maybe the big Camera book too. But the one book that I don’t sell enough of is Dreaming of Jupiter – a pity because it IS a good book.
If you will buy the book it will really encourage me. You don’t have to buy it from me, unless you definitely want my signature. Buy it from a bookshop, or Amazon – much cheaper. I will find out, soon enough if it’s moving. There’s a thousand or more sitting at the distributor’s warehouse and I hate the idea of them getting pulped before I get pulped myself.
Cheers to you all, and WATCH THIS SPACE.
This may well be the last bulletin from Jupiter in 2023, so here’s hoping you aren’t hiding in the ruins of Gaza or freezing in the trenches of Ukraine, and I can wish you a warm and happy Christmas holiday – whatever your religion, even if, like me, you don’t have one.
At the end of last week’s piece I offered a ten-dollar deal on my Camera book, because I thought it would make a really nice present, but I’ve only had one taker, possibly because people don’t always read to the end. The deal runs through Monday, so if you want to buy the book for $40 use the code askingnicely when you checkout.
I wrote a little last week about my reception at the Triumph headquarters on the edge of Los Angeles, but there is more to say that I didn’t write about in the book.
During the ten days that they looked after me at the Griswold Inn they gave me another Triumph to ride while they took my bike apart.
The mechanic who was working on it didn’t care for conversation. He didn’t seem to understand that I had a personal relationship with it and that I was anxious to know how and why it had given me trouble.
In particular I wanted to know why I had run through two barrels and various pistons and rebores, but nobody there appeared to find that anything but normal. It was astonishing, in retrospect, that nobody paid any attention to the air filter, which was nothing more than a piece of paper in a perforated box.
Most of my troubles were caused by bad stuff getting into the combustion chamber. I only heard of K&N oil filters after my journey had ended, two years later, but apparently they had already been on the market for one or two years. Presumably they would have made a big difference, but nobody there seemed to either know or care. In fact, the prevailing belief in America seemed to be that Triumphs were only good for a few thousand miles of fun hauling ass before they fell apart.
Anyway, the people in the office were really just waiting for the place to crash around their ears. My mechanic told me he already had a job lined up at Yamaha.
What they did do was try to get a little publicity. And they told me, triumphantly, that they had secured an invitation to the Petersen Ranch on the edge of LA.
Looking it up now I see that there are two Petersen Ranches. One of them is a long-established spread belonging to deeply religious ranchers, devoted mainly to cattle – Holy Cows, I suppose. That is not where Triumph sent me.
The other Petersen was a publisher of mainly automotive magazines who had done well enough to buy his own ranch. Apparently, I was told, there were people there riding dirt bikes who would be enchanted to meet a man who had ridden half way round the world.
Brian Slark drew me a map to find the place. It was a very simple map with only three or four lines on it. It looked as though it was just around the corner. He didn’t explain that it was a hundred miles away.
It was a time when the highway engineers were experimenting with rain grooves on the freeways and they were not compatible with my tyres. Half the time it felt like riding on a skating rink and when I arrived at the ranch I was very ready for some warm appreciation.
What I found instead was a bunch of overweight, self-important middle-aged men on trail bikes, in suits that reminded me of the Michelin Man. Some of them had been World War Two bomber pilots. Clearly I had not been expected and they took no interest in me at all, until one of them peeled off from the group and asked me where I’d come from. I explained what I’d been doing for the past two years and he said, “Oh, yeah, I rode down to Guatemala one time.”
I had a beer and left.
Back at the factory I did make friends with a couple of mechanics who were working on a bike to break a speed record. One of them, Brent, was a particularly pleasant and thoughtful man and when my time at the Griswold was up and I had my own bike back he invited me to stay with him for a few days before heading North. I seem to remember that they lived in a garage in Paramount. It must have been a very big garage. Thanks to him and his very gorgeous wife, I learned that it was possible to live a pleasant, rewarding life in Los Angeles, after all.
From there, at the end of June, I rode north to San Francisco and, as you probably know, my life took a quite unexpected turn.
See you again in 2024. Happy wassailing!
If you remember, I came through the US border at Nogales with remarkable ease. It was late afternoon on a Saturday in May of 1975. I was tired after a day of riding through hot Mexican desert. My bike was limping along and would only run on full choke. I had no real sense of the distances I would have to cover in America and imagined myself to be practically there – in Los Angeles, that is. I stopped as soon as I could after about thirty miles. My notes became very sketchy, and need fleshing out to make sense.
To Rio Rica – campsite. Met young guys – one Viet vet – to girl friend’s house – soup, sandwich. Beer. Slept in hammock. Next day couldn’t get gas – man gave me some from truck. Talked about trying to get work – made it sound difficult.
Rode on through Tucson, Phoenix, into Mojave Desert.
Surprised at distance without gas – at desert itself – as hot as Mexico. Wind and sand. But the freeway made it seem less hostile. The Colorado River took me by surprise. Took a $3 berth at a KOA site by riverside. Much friendship and hospitality (beer generosity) – swam in river.
This was my first introduction to the snowdrop community – I was amazed by the RVs with their huge awnings, Astroturf and white picket fences. I can still remember how delicious was the ice-cold Coors. It never tasted so good again.
Next day more desert and high crosswinds made life quite difficult.
The bike would only run well at about 50 mph, so I was limited to the right lane, leaning over to compensate for the wind. The big trucks passing on my left cut off the wind abruptly, giving me some bad moments until I learned to deal with it.
Into LA – but it wasn’t.
I must have had an address for the Triumph offices in Duarte, but I had no idea that Duarte was a separate city. A young Englishman called Brian Slark received me with a handshake and a beer.
Just the other day Neale Bayly sent me a picture of Brian as he is today, from the Barber Museum in Alabama.
At this point I think it best to repeat what I wrote in Jupiter’s Travels:
I looked around Triumph’s prosperous offices with an optimistic eye, anticipating some sort of unspecified “good time.” Sure I wanted a beer, and a shower and a chance to change my clothes and even to rest for a bit, but what I really wanted was company, nice enthusiastic, appreciative company. As a Hero I naturally assumed that people would be tumbling over themselves to accompany me. All the keen athletic executives in the front office were extremely cordial. All the pretty girls at their stylish mahogany veneer desks smiled very nicely at me, but as the minutes passed my bright eyes glazed over. I wasn’t making contact. In spite of all the niceness, I knew they couldn’t really grasp who or what I was, and maybe, even, they were too preoccupied with other matters to care.
I must have been a strange sight. The desert sun had burned me very dark and printed a goggle pattern on my face. My shirt was threadbare, and my jeans were shredded across the knees and awkwardly patched. My hair was unfashionably short and disheveled, and I was a bit crazy at the thought of having actually arrived. I imagined myself to look quite romantic. After all, I was the real thing, but their nice, orderly eyes gradually convinced me that I was a bit of a mess, and the best thing I could do was go and clean up.
The credibility gap widened into a yawning chasm and never closed. They were unfailingly nice to me, and materially generous. They took the bike into their workshop and promised to give it all the care that could be lavished on it. They gave me another bike, the same model, to use in the meanwhile. They took me to a hotel about ten miles away and booked me in at their expense and left me there until the next day.
My hotel room was at ground level and had thick glass sliding doors instead of windows, with two sets of curtains. I had a square double bed with freshly laundered sheets every day. At the foot of the bed was a big color television set. There was a writing desk, itself quite a decent piece of furniture, and in the drawer was a stack of stationery and leaflets describing all the hotel’s services and telling romantic tales about its supposed history. I read them all avidly.
The bathroom had apparently been delivered by the manufacturer that morning. Everything in it was still wrapped or sealed by a paper band guaranteeing 100 per cent sterility. Not even the boys from homicide could have found a fingerprint in there.
They kept me there for ten days, a slave to luxury. That’s all for now. May I remind you that Jupiter’s Travels in Camera makes a really gorgeous Christmas present. If you ask me nicely I’ll knock $10 off the price for the holiday season (enter the discount code askingnicely when you checkout before 18th December.)
Two weeks ago I buried myself in the past to avoid the present, and today I can’t see any point in coming back. Almost anything I might have to say about current events would almost certainly provoke fury and outrage. So please join me again in 1975.
I had just crossed into the USA, limping along with a sick engine to Los Angeles where I hoped to get help.
Nothing had prepared me for the culture shock when I got there. After a week or two I wrote about it for The Sunday Times. They gave me a full page, and a bit more, and I can’t think of anything better to offer you now. It’s a long read, but I think it stands the test of time, so here it is:
What is it worth to make a Californian go “wheee!” or ‘wow!” or “Hey, look at that, will ya.” Millions? Billions? Whatever it is, Disney has spent it. Why, the Disneyland carpark alone is as big as Battersea fun fair, so big that it has its own transport system. Flowing gently under California’s great solar grill, the people come rolling over the tarmac on human baggage trains, hundreds at a time, starry-eyed again, about to take those rides again. Clickety, clickety, clickety, clickety… through the longest row of turnstiles you ever saw, £2 a head, just to get in.
First thing inside the gate is Main Street “where America grew up,” celebrating the Bicentennial Boom with gas lamps, trolley cars, barber poles, candy counters, girls in gingham and mutton-chopped waiters in baize aprons, clean as a whistle and neat as a nip (though not since Libya have I been in a land where never a drop of alcohol may be sold).
The main attraction for me is to watch the American families themselves – “Wilbur, don’t touch the gentleman” – parading in pastel pinks and greens and blues, in chiffon and jersey, bare backs and Bermuda shorts, Stetsons and sideburns, freckles and sneakers, and tons and tons of deodorant that keeps you “dry, drier, driest” for longer than ever before with absolutely NO ZIRCONIUM as advertised.
They spill out over the kingdom of fun and thrills in their tens of thousands but sooner or later they disappear, like bees among hives. Where are they going? How do they all fit in? The mystery is resolved underground, for Disneyland is an illusion floating on an illusion, and the heart of all this laboured hilarity is a subterranean labyrinth.
Here the technology of trivia comes to its climax. You float on a barge through a seemingly vast grotto where humanoid pirates enact scenes of battle, arson, pillage, rape, and various other rum doings, under a moonlit Caribbean sky. I stumble out to contemplate the immense resources that have been marshalled to distract me for a few moments.
It wrenches my mind, standing here, to recall that I am the same person who, a few months ago, was riding alone across the Bolivian Altiplano, more than two miles above sea level in a curtain of freezing drizzle. The day before, I had fallen in a river and lost the last of the plastic bags I used to protect my gloves from rain. My hands were frozen tight, and the cold was reaching up my arms.
My usual defence against cold is to sing, uproariously and defiantly, into the flying air – sea shanties and folk songs dimly remembered from the News Chronicle Song Book of 1937. For once the antidote failed. It became intolerable to continue, intolerable to stop. Rummaging in my mental attic for other remedies, I came across a story told to me about an Italian climber who survived a four-day blizzard on a vertiginous Alpine shelf while his companions perished. His method was rhythmically to clench and unclench his fingers – the only movement he could perform without falling.
I began to do the same on my handlebar grips. At first it was simply agonising. Then a biological miracle occurred in my arms. Warmth flooded down to meet the cold. It was such a precise reaction that I could tell where the interface was at any moment, felt it moving down past my wrist to the knuckles then the fingertips. Soon my whole body was tingling with life, and I travelled on to La Paz in an invisible bubble of warmth and comfort. There have been few other moments on the journey when I have known as great a sense of triumph.
On the bleak and frigid plain around me small herds of llama sat among the stony scrub, their long necks sticking up through the grey haze like periscopes in the North Sea. By the roadside, also squatting, were occasional Indian herdsmen wrapped in woollen mantles. The rain ran off their hats and trickled down over the sodden material. I pitied those grey pyramids of humanity and was as astonished by their stillness and acquiescence as they must have been by my frantic motion. I think now that they were probably quite as comfortable as I was. Perhaps we each wondered how the other could stand it.
It is customary to explain all feats of Indian endurance by their use of the Coca leaf but the information I gathered about that, in Potosí and other places, doesn’t support that view. Coca is an aid and a strong habit, but Indians (like all of us) have other more personal ways of generating defences against hunger and the elements.
Here in Los Angeles, I think about those Indians and, for the first time, it occurs to me to wonder how much they were worth in dollars. How much money, I mean, is represented by their possessions and the services provided to maintain them in their way of life? I don’t suppose it comes to a hundred dollars (fifty pounds) a head – maybe much less.
The question is unavoidable. Here, everything speaks to me of money. First the vast freeway constructions, a mesh of concrete carpet, four to eight lanes wide, laid out over thousands of square miles, with spiralling flyovers at every intersection. And the machinery that pounds over them day and night; it’s thirty miles there and thirty back to see a movie, visit a friend, eat a hamburger on the beach, do a job of work. Then the supermarkets and “Shopping Malls,” temples of a thousand options where you must look hard to find anything that a person really needs. Or the Marina del Rey, a nautical metropolis where unimaginable numbers of pleasure boats sprout from the quaysides like figs on a stick, most of them never having gone beyond the harbour wall.
What then would be the capital investment to maintain a citizen in his Los Angeles lifestyle? Divide the population into the value of rateable property, throw in the roads and freeways, the utilities and services which protect and succour him, and the figure cannot be less than 50,000 dollars a head. It may be twice that. Whichever the amount, it strikes me as utterly preposterous.
Is life a thousand times more rewarding, more healthy, more secure in LA than on the Altiplano? If I want access to education and medicine, to libraries and blood banks, must I defend myself first against smog, noise, crime and ugliness on every side? It’s easy to understand that the Indian has little choice, and even less practice at exercising it, but why in heaven’s name does anyone choose to stay in Los Angeles?
Los Angeles is certainly at one extreme of my American experience, just as the Altiplano is at another, and there is a perversity which attracts many kinds of person to extremes. I found that, while most North Americans living elsewhere profess to detest LA, those I met who lived in this city seemed quite content.
The inhabitant of LA has no generic label, like Londoner or New Yorker, to identify him. He calls himself a Southern Californian and is not properly speaking a city dweller at all because, in reality, there is no city, only an immense concrete waffle filled with property, most of it single-storey. He deals with in by creating an enclave for himself on one of those rectangular lots into which Los Angeles County is divided, and from there he exploits the stores, offices, studios and factories, paying very high rates for the privilege.
His car is an instrument of survival. Moving along the freeway, as though on a conveyor belt, it becomes a monkish cell in which he can contemplate, undistracted by the uniformly boring panorama outside and the dully predictable within. At other times, it enables him to get out of it altogether.
The art of life in LA, in short, is to block out as much of it as possible all the time and to escape quite frequently. As a solution for living it is fairly successful and very ingenious. It is also fearfully expensive.
Consumption is more than conspicuous, it gallops, despite recession or unemployment. Take paper products. In many homes paper plates seem virtually to have replaced china. In Californian “rest rooms,” by law, there must be a dispenser of large circles of sterile paper to interpose between your squeamish self and the lavatory seat (they have been dubbed “Nixon party hats”). There is a new product on the television, a douche, which is so disposable that it has apparently gone before you use it. “Just read the directions,” says the ad, “and throw it all away.”
If I had just flown in from Europe, it would have seemed merely extravagant (perhaps pleasantly so). But I come from nearly two years of living in open spaces, tent and hut, where human life is simple and the extravagance is left to nature. I find this custom of perpetual consumption physically and morally offensive. I can’t stomach it and it seems important to me to track that feeling to its source before it fades.
In the last fifteen months I have travelled 15,000 miles in Latin America from the north of Brazil to the south of Argentina, then from Chile up into the Andes of Bolivia and Peru, through Ecuador and Colombia, into Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. Trying now with my mind’s eye to encompass this experience, three related impressions stand out.
First an intrusive presence everywhere of North American products, sales methods, and cultural appendages; second, the sense that, while Africa was a colonial empire, dismantled, Latin America is an economic empire still at its peak; and third that, compared with Africans, Latin Americans carry a heavy load of trouble and frustration.
Do not let me give the wrong impression. We live in a world of trouble. The essential thing is to distinguish between different kinds and degrees of trouble. I am not speaking here of revolutionary movements or clashes between nations, but of the quality of individual lives.
I also want to explain why the motorcycle turns out to be such a good instrument of exploration. It exceeds my greatest hopes. Its outstanding advantage is the very quality which once worried me most: it attracts attention.
Along all the endless thousands of miles of roadside in Africa and South America, excepting only the cauterised wastes of northern Kenya and the Argentine Pampa and Chaco, there is human life in all its manifestations. So much of my last two years has been spent riding past people that I have learned inevitably to read a great deal from people’s expressions. The Triumph and I are a rare if not unique event in most of these places, and the reactions to our passing are spontaneous and revealing.
Above all there are children and I know by heart, as though engraved there for 10,000 years, the attitude of the small boys, naked in the sun, half crouched, arms thrust out, fists clenched, grinning and howling half in fear, half in wonder, ready to fight, to run, to submit. Or the little girls, up on their toes, arms outstretched, palms open, arched towards me wanting instinctively to embrace this marvel before they turn to flee leaving a trail of enticing giggles behind them.
With age, dress and social conditioning, this basic vocabulary grows and ramifies to become the subtlest language of any but, because it is my language too, I have learned to read it. There is no time for dissimulation as I hurtle past. The messages I read are true, and they tell me whether these people are clear or confused, hostile or hospitable, oppressed or free, industrious or indolent, bright or dull.
Against the background of this almost continuous input of information there the casual meetings. At petrol stations for example.
Here’s one in South Africa:
“Ooooooh! Where you come from in that one, baas?”
He’s black, short, boiler-suited, working on the pumps. His face is a pantomime of wonder and appreciation. The servility is a game. It suits him to have me on a white man’s pedestal. He can enjoy me better up there. For us to meet on the same level in this white racist territory would be a long-drawn-out and painful process. I protest at the baas bit, but then we agree to humour each other.
“From England? Ooooooeeee! No! I couldn’t believe…Huh! All the way in this one?” And so on, and so on. He’s sly, but there’s no bitterness. I’d lay my life on it.
Here’s another, in Argentina:
“Where do you come from?”
The question is abrupt, even harsh, and uttered with a studied absence of interest. He’s 19 or 20, wearing salmon-pink bellbottoms, a plastic crocodile belt, a cotton shirt with the names and pictures of the world’s capitals printed on it, open to the waist and cut at the short sleeves to stretch nicely over his biceps.
He’s one of a group who are hanging about between the pump and the bar, punching each other occasionally on the arms. He wants to know only how fast the bike goes, and how much it cost. He suggests that I came most of the way from England on a ship. When I tell him otherwise, the explanation hardly appears to register. He’s so muscle-minded that he can’t see through his own image of himself. He’s proud, resentful, and curious, in that order. It’s too much work for me now to dig down to the curiosity. He saunters off disdainfully satisfied that at least I am no threat.
These two meetings, I find, represent very well the major social difference between Africa and Latin America. In Africa things appear much more straightforward. People seem to have their motivation fairly clear and simple and look reasonably at peace with themselves. There are glaring injustices. There is great cause for anger, confrontation and change, but in thinking how people are in themselves, I am left with a general sense of tranquillity and good humour (the one exception, Ethiopia, seems to prove the rule almost too nicely.)
Latin America leaves a different trace. The self-destructive aspects of the mestizo personality are eloquently described by many writers (e.g. Madariaga’s “Fall of the Spanish Empire”). A great part of any Latin American male’s behaviour is formed by a continual pursuit of his own identity, since he seems to exist for himself largely through the eyes of others. This makes him particularly susceptible to flattery: vulnerable to any challenge to his manhood, however puerile, and reluctant to seek information if doing so might reveal his ignorance.
He is, in short, a natural victim for anyone taking a colder, more collected view of his environment. A people for whom social respect opens the way to profit cannot hope to compete in business with a man who seeks profit first and then buys respect. The scene for the sacking of Latin America by the Anglo-Saxons was set centuries ago by the Conquistadors.
My journey to the United States began, I now realise, when I stepped off the ship in Brazil. I don’t know where else in the modern world one could pass over so great a landmass, among so many different nations and races all paying tribute to one distant power. At first, though, this didn’t occur to me. For one thing, I was locked up almost immediately by the Brazilian police which concentrated my mind for some weeks on a much closer and more frightening power. For another, motorcycling Gringos are a rarity in the north-east, and people did me the courtesy of asking where I came from without assuming that I was a North American.
I was 2000 miles further south in Rio before the prejudice became unavoidable. Then I was on foot, in a laundry, looking for some clothing that they had lost.
“Are you American?” the man asked, with his own peculiar brand of American accent, and an expression which showed that he was ready to jump either way. I said I was English.
“Good,” he said eagerly, jumping off the fence onto my side. “Americans are shit.”
If I had said I was American, he would probably have told me about some relation of his living in New York.
It didn’t occur to me to protest. I am no stranger to prejudice. The Libyans are contemptuous of the Egyptians. The Sudanese despise the Ethiopians. Africans have little good to say for Arabs, and none at all for Asians. Whites turn their noses up at blacks. A fine old Tunisian peasant entertained me handsomely in his mud hut and then, sipping coffee within two feet of me, told scandalous stories about Jews (I am half Jewish, whatever that may mean) and claimed to be able to smell all Jews from a great distance.
There is no shortage of prejudice between nations and races in South America either. It exists between Indians and mestizos, between Chilenos and Peruanos, Argentinos and Brasilleiros. Even in Brazil itself, supposedly a melting-pot of races, the rich white south is openly content to have few black skins to darken the view, and it is all too clear everywhere that the whites are on top of the pile and mean to stay there.
Yet none of this compares in generality and virulence with the prejudice against the United States, its power, its policies and its people. Whether expressed by thousands of people chanting slogans, or by hypocritical asides from the Spanish gentry; whether directed at dollar diplomacy, the US military, the CIA, or Yanquis and Gringos in general, it is heard everywhere as the one unifying idea in Latin America.
It is hard not to share the resentment. South American towns are often a parody of North American life. Shiny curtain-walled banks loom over hovels. In countless decrepit streets a brightly enamelled Coca cola or Pepsi cola sign juts out above every single doorway. Village shops are stocked less with what the peasantry needs than with what American technology produces. Everything has this lop-sided, disjointed feeling. The two cultures do not meet, they collide, and in spite of themselves Latin Americans know they haven’t the force to resist.
They never had time, or the inclination perhaps, to evolve their own independent systems. And yet, unlike the subjects of the British Empire in Africa, they were always nominally in charge of their own destinies. The gap between the myth and the reality was far too wide to bridge, and corruption was the only possible consequence. Nobody I have met in government or law really believes this process can be reversed. I am bound to say that I much prefer the consequences of British rule in Africa to what United States economic domination has done for the Americas.
The Latinos are quite imaginative enough to perceive the humiliating position they occupy vis a vis the “Gringos.” Their accumulation of rage and resentment is sad to observe, and sometimes personally unpleasant. On the West side of the continent, where the so-called Gringo Trail of tourists begins, I was spat on once from a lorry, had mud thrown at me twice, and heard the mocking cry of “Gringo” all the way from Bolivia to Panama and beyond. How I wished then I’d remembered to bring my Union Jack with me.
The British, in fact, are now perfectly placed in South America to enjoy maximum respect and affection. A once great nation reduced to “harmless uncle” status, we suit the psychological needs of Latin America very well. It’s half a century since the pound gave way to the dollar as the major source of foreign investment. There are nostalgic references to the railways we built, the polo tournaments we play, the shops and clubs we opened, and much flattery of London as the best city to live in.
I was fortunate to follow the Royal Yacht’s progress along the coast of Central America (at a respectful distance) and saw how well the old royal magic still works. By popular consensus, we are now all that the North Americans are not. We are civilised, sensitive to the feelings of others, clear of speech and clean of habit, and of course imbued for ever with the spirit of fair play. We are also comfortably old-fashioned.
The impression is helped along by the British communities which still remain. I had never thought to hear again the clarion voice of the ante-diluvian English girls prep school conclude a sentence with a ringing “What!” across the dinner table.
On the playing fields of the Bogota Sports Club I played my first full cricket match in 25 years. And in a smart hotel 10,000 feet above Lima, a tweedy English couple entered for dinner, each with a bull mastiff on a lead. Scanning the room, the gentleman loudly enquired of his spouse, “Same hole?”
For a traveller in search of space and beauty, South America is a heart-stopping experience. Everywhere I saw places where I felt I could cheerfully spend the rest of my days. Like the Atlantic beaches between Bahia and Rio, the luscious farmlands above the Parana River, or the lower slopes on either side of the southern Andes. I revelled in the spectacular fertility of the Colombian valleys and mountains, and countless other times felt myself in complete harmony with my surroundings.
Most of the time I had been moving alone through great vistas of plain and mountain, and it is to these memories that I am most drawn, rather than to the cities. For one who wants to live an economic, hard-working, balanced life in a natural environment, the world still seems to have room enough. I have at least a year of travelling left before the journey brings me back to England, but already I am impatient to stop, to put down roots and grow things. I am totally convinced now that this is the only healthy way to go.
For nearly two years I have been self-sufficient with what I carry on the motorcycle. I am delighted to discover how little a person needs, or even wants, as long as the mind and senses are kept open to the excitement that life itself has to offer. It is this knowledge, finally, that made the ride into Los Angeles such a bruising shock. I see the American consumer as an addict in the grip of a habit at least as, and vastly more expensive than, the Indian’s Coca leaf. It’s a habit which the planet cannot support for ever, certainly not for all its inhabitants.
But worse than that, it seems such a pity that all those resources, all that effort and ingenuity and promise of freedom, which people in Africa and Latin America envy so much, should lead to a sea of waste paper and a desperate attempt to get people to recycle their aluminium beer cans.
Good day everybody.
The news in general is so awful that I’m ignoring it, and finding some peace and pleasure in going back into my journey notes again. It’s May in 1975, and I left you last in the beautiful town of Guanajuato, but the USA looms large on the horizon of my thoughts.
From Guanajuato I reckoned that I was three days away from Nogales and the border. There was no denying that I felt the pull of it. After almost two years on the road, I knew my curiosity and enjoyment of the passing scene was beginning to fade. I was tired and couldn’t help longing for an undemanding environment where I could hand my problems with the bike over to someone else and simply relax. Triumph had offices in Los Angeles and would be expecting me. I became more and more fixated on getting there.
From Guanajuato the road led through Leon to Guadalajara.
Monday: Breakfast in Leon. Chocolate cake and coffee. Hot day. Arrived (in Guadalajara) at lunchtime. Ernesto Renner meets me at a fish restaurant. (He must have been one of the many friends of friends. I can’t remember him now, but thank you Ernesto) He has a bus business. Tres Estrellas de Oro. Little office with electric kettle, coffee and Carnation milk. Room full of new beds and mattresses in plastic. He is much younger than I anticipated. Puts me up for the night and sends me to the Kri-Kri where I chill out to records of acid rock and the blandishments of willowy waitresses in toy aprons.
Tuesday: Culiacan-Los Mochis-Navajoa.
The big disaster. After Culiacan the jacket blows off.
For those who don’t know, the jacket was an original RAF bomber jacket worn by my girlfriend’s father, when he flew Lancasters over Germany. She gave it to me to wear, and it was priceless. I had used it throughout my journey so far. But northern Mexico was unbelievably hot and for once I couldn’t wear it. I tied it down over my luggage – and lost it.
I was devastated.
The loss sets off a strange train of thought, to do with abandoning Jo. Coldly I contemplate it as a natural consequence, weigh the feeling. Think of the jacket as a sentimental burden. The decision to stop looking for it is a protection from the pain of a prolonged parting.
Wednesday: At Los Mochis, much advertised to me, I find nothing to please. Find the sea miles away. – a strange Fellini beach – abandoned beach restaurants haunted by drunken merrymakers – a sign prohibiting litter and immorality and, near it, a vast heap of beer cans, etc. Dirty water, warm as soup.
Thursday: On to Navajoa. Prices are now sky high. Stop at motel where she has no linen. Just for use of room she won’t take less than 70 pesos. I refuse. In town at last I find the Colon – built like a prison wing, two floors, gallery, gates barred. But clean and high ceilings. The trouble with the bike has now become acute – chronic misfiring od right hand cylinder. Spend morning trying to find faul – discover the Zener is kaput. Put a hot wire from switch to coil, but no improvement. Then I find that with choke fully in it runs smoothly at 50mph. But I’ve lost my screwdriver and pliers. The heat on the roads is scorching – forearms burn – altogether I feel that events are conspiring to keep me south of the border – and I am now seething with impatience to get into the States.
On corner of the street near the hotel is a big bar where a lot of men drink draught beer at a counter. They are all well-dressed, smart. Strike up conversation with my neighbour. Seems content with life. Plenty of work, though prices are rising. Someone comes by with a device that measures machismo – two electrodes that you hold in each hand, and a dial to measure the flow of current. Not knowing what it is I take the two, rods and get shocked. My companion tucks his hands under his armpits to hold on better.
From my position at the bar I can watch, through the mirror, some men at tables near the counter. One group of four catches my attention – they are playing dominoes – and with a sense of mounting shock rising within me, as often happens with a sudden realisation of danger or excitement, I become aware that one of the men is ME. Or, simply put, he is physically very close in his hair, mustache, features, colour, etc , but his expressions and mannerisms are as close a reflection of mine as I can imagine. The effect is entrancing. He is in great good humour, joking, gesturing, smiling a lot – tending to dominate the mood of his table as I do myself when that particular confidence moves me. I studied him for a long time to see whether I could judge how I liked him, and whether others seemed to. It seemed inevitable that he would notice me but as best I could tell he never did. It’s strange now to feel that my life continues in Navajoa even though I move on.
There’s live music, the barman is very professional, there are large and small cervezas – 2.50 and 3.50 pesos. The big chunky glasses come frozen and frosted from a refrigerated cupboard. He challks the beers up on the counter in a zigzag – WWWW . The system can lead to arguments.
Friday: To Hermosillo. Spent the morning fiddling with misfiring. This part of Mexico is not of great interest. A reduced version of US affluence around. Oh, but there are some endless arid areas, and a few times off the side of the road was a fenced off area designed to become a poblaçion for resettled people – presumably from the city – unfortunately like concentration camps. Shades of Oscar Lewis haunt me again. [Google Oscar Lewis – he’s interesting.]
The bike continues to run well but only at one speed – 50mph – guzzling gas.
Saturday: To Nogales and the US border.
Mentally preparing myself for a rough time at customs. When I get there I’m surprised to find that there’s no Mexican exit post, only the great complex of US customs, multi-laned entrance like toll gates or a supermarket checkout. Buy a large, iced orange drink with my last pesos, and then dive in. The reception is the opposite of my last experience at Brownsville five years ago.
Dips his hand casually into a pannier, then says “OK” and sends me to immigration.
“What can I do for you?” asks the officer.
“You can let me into your fair country,” I reply.
“That’s good to hear,” he says. “We don’t hear that much these days. How long would you like to stay?”
“How long can I have?”
“I asked you first.”
“Well, three months should be fine.”
“OK.”
Sweet memories south of the border…
Still in Oaxaca 1975, I was going to continue with extracts from my notebooks as I moved on through Mexico to the USA, but I find them harder to transcribe. Compared with the bare-bones existence of the Andean lands of “No Hay” Mexico seemed quite prosperous, but the prosperity was an illusion. It was created by the availability of goods from the USA which only a few Mexicans could afford.
I arrived in Oaxaca at lunchtime and found it full of Gringos.
“Find a vegetarian restaurant with rooms, called ‘Pices’, opened some years before at the prompting of US visitors.. Meet a Gringo who lives in Oaxaca and trades Indian stuff to (American) stores. He has a small eagle he offers to show me but doesn’t return.
Instead, I meet three other Gringos: A disillusioned screen writer and wife, and a highly nervous dislocated person who walks with short arthritic steps and flits disturbingly from topic to topic, anxious to communicate, fearful of boring, hard to follow. He’s a law school student, probably the victim of a breakdown. He too is planning to trade hammocks. The others are into blankets. Christ, everyone’s at it!”
The hotel had an outside shower with the water heated by a small wood-fired boiler. There was a small stack of firewood. The guest lights the fire and goes on adding wood as long he or she wants more hot water. I was taken by the simplicity of it.
“There must be things to see here but now my interest in Spanish towns is satisfied by a glance at the facades and an hour in the plaza. Church interiors disappoint, and it’s the general disposition of buildings and spaces that please, or otherwise. The Cartesian arrangement of Spanish towns is very apt for Spanish thought, echoing their ideals or wishful thinking. They would like everything to be orderly and just but are hopelessly exposed within these rigid frameworks.”
Well, that’s what I wrote at the time. I don’t know if I agree with myself now.
“On towards Mexico City. Uneventful ride. Stopped to look at small village, but less interesting close up. Went to another to get water from a tap. Took pictures of church and children.
Later followed a path uphill towards micro-ondes (short wave) transmitter to sleep away from the road. Was attended by peasant and his son as I made camp. Others on bikes had been here before me. The man had worked in California (as a bracero) and been badly treated but was evidently pleased to see Gringo visitors. Had my usual dinner, though Oaxacan chorizos were starchy and inferior.
Next morning mother and son came to visit, with tortillas. I offered tea and cheese. Rode on to Mexico City, but now one cylinder is smoking badly.”
In Mexico I was hoping to find Bruno at his girl-friend’s house, and got thoroughly soaked while looking for it. but he had left for France three days earlier. She and her friends let me stay while I found a mechanic called Cojuc, who did some work on the bike. I knew that if I could make it as far as L.A everything could be taken care of there. On a Sunday in June, I left for Guanajuato.
“Easy ride. Good roads. But beginning of valve trouble (still unknown). Begin to experiment again with plugs, under flyover bridge. Very hot. Set off expecting more rain, but country looks dry and sky is clear. The ride into G. is astonishing, because of the endless vaulted tunnel that winds round the top of the hill apparently beneath the foundations of the town to shoot up eventually into the heart of it, by the plaza.. Altogether as impressive an example of preservation and restoration I have seen – (Ouro Prêto, Salvador, Cuzco, Paita, Antigua).
Good feeling. Strange that I’ve never realised before how much more self-respect a city or town has when there’s a university. There’s a graduation party in the square. Small group playing – girl with tambourine, two guitars, drums. Stands all around the dance floor with chile achile, choklo, tacos, and ice tubs full of soft drinks. Watched a cockroach make its way unscathed among all those scuffling feet – a lesson in probabilities.”
I remember that a shiny new bus drove up and disgorged a party of high school kids from the US. The girls all wore shorts and it was the first time in probably six months that I had seen a naked leg. I found it shocking, and almost obscene. The Mexicans around me, who always covered their legs, must have seen this many times, and were unaffected. Another cultural lesson.
