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Mexico
sanctioning the All Blacks’ tour of apartheid South Africa earlier in the year had continuing ramifications. In addition to 25 African nations boycotting the Olympic Games in Montreal, it seems others are not issuing travel or work documentation to Kiwis. We’d known this was a problem when Mark Te Tau from my team had scored a highly-paid job in Saudi because of his specialist farming background in NZ. Thrilled with what was unfolding for him, he’d chosen the colour of the new Triumph Stag he was going to buy. Sadly, the visa never came through and when we had left London he was still waiting … and still dreaming of the sleek sports car.
Life was good, the weather hot, the road-side food cheap and nourishing. The sudden exposure to a hot sun was playing havoc with my exposed nose. With the use of open-face helmets, we were getting hit with both wind and sun. My snout soon blistered and peeled. Of course, this left it tender, raw and ready for the process to start again. Our kit didn't include any unguents or salves to preclude or alleviate this. It was presumed that I would harden up sooner or later. The harmful effects of the sun weren’t known to us at the time … we were young and ignorant of many things. The language barrier was a minor one as we always managed to find our way and locate fuel and food. It would have been nice to have a Spanish dictionary or phrase-book but locating one and spending money on it didn’t seem a priority. Things were good the way they were, and what you don’t know sometimes can be a benefit. One night we had occasion to have to put the tent up very close to the road-side, in full view of anyone passing along the way. At some stage in the night, we hear voices outside the tent, not threatening voices, just curious ones. We respond to their salutations best we can, but it is obvious there is a disconnect. A voice calls “Muy peligrosa, muy peligrosa!” That sounds pretty good to us, so we respond “Muy peligrosa” a couple of times and ultimately they pass on and we resettle, happy with our meaningful interface.
A few days later we are riding in the mountains and on several occasions encounter signage before sharp downhill bends which also use the word peligrosa. It comes to us slowly that our night-time visitors had been telling us that where we were camped was ‘Very Dangerous!’
For motorcyclists the perfect ride is infrequent — when the temperature is just right, the road surface is good, the traffic minimal, the radii of the bends matched to the bike you are riding etc. When this happens it is nirvana. For Penelope and I, we hit this heightened state on our last day before Mexico City. Mexico City sits
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no one said it would be easy
on a high plateau at 8,000 ft and to get there from the north you leave the low-lands and sidle along the slopes for several hours, only slowly climbing. It was a perfect day which morphed into the perfect ride with no traffic slowing us and Penelope performing at her finest. We danced our way along, flopping to the left, and flopping to the right in a rhythmic sequence of moves. It was wonderful and seemingly endless. Soon we had romped away from the others, not caring … bound up in the ecstasy of the moment. If something happened to one of them and I had to go back … well, how wonderful would that be! In fact, back behind me, Roly suffered the scary sight of Lawrie sweeping past him onto the wrong side of the road, narrowly missing an oncoming small truck. Lozza had got quite proficient at riding … but there hadn't been many corners up to this point, and he had just frozen mid-bend. Not for the last time was the omnipotent one above kind to us.
Mexico City was a bit of a nightmare, the camp expensive and barren, the air pollution as memorable as noted by others … and there was no mail. We did a side trip out to Teotihuacan, the City of the Gods, which we were very impressed with. Here were pre-Aztec pyramids to rival those of the ancient Egyptians. This had been the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas with possibly 125,000 residents, which would have made it the sixth-largest city in its epoch. Often attributed to the Toltecs, the construction still contains many mysteries and for me rivalled the old-world magnificence of Ephesus and Persepolis visited on the ‘Ernie’ ride. Even still being fit from rugby and the continued exercise, walking around the vast plazas and concourses was debilitating in the thin air.
Roly had decided that the oil consumption of the Panthers needed to be addressed and to that end, we managed, with much sign-language and hand waving to obtain correct size piston rings for both Penelope and Samantha. These were for a Dodge truck but deemed fit-for-purpose and fitted. Only time would tell if they made a difference.
We still had a few days up our sleeves before the 15th Jan, so decided to relocate to the Pacific Coast at Acapulco, to rest and recreate. This was another magnificent day’s ride as it was all downhill to the coast. The road down twisted and turned, with spectacular drops ensuring that we kept the focus on the riding rather than the views. Later we would read in an English-language publication that recently there had been an appalling bus accident on this very road. Something like 45 people had perished, with only one survivor. When asked what was the driver doing at the time
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Mexico
of the accident he responded: “He was peeling an orange!”. The girls had been pretty enfeebled in the rarefied air up on the plateau so appreciated the move.
I’d had a day in Acapulco on my way to Europe so knew it as a resort town famous for the rock diving. I’d thought it all a bit lame, especially as Elvis wasn’t there doing the high dive. We avoided the township all together and rode a little north to a beach area where it seemed like a small grouping of houses had been started, then abandoned … and that was exactly what it was. A small family (Mum, Dad and three wee ones) indicated it was fine for us to set up in a roof-less structure. We loved the way that as we moved in, they sent over the six-year-old boy with a machete almost his size to trim away a few large weeds. Quickly they became our surrogate family, and the mum was engaged to provide cooked evening meals for us. Of course, that is a winner all round, as they got hard-cash and we got tortillas with frijoles and occasionally eggs. They’d put a thatched roof on their dwelling making it a bit more four-seasonal than ours. This was a great place to while away the days. Roly claimed his best ever sun-tan after only four days and Lawrie and I ran the beach as well as spending endless hours diving in and out of the pounding surf. It was pretty idyllic. Oranges and coconuts completed our diet.
Our Mexican family
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no one said it would be easy
We finally left our little patch of paradise and our nueva familia with a little sadness, but I was pretty excited as the looming rendezvous at the Central Post Office on 15th January was something I had been hanging out for … with all the expectations of the besotted. So we moved back to the barren camp in Mexico City, dropping the carburettor needles a notch to lean the engines off a little so as to run a bit better at altitude.
It was a shattering disappointment to find no welcoming arms on the 15th , nor any mail. A few days later I write home recording ‘We haven’t found Anne and don’t know where Steph is or when she is coming. Learnt yesterday that she’s in Saudi Arabia … so she’s on the way, but we have no address for her. Mo has gone to Canada for three weeks so we can’t ring her to find out. Isn’t life complicated?’ Meanwhile, we had been struck down by our first bout of ‘Montezuma's revenge'. Lawrie had both ends going … the full-Monty, so to speak, whilst I was spared the vomiting. Roly seems unscathed and a little bemused by it all. In the camp, we've been doing a lot of communal cooking with other campers and we'll take liberties and blame some Aussies for our temporary demise. We've been pretty productive and got the requisite jabs for the areas we are heading, and also procured malaria pills. We've decided to head off to the Gulf of Mexico to find a beach to lie about on, while we wait for news of Steph.
Meanwhile, an ocean or two away Steph has got her visa and made it to Saudi Arabia. In a letter to my parents on the 14th Jan, she pours her heart out –
‘Tomorrow is Jan 15, the day I was originally due to meet Des