twenty-seventh floor of a downtown office building. The hundred or so members are white and male. Latino waiters serve a vast buffet. When introduced, I mumble a few words of gratitude for Dallas hospitality.
The day’s guest speaker has published the history of the United States flag in verse. Each verse faces a full-page illustration of an American family: Mom, Pop and two kids – white, of course. General Tommy Franks has penned an introduction.
Only the army and the Church stand between America and chaos. The flag is their symbol and the speaker is campaigning to have his history distributed to every primary school. He warns us of the 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, every one of whom is taught from birth to hate and kill Americans. Hindus, Buddhists, Asiatics, Africans and Arabs are equally dangerous. A passing joke at the cowardly French raises a titter.
A member whispers to me in Spanish that not everyone present would agree with the speaker.
My bags are in the Hummer. Don drives from construction site to construction site. His workers are Mexican. I listen to the radio and watch the construction of a freeway overpass. Thirty or more huge trailer trucks queue to unload enormous concrete girders. Three cranes swing the girders into place. Trucks feed a concrete mixer the size of a European factory. We pass by the gun shop and eat steak.
Late afternoon we visit a friend of Don’s who leases mobile road barriers, traffic cones and road signs. He and his father share a 7000-acre hobby ranch in Oklahoma. The ranch is ringed with deer fencing and they’ve sunk a million dollars into damming a creek. If they were British, they would have bought a holiday apartment on the Costa Brava.
Don and his friend drive me to the bus terminal. They make jokes at my bravery in travelling by Mexican bus. Mexican buses fall over cliffs. This is Texas. What cliffs? The road is straight. The land is flat. Nightlife is sticky doughnuts at an arc-lit service station. Lights glimmer dimly in trailer homes and in homes indistinguishable from trailers. I have a double seat to myself directly behind the driver. He drives with one hand while eating a half-pint tub of caramel ice-cream.
Entering the US is tough. Leaving is easy. The bus cruises through customs and immigration. I have a moment in which to note a queue several hundred metres long of aspiring Mexican immigrants. Then we are at the Mexican border. I still have my US entry card. I have no exit stamp in my passport. I have left the US illegally.
The Mexican immigration officer asks how long I will be in Mexico. I explain my trip and make a guess at four weeks. He examines me with interest and issues a visa valid for three months.
Dallas is twelve hours and forty-six dollars away from Monterey. The border region is as dry as Texas. The only hills are of dead cars heaped in junkyards. Finally, real hills appear. The highway dips into a narrow valley and Monterey surfaces from within a pale haze of exhaust fumes. The driver pulls into the depot and rushes me across to the bus company that makes the run to Tampico. A morning bus leaves at ten. This bus is new: seats tip all the way back; seatbelts are easy on the shoulders; Kung Fu movies play on the video screen.
I doze on the road to Tampico and wake to my first palm tree of the journey, sisal fields, jacarandas in flower, a flame tree. We pull into the Tampico bus depot at four p.m. Buses leave for Veracruz every hour. I find a trucker’s restaurant and eat steak ranchero with fresh corn tortillas and red and green chilli sauce.
I call the Ampara Hotel in Veracruz and book a room. This bus is the most comfortable yet. Again I sit directly behind the driver and watch the speedo. Night falls and we crawl through hill country on a double-lane highway behind a convoy of tanker trucks. Mexico is the US’s largest source of oil. Gas torches flame beside collector tanks.
The bus pulls into Veracruz terminal at five the following morning. I have travelled 1214 kilometres at a cost of 115 dollars. Veracruz is hot. The Amparo Hotel is a block from the central square. I have a room with a shower and a ceiling fan. The hotel is clean. My room is quiet. Two windows open on to the central well.
Moto Diaz is the main Honda agent in Veracruz. I had emailed Honda Mexico from the UK. My bike is waiting – a white Honda 125 Cargo. Honda advertises the model as a workhorse. In truth, it is a pizza delivery bike. It has a one-person seat and a large rack for the pizza box. A serious grey-haired mechanic is preparing the bike for my journey. The mechanic assures me that the bike will carry me to Tierra del Fuego sin problemas. No problems. I buy a removable rack box and the Honda agent presents me with a smart helmet. Tomorrow I queue for registration plates. I am warned that this may take all day. This evening I celebrate my purchase with a dish of devilled prawns and a bottle of Mexican lager.
I discover a small square around the corner from the hotel, where the middle-aged and elderly play chess at a pavement café. I sip a beer and watch the games and am drawn slowly into conversation.
Veracruz, Friday 12 May
Just before seven I am the first to queue outside the vehicle registration office – a privilege I relinquish to a woman who arrives a minute later, thus I have someone to follow. Doors open at eight. First disaster: all vehicles must be registered at a domicile. A hotel is not a domicile. Although motherly, the counter assistant is insistent. I am instructed to consult the department’s director. The director is both patient and sympathetic. He will accept an electricity bill as proof of domicile. He instructs me to find an address, any address. Surely I have a friend in Veracruz? In Veracruz everyone has a friend.
He produces his own electricity bill as an example of the proof he requires, lays the bill on his desk and transfers his attention to an assistant. An hour later the bike is registered and the plates are on the Honda. Mechanics and sales assistants watch as I mount and wobble tentatively round the parking lot. I will take the bike out properly tomorrow, Saturday, when (I hope) there will be less traffic.
Veracruz is tidy for a Mexican city. Trees shade street after street of small shops (how do the proprietors earn a living?). Small restaurants are common, as are ice-cream parlours and mini-cafés that serve a table or two on the pavement. Street vendors don’t nag, are happy to give directions and welcome conversation.
In search of riding goggles, I navigate, on foot, the narrow lanes of the market district. Dallas was foreign territory. Here I feel at home. The pace is Mediterranean. So are the chatter and leisurely human interplay. I ask directions and walk pavements striped with sun and shade. My goal is a row of kiosks where bike tyres and inner tubes hang on wooden shutters. I peer into gloom at shelves packed with spares. Most storekeepers are women – or instinct steers me to stores run by women. One advises me that goggles with glass lenses are too expensive – more sensible to buy plastic safety glasses at a hardware store.
I read in a guidebook that Veracruz has a strong black influence. I haven’t seen a single black person. The standard skin colour is a rich pale golden mocha – imagine a good sun tan without the red. People are good-looking, particularly the younger generation. For men, long trousers are obligatory. Young women show their tummies. Given the heat, this seems an unfair advantage (not that I wish to display my own gross wobble).
I have taken three cabs. The first driver opined that Veracruz is a disaster. Politicians have stolen everything. Working people can’t afford to eat.
The second driver was a sybarite. He boasted of Veracruz cuisine and instructed me to eat at any one of the small restaurants upstairs in the fish market.
The third was elderly and teaches English to his granddaughters. His own English is pedantic and he is contemptuous of North American English. He said that in Veracruz I can walk at night in safety, but in Mexico City I would be murdered.
