The Gulf Coast

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The Mexican Gulf Coast: unvisited and unheralded, where cheap hotels lap up the quiet, not so aquamarine waves and the cafes serve until 9pm. The heat in late autumn is humid and sticky, the sun at its best early in the morning before the haze wraps around and creates a murky lunchtime siesta. Autumn is out of season and the locals tell us that it's cold, we should return in Spring when it's warm enough to swim and enjoy the semi tropical bliss of cold beer and freshly grilled fish. We've been in Mexico for a couple of weeks and have got into the rythm of the local life: up early, take it easy, sit in the shade and go for a swim later. It is a life that suits us well and we are learning a lot in regard to the local culture in terms of family first, foremost and last. As tourists we are outsiders, albeit welcomed, we are still held at arms length by the local custodians of virtue. We are gringos.
Traipsing slowly down the coast the road is gently inclining, the hills giving way to mountains in the distance. It's an easy ride with virtually nil traffic on the narrow twisting roads. The only problem being the sporadic and unheralded 'topes' or speed bumps, which are high enough to take out an oil pan if you're not careful going over them. This is what you have to watch out for, literally. Outside of farms, schools and military bases, even if there is a cow tethered byt eh side of the road, topes are guaranteed.
Papantla. The first of the Maya pyramids coming from the north east coast is El Tajin: 'City of Thunder Gods.' populated around the 4th Century BC the impressively remote city was built after the 6th Century AD by the Totonac Indians. The ritual Flyer's Dance originated from these heady times and is still enacted by the Voladors today who twirl 52 times down a virtical pole, 52 times representing the years in their mythological cycle. El Tajin is set deep in the tropical jungle yet is easily accessed down service roads. The site contains numerous pyramids, sprouting vegetation kept under control by an army of gardeners. Lost in the jungle are the remains of bricks and mortar of this once great place. El Tajin was occupied until the 12thC when it was abondoned due to the ever increasing cycles of war and lack of trading opportunities.
Being on a motorbike makes one vulnerable to the weather and all her charms. On a perfect day, the sun shines and there is a gentle breeze that wafts the scent of the local flora and fauna ino your senses. In Papantla I had checked the weather on www.weatherunderground.com to see to my horror a week long storm heading south along the coast. We had to head inland and go to Mexico City for a few days. It was a good day's ride away: on the map. Leaving a strom threatening Papantla behind we head due west into the mountains; the Sierra Volcanica Transversal. The ride is stunning and we are almost reduced to tears by the beauty of this part of Mexico. The sky is azure blue and mountain pure and the temperature is perfect for riding, geared up in padded jackets, boots and jeans. The road snakes up and down the lower valleys, through orange and banana plantations selling their wares by the side of the road. 5 kilos of oranges for 15 pesos, or 1 Euro. It is the end of October and everyone is getting ready to celebrate the 'Day of the Dead' on 1st November. One of the things done in celebration is to line the ancestoral grave with aromatic orange marigolds, leading a path for the spirit to follow from grave to home, for dinner. Marigolds grow in these mountains and everywhere the local Indians are picking them in great swathes and loading up flat bed trucks to take them to the city for sale.
We turn a corner and ride straight into the back of a traffic jam: not seen in months, we carefully pick our way to the front and find a large truck has spilt its load of carbon. The workers who are re-loading it blackened and scampering around the truck with the agility of men working under the watchful gaze of armed police. The police wave us through the powdery road.

Mexico City; home to 18 million residents, both registered and not. It seems that it must be a daunting place to ride a big bike into, find a parking spot and our couch surfing host. (www.couchsurfing.com) Yet two hundred kilometres to the west the city seems a distant day glow dream as the once azure skies turn black and the storm we were running from along the coast has he caught up with us. The road turns muddy, strewn with pot holes and oncoming trucks and busses as the traffic jam we've left behind at the carbon spill also catches up with us. All over Mexico the roads are being upgraded and widened and here is no different. We are stuck in a road widening project of slippery propertions as we curl down the mountains and as the rain starts lashing down we are faced with a choice: make a run for it to Mexico City on the new highway, or stay on the ever slowing local route. We choose the highway and enter a world of fog and freezing rain: it's 12 degrees Celcius. Visibility is down to around ten to fifteen metres, we doing a solid 40kmh and even that seems too fast as we glide past steamed up VW bugs. Shepherds sit on the crash barrier along the hard shoulder, their sheep only known by the constant bleating. After thirty minutes my left arm starts to shake uncontrollably and I'm in serious danger of falling off. In fact, I'm only in the saddle by fear-an all gripping force of gravity that has me hug the tank with my trembling knees and the ridiculousness of my arm shake. After one hour my teeth are chattering and the first exit appears. We shakily head to the toll booth, just managing to stay upright and struggle out of wet gloves to pay the man.
Tulancingo; an important hill town and yet when we leave the highway and pull into the first hotel we see we have absolutley no idea as to our whereabouts. We are in our first and by no means last, Mexican Motel. PAyable overnight, by the half night or for a couple of hours for a quickie with a woman of the night. Each room comes with its own private parking, screened from public view by a rubber curtain. Inside the rooms are made bodacious by multiple mirrors and gigantic beds, a nod to cleanliness in the direction of the well equipped bathroom. These places cost around 200 pesos per 24 hours. We pay for a whole night and are looked at with wariness by the manager. Inside the room I can see my breath it is so cold, the shower takes around twenty minutes to heat up and in that time I peel myself out of my sopping clothes and warm my wrinkling hands over the camping stove. We eat at the truck stop next door and are greeted by a friendly family who run the place. We stock up on spicy carbs; rice and beans. We don't really have any cold weather clothes and aside from our riding gear not much to wear. I'm in sandals and whatever else is dry-my boots being soaked through and time is spent in vain trying to dry them out over the camping stove. The next day brings more rain and 10C. We take a bus into Tulancingo, about 15 kms up the mountain and spend the day in the laundromat and the local library. The main plaza has some food stalls selling roasted corn mixed with cheese and chili and served in a polystyrene cup-in this climate it's a godsend. We are watching a lot of Mexican soap operas in our lovely bordello, wrapped up in the non sexy blankets and sipping warming tequila. We make up our own dialogue to the melodrama on telly. Finally chreystal clear skies wash away the gloom and reveal the
beauty of the place we've been in for a couple of days. Once the shrouds have lifted it is easy to see why this place is inhabited. The cultivated mountains rise in green steps to the fluffy white clouds that contrast vividly with the scrubbed blue skies. It is time to leave and get to Mexico DF. I have a temperature.

The road is fast and easy and a little bleak save that it re-affirms my false ideas of what Mexico must look like. The road cuts through the high plains, a bleak, brown and dusty landscape inhabited by cacti and half finished whitewashed adobe houses. The city is a scant two hour ride away and the road swoops past Teotihuacan, the Maya complex that laid the foundation stone for Mexico City.
We have mixed emotions heading to the city; in love with the beauty of the Mexican countryside we are girding ourselves for a hideous jolt. If 18 million people live in DF, what must it look like, what must the air be like to breathe? We will be robbed, killed and raped, preferably in that order, according to all and sundry who profess a knowledge of Mexico. We enter the city in trepedation. The air is clean (probably after the recent storms) and the traffic, whilst gridlocked, is ordered and fairly easy to navigate around on a motorbike. A local biker guides us into the city. It's all thumbs up and tooting horns. We find our couch surfer without any problems and he has underground parking. We're staying in the boring area of DF known as the financial district-just off Avenida Insurgentes, behind the World Trade Centre. It's a world of Mexican businessmen and power lunches, lattes and fancy cars. Luckily there is a decent public transport system in the city and we leave the motorbike safely underground and explore using the metro system. There is also a comlex system of metro/bus which we don't use due to the bizzarre ticketing system.
Mexico City astonished the conquistadors and has been compared to Seville and Beirut in the 19th C. It has been called the City of Palaces and still today carries a big visual punch. The social fabric of the city is held together in the myriad styles of architecture, all having the common theme of Mexico DF. Big, brash and bold, the buildings are blood-red brick and sandstone in colour, punctuated by intricate tilework wherever an open space is available. The main square, 'Zocalo' is massive and is awesome, a very overused word but one that does justice to this space. Scene of revolutions, demonstrations and military parades, the Zocalo is also home to both government and church, beggar and busker, tourist and priest. In the leafy district of Coyoacan, once home to the painters Diego Rivera and Frida Khalo, markets abound manned by hippies, local kids sell paper mache skeletons and the middle class suck on lattes. The city has a permanance about it that the US seems to lack (excepting NYC). In DF the people move with slow stoicism, heavy footed, stamping down their roots into the broken concrete of a bloody history that evolves around them via the robbed, raped and killed headlines of a western media. Obsessed by a spiralling crime-rate, the media is painting Mexico as some kind of wild west shanty town where eating breakfast is a dangerous occupation when in comparison to it's northern neighbour, Mexico has a slightly lower level of crime.
Back in the Zocalo, the festivities are gearing up for Day of the Dead. The square has become a morbid place of death masks and sepia tinged photos of dead stars, dead uncles and weeping marigolds. The imagery of death, so unusual in our life obsessed culture, (or culture of avoiding the topic of death) could be seen as overpowering. The side streets are overspilling, impromptu markets spring up and everywhere is the death head-cut into marble lining the streets from the 16th C church, yet another invokes the saints and another the blood and guts of evangelism. At night the spirit of tequila takes over and Ida meets her porcelain idol.
For a city of approximately 20 million people, DF is surprisingly easy to get around. The streets can seem quite quiet and empty in terms of population density and it is surprising in it's quiet authority-of its stregnth in character steeped in the history of war and death it embraces that which it has created. A society that accepts life and death in equal measure-a society that has intermingled with the indigenous population to create faces that belong to the earth, to the buildings, to the sky.

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