Simon Gandolfi - Old Man on a Bike

I am facing out of town on a very busy six-lane highway. I don’t have the courage to pull into the outside lane to make a U-turn. I ride (crawl) a while behind buses that halt on every block. I take a right down a minor road, then left and left again to an intersection on the highway controlled by traffic lights. I take a left at the lights and am heading back into town. Is this comprehensible?

A six-lane highway is not the best learning terrain.

I stall a couple of times. Manic cab drivers and bus drivers thump their klaxons. I miss a red light. Bikers hurtle past in search of death (memories of the Dallas BMW boys). I crawl. I make third gear. I make fourth. For a short stretch – five metres – I make fifth. I’ve been riding bikes for years. I’ve ridden bikes in seriously weird places. So I was younger. What has changed? Modern bikes are easier to ride; brakes function; cubic capacity is harnessed more effectively.

I ride into the city centre. I ride around the city and all over the city. I even have to warn myself against overconfidence. I am in search of a solution to my baggage. I ride from bike shop to bike shop. I examine plastic panniers and leather panniers and leather bags coated with studs. All are both too big for the Honda and too expensive.

I park the bike in the hotel garage and walk two blocks to the fish market for a very late lunch. The market is on the harbour front. Stalls on the ground floor sell fruit, vegetables, fish and crustaceans. The restaurants are upstairs, with concrete worktops, gas rings, and plain plastic tables and chairs. Choose a dish from the menu and the cook screeches at a boy to run below and find the freshest relevant fish.

I order devilled prawns (I always order devilled prawns) and orange juice. The prawns are perfect. So is the fresh juice. I am overweight and this is my one meal of the day. I have cut down to fruit for breakfast and in the evening. But what fruit!

I walk a while, checking out luggage stores. I am looking for two small waterproof school satchels. Cheap is important. Later in the evening I visit the chess players. A four-piece band plays in the square: a singer taps a gourd with an ebony stick, and there are two guitarists and a drummer. United by years of practice, portly couples in late middle-age glide joyfully and with rhythm. A show-off forties accustomed to wealthier territory calls to the musicians and holds centre piste with a late-twenties blonde from the US. He wears a wedding band. She doesn’t. They argue between dances, she giving him a hard time. Summoned by his mobile, he takes the call around the corner away from the sound of music. His wife?

Plastic tables and chairs belong to the two cafés each side of the plaza. A row of wrought-iron benches on the pavement are city property. A young courting couple, dressed neatly, share a bottle of water on one of the benches. They dance on the pavement, shy with each other but gaining confidence. The girl’s high heels are new or nearly new. Seated again, she surreptitiously scratches her ankle. That is the staple of the tropics: there is always one mosquito.

Four young male Brits dressed in grubby shorts, T-shirts and designer stubble stumble down the pavement to a vacant table. Already a little drunk, they slouch in their chairs, legs spread, and order litre bottles of beer. They talk loudly among themselves and drink directly from the bottle. They aren’t pretty.

Veracruz, Sunday 14 May

Every bike has its foibles. There is a knack to starting a bike first thing in the morning. Think waking a teenager on a school day. I fail with the Honda and am helped by a young man down from the capital who has the same model of bike back home. I head out of the city on the freeway. This is easy. Confidence grows. I am on the inside lane. Weekend divers hurtle by. A deep hole gapes dead ahead. Swerve or emergency brake? I go for the swerve. A klaxon nearly blasts me off the road. I pull into the curb and calm myself.

The freeway leads through a rolling countryside of paddocks and clumps of big trees. I turn off the freeway towards Antigua – the site of the original Veracruz founded by Cortés. This is a toll road and bikes and cars pay the same charge: three and a half dollars seems exorbitant for twenty kilometres. Sunday drivers hurtle past. Nervous, I grip the throttle tightly. My hand cramps and I prise my thumb back. Both hands are cramping by the time I reach Antigua. I have ridden thirty kilometres. My backside hurts and my thighs ache. An entire continent separates me from Tierra del Fuego. I am too old. Failure seems certain.

Antigua lies a few kilometres inland on the banks of a muddy river. It is a village of cobbled streets, tall trees, a few ruins and a few houses destined for ruin. The roofless ruin of Cortés’ first house occupies one corner of the church square. Banyan roots throttle the walls; an unlikely cannon guards what was the entrance. Children gambol in the square on swings and a slide. The church is charming from the outside. The inside is wrecked by pallid statues of saints in coarse horsehair wigs. One saint lies on his back in a glass case. The sculptor has given him a huge beak of a nose and fake eyebrows. Moths or mice have chewed bits of his hair and his face is chipped and discoloured. A normal child would think vampire rather than spirituality. The final awfulness is the vases of dusty plastic flowers within spitting distance of flamboyant trees and frangipani.

Launches take Sunday trippers downriver to the beach. A fisherman lands his catch and I follow him to a restaurant on the riverbank. Twenty or so tables are arranged on a concrete floor beneath a thatched roof. The kitchen is indoors on the other side of a dirt road. I celebrate my mobility with a shrimp cocktail and one of the fisherman’s catch fried in crisp, wafer-thin cornflour batter and bathed in a green chilli sauce (à la Antigua). Add two large glasses of fresh orange juice and, at ten dollars, this is my most expensive meal since leaving Dallas. A three-piece marimba band sets up: two men play guitar, and a schoolboy plays drums and a gourd. One musician is probably a minor official in real life – blue shirt, pressed jeans, spectacles. The other has a girth problem undisguised by a flowered shirt. People in the US get fat all over. Mexicans appear to restrict fat to the belly. Why?

I am in Antigua because I intend following the route Cortés took in conquering Mexico. My bible is Hugh Thomas’ history of the conquest. Cortés led his army across the Cordillera. The head of the pass is 3200 metres above sea level. From the crest, the Spaniards looked down in amazement at a city far larger than any in Europe. I open the book on the table and try once again to marry the indigenous names on the map of the conquest to a present-day road map. The names have changed.

I glance up at the musicians. The boy on drums has a Tintin quiff and seems embarrassed to be here – replacement for an uncle who got drunk last night? The belly musician is a latent anarchist. Every few tunes he make a run for freedom, breaking out of the routine dadedaddada with a fast riff and intricate flourishes, before surrendering to the reality of a hot midday Sunday on a riverbank with an audience of six, only one of whom is listening – me.

I feel on familiar territory. I recognise the trees and the humidity and the scents and the people taking their time at doing whatever they are doing. I’ve never enjoyed cities much. In London, we lived out in Kew, which has a village atmosphere. In Cuba, we lived fifteen kilometres out from central Havana in Santa Fe. And our home in England now is the perfect village setting, with the garden backing on to two cricket fields and not a house visible beyond.

Veracruz is famous for the friendliness of it people. The musicians join my table between sets. I discover that the gourd the kid scratches and taps is called a guiro. The musicians study the place names on the old map and confess their ignorance.