End Of The Road / Back To Blighty
Trip Start
Sep 13, 2006
1
28
31
Trip End
Mar 27, 2007
Oaxaca,
Mexico
Saturday, December 1, 2007
It occurred to me that it was time to go home (wherever that may be) after I lost my passport. We'd been everywhere together so I was quite upset and it took me about three days to get over the loss. Although I dropped the passport by the side of a road somewhere I like to imagine that it is having a wild time with some smugglers..
After a week of swimming, sleeping and drinking in Mazunte I dragged myself off the beach and headed for Oaxaca. This involved crossing the Sierra Madre del Sur - the ultimate challenge - and one which I surprised myself by being equal to. The second day in particular was rough going with over six thousand feet of ascent
01 San Miguel Suchixtepec
. I started in jungle and finished in alpine pine forests. The hardest part was geeting back on the bike the next day.My front gear cable snapped at a place called Ejutla, in a desertified valley about sixty kilometres south of Oaxaca and I took a collectivo taxi the rest of the way. The taxi driver pointed out the spot where two local cyclists had been killed by a drunk driver the day before. The front page of Policiaca featured gruesome close-ups of the dead cyclists still lying on the roadside.
The week I spent in Oaxaca I spent organising my return and hanging out in the zocalo with whoever was staying at the hostel. The state governor, Ulises the puto priista (as local graffitti affectionately refers to him), is not very popular amongst the teaching fraternity and there were loads of cops about on Thursday evening. Along with Will from Wiltshire I sat in the bandstand with a couple of bottles of Indio wating for the action to start but the teachers failed to show up, which was a great pity as I had been looking forward to seeing them waving red pens and threatening to phone the policemen's parents. Unable to find any takers for the crate of petrol bombs we'd so lovingly crafted that morning, we headed off to look for a pub instead.
02 The Wood And The Trees
Undoubtably the most ludicrous thing I witnessed while in Oaxaca was 'lucha libre' wrestling, the Mexican version of WWF. Grown men (and a dwarf) strutting about in leotards and masks, trying to out-do each other in who could adopt the most ridiculous pose. At one point there were six of these caped crusaders flexing their pecks and eyeing other across the ring as if engaged in some muscular form of foreplay. It was camper than a Graham Norton Christmas special and the crowd loved it.
I delayed going to Mexico City for as long as possible but I needn't have worried - it is a pleasant enough place from the little I saw of it in two days and certainly nowhere near as crowded as Cairo or Bombay. I sorted out my new passport and wandered around. Protesting against the conservative governent is very much in vogue at the minute and I saw three separate demonstations while I was in the city. On my last night I hooked up with Danny from Ipswich and went out for some beer and tacos which seemed an appropriate way to mark the end of my trip.
I was up at three the next morning for a flight to New York. By four o'clock in the afternoon I was standing outside Grand Central Station trying to flag down a cab
02 View Through The Forest
. A uniformed hotel doorman, complete with top hat, went past on a Segway machine. Two complete strangers came up and started chatting to me about this unusual sight, not at all what I expected.Eventually a cabbie stopped and I began the ride to 113th Street, located only four blocks from Central Park. I was a little perturbed when I learned that this was in Harlem but I needn't have worried. When the local school kids started fighting in the street outside the hostel I knew that I was back on familiar turf (lacking a suitable firearm I did not intervene).
I wandered around Manhattan past familiar landmarks such as Times Square, the Empire State Building and the FlatIron. A big hole in the skyline of lower Manhattan was of course, Ground Zero, now a huge construction site, and a couple of blocks further on was Battery Park and the views across to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.
For culture, I went to the Museum of Metropolitan Art, which has the most extensive collection of priceless art of any museum I've ever visited. After a couple of hours roaming the Oriental Art section I could take no more and headed across the park to Strawberry Fields where I communed with my inner-hippie self at the John Lennon memorial garden.
For being a bar-fly, look no further than Greenwich Village or nearby SoHo which are both hopping on a Saturday afternoon. In Washington Square a sword-swallower entertained the crowds while on nearby Greenwich Avenue a game of handball was in progress
03 Hazy Days In The Sierra Madre Del Sur
. I earned myself some street-cred among the urban handball fraternity by relating the story of how I was arrested by the jackbooted defenders of Her Majesty's realm at the ripe old age of eleven for the seditious offence of playing handball in the street. Then it was time for some much needed heat - where better than a New York hostelry. A couple of hard-drinking Keralan IT contractors stood me a drink in the Slaughtered Lamb while around the corner in McSorley's an insurance salesman from Atlanta tried to talk me into going to see a musical which his son had written. I drank up and headed out to catch the subway over to Brooklyn where my cousin lives with her new baby. Sick babies and partying do not together go, so it was a quiet night.When my bicycle didn't show up at Heathrow I was too tired too care. I filled in the appropriate form and walked bleary-eyed into the early morning sunshine. At the bus station I stopped to buy some cofee and cigarettes. Paisley and Adams were together on the front of the papers. According to my watch it was still only Tuesday 27th of March - four more days to Fools Day. Something very strange was going on.
