in fresh lime juice; a stack of fat, spicy sausages, bursting out of their skins; creamy potato salads and crunchy home-made slaw.
Now this is what I left home for.
I speared another sausage with my flimsy plastic fork.
This is culinary adventure.
As it turned out, my new friends were not ruthless gangsters. They were hard-working people with respectable jobs in construction and haulage. They were all family, all from Puerto Rico and had come to America to make enough money to return home and start their own businesses. Every Sunday in the summer they got together here in the woods to eat, talk, laugh, and it was an honour to join them.
I explained that my plans were to cycle to Rio de Janeiro, sampling the most delicious and authentic food I could find along the way. They were insistent that the perfect meal I was looking for would be found only in Puerto Rico, and their kind words and good wishes filled me with a new zest and optimism for the journey ahead. For the rest of the afternoon the sun broke through the trees in smoky shafts of light and the sweet smells of barbecue filled the forest. I was forced to take part in a post-lunch game of baseball, in which I performed uselessly, and as the charcoal embers gave off the last of their heat it was time to say farewell. A family-sized silver-wrapped parcel of leftovers was presented to me for eating later that evening, along with a crackly pillowcase of potato chips and a vast bottle of bright yellow fizzy liquid. Each of the men embraced me with a bone-crushing bear hug before going through a confusing collection of handshakes, knuckle taps and high-fives. Full of food and optimism, I waved goodbye, mounted my bicycle and made my way back on to the forest trail.
‘Yo, brother! You ever write a book about this trip of yours, you better put my mom’s rice recipe in there,’ came a call from behind me.
‘No problem,’ I hollered back in my best New Jersey accent.
‘And one more thing, if you’re goin ta’ Brazil, you goin’ da wrong way. Rio de Janeiro gotta be south a here.’
This was not the last time I would be told I was going the wrong way. Leaving New York, my plan was to cycle north for the Niagara Falls and the Great Lakes before turning west across the country towards the Rocky mountains, on what I decided was the scenic route to Rio, via Toronto and Vancouver.
‘I’m cycling to Brazil,’ I shouted into the empty forest, buoyed with Puerto Rican rice, cheap American beer and naive self-assurance. Enjoying a long New England afternoon I made good time towards Nyack and the ominously named Bear mountain. The wide, slow-moving water of the Hudson river shimmered benevolently in the late afternoon sunshine. The dark green forested banks were dotted with whitewashed, clinker-built colonial houses, once homes to the wealthy merchants who managed the flow of New World commodities, fur, maple syrup, coal and buffalo, into New York. They stood as a reminder of the river’s important role as an artery into the great city I had left behind earlier in the day. In the morning I had battled my way through the busy traffic, kamikaze cab drivers and beeping horns of Manhattan, but out here, cycling along the banks of this historic river, I could have been a thousand miles away from the energy and power of New York City. At last, I was on my way.
It didn’t take long for my confidence to be undermined. The flat roads of the morning ride, which had stretched out before me making comfortable cycling, began to curve round the steep sides of the growing hills that now flanked the valley. The gradients increased and to keep my overloaded, 60-kilo bicycle moving forward became a hard and painful struggle. After leaving the shade of the forest trail, the heat of the afternoon sapped my energy.
I had only planned to spend five nights sleeping on a friend’s couch in the Big Apple, but thanks to Natwest Bank’s complete lack of customer service, and the epicurean charms of the city that never sleeps, I did not leave for five weeks. Any fitness I had gained labouring around Richmond Park had vanished after a lengthy intake of hamburgers, knishes, bagels and street pizzas, combined with late nights and riotous living. Now I was paying for it, hunched over my handlebars, dripping with sweat, making miserably slow work of the short journey to my first night’s goal, Nyack State Park, where I hoped I might be able to pitch camp.
NYACK STATE PARK CLOSED STRICTLY NO OVERNIGHT CAMPING!
If a squadron of mosquitoes hadn’t been feasting on every bit of tasty skin that wasn’t wrapped in sweat-drenched clothing, and if the tired muscles in my legs had not been contracting in complaint at their unexpected new existence, I might have obeyed the friendly sign that greeted me at the gates of the state park. Yet as the last minutes of twilight began to give way to gathering darkness and a distant growl of thunder warned me of the weather to come, I decided to risk the wrath of an angry park ranger and wheeled my heavy load up the last hill of the day. Finding a little corner of grass hidden between a large rock and a malodorous public toilet, I set about pitching camp. Pre-trip daydreams had been buoyed with romantic ideas about camping in the moonlight on the banks of foreign rivers, grilling fish over an open fire, but being able to count my previous nights under canvas on one hand, I was about to find out how immature this boy’s own fantasy was.
‘Ultra light’ it declared on the bright label of my brand-new one-man tent as I pulled it from its tidy little nylon bag and rolled it out on the grass. Could have been a bit fucking lighter if you ask me, I muttered, while trying to decipher the complicated Swedish instruction manual.
‘Grattis, du är nu den stolte ägaren av ett nytt tält’
The annoyingly efficient-looking Swede in the pictures instructed me that my first job was to link up the two sausage-strings of shiny, metal poles. Once connected, they had to be slid into their relevant holes before the whole tent could be pegged down. This was not dissimilar to knitting with a pair of eight-foot needles, but I managed, with an adequate amount of swearing and loss of temper, while being perpetually pestered by the biting and high-pitched whine of every blood-sucking insect in New York State, to get the right bits in the right places. And, as if by magic, my new home rose miraculously out of the ground.
It hadn’t looked that small when I performed a dry-run erection on the living-room floor of the pokey, one-bedroom flat in London where I had lived for the last five years. But now, dwarfed by the immense trees and the public toilets of Nyack State Park, it looked pathetic. A London estate agent would have described it as ‘compact and with a clever use of space’, but as I climbed inside there was no escaping the fact that my accommodation for the next two years was inconveniently petite.
To rest my bones at the end of a hard day in the saddle, I had also invested in an expensive, ultra-light, self-inflating camping mattress. It too lived in an efficient nylon bag and, once removed, it unrolled itself like an asthmatic woodlouse, wheezing pathetically as it tried to ‘self-inflate’.
That’s it?
At that price, I had hoped that a plump and bouncy airbed would expand before my eyes, but instead a small, bright orange piece of foam that looked about as comfortable as a doormat materialised in front of me. ‘Tat-tat, tat-tat-tat.’ The sound of rain drumming away on the tightly-stretched nylon that now surrounded me didn’t help lift my sinking mood. I made a dash through the escalating downpour to rescue my panniers and other bits of equipment, before retreating back into my bunker, soaking wet, to begin making plans for supper. My first-night fantasies of an open fire were literally washed away, and instead I would have to fire-up the most exciting item hidden in my bags. The camp stove.
I have no doubt that if you find yourself stuck on a freezing mountain at high altitude, somewhere in the Himalayas, and you fancy a quick cuppa, a high-octane jet engine is just the job for melting a few litres of snow and getting a good brew on, but if all you want to do
