Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

by Ted Simon

  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?'

  Every day, in some little way, I had had to damp down fears, still suspicions, prove that I was not there to make a fool of anyone. All the more difficult when people who do not have the information you need, cannot supply the thing you want, are reminded of their own ignorance and the chronic material shortages with which they live. People can only say 'No hay' so often before it changes to 'Fuck Off. In the land of No Hay, they play Hunt the Scapegoat, and every Gringo qualifies. It was a constant preoccupation to escape that label, and find a way to meet with people in a more human and personal way.

  Of course, where people live in one place and get used to each other they get along fine, usually, just as they do everywhere else in the world. Nowhere could I have found warmer or more generous friends than those I stayed with in Rio, in Curitiba, Bariloche, Santiago, La Plata, Medellin and Cartagena. Once contact is made and the intention is clear there is no shortage of trust and warmth.

  And then there are also the exceptional people who make nonsense of all generalizations. At the roadside in the south-west of Argentina I was struggling to mend a puncture on a hot dry day when a man stopped and came over with the sole purpose of encouraging me. I could see by his dress and the car he drove that his means were limited, but he put his hand in his pocket and brought out a bundle of paper pesos with several notes of a quite high denomination. 'If you are short of money' he said, 'please take what you need.' I needed nothing, but I was overwhelmed by such spontaneous generosity, and his single gesture helped me later to swallow a dozen rebuffs. Unfortunately there were too few like him to absorb all the punishment, and by the time I got to Panama I was feeling the cumulative effect of it.

  There had been other pressures too. My relations with the Sunday Times seemed to have gone sour. After a promising start in Brazil, Argentina and Chile, none of my articles had been published and there were ominous signals about money. Prices were rising constantly. Inflation had made a mockery of my original budgets, and it was obvious that I would need more money, even though I was living on the slenderest of shoe strings. As I struggled in and out of ditches and became a connoisseur of cockroaches, I was bitterly aware that there were people in London who thought my journey was a frivolous waste of funds.

  I had hoped for news in Panama that would at least state the position clearly. Panama was an important drop along my route. The Lucas company had a huge depot there in the Free Zone, and it was the first forwarding address since Lima. There were tyres, brake linings and tubes waiting, but no mail, no answers to questions, no news from anyone.

  It was this uncertainty as much as anything, I suppose, that focused my mind on California, because I could not expect to have the future of my journey resolved until I got to the States and was once more in easy communication with England. Thinking about California, I could not resist anticipating the reception I had been promised there by Triumph. The American market was vital to Triumph's sales, and their headquarters was in Los Angeles. There had been talk of a hero's welcome, and in my depressed state I thought about it more than was healthy. So far on my journey, I had scrupulously resisted travelling as though to a destination. My entire philosophy depended on making the journey for its own sake, and rooting out expectations about the future. Travelling in this way, day by day, hour by hour, trying alway
s to be aware of what was present and to hand, was what made the experience so richly rewarding. To travel with one's mind on some future event is futile and debilitating. Where concentration is needed to stay alive, it could also be disastrous.

  I was aware of the danger, and tried hard to recover my earlier spirit of enjoyment and optimism about the journey. The squalor and steamy heat of Panama did not help. I tried to wring some interest out of the hotel where I was staying. It was more of a boarding house, really, with guests, mostly single women, staying for longish periods and doing contract jobs in the city. I met Pete there, in the kitchen, cooking his lunch. One of the rules was that guests may not cook in the kitchen, but Pete was granted a special dispensation, he said, on the grounds that 'if I can't cook, I'm leaving'. The proprietor's wife, a knotty white lady wrapped in kimonos, took a realistic view because he lived there by the month and paid the daily rate of six dollars.

  He offered me a drink, and we sat sweating and almost naked under

  the fan in his bedroom, drinking rum and coke. He drank an awful lot of it. He was a construction engineer, young and good-looking, but there were dark stains spreading round his eyes like a kind of rot.

  I put it down to the booze, but he swore that he could leave it alone. 'Never when I'm working,' he said. 'Only afterwards.' He just happened not to be working.

  In that case, I thought, it must be the screwing. Pete told me fairly quickly that he had screwed every girl in the hotel. Without exception. It was important to him to make no exceptions, though some were considerably less inviting than others.

  'Staying here is like a licence to screw,' he told me seriously. 'The girls are all very discreet, they never talk about it, but I don't mind you knowing. That's why I don't mind paying six dollars a day. It's worth it.'

  I was particularly interested in Pete because he had just ridden a three-cylinder Kawasaki on almost the same route from Rio to Panama that I had taken. I was fascinated but appalled by his account of it.

  He hated it. He hated the country and the people. A lot of the time he rode at night so that he would not have to look at things. Between rides he said he had spent most of his time 'fucking and drinking in bars'.

  'Remember that bridge coming into Ecuador?' he asked.

  There was only one bridge he could have meant. It was built like a railway track, but with planks instead of rails to take the wheels of cars. The sleepers were set about eighteen inches apart, and there was nothing between them but air, and only river beneath. It might not have been so bad if the planks had not kept changing direction, so that it was impossible to build up any momentum. I had fallen halfway across and was lucky not to have gone through into the river. Bob and Annie had also fallen on it with their Norton.

  'Sure I do,' I said. T fell on it.'

  He howled, and grabbed my hand.

  'Me too, pal. Which way did you fall?'

  'Into the middle.'

  'Jesus, I only fell against the side. Boy, that was some ride. I'm really glad to meet you, pal.'

  The important thing for Pete was to have done it. The whole journey had taken him two months, against my six, and he had spent ten thousand dollars on the way. He said there wasn't anywhere he would not rather have been in a car.

  The hotel did not help me out of my depression. Nor did the slight touch of fever I felt now and then. When I was invited to stay with some people in the Canal Zone, I accepted gratefully. They were exceptionally kind and considerate - a US Navy Captain, John Mallard, and his wife Anne, living in quarters on a Marine base, and for two weeks they gave me total insulation from care or responsibility in that strange, artificial world of the peace-time military establishment.

  Captain Mallard, a submariner, was second-in-command of the Canal Zone, and among the most liberal and understanding men I have met. While Panamanians were hurling insults at the USA he never allowed a prejudiced or intolerant remark to pass his lips, and he seemed deeply concerned that the American presence there should benefit Panamanians in every way possible. In the year of Watergate, he was a fine and reassuring ambassador for his country.

  So I tried to rebuild my morale, and to some extent succeeded, but still I could not be rid of the thought of California as the promised land where I should be able to shrug off all my cares and woes. I set off, finally, just before the rains came, with the conflicting ambitions of seeing all the remarkable things there were to see in Central America and, at the same time, to get through it all as fast as possible. It was not a very propitious programme.

  On my way out of Panama I ride up to Volcan at ten thousand feet for the pleasure of feeling cool. I meet a man in the street who tells me I can sleep on the porch of the motel that he manages. Free. There are two pillars under a roof where I can sling my hammock. As I'm making myself coffee, my benefactor comes across.

  'What a remarkable coincidence that we should meet,' he says. 'If you had arrived a few minutes earlier, or later, we would have missed each other.'

  I agree that this is true, though he is straining my sense of the miraculous.

  He has come to save me with two naive religious tracts translated into Spanish and distributed by a North American mission. One is called 'Sospendido Por Un Hilo', the other 'Pesado y Hallado Falto'. The titles are literal translations of the English idioms 'Hanging by a thread' and 'Weighed and found wanting'.

  US advertising companies in South America also translate their domestic slogans into Spanish, word for word.

  Coca cola has Chispa de la Vida for the Spark of Life.

  MacDonald's Su Clase de Lugar is Your Kind of Place.

  Everywhere in Latin America I have seen these crude images imposed on the Spanish culture, like a terrible revenge. What the Spaniards did to the Indians by the force of arms, is now being done to them by the mighty Yanqui dollar.

  The border crossing from Panama to Costa Rica is quick and civilized. Soon afterwards I find a small town with a small restaurant that looks irresistibly clean and appetizing. Full of meat, eggs, rice, coffee and

  well-being I ride on, taking a rosy view of this nice country. When I run out of petrol, a laughing Indian woman sells me a litre at a farmhouse door. It's all she has, and it's not enough to get me to a pump, but some telephone repair people stop and siphon a gallon out of their tank. There's something not quiet right with the bike. A change of plugs improves it, but there's still a problem. In the early afternoon a mountain range takes me by surprise, lifting me high up into a freezing fog. I wasn't expecting such dramatic features in such a small country, and have to laugh at my own foolishness. On the other side of this range it is raining. On the way into San Jose I stop for a coffee, feeling cold and a bit depressed. Two girls are sitting nearby, and one of them is really beautiful. She smiles at me and instantly I am happy again. For the second time I have to laugh at myself, but this time with more pleasure.

  Outside the cafe a Gringo is standing by the bike. He is called Lee, and he came down with some friends on two Harley Sportsters and a truck from Boston. They have opened a restaurant next door called La Fanega, where you can get hamburgers, quesoburgesas, pescadoburgesas, machoburgesas, draught beer and music. They have a spare bed, so why don't I stay the night?

  Next day I look in my address books. Starting with friends in Argentina, I have a chain of friends of friends stretching right through Central America, and there's one here, just handy to celebrate my birthday.

  Soon I am sitting at the poolside of a very swish country club with a completely different set of people, listening to an impeccably turned out honey from Florida with tight white slacks and a 'sweet American ass'. Her provocatively buck-toothed cocktail-sipper's mouth is dispensing gossip about some people, who, it seems, are the world's ugliest and most disagreeable couple. He is a rich alcoholic, and she is a cosmetic surgery freak, who has just had two inches of fat removed from her abdomen.

  'She'll drop her pants anywhere just to show off the scars. Ain't she gross? Last time he drank h
imself almost to death she hired a Lear jet and flew him to Miami. It burns my stomach.'

  Costa Rica is popular with the Lear jet set, and hospitable to Gringos, but I have to admit that life here seems more pleasant for just about everybody. I could stay a long time, wandering between the sea and the mountains, but the rains are close on my heels and it's time to move on.

  Nicaragua has a volcano called Santiago.

  I have been sitting on the lip looking down into it for an hour, completely mesmerized. Next to the Iguacu falls, it is the most impressive natural phenomenon I have seen. First there is an enormous bowl, which funnels into an even blacker cup. At the bottom of the cup is a pipe leading to the centre of the earth, and in this pipe I can see molten rock surging and splashing. It is cherry red and although it is a long way away it seems to come very close as I stare at it, so intense is the glow and so fascinating the thought of what it is, full of mysterious implications, like a moon-shot in reverse. I am told that the government finds it useful when they want political opponents to disappear without trace.

  In Honduras the men seem to get a bit taller and slimmer again, and have a tendency to wear cowboy hats and walk like Gary Cooper. There's a quite wonderful Mayan ruin at Copan where I spend a day. In the grassy clearings sensuous bodies stand sculpted into stone slabs, birds sing thrilling songs and a few adventurous sightseers make pleasant company, but I can't stave off the tiredness and loneliness that is creeping up on me more and more often now.

  A dirt road takes me fifty miles or so through forest to the frontier of Guatemala at a small border post. On the Honduras side I pay another dollar to some nebulous authority called 'Transit', for what I don't know. I paid them on the way in, as well as customs and immigration. They all pretend it's official, but you are lucky to see a receipt, and though a dollar or two is not much, it adds up when you're scraping along. On the Guatemalan side the first thing I see is a battered desk by the roadside and a little fat man who needs a shave and wears something vaguely like a uniform. He says he is the Army, and I have to pay him a dollar.