If you have ever read Dan's column in
BIKE magazine you probably know what this is about . Its basically all his columns from the start , how he jacked it all in and rode around africa (and snippets of why) , then back in the UK working for Bike again , and then off to America , ffrom canada down .
I've almost read it, it was only out Thursday, but as I pre-ordered mine was here wednesday , and I have been ploghing on through it
The Guy is a legend, he lived the dream, lived the nightmare , and neally didn't make it out the other side . Reading it leaves you in a state of awe at what he did and saw, and gives you
WanderlustI just want to jump on a bike, and fuck off ....its not the first book thats made me want to do that
There was a extract of it in last sundays's
Sunday TimesDan Walsh
Trouble. I knew she was trouble the first time I saw her reel across the bar, all oversize Gucci sunglasses, barely-there Versace miniskirt and legs from here to Cairo.
“A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window,” murmured Marlowe, somewhere.
An hour later she threw her drink in my face.
A day later she met me for lunch. Two days later she was lunch. Caligula would have blushed.
Three days later she mentions she’s married, and I’m chewing on eggshell. He’s back in New Orleans, right? “No, he’s here on the island.” Great. Doing what? “Business. I guess you could call him a gangster.” Marvellous.
That should have been my cue to “no thank you”. But “thou shalt not” sounds a lot more convincing in a stone-cold celibate church than it does on this tropical beach, at midnight, barefoot, a tall rum in one hand, a taller woman’s salsa-snaking hip in the other, as we dance real close, and she’s got one hand flamenco-flicking the hem of her skirt and the other in my hair, and the warmth of her mouth on my neck, my cheek, my ear as she drawls, “Dan, why don’t you stay a little longer?”
Besides, this isn’t real life, this is Roatan. I fell for the island when I read its history – originally populated by preMayan Indians, it was depopulated by Columbus, who decided the subsistence farmers and fishermen were actually cannibals and they’d be better off worked to death on the slave plantations of Cuba and Jamaica.
Abandoned for a century, it was rediscovered by British buccaneers, including the Welsh maniac (and inventor of rum, maybe) Henry Morgan, who used it as a base to launch noisy raids against the Spanish New World. At the height of its lunacy, Roatan was home to 5,000 pirates – it must have made Saturday night in Glasgow look like a Hove retirement home.
Eventually, the Spanish stopped torturing heathens for long enough to clear the pirates out. The island was empty again until the British abolition of slavery – although colonial landowners were forced to free their slaves, they certainly didn’t want them living next door or marrying their daughters. So the Caribbean forced-labour force was shipped here. Where they stayed.
I can’t blame them. Roatan’s a place to fall in love and a place to fall in love with. I love this island because it’s flawed, because it’s not an airbrushed travel brochure. Sure, it’s rum-and-reggae easy, but I still see sailors fighting on the dancefloor, still see rude boys playing with knives outside the clubs, still see a taxi driver chase a colleague down the street with a gun (fortunately, he shoots like these cowboys drive).
Though it pretends to be as modern as tomorrow afternoon, with Bowling for Columbine on big-screen DVD and United v Liverpool live on Fox Sports, though there’s an ATM and internet access and satellite phones, when it rains, the dirt roads muddy-flood, the power cuts out, the ferry stops and we’re as cut off as the 19th century. The beaches are beautiful but they bite back, alive with sandflies the size of blackheads with great-whites’ jaws. New arrivals get it worse and are easily spotted, as they itch like the Singing Detective. And it’s hot. Damn hot. So hot that breathing doesn’t refresh, just scalds and suffocates. Getting up makes me sweat. Cleaning my teeth makes me sweat. First smoke of the morning to last beer at night, I sweat.
After a week, I’m struggling to find reasons to leave and dreaming of opening my own hobby bar. It’s not just the island, it’s the people too. Caribbean rather than Central American, English-speaking (with a heavy Carib accent, me darlin’) not Spanish, it’s the kind of place where passers-by nod their heads to the mambos floating out of bars. The kind of place that attracts thirtysomething gringos and Euros who are a step beyond the usual teenage gap-year backpackers, a cut above the two-weeker holidaymakers who pollute the region’s Ibizas.
Then the Blonde turns up. I’m living the dream – doing a whole lot of nothing on an island hidey-hole and scoring with a woman way out of my league. Big-grin happy, laughing-out-loud happy, making-up-songs happy. I just wish it wasn’t at another man’s expense. But it is. The drunken thrill of a secret rendezvous sinks into sober morning guilt. Sultry afternoons turn cold-sweat clammy with every car-door slam and gravel crunch.
Should I stay or should I go? Ride and decide. Drag my Dakar motorbike from under the palm trees, wipe off the monkey poo (cheeky monkey) and head out, past Sundowners beach bar and its alcoholic dive-master crowd, past the gym that’s closed due to lack of Californians, past the taxi rank where 225 “The Seductor” and 003 “Night Stalker” still can’t understand why so few females take a cab after dark, onto West End’s sandy high street, with its “Cheapest in the World” dive shops, pink-legged tourists, pointlessly busy dogs and commuting crabs, and out onto the island’s one road.
It’s an up-and-down, left-and-right, storm-damaged single lane that ripples up and down the green mountain from the tourist west to the poor east, sometimes empty, sometimes clogged with too many taxis and too-large imported trucks. A month ago it worried me – now, it’s a supermoto track, with humpback jumps, wheelie-practice slopes and slithery gravel slides. A month ago I always wore gloves and boots. Now I’m happy in trainers and shorts.
Past Anthony’s Key, the $200-a-night exclusive honeymoon hideaway, past Parrot Tree Plantation, the first pirate colony, past a bright-green monkey lala lizard sprinting on its back legs, past a gaggle of kids wobbling unpredictably on oversize bicycles as they race downhill, past the barrio shanties of Coxen Hole, riding as long and as far and as fast as I can, till I reach the other dead end and turn round and do it all again.
Five minutes from home, I hit a junction and decide at the last minute to swing left, up a road to nowhere but a beautiful view of both sides of the island. Park up, watch the setting sun paint the scene fiery gold, baby blue, cat’s-mouth pink. I love this island.
Decision made, I head back. The blonde’s gotta go – adultery’s adultery even if the marriage is a sexless sham, an arm-candy-for-shiny-bauble exchange. I wonder where she is? If she’s at the Italian I can get some pasta while we talk and... bang. I crash hard.
The front wheel makes a tearing sound as it breaks free on a righthander and, wallop, the bike’s heavy on my right side as my arms spread in front of me and we scrape downhill, shriek downhill, and the tarmac tears my trainers and grinds down my toes, biting at my hips and snagging my elbows, burning my knees and ripping off my clothes, and the speedo’s still reading 50 and I wish this would stop.
It stops. The stalled engine pings, my dizzy ears ring and everything stings. “What goes around, comes around,” the spinning wheels sing. A cab pulls over. The Spanish driver’s taking his wife and son home. All three get the bike up, get me up, then coo sympathetically when I wobble and throw up. “Can I take you home?” I wish.
I thought I was abroad. I thought the people here were scruffy acquaintances, drunken partners, passing lovers. Turns out they’re friends. Turns out I am at home. Patricio, the Argentine hotel owner, half-carries me to my room, strips me with no embarrassment and puts me in the shower with a Cuba Libre and a bottle of Dettol. Alex, the Italian restaurant manager, and Julio, a local street hustler, throw the bike into a borrowed pickup. The Blonde turns up with a mouth full of kisses and a bag full of goodies. “Okay, we got rum, beers, juice, smokes and Valium. I gotta run.”
She leaves, they arrive – the Sisters of Mercy. Lauren from Georgia snaps on rubber gloves and cleans the wounds, Danielle from Florida snips up dressings and tapes on bandages, and Jeanine from Alabama sits on the edge of the bed looking purty.
Next day, a doctor with kind eyes and cruel hands scrubs my wounds clean. With a soapy bristled brush. Scrubs. After he’s run my cross-eyed body through the x-ray and confirmed two broken ribs and a chipped kneecap, he scolds me for riding in my shorts. He’s absolutely right.
Everyone crashes eventually – and without proper kit, it hurts. Really, really hurts. For weeks. You try doing anything fun without using your palms, knees, toes or elbows. Truth is, I’ve been lucky. I crashed minutes from a familiar hotel – it could have happened in the middle of nowhere, at night, somewhere genuinely foreign. And though I’m sore, I’m not broken. I’m useless, but not for long.
The bike’s a bit battered but crashed well. Mainly because I took most of the damage. Bent bar, scuffed guards, four popped indicators (apparently I hit both sides – I’ve no idea how); the only real problem came from the smashed switches – the righthand cluster exploded and the kill switch is dead, Zed. Rob, a Florida mechanic, helps me bodge it back together.
I arrange to meet the Blonde for dinner. Her friend, the Brunette, turns up instead. “She can’t see you any more. He knows. You should leave.”
Next stop – the 6am ferry to the mainland. Tomorrow.
