Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

by Ted Simon

  'How do you say in English', he said in English, 'when you have too much in the night?'

  'Hangover,' I say.

  'Hamburger?'

  'No, hangover,' and I write it out for him: i HAVE A HANGOVER. T have a hamburger,' he reads, entertaining us both. I begin to like him a little, but I'm still pissed off about the dollar.

  'Can I have a receipt?' I ask, trying to make a nuisance of myself. He laughs happily.

  'Oh no, this is for me. So that tonight I can make another hamburger.' For once I don't mind losing my dollar. That's how I like my corruption - honest.

  There would be marvellous things to see and do in Guatemala, and I have planned to take advantage of them, but the excitement has evaporated. It is becoming terribly difficult for me now to get interested in anything except the route north. The Pan-American Highway stretches out ahead of me, unbroken, all the way to the USA and I feel myself being swept along it, with no time, no energy, for anything more. I see the fascination of these Central American countries but can't drive my imagination to take hold. Everything in me now cries 'Enough. It's time to stop. Give us a rest.'

  The bike is tired also, but that is only a figure of speech. I do not credit the bike with feelings. If it has a heart and soul of its own I have never found them. People I meet are often disappointed that the bike does not even have a name. They often suggest names ('The Bug' is top favourite), but none of them seem to do anything for the bike or for me. For me it remains a machine, and every attempt to turn it into something else strikes me as forced and silly.

  But it is not just a machine, not by any means, and I respect it totally for the very special thing it is. I know that all its idiosyncrasies, the things that make it quite different from any other motorcycle, are the result of what we have gone through together. The way I sit, my touch on the throttle, the speeds I travel at and the mistakes I make are what fashioned it into something uniquely connected with me. Like those intricately sculpted slabs of stone I have been looking at in Copan, my bike records the passage of time and events. Its surface is richly engraved by incidents of twenty months and twenty-five thousand miles. It bears major inscriptions from Benghazi, the Nile ferry, the desert, the Zoë G, a front wheel blow out in Brazil, a bad fall in Argentina, a ditch in Colombia, and almost every day has contributed some minor mark somewhere. It has been moulded by me, and to a large extent it has really become an extension of myself.

  When I talk to it, which I sometimes do in moments of concern or exasperation, I am of course talking to myself. And when I say it is tired, I mean that it reflects my own fatigue. For I am tired also of looking after it, and as we approach Los Angeles, which is as much home for the Triumph as it is for me, I spend less and less time fussing over it, telling myself that it can surely manage the last four thousand miles on its own. I stop worrying about little faults, and cure symptoms rather than looking for causes.

  I am spending less and less time on keeping up my own systems too. My clothes are getting ragged, my boots leak badly. Since Honduras the strap on my helmet has been broken, but I won't do anything about it. My goggles are either lost or scratched or without padding. My left hand glove has most of the leather missing on the palm, and two fingers are poking through. Only the flying jacket is actually improved, because in Buenos Aires it became so dilapidated that I had to sew a new skin over the sleeves and shoulders, equipped with glamorous-looking fur cuffs and collar.

  So the bike and I are both running down. In Costa Rica I was lucky to get a new rear chain sprocket, for the old one would certainly not have lasted through, but otherwise I am no longer the fussy owner I once was. As long as it goes, I'll not ask for more.

  In Guatemala, passing lake Atitlan, I ride into heavy rain. The highway is broad and empty, but my goggles are misting up and my visor is worn out. I am so used to being in motion on the bike, that it never occurs to me to stop if I can do something while I'm going.

  In the rain and the condensation, visibility is almost nil, and I'm trying to wipe the droplets off the inside of the lenses as I go along.

  Suddenly I realize that I have wandered into the middle of the road, and look up to find a huge truck bearing down on me out of the rainstorm. It is far too late for me to react, and it is entirely by chance that the truck misses me, by a hair's breadth. As I realize what I did, how close I came to being literally wiped out, obliterated, I feel that fearful rush of heat and cold sweat that makes the heart nearly burst, and feel immensely grateful for the warning while wishing I knew whom to be grateful to. A God would come in useful at times like that.

  I can count only two other times when I came so close to an end.

  I must be really tired at the back of my skull. I must be careful. I must never let that happen again.

  By the time I got to Mexico City one cylinder was smoking just as it had in Alexandria, but this time I was better prepared. I had two spare pistons with me, both oversize so that I could rebore if necessary. Was it necessary with only three thousand miles to go? This time though, a friendly Triumph agent was there with all the equipment and the will to help. It seemed silly not to take advantage. Friends of Bruno put me up, Mr. Cojuc, the agent, did the rebore, I put it together again in his workshop and if for no other reason, the close contact this gave me with Mexican workers made the experience worthwhile.

  The job itself unfortunately was only a partial success. As well as one cylinder getting badly scored, the exhaust valve was pitted. I had no spare valve and there was only just enough metal left to grind it in again. It should have been alright, but it wasn't.

  At Guanajuato, I began to suspect trouble, and as I pushed north it got worse. Those June days riding up through bone-dry Mexico were probably the hottest ever. Hotter than the Sudan, hotter even than the Argentine Chaco. My faced reddened in spite of all the weathering it had had, my forearms blistered, and the engine ran hotter and hotter.

  Somewhere after Culiacan I lost the flying jacket. It had finally become unwearable in the heat, and I had tied it to the red bag behind me, but the heat must have dulled my senses also, for it was not tied as it should have been. Somewhere among unnumbered kilometres of open road it blew away. I was utterly distraught when I found out, perhaps abnormally so. I searched the road for an age, finding no sign of it, and the searching intensified my grief until I had to stop looking because I could bear it no longer. It had become something of an extraordinary significance to me, that jacket, closely connected as it was to the love I had left behind me, and losing it broke an important link with the past. For the first time I felt that I had gone too far ever to go back to what I had been before, and I began to understand just how much unconscious effort I had been putting into keeping my connections with the past alive. It left a bleak and empty space.

  Beyond Navojoa I realized that a valve was burning out. The left cylinder was misfiring constantly, power was dropping off, fuel consumption going up. Eventually I found that by riding with the choke fully in at fifty miles an hour I could still get reasonable power. At other speeds it was pretty bad, and of course it was not going to get any better. I was afraid that the bike might soon become undrivable, and as I came closer to the USA it felt as though some malign fate was determined to keep me south of the border.

  I last touched the coast at Guyamas, and swam in the ocean there knowing that I would not see the Pacific again until Los Angeles. That southern Pacific coast had come to mean a great deal to me. Ever since I first came to it in the south of Chile, at the lovely stretch round Puca-trihue, I was powerfully drawn to it, and my mind ranged over all the memories of sunsets and surf, salt and seaweed, frigate birds, pelicans and seagulls. There were those same pelicans at Guyamas plunging into the waves around me, wearing the same self-satisfied look on their faces. In the Gold Museum at Bogota there had been a gold necklace with a row of birds delicately fashioned from wire, and I had been delighted to recognize them as 'my' pelicans, for some ancient Inca craftsman had noticed in them that
same happy complacency.

  Inland from Guyamas the sun was even hotter, and the land was as arid and featureless as desert. Long-distance buses roared by at high speeds, too close for comfort, swinging their tail ends in an alarming way. One which had cut in on me ruthlessly stopped further up the road. I was able to overtake it before it had picked up speed again, and I rode up alongside the driver's seat. He looked down at me with a contemptuous grin and I raised my hand to point it at his head like a pistol, and then I shot him. His whole body jerked up as though struck by a bullet and he looked very angry, but it was the only time I ever got satisfaction.

  Buses and lorries all threw out quantities of unburnt diesel from their exhaust systems because of a common superstition that the extra fuel would get them there faster. In the still hot air the black smoke hovered over the highway like a long coil of barbed wire, and riding through it my face and clothes became black with oily droplets. I fiddled frequently at the roadside, trying to get better performance from the engine, and lost several tools through carelessness in the heat. It was obvious to me that I was letting myself get close to my limits.

  Those last days in Mexico were like the beginning of the journey in reverse. Then the more I called on my resources, the more they multiplied. Now the more effort I spared myself, the more tired I became. As I left Guyamas at lunchtime for Hermosillo, I knew I would probably cross the border the following day, but I became ridiculously fearful that I might not make it. It was as though all the travelling I had done had taught me nothing.

  On that last day in Latin America, between Hermosillo and Nogales, I could not help noticing how much more prosperous the people were. Prices in Hermosillo had been sky high. There was nobody I would even have called a peasant, let alone the ragged children and beggars I had been used to seeing for most of the last thirteen months. Bars and restaurants were painted and clean, nobody seemed to spit any more, there were no old wrecks on the road, no wandering animals. Men wore boots and cowboy hats, and clean pressed shirts and even looked like Americans. I thought that by the time I crossed the border it might be hard to tell the difference between Mexico and the USA.

  So when I did get to Nogales the shock was stupefying. At the end of this normal, prosperous Mexican street stood an edifice in glass and concrete that seemed to my eyes so grandiose, so unnecessarily clean and modern and bloated that I felt I must be stepping out of the Middle Ages into the year 2001. Indeed I could not imagine that ordinary people would stand a chance of getting through. I prepared myself for a very rough time. US border officials are not famous for their cordial treatment of ragged travellers. With my last remaining pesos I bought a giant paper cup of Orange Crush and studied the ramparts wondering where to attack them.

  There are no outgoing formalities at all, as though Mexico had simply given up an unequal contest. I rolled warily into one of the customs bays. An agent came out with a marble chin, trousers with honed creases and hair like moulded plastic. I expected him to empty the petrol tank and drill out the crankshaft looking for cocaine or peyote. He dangled one hand loosely into one of my side boxes without even looking.

  'Okay,' he said.

  What does he mean, okay?

  He grinned. That's okay. Immigration's over there. Glad to see you.' Amazing. »

  The Immigration man smiled at me too. I was impressed. 'What can I do for you?' he said.

  'You can let me into your fair country,' I said. I hadn't meant to put it that way. It just came out.

  'That's good to hear,' he said. 'We don't hear that much these days. How long would you like to stay?'

  'How long can I have?' T asked you first.'

  'Well, three months should be fine.' 'Okay.'

  I really didn't mean to stay anything like that long.

  He punched me into his computer terminal and it turned out that for once I was not a prohibited person. So that was that, and I was in the United States.

  Going to the United States from Latin America is like going to a movie, the kind they like to call a Major Motion Picture.

  I ride along the freeway waiting for the titles to show. All the well-known images pop up: billboards, front lawns with mail boxes on sticks, cowboy hats and blondes driving pick-ups. I don't know the plot, but it's bound to be a richly satisfying and professional job. The realism is extraordinary, but I can't believe it's real because everything looks so terribly relevant. All the dirty corners of life that I have got so used to south of the border have been swept clean.

  Another thing. There is this incredible sense of ease. The moment I crossed the border I felt safe. Why? I didn't feel unsafe before. Not at all. I think the explanation is that here I don't even need to think about it. I can afford to stop thinking. Look at the road surface, for example. It is perfect. Not just this bit, but the next bit too, and all the way to Los Angeles. I can count on it. I don't have to worry that round the corner it will turn suddenly to dirt, or drop me into a pothole. I can almost afford to take my eyes off the road; only habit keeps them there, a useful habit I shall need again later.

  And everyone speaks my language. I don't have to think about making myself understood. 'What's the best way to LA? Is it through Tucson?' 'That's right.' So easy!

  Then there's so much fat around. Everyone is prosperous, though they might not know it, with a house and a refrigerator. There isn't anyone ·who couldn't afford to help me if they wanted to, and they would want to, I know it, because their minds can grasp what I am. Also I am not black or crippled or ugly, and I have this cute English accent.

  In Mexico the grass was brown, but in Arizona it's green because it is watered. It must be. Surely God would not be so discriminating. The air is clean. Would you believe it? Not a wisp of exhaust do I see from any car, truck or bus. That is a miracle in itself. And here, just where I want it, is a camp site. Rio Rica; a broad grassy paddock under a clear dry sky. Clean lavatories, showers, washing machines, a shop. Cold beer. 'Five dollars.'

  'That's too much, I'm afraid.'

  'Oh. Okay. Sure. We'll only charge you two dollars.'

  I never doubted it. I sling my hammock between two trees. Some kids come over, easy, cool, with beer. They talk to me; I don't have to make it happen. We all go off to spend the evening at a girl's house in town, eating sandwiches, listening to rock, talking. One of the kids was in Vietnam. I hear the whole story in three sentences, and he isn't even talking about the war. In fact the words don't say much, but the meaning comes through like a meeting in space. I'm so tuned in to body language and inflections that I hardly need words, but having the words too is so relaxing.

  It goes on like that, through Tucson and Phoenix next day. Even the bike has relaxed and runs better instead of worse. I see on my Esso map that there's a long stretch of road from Phoenix to Blythe with no town marked on it, but I am so laid back that I don't think to wonder why. Before I know it I'm in the middle of another desert, totally unexpected, hotter even than Mexico, with a cross wind blowing sand up my nose.

  Well, that makes for a better movie, but it doesn't prick the bubble of credibility because I'm still on a four-lane highway with plenty of gas in my tank and, sure enough, happily placed in the middle of the desert, is the big, green Colorado River, and the KOA camp site with all the usual facilities and proud mobile home owners are lining up the cold cans of Coors beer just for adventurous chaps like me.

  Next day I battle my way against an even heavier head wind. The valve trouble is so bad now that I'm down at times to twenty miles an hour, and in real trouble with the big container trucks when they come past. The wind sandblasts my arms and nose and makes me really quite tired, but as an ordeal it is still completely fictional because, whatever happens inside the borders of this country, you're never more than a half-hour helicopter flip from the ultimate in medical technology.

  The thing could not have been scripted better. Only two hundred miles away are Hollywood and the Triumph offices. Without any simulation or trickery whatsoever, I shall be
able to arrive in the world's most elaborate city as though I had just come out of the Atbara Desert.

  I have given some thought to what I would like to happen next. I see marching bands, majorettes, a great arena of people rising spontaneously, irresistibly to their feet, tears streaming down their cheeks; Governor Brown, arm outstretched, apologizing for the President's absence; my own succinct keynote speech reminding the US of her responsibilities to

  her poorer neighbours followed by rapturous applause and an intimate dinner with the Secretary of State.

  This is beyond the resources of the Triumph company to arrange on the spur of the moment. I turn up at their rather plush offices on the edge of Los Angeles like a bashful Battle of Britain pilot missing presumed dead.

  'Holy cow,' they say. 'It's Ted Simon,' and they all shake my hand and bring me a beer.

  I looked around Triumph's prosperous offices with an optimistic eye, anticipating some sort of unspecified 'good time'. Sure I wanted a beer, and shower and a chance to change my clothes and even to rest for a bit, but what I really wanted was company, nice, enthusiastic, appreciative company. As a Hero I naturally assumed that people would be tumbling over themselves to accompany me. All the keen athletic executives in the front office were extremely cordial. All the pretty girls at their stylish mahogany veneer desks smiled very nicely at me, but as the minutes passed my bright eye glazed over. I wasn't making contact. In spite of all the niceness I knew they couldn't really grasp who or what I was, and maybe, even, they were too preoccupied with other matters to care.