Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road

by Neil Peart

  From the map (that lying Mexican map!), I decided that Zihuatanejo to Oaxaca ought to be “doable,” so off I went. The first obstacle was our old nemesis, Acapulco; if there was a way around it, I sure couldn’t find it, and no helpful sign appeared to guide me (surprise, surprise), so right through miles of busy, sweltering, smoky, dusty, and frustrating Pie de la Cuesta, “downtown” Acapulco and out along the coast by Las Brisas, the “pink palace.” As I noted in my journal about Acapulco, “I’m really getting to hate that place!” Though I can’t deny there’s lots of Mexico in it — just none of the good parts.

  Then I had to stop for at least four roadblocks today, mostly army, but one with the notoriously corrupt “Judiciales.” I don’t remember any last time, do you? Result of Zapatistas, or rising crime from failed economy? Pressure from the U.S. to appear to combat illegal immigration and drugs? Or make-work project for the military, to keep them out of the “coup” business? Could be.

  Anyway, with all that, it was already about 3:00 before I turned off into the mountains, taking a different road than we did, but I still thought I might make it by, say, 7:00. Fool that I am. Washed-out and potholed, endless second- and third-gear twists and turns with patches of loose gravel, villages with thousands of topes [speedbumps], often unmarked, trucks and buses to get around, dodging pigs, dogs, chickens, cows, horses, and burros. All the good stuff.

  And soon, it started to get dark . . .

  Oh man, was I freaking! The first time on this whole long journey I’ve travelled at night, and of all places: in the mountains of Oaxaca. In addition to the obvious hazards to life and limb, apparently the “bandido” threat is very active these days on the roads of Oaxaca, even along the coast, and Lonely Planet warns, “the best defence is not to travel at night.” But I didn’t know what else to do; there wasn’t a Best Western anywhere to be seen, and camping at the roadside didn’t seem a particularly clever option either. Being in such a weakened state anyway, regarding internal strength and resilience, I was nearly in tears trying to face up to this crisis. Nothing to do but ride onward, though slowly, carefully, and fearfully.

  It was 9:30 before I made it to the Camino Real Hotel in Oaxaca, 918 kilometres [574 miles] and 14 hours from Zihuatanejo. I guess you could call that “doable.” Saw one hotel, on the dusty main street of Tlaxiaco (once called “Paris Chiquita” — ?), which seemed to be the happening town out there, but by then I’d had an hour or so to get used to the darkness, the moon was coming up, and — truth to tell — the place looked pretty scary. I wasn’t that desperate by then, even after getting lost there (no signs at main junction), and was actually glad, just after that, to see a sign saying “Oaxaca 144.”

  “Oh, that’s not so bad,” I thought.

  At least the last 65 kilometres were “Cuota” [toll road], fast, safe, and lightly trafficked. But dark! First time I’ve ridden at night this whole trip; hope it’s the last. Not as horrible as I’d thought it was going to be, when I realized it was going to happen, but bad enough. And carries the potential for so much worse: a flat tire, a breakdown, a crash, bandidos.

  Never a dull moment, that’s for sure, and I never had a moment of feeling really tired, either, in the sense of being drowsy. Yesterday and today, fired up with a sense of mission, commitment, and 100% alertness. Ready for anything, all the time.

  Plenty tired now, though.

  However, next morning, I was sitting at a sunny café in the zócalo having “huevos oaxaqueños,” watching the strongly “indígena”-looking people go by, and thinking, “was it worth it?”

  Hell, no. I was exhausted, sore, bleary-eyed, stiff all over, with blisters on my hands and a very tender ass! I felt awful. But at least I was in Oaxaca, and with a whole day to spend. I didn’t feel like doing anything major, like the ruins of Monte Alban, but there was an excellent new museum in the convent beside the church of Santo Domingo, and a collection of pre-Hispanic art in the Rufino Tamaya museum, and of course, sticker-hunting (fruitless, alas).

  Unfortunately I couldn’t get a table overlooking the zócalo at El Asador Vasco (Saturday night, after all), but it worked out okay. The “pollo en mole negro” was worth all the trouble of getting there (and had been a main inspiration). There wasn’t much happening in the zócalo yet, and this time they had an excellent group, “Les Romanceros de México,” playing right in the restaurant, with three of those 12-string mandolin-type players, two guitarists, and a young guy on tambourine and maracas (good too). After dinner, I strolled around, things just getting going at 9:00, and had my scuffed old Rockports painstakingly shined. Marimba music seems to be very “in” this year in Oaxaca, for there were two groups working the square, but only one mariachi group. It wasn’t quite as happening as when we were there, or perhaps not that early, for there were certainly lots of people around, but I was still too tired to hang around much later. And no complaints, it’s still a most excellent city. Maybe I’ll take you there again sometime!

  The streets were thronged with hawkers (lots of mylar balloons), families, and a fair number of police. Despite all my protests, I must admit that does make me feel more secure in a crowded street situation, especially after reading the latest reports on Mexico City’s current crime situation — whoa! It seems to be a lot worse than when we were here, since the economy took that big dive. After reading that stuff, I got more serious about security, and was working off three separate wallets — leg, belt pack, and another one hidden with my good watches in the pocket of my rolled-up day-pack in the duffel bag. I should come out with something remaining. Also, there are tales of hijackers on the Oaxaca roads at night; kept me alert last night too!

  Anyway, it’s the next morning now, in Cuernavaca, and I had a nice walk around yesterday, to the Jardín Borda, summer home of our old buddies Mad Maximilian and the lovely Carlota [Emperor and Empress of Mexico for three years, in the 1860s, which resulted in him being executed by a firing squad in Querétaro, and Carlota going insane and living as a ward of the Vatican for another 30 years, still thinking she was the empress of Mexico], the Palacio de Cortés, and through the busy streets of this rather frantic city, in which this hotel and its beautiful gardens make a lovely oasis.

  So much life, talk and laughter and music, buying and selling, shoe-shining, politicizing, and birds squawking in the treetops so loud I was sure they were toys or something (long-tailed grackles). The city is a bit grungy, it’s true, and there’s too much traffic in those small streets, but as many cities know, here and in Europe, that’s hard to fix. I also noted the stoplight merchants: gum, candy, Santa hats, lottery tickets, newspapers, but best of all, a fire-eater.

  Today I’m off to visit our pals at Grupo Bavaria [the BMW dealership in Mexico City we had visited on our journey], Pablo, Rodolfo, and Miguel (I think that was the little mechanic’s name, no?), hoping they’re still at the same place on Calzada Tlalpan. If not, I’m in trouble, for it’s my “no-drive day” in Mexico City. [To combat air pollution the city only allows vehicles whose licence numbers end with certain digits to drive on particular weekdays]. But I’ve written down old Martín’s number [“ambassador” from BMW club], just in case I need some help.

  Interesting that the ride up from Oaxaca to here didn’t seem nearly as dramatic as it did going the other way, a few years back. I asked myself in my journal, “more experienced, or just spoiled? Well, I still liked it, just wasn’t fazed!”

  Anyway, it’s me off to “Make-sicko” City [courtesy of Mexican writer Octavio Paz], where I’ll get this mailed, and send you a couple more books too. The next exciting installment of this story, the journey to Belize, is sure to follow soon. For now, know that I think of you every day, and that there are lots of great places just waiting for you.

  Maybe you can take me there sometime!

  El viajero fantomo

  [Journal notes]

  Four Seasons Hotel, Mexico City, December 9th

  In El Restaurante, with excellent guitar duo playing from ba
lcony in courtyard. Wish they’d lay off the Christmas stuff though. No one else here, at 7:00, but I’ll just drink champagne by myself. I’ll show them!

  And write myself a letter.

  Earlier today, while riding, I was thinking of how missing my girls was so often like a physical ache, and just now, that connected with the Ghost Rider — “phantom pain.” Hurting for a piece of you that’s been torn away.

  Everything well organized to leave here. Laundry done, “dress up” clothes dry-cleaned, box of stuff sent home, so luggage a little lighter, books and letter to Brutus, business taken care of, all that, and hope bike will be happy too. On the “last leg” now.

  Nice talk with waiter about different parts of Mexico. Such good staff in this place, in every capacity. Expensive, and worth it. Going all out, with Oscietra caviar and huachinango with purees of tomato and huitlacoche. Waiter surprised I can even pronounce that last one [a kind of fungus, like truffles, considered a delicacy], but I just told him, “Well, I’ve travelled here before, and once you learn to say Teotihuacán, or huachinango, you get the idea.”

  Oh man, what a meal. Devoured in about three minutes, but couldn’t help it. Too good.

  Suddenly at 8:00, everybody shows up. More beautiful women. (Not that I care.) Toying with notion that, in terms of what I expressed in The Masked Rider, Mexico offers both Africa and Paris. Soul and sophistication.

  Just looked around to see if I was the only one here alone. No, there’s one other loser. I mean loner. Oh joy.

  Also just had glimpse into future (a wishful one, anyway). For example, transcribing these notes, and even expanding on them — maybe make a book out of all this, after all. Hope that happens, in a way, and yet . . . what a long, mysterious road the future seems like from here. Can’t even picture it, really, except in limited terms of maybe two months. Too scary. Still, right now two months is plenty to think about. That’s, like, next year!

  Maybe it will be okay . . .

  After dinner, strolled out into courtyard, fountain playing, guitars playing, big crowd on open terrace upstairs, lots of people in bar, couldn’t go back to room.

  One more cognac.

  And goodnight.

  After a little confusion at the BMW dealer, and a little confusion with the busy streets and misleading signs, I didn’t get free of Mexico City until early afternoon, then made my way to Veracruz, on the Gulf of Mexico. Brutus and I had hoped to visit Veracruz on our previous visit to Mexico, but after spending three days in Manzanillo while he recovered from his injuries and had his motorcycle fixed up enough to ride again, we didn’t have time to get to Veracruz. Thus, as with many places, I stopped there with Brutus in mind.

  In fact, most of the time I rode with him in mind, for Brutus was very much with me on this journey now. So often I was riding along and thinking of what I would write to him, and how I would describe it, and saving up all the details in my head and my journal notes to convey them to him in a letter, once I got to Belize and had time to write again.

  For now, I was trying to make some time, for I had agreed to meet Steven and Shelly in a few days at a small town called Corozal, just across the Belize border, and along the way there was another place I knew Brutus would want me to take the time to visit. Palenque was the name of a vast, ruined Mayan city in the troubled state of Chiapas, and at the time of our previous visit the rebel “Zapatistas” were frequently holding up vehicles and robbing tourists, and travel there was “not recommended.” As far as I had been able to learn, things were a little calmer in the area lately, so I was going to try to visit it, for Brutus.

  According to the Lonely Planet guidebook, the Palenque area was the rainiest part of Mexico (also “always sweltering, and rarely a breeze”), and my experience confirmed those observations. I arrived at a small resort in blinding rain, and checked into a spare, cozy cabin on the bank of a muddy stream, overhung with lush tropical trees and vines. Heavy rain fell most of the night, and in the morning I noted in my journal that this was a tropical rainforest, after all, and I reflected on a less-obvious contrast to the deserts where I had been travelling so much: “In the desert all foliage is designed to conserve moisture; here leaves are huge and many, to lap up as much as they can. Lush life, large life. Every stone with moss or mould, but not so different in desert, where simply more modest.”

  I was reading a book called Remembering Babylon, by David Malouf, and his thoughts on the essential quality of “endurance” made me think of the ponderosa pine seeds that germinate only after a fire, or certain desert plants that germinate only if their husks are worn away by stones in a flash flood, thereby ensuring they will have enough moisture to grow. I also remembered reading about certain fruit seeds which would only germinate if they were excreted by birds or animals. In Darwinian terms, this apparently helped to assure their dispersion, but the metaphor that occurred to me concerned the ordeals of new growth — that in order for a little baby seed (or soul) to grow, it would have to pass through fire, flood, or . . . shit.

  During those long days of riding across Mexico, my thoughts turned ever more strongly toward home, or at least the idea of home. I still had to get through two more weeks of travel, and the dark day on the horizon called Christmas, but all I seemed to be thinking about as I rode was making the trip back to Mexico City. The long trip home, it seemed like.

  Getting ahead of myself or what? Feelings of anticipation bring back that childhood sense of Time; its incomprehensible linearity, how unreal there seems from here, in either direction.

  Still, four months as an exile, a drifter, a saddletramp, a ghost rider. Enough already!

  In Palenque I seemed to be “Mr. Out-of-Season” again, for I sat alone at the resort bar (“enduring — or ignoring — Christmas music”), and at dinner the tables were empty but for a couple of American families. I had been in Mexico long enough to be able to order my meals in Spanish, at least, which I tried to do as a matter of principle, and that day I noted my favorite word-of-the-day, mantequilla (butter), and remarked that at first I thought their butter was “flavored,” with herbs or something, but then decided that no, it was simply a little rancid.

  That night I started The Orchard Keeper, by Cormac McCarthy, and noted that it was, “typically beautiful but grim, McCarthy’s own special oxymoronic style. Written in ’65 or so; his first?”

  The rain tapered off in the morning, and I rode up to the ruins and spent a few hours exploring the huge complex of pyramids, the tumbled stones which had been partly reassembled once they had been cut out of the surrounding jungle, so dense and green. I remembered reading Graham Greene’s The Lawless Roads, about his travels in Mexico in the late ’30s, where he had described visiting these ruins when they were just overgrown mounds, and it was easy to see that if they were neglected again they would soon be absorbed by that prolific, relentless tropical growth.

  On a gloomy, overcast day, only a few groups of Mexican students wandered through the wet grass between the temples. “Far from crowded,” I noted, “except with ghosts.” Flocks of melodious blackbirds flew overhead, and another bird that at first I took for an African hornbill, because of its shape and rhythm of flight, but finally identified from my Birds of Mexico as a toucan. In the nearby woods I also spotted a yellow-billed cacique, which the book described as “elusive.”

  I climbed the 69 steep, narrow steps of the largest pyramid, the Templo de Los Inscriptiones, and then followed the claustrophobic passageway that led down inside it to the crypt. A triangular stone door and huge carved slab surrounded the small room where the sarcophagus had been, though it and all the other recovered treasures were in the museum in Mexico City — except for a jewelled death mask, which had been stolen in 1985 and never recovered. “Yet another ghost story,” I noted, and was also intrigued by the tale associated with a smaller temple, the Pyramide del Conde, named for an eccentric German, Count Walbeck, who had lived inside the pyramid for two years in the 1800s, with a companion who was only descr
ibed as “his lady friend.” I tried to imagine how they would have lived there, buying food from nearby villages and collecting rainwater, though at the time I never thought to wonder why.

  The next morning, I made my way to the border, then across to Belize and the seaside village of Corozal. Tony’s Inn and Resort was a small hotel right on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, with palms and Norfolk Island pines above a curve of beach and the sea of blue and green. Steven and Shelly and I hadn’t seen each other since Barbados, so it was an emotional meeting, but a welcome one. As we sat together at the outdoor bar and drank margaritas, I realized that I was talking a mile a minute. Other than Andrew in Los Angeles, who was only starting to become a truly close friend, I hadn’t seen anyone who really knew me for more than a month, since Alex and Liam in Santa Fe, and it was so good to be with people I felt comfortable around. Steven and Shelly had rented a Jeep at the airport in Belize City, and as we travelled on together they offered to carry my bags with them, so I enjoyed the luxury of riding an unladen motorcycle for a few days. I also enjoyed having someone to talk with in the evenings, and thus didn’t do much writing in my journal, until one sunrise, when I sat in the dew-wet grass on a pyramid-shaped mound, an unexcavated Mayan site in the resort of Chan Chich, where I described the early morning wildlife:

  Up at 6:00, standing atop mound to west, jungles of Guatemala behind. Spooky howler monkeys around, “stentorian (or stertorous?) breathing” sound. Little blue heron, bat falcon, couple of vultures, parrots, sound of melodious blackbirds and loud drumming of woodpecker on hollow tree, “chortle” of Montezuma’s oropendola (my favorite of the local birds for sight and sound). Two flocks of ocellated turkeys, tall tree hung with oropendola (“yellow-tail”) nests, many birds heard but not seen. Parrots’ raucous chatter. Turkeys not pretty, but beautiful, their bare blue heads with red warts and spectacular plumage.