And then there were two.

Call it what you will – be it fate or just plain chance – it's amazing how "right place at the right time" sometimes works out. Take, for instance, my recent traveling situation. Just as soon as I had ditched a good load of unwanted luggage in the great beach purge, I stumbled upon a lively Italian who happened to have the same vague idea of where she might be headed as I did – and who also happened to fit as snug as a puzzle piece into the empty space on the back of the bike. And just like that, one became two.


A few words about Anna. She sings, she dances, she laughs, she entertains. She’s taken a regular black motorcycle and given it the feel of a circus on wheels. She never complains or lectures about my sometimes-erratic in-city driving and cheers out loud from her perch on the back of the bike when we skim the sides of the vehicles we’re passing in between. Twice she has seared her leg on the exhaust pipe and both times has been a champ through the blistering, scabbing and subsequent scarring. She doesn’t speak any English and I don’t speak Italian, which means we communicate exclusively in Spanish; when there is a word neither of us knows, we mix our two native tongues and move on. And yet she always understands what I’m trying to say, even when no one else does. It’s incredible.

Between Anna and the motorcycle, there is never, ever a dull moment. To get an idea of what we've been living through this past month, a written portrait of the first two days together…

Right out of the starting blocks, heading out of Oaxaca City, we got lost. In Mexico, just as you’re really starting to enjoy the aide of the large green road signs that indicate in which direction is such-and-such city, inevitably the path they lead you down will fork and at this point the signs disappear (and are replaced instead by four men mulling around by the side of the road, two standing, one sitting, one leaning against a shovel, all staring like you’re an elephant on roller-skates). So as the odds would have it, half the time you get lost. Which is what happened. We took the wrong road and we got lost. And just our luck, it was a road through the town with Mexico’s most unfriendly speed bumps.

Here I stop for a short interlude on Mexican speed bumps. (I could write a whole chapter on this subject alone, but I’ll leave it at a paragraph). Every village, town and city in Mexico believes in speed control via speed bumps, which given their shape and frequency can turn a pleasant drive into a gladiator-style obstacle course worthy of a time slot on late-night cable TV. Some are sloped and gentle, others are a more rounded and severe, and some look like a tree trunk was felled in the middle of the road and covered with cement. It’s always unclear whether they’ve been put there by whoever is officially in charge of putting things in the road, or whether they’ve been put there by the locals who will sometimes stop you with a string stretched across the road to vend dried shrimp, sweet bread, peanuts, pork rinds with hot sauce, fresh coconut, popcorn or any other 5 peso foodstuff. At military checkpoints they use old rolled-out tires as stand-in speed bumps, and at construction sites they’re made of dirt. In theory, all should be marked with yellow paint and a sign a few hundred meters out; in reality, these warning signals are as rare as is winning something out of the claw machine. Thus you usually don’t see the speed bumps until you’re ten feet in front, at which point there isn’t much you can do but hop up on your foot pegs, hold on tight, and hope that today is another lucky day.

(Curiously, I noticed the other day that EVERY single bridge in Mexico – right down the twenty-foot, we’ll-put-something-here-to-cover-this-slight-dip-in-the-road bridge – is marked with a sign that denotes the bridge name. Clearly it is more important that I know when I’m crossing piddly Puente Mesa Verde than it is for me to know I’m about to take off into orbit over a speed bump).

It was the tree-trunk type that we encountered in our unintentional detour and no matter how slow or gently we went, there was no way past without scraping and thudding over top of each one. Just imagine: buh-BOOM… (times 16), followed by the pained groans of the two girls bouncing atop them. No sound could be more grating to the ears of a motorcycle owner (who might have to flip tortillas for 10 pesos an hour if something drastic should happen to her sole mode of transportation). It’s certain that another layer was scraped off the already-battered underside of the bike (yet still it runs like a pro… this is love).

Once back on track, we sped through the world capital of mezcal and the surrounding valleys where huge fields were dug into the mountainside and lined with vertical rows of blue agave plants – a stunning color contrast against adjacent fields of deep red dirt and minty green rock formations. The further we went the closer they neared the road until we were flanked on both sides by giant agaves, sun shining overhead and airy clouds floating through a brilliant blue sky. (These are the times you could just die).

Then rather abruptly and unexpectedly the agave disappeared and the steep walls around us morphed into a fantastic cactus forest, where an infinity of spiny cacti arms reached straight up towards the sky (photo at left). And just as suddenly, after a few short curves, they were no more. Let’s turn around and look we said, fascinated by this aberration. So we headed back, and for lack of anything resembling a shoulder on the road (not only here, but in all of Mexico), I headed for a small patch of dirt just off a bend… But the gravel was looser and deeper then expected and before I could devise an exit strategy it bit into my front tire, twisting it unsympathetically towards the ground. And WOOSH, down we went – the bike, the two of us and a whole bunch of bungee-tied luggage, skidding straight into the dirt.

For me, this sort of low-speed “drop” (as is termed in the motorcycle world – it’s a much friendlier word than “crash”) is a common enough occurrence. Hardly a month goes by when I am not stuck in some off-road terrain cursing my lack of judgment and wiping off my skinned elbows, with a growling 500+ pound machine at my feet. For a first-timer, though, I imagined it could be a distressing situation. But when I hastily twisted the half of my body not wedged under the bike back towards Anna, she was face-up in the dirt with a little blood on her arm and was shaking not with tears or panic, but with laughter (I love this girl). She asked if I’d ever seen Motorcycle Diaries. And there we were. Luggage sprawled everywhere, somewhere in the middle of a cactus forest, somewhere in the middle of the mountains, somewhere in the middle of Mexico. (Photo at right: after the fall)

This is how we went along, in happy disarray. When we felt the first drops of rain, we charged ahead like the fearless road divas we were, throwing fists up into the air and crying out “Vaminos! Vaminos!” And then when a gentle sprinkle turned without warning into a tumultuous downpour and our clothes were pasted to our bodies and the road in front of us was a dark grey blur and my boots were filling up with water and behind me Anna was crouched down screaming, “It hurts!” (And it does – it’s like the bug thing where it feels like someone is chucking tiny pebbles at you, except it’s a whole lot worse), well then we chugged slowly and half-blindly back to the nearest village like the waterlogged buffoons we were. We unloaded our soggy luggage and passed the time with tostadas and a change of clothes under a roofed patio restaurant. A frosty worker eyed us suspiciously as she swept water off the cement floor with a broom. But it didn’t matter. We were out of the rain.


That night, further down the road, we were taken in by a hospitable restaurant-owner who let us sleep in the giant nylon hammocks hanging from a breezy palapa. Sealy-Posturepedic, please exit the dance floor. Sleep has never been so sweet.

When we woke up the next morning it was already hot, and by the time we set off it was steaming. The drive this day was nowhere near as scenic and our enthusiasm levels were slightly diminished after a few hours of forging ahead through flat plains. Looking back the day seems nothing more than a big tired jumble of dust and heat and wind and semis.

Sometime that afternoon we pulled into a Pemex station (all gas stations are government owned, and thus are called “Pemex” – short for Petroleum Mexico, I’d guess) and for the first time in all of Mexico encountered a band of foreign motorcyclists… By this hour were something of a sight. Practically tumbling off the bike, we poked fingers on our arms to see how badly we were burnt. We poured water out of an old Coke bottle onto a dirty rag and used the rearview mirrors to wipe the grime off our faces. Our luggage was wrapped with a spider web of bungee cords, with flip-flops and towels stuck under the tightened straps and crushed plastic bottles shoved into crevices between bags. Our eyes were bloodshot under our plastic Chinatown sunglasses and our hair was greasy under our helmets. Had this been a cartoon, we would have been enshrouded in our own cloud of dust (a.k.a., the Pigpen effect). We may as well have tied a string of tin cans to the rear fender.

Now pan out on us, pan in on them. First, they were clean. Really clean. Fresh out of the shower clean... I don’t know everything about motorcycles, but I can tell you that their most basic feature is that they’re all open air. Which would seem to mean that no matter how fancy or well designed, all are going to be equally vulnerable to dirty roads, black exhaust smoke and mixed debris thrown off the back of semis. But these five somehow defied the basic laws of Mexican motorcycling. Even their bikes and gear looked clean. Their luggage – none the least bit overstuffed – was situated primly on luggage racks and in saddlebags. When they talked to us, they sucked water out of tubes attached to their Camelback packs as if to say, yes, we’re well hydrated too. They asked proper questions about mileage and destination and engine size and such. One inquired about “the wind” on the other side of the mountains. Yeah, sure, it had been windy, but I didn’t realize this was an official weather condition… how do you learn about things like this? Had they been part of our cartoon, they would have all had huge, brilliantly white smiles with a dimple in each chin, and sparkles radiating from their squeaky-clean bikes.

The difference between them and us: they were well informed, well equipped and well prepared. We weren’t sure of where we were, were only vaguely sure of where we were going, and it’s questionable whether we ever know what we’re doing. And yet, we’re having the times of our lives. In one of his books, Paul Theroux briefly mentions how the tools of the information age have robbed the traveler of the joy of discovery. Even with guidebooks in hand, I’m certain that the two of us have been robbed of nothing in this grand heist.

(A few days after this gas station encounter, running on the last fumes of the reserve tank, we would be forced to stop in a mountain village clogged with pick up trucks and buses and buy 10 liters of gas from a woman selling it on the sidewalk under an umbrella in front of an open-faced shop with deep red beef flanks hanging from a wooden support beam. She would pour it into the motorcycle for us using a funnel made out of the top of a Coke bottle. I would remember at this moment our fellow motorcyclists and wonder if they too were prone to such episodes.)

So this is life with Anna and the motorcycle. We listen to a lot of Smashing Pumpkins and Italian rock ballads. I hear her Spanish as correct and frequently ask Mexican citizens if they’re speaking with an accent. She learned how to drive the motorcycle, and when she once fell over with it in a tricky mud puddle in a campground entryway, she got right back on and kept driving. We play with poi and devil-sticks whenever there is an open plaza and look like a band of orphaned gypsies. When we’re on the bike together, people lean out of the window and take pictures of us with their camera phones. This is fun. I am happy beyond words that we found each other.

We are Italian-American, with a Spanish accent.

**In re-reading this, I realized there might be some concern over the well-being of both Anna and the bike. Rest assured, both are in good condition.**