The littoral, Saturday 8 July
At first the road to Panama follows the coast. Even the shanty towns of Costa Rica’s capital looked cared for. Here, on the Caribbean littoral, wooden houses rot unpainted among the palm trees: evidence of poverty or of neglect?
The road swings inland. Puffs of smoky cloud spill from pockets in the mountains bordering the banana plantations. A river divides Costa Rica from Panama. Waiting in line at Costa Rican immigration takes a few minutes. I am alone at customs. Panama is the far end of a Chiquita Banana Company railway bridge. Loose and uneven planks lie end to end across the sleepers each side of the rails. Rain has been spitting and the planks are as slippery as a greased pole. I edge across in first gear, one foot on the rail, one on the planks.
Two truck drivers wait at the customs window in Panama. I tell them of my fear. They warn me of a second bridge on the road to Almirante, the second bridge is in worse condition and three times as long. Cars have crashed. For bikes it is very dangerous. Many people have fallen. Recently an American broke his arm. A German broke a leg.
Jungle cloaks the mountains. Rain spits from a charcoal sky. The river is in flood. The Bridge of the Americas scares me. It is a railway bridge approximately 200 metres long. The flat base is supported by concrete piles and runs within a tunnel of box girders. Road transport drives on loose planks laid either side of the train rails. The planks are uneven and slippery. Many are missing. Twisted guardrails warn of past misadventures, and much of the safety netting has been ripped away. A bigger bike than the Honda would slide through the gaps. The fall? Fifty feet.
The traffic lights show red. I wait astride the Honda and cringe as the planks lift and clatter beneath approaching trucks. My spectacles fog and my nose drips. The lights change to green. An impatient driver honks his klaxon. Walking the bike would delay him – and he would suppose me a coward. I ride twenty yards before the front tyre slips in a gap between two planks. Desperate to save the Honda, I tip inwards across the rails and sprawl beneath the bike. I look down between the railway sleepers at muddy foam. Drivers pound down the track and heave the Honda off my leg. They warn me that the bridge is dangerous – as if I require warning. They lift me on to my feet and the bike into the back of a truck. I sit up front in the truck with a young driver.
Almirante is a further fifteen kilometres. The sky clears. A good tarred road twists between forested hills. The sky has cleared and sunlight streaks the canopy. The mountains of the great divide tower above the hills. Beyond lies the Pacific Ocean. The driver warns that the mountain road is dangerous, that my small Honda lacks power for the ascent. He warns of hairpin bends and of precipices and of the many truck drivers who delight in squeezing a biker off the road. He warns of thieves in the mountains and that there are no farms or houses. I can expect no help if I fall.
I catch glimpses, between the hills, of the Gulf of Bocas del Toro. The waters are deep blue and spread with islands, some lightened with pale crescents of sand. The truck is new and the seat is as comfortable as the armchair back home in my study. The stitches in my right hand itch. My left shoulder, thigh and knee ache from the tumble. I imagine how pleasant it would be to end this idiotic journey and sit on a beach drinking piña coladas. A reality check reminds me that I find beaches boring and piña coladas sickly sweet. So much for fantasy.
The driver tells me that Almirante has seen better days. Once it was the capital of the United Fruit Company’s empire. Railway lines to the docks carve the town in two. Main Street is mud and ruts. Paint peels and flakes from the weatherboard buildings. Tin roofs crumble with rust.
The driver warns that few tourists stay in Almirante. Tourists take the ferry directly to the Gulf island resorts of Bocas del Toro. The driver knows of only one hotel. My heart sinks as we approach the Pension del Station. The first-floor balcony droops. The walls sag. A guest sneezes and the entire hotel will collapse.
My saviour has a delivery to make to the biggest store in town. The storeowner recommends a new hotel across the road run by a friendly mother–daughter partnership, the Hotel Puerto del Almirante. Rooms are on the first floor above the storekeeper’s warehouse: twenty-five dollars with bath, TV and air-con. I protest to the daughter that I am a pensioner. She halves the rate. The room is large, the double bed is comfortable, the bathroom functions, the air-con is silent perfection. An added comfort is the pedestal fan aimed at the bed to keep intruding mosquitoes at bay. The daughter apologises: the TV isn’t cable.
I dump my gear and buy a couple of cold sodas to share with the truck driver. His home is in Panama City. He and his wife have three children. The eldest, a boy, is six. The driver earns 420 dollars a month and works a seventy-hour week.
How to reward a Good Samaritan without giving offence? I finger my billfold, slip out a twenty-dollar note.
The driver understands my embarrassment. He says, ‘Please, old man, there is no need. You are a guest. We are friends.’
A second trucker, witness of my fall, drops by. We sit on a garden wall in the shade and chat of family and the days the drivers are away from home and why an old man chooses to ride from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego. Both drivers warn me of Colombia. Colombia is truly dangerous. For certain, I will be kidnapped – or shot by bandits. Colombian bandits murder travellers for a few dollars.
Neither driver has visited Colombia.
The mother of the hotel partnership directs me to a restaurant round the corner. The restaurant is closed. I find a Chinese alternative on the next block. A dozen Filipinos off a banana boat screech encouragement as they watch a TV championship fight between a Filipino boxer and a North American. Half a dozen local girls at the same table fight for the sailors’ attention. I choose the corner table furthest from the TV and sit with my back to the wall. A skinny Chinese cook takes my order of shrimp-fried rice and a cold beer. A permanent scowl suggests that the cook hates mankind and probably spits in the food. The beer comes with a grease-smudged tumbler. I drink from the bottle.
The Polish chief engineer off the banana boat invites himself to join me. He is a six-foot-two time-bomb with a short fuse, red face, grey-blue eyes, grey hair en brosse. A pot belly bursts a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt; baggy blue shorts have been through the wash a few hundred times; a strap is missing from his right sandal. He is drunk and mistakes shouting at me for conversation. Much of his shouting concerns deck officers: all deck officers are idiots. A second subject is racism. Foreigners (non-Polish) believe all Polish people are racists and idiots.
‘Not so,’ the chief insists.
As proof that he is not a racist, the chief cites his recent promotion of a Filipino to assistant chief engineer.
‘They love me,’ insists the Polish engineer of the Filipinos and shouts for more beer. ‘I am their king. Of course they love me.’
I keep silent. Silence is advisable when closeted with a bomb. Even indicating agreement with a weak smile could be dangerous.
The chief bellows for the newly promoted Filipino engineer to come pay homage – which he does, a quiet man, well-mannered, wearing round, wire-rimmed spectacles, chinos, a crisply ironed white shirt. The chief parades him as he would a prize dog, then dismisses him and returns to his criticism of deck officers.
‘Tomorrow, I show you ship. You see I speak true. All deck officers fucking idiots.’
I swear to visit the ship. The skinny Chinese people-hater shoves a bowl of rice and what might be shrimp on the table. I wonder whether the small black objects in the rice are seeds or rat droppings.
Retreat might be possible. ‘Forgive me,’ I murmur. ‘I don’t feel too well.’
A pale street lamp lights a male group seated on a low wall outside a general store. Most are Afro-Caribbean, smokers and sucking on beer bottles. Conversation dies as I enter the store. Antipathy for a stranger? I buy a pack of biscuits and retire to the hotel.
The hotel floors are polished wood. I carry my shoes up the stairs to the first-floor balcony. Arc lights at the docks glow beyond the roofs of the bungalows. The Polish engineer’s ship is loading and an incessant whine of winches comes from the banana wharf. A truck rattles as it crosses the railway lines. Moonlight glistens on the bay. Fishermen’s lanterns speckle the sea. So to bed between fresh clean sheets. Panama marks the end of Central America. I have survived. I feel moderately proud and good about myself.
Almirante, Sunday 9 July
Yesterday on the road from Limón, I bought new batteries for my camera at a small roadside store. The batteries must have been old or stale (if batteries go stale). They were flat when I reached that awful bridge. I am out of bed by half past five this morning and bike back with fresh batteries loaded. I photograph the bridge, and then stop for breakfast at a truckers’ café midway between the bridge and Almirante. The café is built on a ridge overlooking the highway. It is not much of a place. The floor is cement, as is the kitchen counter. Wooden posts support a thatch roof. A couple of hammocks hang from hooks. The upright chairs are old and have carved leather backs. Sit at one of the four tables and you look down over rich jungle to the island-spotted gulf of Bocas del Toro.
A girl, eight years old, sweeps the floor. Her brother, four years older, is outside lighting a fire laid in a half-drum. The mother fetches me a cup of freshly made coffee.
I question the daughter on her school and whether she enjoys books and reading. Being a pompous old man, I tell her that education is the only road to freedom.
The mother agrees. ‘There is so much competition now.’
A white butterfly in a hurry flies directly across my view. Most butterflies appear aimless. Is this one aware that life is short? I note other butterflies, red, yellow, copper-coloured. Birds work up a racket while I eat puffed pancakes with chopped steak in a tomato sauce. The sun shines. We are a thousand feet above sea level and the air is cool. The family house is a further fifty metres up the ridge and nestles against the trees. This must be the most perfect truck-stop in the world. Riding back to Almirante, I realise what an idiot I am in talking freedom to the young girl. What do I know? Maybe she is already living close to Paradise. Equally, she may feel condemned to jail by birth.
Almirante was United Fruit. Now the name is Chiquita Banana. Chiquita’s air-conditioned HQ is in the port area. Entry is via guarded security gates. Two of Chiquita’s fleet lie alongside a concrete wharf. The wharf belongs to Chiquita. To board a ship, I require clearance from the Big Men. The Big Men are Panamanians of Afro-Caribbean heritage. Although bilingual, English is their home language. They are well fed and well barbered. They are obviously superior and bask in their superiority. Their open-plan office is on the first floor. Windows overlook the port. I explain my presence. Much telephoning ensues before I am issued with a visitor’s badge and a green hard hat.
The Polish chief engineer greets me at the top of the gangplank. He wears the previous evening’s baggy shorts and Hawaiian shirt. Perhaps he slept in them. The ship sails in an hour and he conducts me on a whirlwind tour of the engine department. The control room is screens and switches. A steel door leads to a bank of computers that control both ship and cargo. The chief demonstrates opening and closing one of the many valves that balance the fuel load. Next we visit the engine, which seems small for such a big task. Down a deck level, I realise the massive depth of the cylinders. We visit pump rooms and more pump rooms, filter rooms and more filter rooms, heating units for the fuel oil, cooling units for the cargo, climate control for the cargo, generators, spare generators, more generators. The tour is designed to impress. I am impressed.
We return to the control room. ‘I am university engineer, educated man. Harrison Ford, bullshit,’ announces the chief as he imitates the actor spinning imaginary control wheels. ‘Open this valve, open that valve. Big captain in white uniform save everyone. All bullshit.’ The chief jabs a finger at a flashing red light. ‘Captain, idiot. You think he know what is? Bulb break in cabin, he call me how to fix. Deck officers all idiots.’
What else did I learn? Bananas are picked green and put to sleep while travelling. Reaching their destination, the bananas are given a whiff of gas, awaken and turn yellow. I know what gas and the climate control that puts them to sleep. And I know that Chiquita has sold off the trucks and trailer-tractors that transport the containers from the banana plantations to the wharf. The new truckers borrowed from the banks to buy the tractors. Debt keeps them vulnerable. They can’t argue prices with Chiquita and they can’t strike.
Joni runs the best breakfast and luncheon place in town. I have chopped steak in pepper sauce served with salad, coffee, and the round, flat, fluffy pancakes that, in Panama, serve for bread. I decide to stay in Almirante for two more nights.
Early-fifties Joni is an ample matron, part Irish from three generations back; the rest is Afro-Caribbean. Joni’s grandad came to Almirante from Jamaica to work for United Fruit. Joni recalls Almirante under Company rule. The town was clean and ordered. Infrastructure functioned. Trains ran on time. The same is said by the old folk of Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany and the Indian subcontinent under British rule.
An old man enters with packets of pancake dough.
Just the one today, Pappi,’ says Joni.
‘As you wish, my love.’
We return to comparing United Fruit with Chiquita Banana. ‘Chiquita is all measurements,’ says Joni. ‘All Chiquita care is measurements. They measure everything.’
Later I chat with a successful local businessman at his office behind his warehouse. He is Jewish. His father emigrated from Palestine as a young man and he has inherited from his father memories of a gentler Middle East, memories that predate the Second World War, of communities that were fuzzy-edged and seeped into each other, Copt and Druse, Jew and Muslim, Armenian, Catholic and Orthodox. Both his wife and his mother are Panamanian Catholics and he abhors the modern simplification and stark lines of demarcation: Them and Us.
‘In Panama we do business together, Jew and Muslim. Most of us are in business together. We think similarly and are comfortable in each other’s company.’
The businessman fields telephone calls before switching our conversation to Almirante. ‘United Fruit was king, paternalistic. Chiquita is accountants. Kings give gifts. Accountants respond only to financial logic.’
In its heyday, United Fruit made the market price. Now competition among growers and overproduction has switched power to supermarkets. Supermarkets respond to the demand in rich countries for cheap food.
The businessman judges that United Fruit was both good and bad. Employees were moved from plantation to plantation, from Company town to Company town, and housed according to rank. Houses were maintained by United Fruit; United Fruit cared for employees’ health, their pensions, educated their children, decided what stock was available in the Company store. In return, employees were loyal to United Fruit rather than to Panama, Costa Rica or Guatemala; their roots were in United Fruit rather than in Almirante. Now townspeople feel both abandoned and betrayed. Self-direction and maintenance are foreign to them. Houses crumble. Rubbish collection is sporadic, power failures frequent.
The businessman asks whether I have been to Bocas.
I will take the early ferry tomorrow.
‘That is where all new investment is,’ he tells me. Tourism is vital to the nation’s economy. Tourism depends on Panama’s unique flora and fauna. He fears a powerful investor moving in, a financial entity with no care for the environment. He asks me to tell my readers to support Greenpeace.
Readers, support Greenpeace.
Bocas, Monday 10 July
Fast twenty-seat passenger launches leave for Bocas from Almirante when they have a full load, say every half-hour between six in the morning and six-thirty in the evening. The crossing takes twenty minutes; the fare is three dollars and subsidised by central government.
I want to explore the island by bike. The car ferry is an almost square flat barge surmounted by a bridge and a café. The ferry has a maximum speed of six knots. The fare is ten dollars each way for rider and bike. The first morning sailing is at six. The ferry is often full and I have been warned to arrive early. I leave the hotel in the dark.
A car loads first.
The stevedore directing the loading calls, ‘Simon, bring your bike.’
I have been travelling three months. Hearing my name called in a strange land at half past five in the morning is oddly cheering. So is chatting with a couple of truck drivers. Six Mack trucks are carrying sand and gravel for one of the islands where a gringo (the driver’s term) is constructing a housing development for billionaires. One of the billionaires is a famous US basketball player. The drivers recount that the player’s house will cost two million dollars (they learnt this on TV).
First light shows a thin mist clinging to the trees along the mountain-side. Red lights flash on the Cable & Wireless radio masts. The floodlights along Chiquita’s pontoon are exactly spaced. Thick black cloud lies over the sea to our left. The water is almost black. An inbound passenger launch leaves a white trail. The smell of frying chicken drifts from the open window behind us and a tin spoon clatters against a cooking pot.
I breakfast on pancakes with sausage and miserable coffee. Meanwhile the conversation has turned to bikes. A truck driver owns a broken Yamaha. A second driver claims to be a bike mechanic. ‘Buy the parts,’ he says. ‘We’ll put it together on a Sunday. Start at six.’ He acts assembling the engine. ‘Ping-pam, ping-pam, ping-pam, finished by four.’
This same truck driver was in the army at the time of the US invasion of Panama. ‘Twenty-three dead,’ he says of US soldiers. ‘It’s a big lie, Pappi. We shot them in the sky. Pom,’ he goes, aiming an imaginary rifle. ‘Pom, pam, pom, pam. I tell you, Pappi, twenty-three is a big lie. And how many they kill? Thousands.’
All these dead to arrest one man: the US could have grabbed Noriega any time, claims the driver. The invasion was on 20 December. On 18 December, Noriega visited a US base (I have no idea whether this is true – nor can I recall the year and I am embarrassed by my ignorance). The driver believes that the invasion of Panama was a practice run for the invasion of Iraq. He accuses Americans of believing they can do anything they wish. The other two truck drivers nod their agreement. Perhaps they agree from fellowship for a fellow trucker. I keep silent.
I am becoming obsessive (or I now recognise my obsession) in my demand for detail. I am interested in the cost of a used Mack truck. One driver’s Mack is twenty years old. Value in Panama – 5000 dollars. This driver used to drive mules (the motive part of a trailer truck) until Chiquita forced down the freight rate. Four hundred and fifty dollars is the freight on a load of gravel out to the island. The crossing takes two and a half hours. The driver makes two trips most days, six days a week. He leaves home at four-thirty in the morning and returns home at eleven at night. The truck owner pays by the trip. The driver earns nothing while the truck is in for repair or service. A good month, a month without breakdowns, he earns 500 dollars. His brother is a labourer on a banana cooperative. Chiquita has cut the price of bananas and the workers are on strike. The brother telephoned in the night: his family has no food.
Bocas is a beautiful tranquil island of wooded hills and beaches. A small island, but it is on the world map. It has arrived. It is a non-tourist tourist destination. The architecture is wood-shuttering Cape Cod-Caribbean in pastel shades. Every building on Main Street sells something: food, booze, tours, real estate.
Two weeks on the island and tourists enjoy the delusion of belonging. They become prey for male middle-aged ex-trendies with tans and ponytails who hustle real estate. Hustlers and marks sit in conference in bars and restaurants. On sale is the dream of owning some easy business, life without stress, yearly holiday of 365 days, sun, sand and sex.
The scene is familiar: Ibiza, Block Island, Hydra, Mykonos …
I need a hospital. Eight days have passed since I sliced my hand. The stitches are due out.
Bocas hospital has an emergency unit with air-con. An indigenous child with an infected foot is the only other patient. A nurse sits me on a chair and sets to work with tweezers and blade. The removal is painless. The nurse dreams of being a writer. She doesn’t read. Read two pages and she has a headache. The headaches began soon after she left university. She has medical training: suggesting an eye test seems presumptuous. She despatches me around the block to pay. I pass an open window and see a skeletal old man curled up on a bed. He groans as he attempts to roll over. I glimpse my own reflection in the glass. I hunt down the cashier’s counter and pay five dollars.
Light rain falls as I ride the few kilometres across the island. The road rises through low hills. A patch of bamboo forest caps the crest. Weighted by rain, the bamboos arch over the road. Cattle graze shaded paddocks between the woods. Lots are advertised for sale. A development of cheap tasteless wooden holiday homes would benefit from a can of gasoline and a match. The bay at the far end of the island opens to the sea. Turn left and a sand track leads to the Institute for Tropical Ecology and Conservation. The teachers are North American. So are the students. Some are from Canada, most are from the US. I read the literature: ITEC is a not-for-profit organisation based in Gainesville, florida.
The school is on a sand beach protected by a reef. A further reef projects from the next island. Students eat at a next-door restaurant. The restaurant has a small orchard: breadfruit, guava, a calabash tree. I order coffee and watch, between the palm trees, waves break on the reefs. A lone pelican sits on a marker post fifty metres out. Two parrots nibble my ankles beneath the table.
The parents of a student I chat with have paid 2500 dollars for his five-week course. He is from New England, a great kid, a quarter Indian (as in Asian). Once he has his master’s, he intends entering business. Business is exciting. He is having a great day. So am I. He believes that the Iraq war is the right war. I resist relating the opinions voiced by the driver of the Mack truck.
I stop at the Smithsonian Institute on the way back to town. Staff are out on the reef. The administrative secretary gives me a beautifully produced catalogue of the Institute’s work in Panama. I will send the catalogue to Mark, the younger son of my first marriage – he is a marine biologist.
Back in town I sit at the end of a small quay and munch a sandwich while watching the traffic. Bocas cabs are small outboard launches. A tourist group arrives by launch from Almirante. They pile upmarket luggage on the quay. They require a boat to take them fifty metres to a plush new hotel on the waterfront – a confectionery of white-painted weatherboard that has cost (I am told and believe) a million dollars. An indigenous local boatman poles his boat over to the quay and is scorned by the hotel’s white greeter who spots half an inch of water in the bilges. The greeter instructs the tourists to wait while he fetches a better boat. He ignores the boatman.
The boatman sponges the offending water out of the bilges. He is a patient man, perhaps a little closed. I ride with him over to a neighbouring island. A steep wooded ridge runs the length of the island. A strip of small raggedy wooden houses cling to the shore and are served by a seemingly haphazard rash of plank-on-post docks. The boatman patrols a while, collecting passengers one by one. A young health worker has a date at a shoreside bar. A young Israeli woman (resident here for three years) works at the plush waterfront hotel back on Bocas. The boatman drops her at the hotel’s dock. The boatman and I laugh together. The trip has been fun.
The ferry from Almirante is on its second run. It unloads a couple of 4x4s and a freezer truck at Bocas. The Mack trucks are on board. I park the Honda and sit with the drivers outside the ferry’s café. A truck driver points to the first of the million-dollar homes in the Bocas archipelago. The house sits on the point of a wooded island. A second house is a further kilometre down the same island and we spot a third before the ferry heads in through mangrove thickets to the private dock on Frefor Island.
Frefor is an island without a village. It is an island without Panamanians. The developer and his staff are from the US. They speak English. Most of the workers are of West Indian background. Shifts are delivered by launch. The workers are big muscular men dressed in American work clothes. They appear well fed and carry themselves with a certain arrogance. It is an arrogance often evident in those employed by the very rich.
The sun breaks through the clouds and the sea gleams between patches of mangrove. Frefor is a long jungle-cloaked ridge. The million-dollar homes are on the far side facing the open sea. The ferry turns in to the private dock. I watch the Mack trucks dump their gravel a hundred yards uphill. I hope that a sufficiency of billionaires will enable the drivers to buy their own trucks.
The ferry is slow. We load trucks and cars in Bocas and head back to Almirante. A young mulatto woman enquires whether I have a girl-friend, a novia. I answer that my wife is my novia. She tells me that many gringos on Bocas have novias. I believe her. She has failed in seeking a gringo – partly perhaps, because she gnaws her nails. She is also awkward in her movements, consumptively thin and divorced of charm. She has no money and hasn’t eaten. Fish and pancakes cost a dollar fifty. She doesn’t thank me. One of the truck drivers and I quiz the cook. She earns 250 dollars a month. She is a competent cook of simple food. Billionaire owners of houses on Frefor earn 250 dollars a minute and enjoy more sophisticated tastes.
The great divide, Tuesday 11 July
Today I will cross the isthmus from Atlantic Ocean to Pacific. The Cordillera Central is the spine of the isthmus. The mountains peak at nearly 3500 metres. I have become accustomed to climbs and have faith in the Honda. A storm battered the coast during the night and I awake to rain beating on the roof. I pack only to be warned that fallen trees have blocked the mountain road. Borrowing an umbrella, I walk to Joni’s and enjoy a leisurely breakfast.
The rain eases and Joni dispatches me with a kiss. Hills ring the gulf of Bocas del Toro and the road swoops and climbs as it follows the coast. Massive trees blanket the slopes. I ride slowly and swerve round great limbs that have been ripped down by the storm. Much of the cloud has cleared. Light and shade patchwork the tarmac and sunlight streaks a sea spread with mangrove islets. The coast hooks to the south and mountains rise sheer from the shore. The views are of a hardly credible beauty. I park on the verge and take photographs. A further fifty yards and I stop again. So it continues, view to view, photograph to photograph. I have fallen into the trap that, years ago, in past journeys, made me give up photography: the temptation to be caught behind the camera, pit view against view. Which makes the best picture?
The cure is simple: stuff the camera back in its bag and revel in the ride.
The Atlantic coast was hot and humid and jungly. Now the road winds inland up steep narrow valleys. Tropical forest gives way to pinewoods. Wispy clouds shade the sun. The pines thin. The road breaks clear into a harsh dry landscape of rock and scrub. A vast reservoir lies to the left of the road and the temperature plummets. I stop to pull on a second pair of chinos, a second undershirt, long-sleeved shirt and jumper.
Yesterday, from the ferry, I counted four lines of mountains rise one above the other. The fourth is the divide. I creep towards the summit. Only the curvature of the earth separates me from Africa to the east and, to the west, Asia and Australasia.
The truck drivers on the ferry warned of the wind that rips across the peaks of the Cordillera. They never mentioned the sudden fear that strikes as the wind hits, the vulnerability, a sense of being less than the smallest pinhead. I am alone and on a small bike. This is no place to linger.
Cross the divide and you are in steep uplands. Dairy farms with Swiss names cling to the high slopes. Descend towards the Pacific and you cross the rolling grasslands of wealthy ranchers. The openness of the countryside brings a sense of freedom. The temperature is ideal. I pack away the extra clothes and speed in shirtsleeves on a tarred lane between small shade trees. The sea sparkles way in the distance. Racehorses graze neatly fenced paddocks. I zip past a lone tractor pulling a trailer – no further traffic on the road. My writer’s mind takes control. Ideas and insights tumble one over the other.
Glorying in my genius, I miss a road sign.
I shoot straight across a right-angled T-junction. The front wheel bucks as it hits the verge. Long grass ends at a barbed wire fence. The headlight strikes a fence post. I sprawl beneath the bike. Bloody hell, what have I smashed? Is this where it ends?
I imagine broken bones.
Moving could be harmful.
A car crunches on the verge. Doors open, followed by hurried footsteps. A man asks, ‘Are you hurt?’
My head is buried in long grass. I say, ‘I’m not sure.’
The bike is dragged upright. I move gingerly, checking my limbs for fractures. A woman tells me to be careful. I am being careful. I sit up and face my rescuers: father, mother, son and daughter in early teens. All four wear expensively casual haircuts, tailored jeans and those sports shirts logoed with a curly-tailed crocodile. For jewellery they share a gleaming two-tone Toyota Landcruiser.
The mother’s expression suggests concern. The father holds the Honda upright and is irritated at the delay. ‘Your arm’s bleeding,’ the girl observes with that teenage tonal amalgam of contempt for and delight at misadventure. ‘You’ve trodden in dog poo’ is a favourite.
I am aware, of course, that I don’t look my best. I see myself through their eyes: an old Brit seated in long grass, plump, bearded and somewhat bemused.
‘Didn’t you see the road sign?’ asks the father.
‘No,’ I say.
‘You should be more careful.’
‘Yes,’ I say.
I should appear grateful. I probably look sulky. I wish that the boy and his sister and their parents would return to their vehicle. I clamber to my feet and help the father wheel the bike to the road.
The boy says, ‘The headlight’s broken.’
The light is buckled, glass shattered, the left-side footrest bent – no further damage visible. I know from previous falls that the engine will be flooded and won’t fire.
I prop the bike on its side rest and say, ‘Thank you for your assistance. I’ll just sit here a while and get my breath back.’
The father can’t resist reminding me to be more careful. The son sneers. The daughter offers me a tissue. The mother says, ‘Well, if you’re quite sure.’
The family board their Landcruiser. Mother and daughter wave. I attend to a small hole gouged by the barbed wire in my right upper-arm. Then I walk a short way, testing my legs. I wheel the Honda to the top of a slope, mount, gain speed and release the clutch. The engine splutters and fires. Both the bike and I are a little battered but we are back in business. And I have a goal.
The small towns of Bloquet and Volcán nestle on the lower slopes of the Cordillera. Bloquet is sick with an infestation of weekend and holiday housing developments. Why must the houses be so utterly without charm? However, the altitude produces a climate perfect for temperate-climate fruits and vegetables. A sign on the roadside on the outskirts to Bloquet signals a side road to my destination: Fresas Marie.
I have discovered similar summer cafés down lanes in Devon, England, in Austria and Switzerland, in Providence and Upstate New York. The cafés are invariably owned by single women on the plump side, widowed or divorced and blessed with gorgeous smiles. The cafés are small, the ceilings low. The decor is a little too designer quaint and overdecorated with china statuettes and painted plates. Bunny rabbits cast in cement struggle with garden gnomes for supremacy among flowerbeds. Who could give a damn? I am here for the fruit. I sit in the sun and glut myself on fresh-picked strawberries blanketed with whipped double double cream – surely a luxury equal to munching a freshly picked peach in the Antarctic.
And Marie of the lovely smile is too polite to enquire as to what damaged the Honda’s headlight. Bliss.