Four wheels good, two wheels better

Biking the Americas – with engine, and without. Two great travel books 

There’s something seductive about travelling on two wheels. You are smaller, more mobile, more maneuverable – somehow more free.  I have always loved bicycles. Today, I rarely get further than the six-mile ride round Central Park. But I remember beautiful day rides through Norfolk when I lived there 10 years or so ago. I also remember, with wonder, snaking 4,000ft down a Himalayan pass at dusk on an Indian racing bike with part-time brakes. And going right back, at 15, I rode with a friend from the English Midlands across into Wales and up into Snowdonia. One part of that journey stands out, 44 years later – a very long day's ride from Cleobury Mortimer across the Marches towards the Welsh border, through Shropshire, covering mile after mile of single-track road between high hedges, into steep valleys and over high hills, past isolated farmhouses with collies that lazed in the road and woke and chased you as you passed, barking madly; all with grey sky and green country, the typical soft summer English morning.

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But I’ve never done what David Kroodsma did. One day in late 2005 the young Californian climate researcher got on his bike in the morning, as usual. But instead of turning right to go to work, he turned left to ride to Tierra del Fuego. He had a double motive. He was going to have one hell of a ride. And he planned to spread awareness of climate change as he went. The resulting book, The Bicycle Diaries: My 21,000-Mile Ride for the Climate, is one of my reads of the year so far.

I found it hard to get into this book at first. It seemed to take Kroodsma a long time to get going; there was too much about his motivations. The book should have started when he crossed the border. The backstory could have been dealt with in a paragraph or two, or worked into the story later. For God’s sake, Dave, get on your bike already. I was also irritated (unreasonably, perhaps) at the amount of hi-tech kit he acquired for the journey. “I also had a small suite of electronics: a laptop (which I would mail to a friend once I reached Mexico), a PalmPilot with tiny folding keyboard (to replace the laptop south of the border), an iPod for music and to back up photos, extra memory cards, a host of chargers and cables, and a small tripod for my camera. I also brought a small electric razor powered by rechargeable AA batteries...” Forget it, Dave. It’ll all get nicked.

But then Kroodsma crosses the border into Mexico, and the story takes off. As he works his way down Baja California, the landscape unfolds, and he meets the people. As the journey gets interesting, so does Kroodsma. He’s a resourceful traveller, and a good guest. By the time he gets to Mexico City, The Bicycle Diaries has become an engaging read.  

The point at which I decided this was not just a good book, but a very good one, came when Kroodsma passed through a town called Caucasia in Colombia. There’s nothing remarkable about the place; he just somehow brings it very much alive. This feeling of riding with Kroodsma gets stronger as he pedals over the northern Andes and into Venezuela, and southward into Brazil. Along the way there are fishermen, oil people, teachers, drunks and more. Then he makes a remarkable voyage with his bike up the Amazon to Peru, and has an even more extraordinary trip across the high cordillera to the Pacific coast. The man is a true adventurer. Woven into the narrative are Kroodsma’s thoughts on the climate. This could indeed have been earnest and preachy, but Kroodsma has a light touch, and ties his remarks to the ecosystem he is passing through – coastal wetlands, agriculture, the high glaciers that provide water for Peru’s cities. It isn’t heavy; it’s very interesting, and is also well-referenced.

Kroodsma doesn’t quite have the magic touch of someone like Ted Simon or Eric Newby. But he is a good solid writer, and there is a lot to enjoy. There are also some great photos, all presented at the point in the narrative when they were taken (he stays with a family; their picture’s on the same page). Moreover I felt a growing sympathy for Kroodsma himself. Besides being culturally sensitive, he’s also very thoughtful. The climate evangelism ebbs away as he feels more and more that the people he is meeting are threatened by pollution that his country, not theirs, is causing. Meeting a Brazilian researcher in Manaus, he is told: “It’s like, when you are in an elevator with a bunch of people, and one person just keeps on farting. That person needs to change what he eats.” I laughed, at first not sure how to respond. “You guys are farting too,” I said. “Yeah, but not nearly as much!” Kroodsma admits that since the USA pollutes more than all Latin America put together, he should perhaps continue his project there. He has since done just that, becoming a leading figure behind the Climate Ride movement.

I liked this book. It’s a good travelogue, but also a vivid description of what may happen to a lot of places, and people, as the climate warms. Combining the two in this way might not have worked, but it does. It took a few pages to get into this book – but I am very glad I stuck with it.

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Kroodsma pedalled. But motorbikes can be great for this sort of journey too, as Lois Pryce shows in her book Lois on the Loose: One Woman, One Motorcycle, 20,000 Miles Across the Americas. She begins with a quote from Robert M. Pirsig’s famous 1970s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which he says that travelling by car is like watching a movie, but riding a motorbike is like being in one. It was a round-the-world ride on a Triumph Tiger, again in the 1970s, that gave rise to one of the greatest travel books of all time, Ted Simon’s Jupiter’s Travels.

Near Wanka, 1994

I gave up riding a motorbike after an accident in London in 1980, but can still see the attraction. I still like to sit on the pillion and in 1994 I rode across Bhutan with a friend on his little trail bike; I am still not sure how we got over 12,000ft passes on that thing, often with hangovers (we called on many friends along the way). But we only dropped the bike once, on a dirt road at twilight, when my friend took a tight hairpin bend too slowly after 12 hours on the road. We were sent sprawling, happily unhurt, near a village that rejoiced in the name of Wanka.

I remembered this while reading Lois on the Loose;  I think Lois Pryce would have been splendid company. In 2003, in her late 20s, she was working for the BBC in London (but in telemarketing, not a glamorous TV job). Bored nearly to tears, she found solace in motorbikes. Sloping slothfully back to work after a holiday in the saddle, she decides she has had enough of her cubicle, her dull job, and her management-speak boss. Things reach a climax when she hears him moaning on the phone that his new toilet seat hasn’t been delivered.  So she decides to quit and ride from Anchorage to Ushaia. As you do.

It’s not the safest journey, especially on your own, but Pryce reassures herself by looking at the State Department’s advice for US travellers to the UK. This assures her that she should by now have been robbed by a bogus taxi driver, mugged, date-raped, blown up by the IRA or all of the above. “I ...wondered if there really was any need to motorcycle across Colombia or the Congo when there was clearly so much action that I was missing out on here, on my very own doorstep,” she writes. In the late winter of 2003 she ends up in Anchorage. In Alaska she finds there are far more men than women – but as a local woman warns her, one must choose carefully (“the odds are good,” she explains, “but the goods are odd”). Still, she doesn’t plan to stick around. Meanwhile it’s snowing, she speaks no Spanish and she has 20,000 miles to go.

Pryce presents herself as a bit naive, and sometimes she does seem that way (she knows no Spanish; in Canada she is booked for having no insurance). Yet in other ways she’s well-prepared. She knows her big old Brit bike isn’t right for the journey and gets a secondhand single-cylinder 223cc Yamaha trail bike. It’s chosen carefully; she needs to pick it up on her own if she drops it. She clearly knows her way around the bike and does most of her own maintenance and repairs (of which there are plenty) on the trip. She’s also tough, camping out in the Yukon, where it is still snowing. There are bears. In Vancouver her bike winds up in the pound. In Los Angeles she winds up in a weird strip club. She keeps going. Unlike Kroodsma, who is likeable but a little serious, Pryce keeps laughing and keeps you laughing with her. By the time she crosses the Mexican border, I liked her a lot, and I wanted her to reach the bottom of the world.

To find out whether she does, you’ll have to read the book. It does have its darker moments. In Bolivia a fellow-rider crashes very badly; Pryce is appalled, and does everything she can to help. In Guatemala and Nicaragua she is the target of attempted scams. In Colombia she’s driven back into her hotel by predatory males. On two occasions she suffers sudden, violent stomach upsets that are graphically described; it’s funny, but it clearly wasn’t at the time. But there are also some very high points – the mountains of Canada and Ecuador, especially; the desert of Baja California; and warm encounters with other bikers along the way. In Quito she gets roped in to the Ecuadorian celebration for the 100th anniversary of Harley-Davidson, is mildly depressed by an encounter with Western backpackers and then gobsmacked by the Andes. In Peru the frontier guards give her water-melon, which she accidentally drops down her cleavage.

Lois on the Loose isn’t really a classic travel book as such. If you’re looking for shrewd observations on the countries, deep, meaningful cultural encounters, etc., you won’t find them here. In many places, she doesn’t even seem to have met the locals much. If you are expecting Colin Thubron or Paul Theroux, you may be disappointed. But I wasn’t. This is just a good yarn by a young woman having fun on the road. Pryce isn’t the solemn, committed type, and she’s making her trip, not a travel writer’s. In fact I wonder if she had a book in mind at all when she went.  

Pryce has been on the road since, riding from London to Cape Town – a journey she’s recounted in another book, Red Tape & White Knuckles. More recently she’s been riding in Iran. So far as I know she hasn’t made it to Wanka yet. But, you know, I rather think she will.

David Kroodsma’s latest adventures can be followed at http://rideforclimate.com/blog/ and Lois Pryce’s at http://www.loisontheloose.com/

Follow Mike Robbins on Twitter (mikerobbins19), on Facebook or on Goodreads

Mike Robbins's collection of travel writing, The Nine Horizons, was published in 2014 and is available as a paperback, as a Kindle download and in other eBook formats.

The lost manuscript of Silvia Guzmán

Silvia’s country falls apart after a coup. She flees to London. Picked up by the police, she is dumped for weeks in a bed-and-breakfast with a crazy landlady, then rescued by cold intellectuals. She finds she is a nuisance to one side and a cause to the other, with no dreams, family or opinions of her own. Until she meets another, earlier, refugee; and then she has a surprise for everyone.

The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzmán is a story of flight, loss and the pain of exile. But it is also a sideways look at liberal London. The author explains how it got written – and, eventually, published.

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AT THE beginning of 1991 I travelled to Ecuador to study Spanish and to explore the country. For three months I studied, travelled, made friends, drank cheap beer and ate very well. I decided to stay until my money ran out.

One morning in April 1991 I sat in a pavement cafe in the capital, Quito, reading a newspaper story about four nuns who had been stopped at the airport while trying to board an Iberia flight to Madrid. Suspicions had been aroused because one of them was pregnant. Outraged, the nuns threatened to report the customs officers to their bishop. The Ecuadorians searched them anyway. The ‘baby bulge’ was 10kg of cocaine. They weren’t nuns; they were Colombian couriers.

Ecuadorian friends found the story funny. In general, though, they were deeply concerned that drug-smuggling activities in Peru and Colombia were spilling over their borders. It seemed inevitable that this would at least affect their way of life. For example, controls on people’s movements had been reintroduced. Travelling in the remote jungle border province of Morona-Santiago, we had our bags minutely checked by the military; even shaving tackle was examined. In the north, taking a bus down the main Pan-American highway, which comes from the Colombian border at Tulcán, we were herded off along with the other passengers by the Policia de la Migración Nacional, and no-one was ignored. Especially the Colombians. A few weeks later a friend on the same bus saw three Colombian passengers caught in a routine search with pockets full of cocaine. This had nothing to do with the traditional use of coca to dull the appetite; this was the drug economy. More than one Ecuadorian told me that they regarded this as a threat both to their stability, and to democracy.

*** 

At the end of April my money did run out and I flew home, travelling with an Irish photographer; he proved most congenial. We enjoyed bibulous transfers in four airports, but eventually I found myself back in London, hung over, broke and at a loose end. I had plenty of time to think. It seemed a good time to write something.

I was living in in a friend’s house in Brixton, just south of the city centre; it was an area in which many West Indian newcomers had settled in the 1950s and 1960s. Some had done well. Others had not. Relations between the police and young people were poor, and there had been riots in 1981 and 1985. But our part of Brixton, and adjoining Stockwell, was attractive, with tree-lined streets of tall Victorian terraces. The population was mixed – working Londoners who had been there forever, and the more prosperous of the West Indians. There was also a growing population of young, upwardly mobile media and other professionals, who thought its multi-ethnic makeup made it a fashionable place to live. They also thought a house there was a good investment. (They were right.)

I worked in my bedroom, a small but comfortable room at the top of the house, with a view over the neighbour’s gardens. There was a rickety card table covered with a bright yellow plastic sheet. I put it beside the window, which seemed to be always open; memory plays tricks, yet I remember the summer of 1991 as a warm one in London. I had a portable electric typewriter that I had bought the previous year when still in gainful employment. Now and then I wrote the odd job application. Mainly, I wrote The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzmán.

Briefly, and without revealing too much, the plot is as follows. A young woman is forced to leave her family after a violent drug-fuelled coup in South America, and seeks asylum in London. She does not get a warm welcome, being put in a bed-and-breakifast with a rapacious and unpleasant landlady. Then she is rescued by a trendy couple in South London.  The rescue is a mixed blessing. Silvia has become a nuisance to one side, and a cause and useful tool to the other. Still in shock, she can do little about it. But when she meets another, earlier refugee, that starts to change; and in the end she has a surprise for everybody.

The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzmán is not really about drugs, or politics, or asylum-seekers. It’s about Silvia Guzmán. Novels are not the place for lectures. Trim your plot and your characters to make a point, and you will write crap. Orwell, that most political of writers, understood this as well as anyone, and put it with some force in his 1940 essay, Inside the Whale. If a novel does make the reader think about their world, it is because it paints it well. Since that is what makes a good novel anyway, to attempt more is superfluous. 

In any case, I had great fun writing the book, not least because there is a sub-plot that includes a book within a book, written by one of the main protagonists. I can’t remember where I got that idea, but it was probably from Anthony Burgess’s The End of the World News, which I read around then; it is a delightful and unusual novel that uses this technique to great effect. It lets you write two completely different books at once, and stops you getting too bored with either. It also lets you offer the reader two different narratives. In this case, the book-within-a-book is a complete contrast to the main narrative, being of the sex-and-shopping genre. I may try that again one day.

*** *** ***

I did try to publish Silvia Guzmán, and there was some interest from publishers, but no-one took it. Besides, what I really needed was a job. Later that year, in a pub, I was tipped off about an interesting job producing publications in Thimphu, Bhutan – a country where Westerners could not easily go. I spent nearly three years there, and explored the region as well, travelling to Calcutta, Sikkim, and Nepal as well as within Bhutan. The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzmán was forgotten. I threw out all my old manuscripts in 2003 when my parents' house had to be sold. So far as I knew, there was no surviving copy; the book had never existed in digital form.

In August 2013 I was searching for some old negatives in belongings that I had at a friend’s house in England (I now work in New York). I found a yellow foolscap folder, dusty and discoloured. When I opened it, a comic-book in Spanish fell out, and I realised the folder must have something to do with my long-ago journey to South America.

What fell out next was a sheaf of publishers’ letters. “What you have here,” said one, “is a good, heartfelt novel, told from a convincing perspective and with an important story to relate ...Your dialogue is good, convincing, very readable ...and in general you’ve written a very good novel.” Another commented that I had “chosen a very emotive topic and ...tackle important issues with great understanding.” Another said it was “a very decent piece of work, sympathetically done”, while another called the writing “assured and intelligent”.  But none made an offer. There was a recession and they could not be sure it would sell. (Looking back, I am sure one or two publishers did not like the book; I seem to remember that one was almost abusive. But then, if something is liked by everyone, it is no good.)

Beneath the letters, unseen for 22 years, was the book.

Reading it, I was struck by how little I would change today. So I have changed nothing at all. The only superficial sign of the book’s age is that there are no mobile phones (we did have them in 1991, but they were large analogue devices and were still mostly used in cars). In the broader world, drug trafficking now affects Mexico more than Colombia, but it remains a source of instability, and of terrible violence. As someone who has had many good friends from Mexico, I feel as strongly about this as I ever did. As for the treatment of asylum seekers, this is no better – in fact it is worse. Instead of a dodgy bed-and-breakfast, Silvia would likely find herself in somewhere like the notorious Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal centre north of London, where there have been fire, hunger strikes, and sinister allegations of sexual violence and intimidation.

But in a way that is not the point. The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzmán is about Silvia. I am sorry I have kept her prisoner so long; she is free now, and I hope you will enjoy meeting her at last.

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From reader reviews of The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzmán

“This is a charming and insightful book, of considerable relevance to the present day furore that is permeating British society and media in relation to asylum seekers and immigrants, and I can recommend it very highly.”

“I really enjoyed this book and found the writing generally unsensational but vivid and gripping from the beginning. Mike Robbins ...does not shy away from describing graphic and unpleasant incidents, but does it in a fashion that slowly pulls in the reader until they find themselves suddenly hooked and wanting to know more.”

“The reality is that refugees are refugees for a reason – and these reasons frequently have their origin in the habits and behaviours of those of us in “developed” countries. Robbins doesn’t hesitate to point this out.”

“I am reminded of the writing of Graham Greene when I think of this narrative and I hope that Mr Robbins continues to put his undoubted past experiences to good effect in future similar works of fiction.”

“There is much to enjoy here - the insightful descriptions of the fascinating mass of contradictions and beauty that is S America; the emptiness of London's fashionable moneyed liberalism; the humour of the fairly mediocre and formulaic "sex and shopping"novel within the novel; the parallel world lived in by Britain's refugees - be they from overseas or from failed families around our country.”

“This is a thought-provoking tale where the author does not shy away from shocking scenes and sensitive themes. How he portrays them though is by cleverly allowing the reader to reach their own conclusions. I also particularly enjoyed the vivid atmospheres that the author creates with his expansive use of colours, light and sounds, so that I felt exactly in that place and time with Silvia. ...I wasn't expecting to feel so emotional at the end. I admit to having a tear in my eye. For Silvia.”

The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzmán (Third Rail) is available as a paperback (ISBN 978-0-9914374-0-5, $16.99 USA, or £10.07 UK) or as an eBook in all formats, including Amazon Kindle (ISBN 978-0-9914374-2-9, $2.99 USA, or £1.85 UK). Enquiries (including requests for review copies) should be sent to thirdrailbooks@gmail.com.

 Follow Mike Robbins on Twitter (mikerobbins19), on Facebook or on Goodreads