Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (44 page)

From the beginning of the journey friends had suggested that I should carry some kind of weapon. Some had ideas, borrowed from political thrillers, of guns that broke down into pieces that looked like motorcycle parts, or tent poles. At least a small pistol like Bruno's, they thought, could be hidden away somewhere. Guns never made any sense to me. When I pictured myself fighting off bandits with firearms I knew the idea was ridiculous.

For one thing, if I were to be attacked at all it would almost certainly be on the road. Short of having rocket launchers slung under the handlebars it would be impossible for me to defend myself while riding. By the time I stopped the bike and got to my gun it would all be over.

But my revulsion for firearms went much deeper than that. I was convinced, from the start, that merely to carry a gun invites attack. When there is a fear of hostility my mind is torn between two kinds of response; to lick 'em or to join 'em. With a gun in my pocket I would be thinking more about licking them, and I have come to believe firmly that what is going on in my mind is reflected in a thousand little ways by the way I behave towards others. I am not beyond believing that just having that gun in my pocket would be enough to get me shot. Anyway, there was a notion of manliness associated with weaponry that I could not understand. Guns seemed to me to speak only of fear. I would prefer my chances of walking empty-handed up to any bandit, rather than trying to shoot him first, and all the accounts I later heard seemed to bear me out.

Even so, it was impossible not to be impressed by tales of highway robbery in Colombia, and I decided at least to make life a bit more difficult for the robber. I bought three padlocks and a chain to secure my leather tank bags.

The only robbery I suffered in Colombia was soon after we arrived there while we were staying in Popayan. I was standing in a grocer's shop with the contents of my pocket on the counter, searching for loose change when someone deftly pocketed my keys. It was a quite senseless theft. The keys were surely useless to the thief but I had lost the duplicates and before I could leave Popayan I had to have my three padlocks sawn off with a hacksaw.

So much for paranoia, I thought, and tried never to be bothered with it anymore.

Bruno and I had come a long way together by then. We were two thousand miles north of Lima and into our third month. He still hoped to reach Mexico with his van. It was struggling valiantly and looked like getting there against all the odds, when we left Popayan for La Plata. The dirt road was winding and mountainous as they all were, but it was narrower than most and, for the first time, I had trouble with the lorries.

Normally the lorries and I co-existed. They swept along regardless of all other traffic, indifferent to accidents, noisy, filthy, painted and repainted with wonderful fairground colours, and brave mottos, spraying transistorized music and football commentaries from the cab. They never went for me, and I never duelled with them. It was no part of my pride to fight battles with Colombian lorry drivers. Where there was room, I slipped past. Where there wasn't I got out of the way.

On the road to La Plata it was distinctly harder to get out of the way, though it was really just a matter of going slower, and being ready for a lorry to appear round every bend. Most of the bends were concealed and I had a lot of anticipating to do, but that was alright. That also was what my journey was about - a sort of Zen meditation on reality. I went more slowly and appreciated it all the more.

Bruno's case, however, was different. All the anticipation in the world could not get him past a lorry where there was no room. I had been waiting a very long time for him at a bare-boarded cafe next to a brothel in a mountain top village when a bus driver came through and said my friend was in trouble. I found him with one wheel in a ditch and up against a concrete culvert. His half-shaft had broken its joint. We found eventually that he could still crawl along and we crept painfully back to Popayan. I was not sorry to be back. I had found Popayan to be one of the finest cities, ranking with Cuzco and Ouro Preto as places that generated contentment. I think there must be happy occasions when the size of a community, the appreciation of the people and the shape and disposition of their dwellings all coincide at a point most favourable to the human spirit. These three cities seem to have passed through that time, and the memory lingers on.

We moved into one of the most beautiful hotels in South America, El Monasterio, and shared a room for $8 which we thought of as a lot of money, having lost touch with the Western world. Bruno put on a virtuoso performance for the Renault agent, and had his half-shaft replaced for pennies. We gorged ourselves on the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of Popayan and Bruno left early next day, determined this time to drive as slowly as humanly possible, while I went looking for someone to saw through my padlocks.

I left at lunchtime, in glorious weather, hoping to miss the regular afternoon storm. Then a fuse blew again and I spent too long trying to trace the fault, with the tank off and everything unpacked. I just had time to put in a temporary hot line from the coils to the battery and get packed up before the storm broke over me and made me very wet, but it was over soon enough. The sun came out, and dried me through and through. There was so much natural beauty on that road, that I swung out of control and managed a thirty foot skid on loose dirt across a blind bend.

When I thought what a lorry would have done to me there, I had to chalk that one up as a life lost.

But it was Bruno's day of reckoning, not mine. Incredibly, he met another lorry and this time there was not even a ditch to hide in. They both braked masterfully. The impact was not enough to hurt either driver, but the Renault was converted from a rectangle into a lozenge. I was not present at this sad scene. Bruno spoke of it later with much emotion, although like a true gaucho of the highway he did not allow grief to unbalance him. Many Colombian lorry drivers assembled at the scene, he said, and they were able, by force of numbers, to persuade Bruno that the accident had been his fault and that he owed six hundred pesos for the repair of a lorry fender and the repainting of several hearts and flowers. Leading with his right wheel several inches ahead of his left, he was able to meander on along the road to La Plata, and I overtook the pathetic pair later. The geometry of the car was certainly peculiar, and his front tyres were almost bald after only thirty miles.

We decided to make a camp and go on to La Plata in the morning, and I found a green field leading down to a river. We drove in, and halfway down the field sank into a bog. For half an hour or more Bruno laboured to bring his crippled car back up to the gate. He could get speed up across the field but always that last short stretch when he had to turn up the hill was too much, and he slithered to a halt. Finally, in desperation, using every device we had learned on the way, we heaved the car out. The field was a horrifying sight, denuded of pasture, rutted and ripped to shreds. It seemed better to move on before the owner came and shot us. So we came to La Plata after all and took a room at the Residencias Berlin. There we made the acquaintance of Jesus and Domitila Clavijo, their ten children, and Roberto the parrot.

Domitila, the mother, was a woman of great vigour and good humour. She bustled constantly, in the kitchen, the dining room, the many bedrooms scattered around the yard, issuing instructions to her small army. Her children, boys and girls ranging between eighteen and zero, seemed exceptionally bright and well-mannered. We played chess with the boys, talked to them all, and admired the way they supported their mother: They seemed alert and generous and sensitive to feeling to a degree far beyond what I would consider normal in a European or North American home. Something of this had already impressed me about Colombia in general, as though the very hazards and cruelties of life there were bound to generate their opposite qualities.

The father, Jesus, made a strong impression also, but of a quite different kind. He sat generally on a chair in the dining area, a middle-aged man with a spreading bulk, a lightly-woven hat perched over an expressionless face, and his left hand in his pocket. The hand was so firmly in the pocket that I had the feeling his sleeve was sewn to his trousers. He spoke softly and sibilantly, but he exerted great authority over his family. They clearly feared and respected him as much as they loved their mother. He did nothing in the hotel, though he had some land outside La Plata which he
supervised
. On Saturdays he went to the billiard saloon and drank with his cronies. The Saturday I was there he returned drunk, accused one of his daughters of whoring in town, brought several of them to tears, and then went to sleep it off. One of his sons explained this to us.

There had been a time, not long before, when Jesus' family and friends had been the kings of La Plata. They ran it, in every way. They decided what would be built, what would be torn down, who could live there and who couldn't, who should pay what to whom, and who was guilty or innocent. There were no police. Government agents were sent packing with bullets at their tails. La Plata, like most small towns of the interior, was a law unto itself, and Jesus and his friends were
it.

One day, at the billiard saloon where the weekly council meetings were held, there was a disagreement. It was a trivial enough matter, something like whether the bus should stop outside Manuel's store or Jose's barber shop. But feeling was already running high between the Jesus faction and others. Jesus had his hand on the wooden frame of a billiard table when a rival drew a machete and sliced it off. Not satisfied with that he chopped through the middle of Jesus' brother's hand as well.

When the brothers returned with their stumps sewn up, they murdered their assailant and his uncle, and narrowly missed his wife. Those were the days! They were over now, though. The government had finally found enough soldiers to bring their own brand of law to La Plata, and Jesus now exercised his authority less directly. It was later in the same conversation that I discovered that the field we had ripped up and ruined almost certainly belonged to Jesus. I decided, in the circumstances, to keep the matter to myself.

For Bruno it was a godsend that the police were back in La Plata. His van was obviously undrivable. It had shredded two tyres in thirty miles. We were already within a few days of the Caribbean coast, when the car would in any case have to be shipped to Panama at great expense. It did not add up, and after swallowing a few times, Bruno decided to let the van go.

Colombians are insane about buying things from abroad. They are convinced that everything foreign is a bargain, and there would have been no difficulty selling the van, wrecked as it was, but for the fact that it was quite illegal and the buyer would have difficulty getting licence plates. A policeman solved the problem by buying it for himself.

A closing-down auction was held in the courtyard of the Residencias

Berlin. Buyers came from all around. There was foam plastic, kitchen ware, clothing, even an oil painting, and I added my obsolete air mattress to the display. The bargaining continued with animation through the day. Domitila and I fought well into the night over the mattress, and eventually we all fell exhausted and satisfied into our beds. Next day Bruno picked up his two leather grips and climbed on to a bus, and my life with Bruno came to an end. Both of us agreed it had been wonderful and unforgettable, and we had no problem about going our separate ways. We would meet again. No doubt.

Bruno took the bus on 17 March and I rode off the same day, first to Bogota, then to Medellin and on to the Caribbean port of Cartagena, up and down across hundreds of miles of valleys and mountains, all be-witchingly beautiful.

I bargained for space on an island trading vessel and sailed to San Andres, known to English pirates as St. Andrews. From there, for the first and last time, I took to the air. Honduras Airlines stuffed my bike onto the flight deck of a Lockheed Electra, right behind the pilot, and flew me to Panama, looking down on the canal. And Panama, I told myself, was only a hop skip and jump from the USA. It was a silly mistake to deceive myself in this way, just laziness and wishful thinking.

The lure and challenge of South America had always distracted me from that string of 'banana republics' connecting it to North America, and I had paid no real attention to its geography.

In Panama I had to face up to the fact that there were at least six distinct countries to traverse, and five thousand miles to ride, before I reached California. It made me sad to realize that what should have been an exciting prospect left me rather dispirited.

The ten thousand miles since Fortaleza had been hard but I loved the physical work of travelling and it was not that which exhausted me. More difficult to sustain, I found, was the daily grind of contact with the Latin American personality. It should not have come as a surprise. Where else in the world is the male individual so insecure, divided as he is between the Latin and Indian cultures, with the blood of both in his veins. The Latin American has no tribe to fall back on, as the African does, no reliable judiciary to defend his rights as the European does, no social ideal or sacred constitution to appeal to as the North American does, no pervasive mythology to soften life as it does in Asia, and not even an ideology to subscribe to, as has the Russian or Chinese. Without wealth, what is there left to him but his manhood, to be flaunted and defended at every occasion.

Travelling, you meet it again and again, the unspoken question: 'How does this man threaten my virility?'