Cycle Nomad
  1. The author beside his loaded bicycle at a high pass strung with prayer flags on the Tibetan Plateau, snow peaks behind.

    Photographs

    Seventy slides from two years on a bicycle, 1999 to 2001, in the order ridden.

    1. I Malaysia to Tibet
    2. II Nepal and India
    3. III Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon
    4. IV Turkey to France
    5. V Panama to California

  2. Malaysia to Tibet

    1999 to 2000

    I had come to Asia to dissolve the self. It turned out to be the only thing anyone could see.

    Read this stretch of the road

    Route map from Kuala Lumpur north through Malaysia, Thailand and Laos to Kunming in China.
  3. A carved Hindu temple tower among trees below a steep, mist-wrapped hill in Malaysia, red earth in the foreground.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    Malaysia

    A Hindu temple tower below a hill in the Malaysian rain. The British brought Tamils from South India to work the rubber estates; their gods came with them and stayed when the British left. Kuala Lumpur, October 1999: a man on a moped heard my good morning and did not move his face. I was free. It felt like any other morning.

  4. Rocky islands in silhouette off a beach on the Thai coast at sunset.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    The Andaman coast, southern Thailand

    The sun went down behind the islands as if nothing were at stake. I had ten thousand dollars, a bicycle, a list of monasteries, and no doubts at all.

  5. A weathered seated Buddha with a saffron sash before a ruined brick prang at Ayutthaya.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    Ayutthaya, Thailand

    For four hundred years this was the capital of Siam. In 1767 the Burmese burned it and marched its people away as captives, and the kings never came back. Someone had tied a saffron sash across the Buddha's chest, as if he might be cold.

  6. A covered metal bowl holding a spoon and fork, set on a patterned red carpet in Thailand.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    Thailand

    A bowl, a spoon, a fork, on a red carpet. I had come to shave my head and live on what was given. The first plan lasted until the first monastery, where the monks ate better than I did and the women of the village prostrated themselves before them on white tile. I had come looking for holiness. I had found an institution.

  7. The author grinning beside a Thai man in sunglasses under a roadside shelter.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    Thailand

    A man I met at a roadside shelter. We laughed at something; I no longer know what. I do not know his name either. I must have asked. I must have written it down somewhere.

  8. Weathered and broken Buddha statues gathered among fallen leaves under trees outside a forest monastery in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    Chiang Mai, Thailand

    Broken Buddhas gathered under the trees outside a forest monastery in Chiang Mai, heads set back on bodies where they fit, left on the ground where they did not. The leaves came down on all of them alike.

  9. A family seated on a mat on a tiled veranda in Laos, a toddler beside them.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    Laos

    A family on a veranda in Laos. In another village a girl saw my face, screamed Falang!, foreigner, and the whole village ran inside. Here they stayed where they were and let me take the picture. I still do not know which village was the more polite.

  10. A market table in Laos laid with bananas, chilies and bundles of green poppy seed heads, a vendor seated behind.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    Laos

    A market table: bananas, chilies, and bundles of poppy heads, green and ordinary as onions. In the hills soldiers guarded the opium fields; in the 1990s Laos ranked among the largest opium producers on earth. At the market it was simply another thing that grew.

  11. A road in Yunnan filled from edge to edge by a flock of white ducks, a herder walking behind.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    Yunnan, China

    On the road to Kunming the ducks had the right of way. A man walked behind them with a stick, as his father must have, in no hurry. The century was ending. No one had told the ducks.

  12. A stone village marker reading Longdong in Chinese and English, Yuanjiang County, Yunnan, a street and children behind it.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    Longdong, Yunnan

    Longdong, a village in Yuanjiang County. In Chinese it means Dragon Cave. My sons think this is the funniest photograph in the collection, and they are right. Two years of temples, wars and revelations, and this is the one they ask for.

  13. A dog sitting on a tree stump in a stone-walled village courtyard in Yunnan, an empty wire cage nearby.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    Yunnan, China

    A courtyard in Yunnan: a dog on a stump beside an empty cage. In the markets I saw what was done to animals, and I will not describe it here. The dog had seen it too. He was not interested in making friends, and he had his reasons.

  14. A farmer behind a water buffalo, ploughing a flooded rice paddy below a hillside town.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    Southwest China

    A man, a buffalo, a flooded field. Dynasties rose over this paddy and sank into it, and the plough did not change. The first grey hairs came in China.

  15. Crowds of cyclists filling a Kunming street at rush hour beneath a red banner for the China Kunming International Tourism Festival.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    Kunming

    Kunming, where the first map ends. Rush hour was still bicycles, a slow river of them under a banner for the city's International Tourism Festival. For once I was not the only man on a bicycle. They looked anyway.

  16. A round moon gate in a tiled garden wall in China, bamboo beyond it.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    China

    A round doorway, built so that whoever passes through steps into something whole. The permit to ride from Chengdu to Lhasa was refused, and refused again. In the end I flew over what I had meant to ride.

  17. Sticks of red incense smoking in a temple courtyard in China, a tiered bronze burner blurred behind them.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    China

    Incense smoking before a temple burner. A generation after the Red Guards smashed the temples, the smoke was rising again. By permission, of course. Whose?

  18. Tibetan monks in maroon robes debating in a monastery courtyard under bare trees, the questioners standing and the defenders seated.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    Tibet

    In the courtyard the monks debate. The questioner stands, claps, and stamps: the clap joins compassion to wisdom, the stamp shuts the door on rebirth in the lower realms. The one who sits may give only three answers. I had come to Asia to become one of them. Watching, I understood I had no answers at all.

  19. A yak with a red tassel tethered at the steps of a Tibetan monastery, a painted Buddhist mural behind it.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    Tibet

    A yak tethered at the monastery steps, a painted paradise behind it. The nomads poured me tea churned with its butter, the worst thing I have ever tasted and the only thing they had to give. They laughed at me and poured more.

  20. A mani stone carved with the Tibetan mantra Om mani padme hum, its letters painted white, red, yellow, green and blue.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    Tibet

    Om mani padme hum, carved and painted on a stone and left by the path, one among thousands. It is the mantra of Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, of whom every Dalai Lama is held to be an emanation. A stone says its prayer once and then keeps saying it. The State can close a monastery. It is harder to close a hillside.

  21. A doorway into a Tibetan room with dried meat hanging from the rafters, painted chests, stacked bedding and a thermos.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    Tibet

    Meat hanging from the rafters of a Tibetan house. There is no refrigerator, and no need of one: at this altitude the cold, dry air keeps meat through the winter. A thermos of butter tea on the painted chest, a padlock hanging open on the door.

  22. A faded portrait of Mao Zedong and Cultural Revolution slogans praising him, painted on a wall inside a Tibetan temple behind a wire grille.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    Tibet

    Inside a Tibetan temple, behind a wire grille, Mao is still on the wall: great teacher, great leader. The slogan was born in 1966, the year the Cultural Revolution came for the monasteries, and Beijing retired it after 1971. No one has painted it over. Whether the grille protects the slogan or the temple from the slogan, I could not tell.

  23. A kettle heating on a parabolic solar cooker against a whitewashed wall in Tibet.

    I. Malaysia to Tibet

    Tibet

    A kettle boiling on a mirror. On the plateau the air is thin and the sun is close, and where no trees grow, a dish of polished metal does the work of a fire.

  24. Nepal and India

    2000

    Then the hospital, and the appendix. Two months on my back, then the road again, down into India.

    Read this stretch of the road

    Route map from Shigatse over Gyatso-La and down through Kathmandu and Pokhara in Nepal.
  25. A cremation pyre burning on a stone ghat beside the Bagmati River at Pashupatinath in Kathmandu, onlookers on the terrace above.

    II. Nepal and India

    Pashupatinath, Kathmandu

    At Pashupatinath the dead burn in the open on the steps of the Bagmati, and the living sit on the terrace and watch, the way one watches weather. A few days later, in Pokhara, I lay on the ground outside the public hospital with appendicitis, looked at Machapuchare, and waited for the end. Two weeks earlier, on the Tibetan plateau, it would have found me.

  26. A crowd of village children gathered beside a bus that had rolled off the highway in the Terai of Nepal.

    II. Nepal and India

    The Terai, Nepal

    Children of the Terai around a bus that had rolled off the highway into a field. Nobody screamed. The children came to look; the men came to see what could be saved. The Maoist war was four years old and would kill more than seventeen thousand people. The boy in the striped shirt would be nearly forty now.

  27. An ox cart fording a wide, shallow river on the plains of the Subcontinent, men wading alongside.

    II. Nepal and India

    The Subcontinent

    Where the road reaches the river, the river decides. A cart, two oxen, men in the current to their knees. On these plains the monsoon redraws the map every year, and people cross where the water lets them.

  28. Two men and a schoolgirl in uniform in the doorway of a shop near Nainital, India, where the author stayed.

    II. Nepal and India

    Near Nainital, India

    Near Nainital, in the Kumaon hills, a shopkeeper took me in. He was a man of standing in the village, the one people came to with their problems, and he had an apple orchard; we walked it together, and he would not stop giving. The men ate together. The women ate in the kitchen, apart. So kind, so generous, and so different. Up in the hills the Western seekers traded one set of bells and incense for another. I was one of them, with a bicycle instead of bells.

  29. The author laughing beside Manjot's family in Samrala, Punjab, an older woman, a young man and a white-bearded elder, a bowl of bananas on the table.

    II. Nepal and India

    Samrala, the Punjab

    Manjot found me at his family's cold-drink shop on the Punjabi plain, would not let me pay, and took me home to Samrala. In Punjabi culture, he said, the guest is God. His mother cooked; the men ate first; she ate in the kitchen. In 1947 Partition drew a line through the Punjab in a matter of weeks, and millions crossed it running, in both directions. In the photograph everyone is laughing, and I can no longer remember at what.

  30. The Golden Temple at Amritsar strung with lights at night, reflected in the dark water of its pool.

    II. Nepal and India

    The Golden Temple, Amritsar

    The Golden Temple at night. By day its kitchen feeds as many as a hundred thousand people and asks no one his religion or his name. In June 1984 the Indian Army stormed it to drive out armed militants; that October the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was shot dead by her own Sikh bodyguards. Sixteen years later the lights were back on, and the pool gave them back double.

  31. Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon

    2000

    The road does not move. You move on it and take what comes.

    Read this stretch of the road

    Route map across the Punjab from Delhi to Lahore and Islamabad, with the Swat Valley marked to the north.Route map from Amman north through Damascus, across the Anti-Lebanon range and up the coast past Tripoli.
  32. The walls and domed pavilions of the Lahore Fort under a Pakistani flag, a minaret of the Badshahi Mosque behind.

    III. Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon

    Lahore

    The Lahore Fort, the flag of Pakistan over its walls, and beyond it a minaret of the Badshahi Mosque, finished by the emperor Aurangzeb in 1673. Before this flag the Mughals flew theirs here, then the Sikhs, then the British. Lahore outlasted them all, the way great cities do, by taking none of them too seriously.

  33. A Mughal glazed-tile panel of a flowering tree inside a pointed arch, framed by blue and yellow floral borders.

    III. Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon

    Lahore

    A flowering tree in glazed tile, the kashi work the Mughals brought from Persia. Someone set these pieces one by one so that, centuries later, a man on a bicycle could stand in front of them with nothing to say.

  34. The ornately painted and chromed front of a Pakistani bus parked on a city street.

    III. Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon

    Pakistan

    A bus dressed like a bride. A driver will spend more on his vehicle than on his house, because the house stays where it is and the bus is seen by the world. In Pakistan someone was always offering tea. If I have a religion, it is that.

  35. A black road sign reading DMT with an arrow pointing left, beside a road at dusk in Pakistan.

    III. Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon

    Pakistan

    DMT, this way. In America DMT is the spirit molecule, the drug that is supposed to show you God. In the armies the British left behind, DMT means Driver, Mechanical Transport. One takes you to the divine; the other takes the colonel to lunch. I never found out which this sign meant. I have my suspicions about the arrow.

  36. Two men walking a mountain road in the Swat Valley, one carrying a load of cornstalks, snow peaks above.

    III. Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon

    Swat Valley, Pakistan

    Men carrying the harvest up the Swat road under the snows. In Madyan the people had hazel eyes and light-brown skin. So did I. After a year of being stared at across Asia, nobody looked twice; strangers invited me in to pray with them. It was not the faith that took me in, or the Buddhist ruins, or anything I had read. It was my face. In the 1970s the psychologist Henri Tajfel showed that people favor their own group even when the group is assigned at random. On the Silk Road, the dice came up mine. Until I opened my mouth.

  37. The Swat River running through a steep valley below a hillside town, a snow peak at the head of the valley.

    III. Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon

    Swat Valley, Pakistan

    The Swat River, clear and fast, as if it had no history. Seven years later came the Taliban, then the army, then, in the summer of 2010, the river itself, which took the bridges, the road and whole villages.

  38. The standing columns of the Temple of Hercules on the Amman Citadel, the city spread over the hills behind.

    III. Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon

    Temple of Hercules, Amman

    Iran refused a visa, again and again. I flew from Islamabad to Amman. On the Citadel the Romans raised a temple to Hercules around AD 165, when the city was named Philadelphia, brotherly love. Of the god, a hand and an elbow remain. Brotherhood has fared about the same.

  39. The steep stone tiers of the Roman Theater in Amman curving down to its stage, a single figure on the stage.

    III. Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon

    The Roman Theater, Amman

    Below the Citadel the Romans cut a theater into the hill for six thousand people, in the reign of Antoninus Pius. It faces north, so the sun stays out of the audience's eyes. One figure crosses the stage, small as a comma.

  40. A blue road sign in Arabic and English pointing north to Syria at the Jaber border crossing in Jordan.

    III. Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon

    The Jaber crossing, Jordan

    North to Syria, which would give me the kindest welcome of the journey. In 2015 rebels took the far side and this crossing closed for three years. In December 2024, as the old regime fell, it closed again. The sign still points north.

  41. The ruined Great Court of the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek, its carved exedrae and pink granite columns under a violet sky.

    III. Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon

    Baalbek, Lebanon

    Baalbek, in the Bekaa. The Romans called it Heliopolis, City of the Sun, and spent three centuries raising temples to Jupiter on foundation stones of some eight hundred tons apiece. In 2024 bombs fell near it, and UNESCO placed it under its highest protection. The stones have outlasted everyone who ever wanted them. That is not the same as being safe.

  42. The author in a blue down vest standing on a fallen stone block in the ruins of Baalbek, broken columns and walls behind.

    III. Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon

    Baalbek, Lebanon

    After the ruins I took tea and a sheesha at a café across the road. The men at the other tables all wore the black-and-white keffiyeh and talked low and grim, like a board meeting where the agenda is somebody else's country. When the waiter asked where I was from, their table went silent. France, I said, leaning on the nasal an. My French was good, and I kept it to the essentials: the tea, the bill, merci. I have never been prouder of a vowel.

  43. Cloud pouring over a stony mountain crest on the pass out of the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon.

    III. Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon

    The pass out of the Bekaa, Lebanon

    Cloud pouring over the pass out of the Bekaa, at more than two thousand meters. The valley below is the northern reach of the Great Rift, where our primate ancestors first stood up, and up which, some ninety thousand years ago, people walked into the Levant. Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, Romans and Arabs ruled it after them. On the ridge I felt what I had felt under the stars: a magnificent unimportance. It was the best news I had had in weeks.

  44. The mountain town of Bsharri above the Qadisha Valley, red roofs and a twin-spired church below snow-streaked peaks.

    III. Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon

    Bsharri, Lebanon

    Bsharri, at the head of the Qadisha Valley, where Maronite hermits cut their cells into the cliffs and Khalil Gibran was born. Coming down into Christian country, I peeled the sticker off my bicycle that read There is no god but Allah; the Syrian border guards had already had opinions about it. A man who changes his theology at every border is a diplomat. With stickers, he is a cyclist. That night, down the valley at Ehden, Joseph's friends fought a duel with kebab skewers, two hunters arrived with shotguns, and I drank arak to the health of George W. Bush with a loaded gun on the table. Later a man with a crooked chin and another shotgun told me: You go. This is not hotel. I rode out into the dark.

  45. A high-rise tower in Lebanon scarred with shell and bullet holes from the civil war.

    III. Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon

    Lebanon

    The civil war lasted fifteen years and ended in 1990. Ten years later the towers still wore it. Lebanon has been bombed again since. I do not know if this one is still standing.

  46. Two touring cyclists standing with a Syrian family under a roadside shade structure in northern Syria.

    III. Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon

    Northern Syria

    The only other cyclists I met in the Middle East, under a family's roadside shade in northern Syria, not far from the Turkish border. For an afternoon there were three of us who understood exactly what we were doing, and none of us could have explained it. Within a dozen years the war had reached these roads.

  47. Turkey to France

    2000 to 2001

    The strong do as they can, and the weak suffer as they must. I underline it, and for a long time I am sure it is about other people.

    Read this stretch of the road

    Route map of the Mediterranean crossing: southern Turkey, Crete and Greece, Italy, the Alps, Switzerland and France to Paris.
  48. A late Roman floor mosaic of a woman labeled Soteria, salvation, framed in a geometric border, in the Hatay Archaeology Museum at Antakya.

    IV. Turkey to France

    Antakya, the old Antioch

    Soteria: salvation, in Greek, set in stone in the fifth century and kept in the museum at Antakya, the old Antioch, among the great collections of Roman mosaics. It was at Antioch that the followers of Jesus were first called Christians. In February 2023 an earthquake brought much of the city down; the museum walls cracked and the mosaics were packed away. Salvation, as usual, was postponed.

  49. The ruined walls of Yılankale castle on a rocky summit, a Turkish flag flying above the Ceyhan River and the flat Cilician plain.

    IV. Turkey to France

    Yılankale, Turkey

    Yılankale, the Snake Castle, above the Ceyhan River and the Cilician plain. The Armenian kings of Cilicia raised it in the age of the Crusades, and it was abandoned in the fourteenth century. The villagers say it belongs to Shahmaran, half woman, half serpent. Someone has put up a flag.

  50. A long snow-covered mountain range in southern Turkey above pine-covered foothills.

    IV. Turkey to France

    Southern Turkey

    Snow on the mountains of southern Turkey, in winter. On this coast in 1190 the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, marching an army to Jerusalem, drowned crossing a river. The river is called the Göksu now.

  51. Roofless stone walls and the tiered seats of a small ancient theater among green scrub, the sea behind, on the Turkish coast.

    IV. Turkey to France

    The Turkish coast

    Ruins on the Turkish coast, where I camped. Walls with no roofs, a theater with no audience, the sea behind them. I pitched the tent about where the actors used to stand. Nobody asked for an encore.

  52. The author in a red shirt standing with his loaded bicycle among tall fluted marble columns near Antalya, Turkey.

    IV. Turkey to France

    Antalya, Turkey

    I leaned the bicycle against a temple outside Antalya. The columns had stood since Rome. The god had gone, and the roof with him. What I was carrying seemed heavy to me then.

  53. A stone fortress at the end of a Greek harbor mole, fishing boats in the foreground under heavy winter cloud.

    IV. Turkey to France

    A Greek harbor

    A harbor in the Greek islands, the boats waiting out the winter under a low sky. On Rhodes the white yachts waited too, and in a youth hostel I read Thucydides: the strong do as they can, and the weak suffer as they must. I underlined it, and for a long time I was sure it was about other people.

  54. The author with his bicycle between two members of the Laurenzana family outside the Locanda di Eolo in Potenza, Italy.

    IV. Turkey to France

    Potenza, Italy

    I stopped at the Locanda di Eolo, outside Potenza, to ask about a campground. The Laurenzanas kept me for weeks of winter instead: Salvatore, Stephania, Sandro, Enza. Grappa on the morning of Epiphany, Italian verbs on flashcards, books my grandmother mailed from home. I had left one family to find something on the road, and what I found was another family. I would miss them. No: I would grieve them.

  55. Two men standing in the doorway of a bicycle shop in Italy, wheels and frames hanging behind them.

    IV. Turkey to France

    Central Italy

    In the middle of Italy the bicycle fell apart, and so did I. I had decided to walk to Rome and fly home. Then a sign for a bicycle shop, and Marzullo, twenty-two years at the trade, hands flying above his head as he talked. He charged me only for parts and sent me off in a pair of blue Lycra MARZULLO team racing pants. It remains my only sponsorship.

  56. A hillside of yellow wildflowers under an open sky in northern Italy.

    IV. Turkey to France

    Northern Italy

    A hillside of yellow flowers in northern Italy, indifferent to everything I was carrying. The Alps were ahead.

  57. A snow-dusted Alpine peak wrapped in cloud above a Swiss lake.

    IV. Turkey to France

    Switzerland

    Over the Alps in a snowstorm. A man who had set out to become a monk found his monastery at last: cold, silence, and a single rule, which was to keep going.

  58. The Pont d'Arc, a natural limestone arch over the green water of the Ardèche River in southern France.

    IV. Turkey to France

    The Pont d'Arc, France

    The Ardèche cut this arch through the limestone some 124,000 years ago. In a cave beside it, people painted lions and horses 36,000 years ago; they had walked here, as their ancestors had walked everywhere. I rode on across France beside my father. For a thousand kilometers the road gave us something we could share, and some days we laughed. It did not last. For a while it was enough.

  59. The stone memorial plaque on the ruined church at Oradour-sur-Glane, headed Silence, recording the massacre of hundreds of women and children by the Nazis.

    IV. Turkey to France

    Oradour-sur-Glane, France

    The plaque asks for one thing: silence. On 10 June 1944 an SS company of the Das Reich division killed 642 people here, almost the whole village. They locked 240 women and 205 children in this church and threw in grenades. France kept the ruins as they fell. About a hundred kilometers south, at Lascaux, people painted horses on the walls of a cave some seventeen thousand years ago. We are the primate that did both. At Gombe, Jane Goodall watched one band of chimpanzees destroy another over four years. Civilization is the paint on the cave wall. Underneath, the rock is the same.

  60. Panama to California

    2001

    They fly north to breed and die, on a road no single butterfly finishes.

    Read this stretch of the road

    Route map from Managua north through Central America and Mexico, up the Baja peninsula to San Diego.
  61. The steel arch of the Bridge of the Americas over the Panama Canal in haze, framed by overhanging leaves.

    V. Panama to California

    The Bridge of the Americas, Panama

    The Bridge of the Americas over the Panama Canal, where the Pan-American Highway crosses from one half of the world to the other. The United States had handed the canal back to Panama at the end of 1999. I started north from here, the direction everyone on this road was going.

  62. A deeply rutted, waterlogged dirt road between a treeline and a cane field in Panama.

    V. Panama to California

    Panama

    A road in Panama after the rain. I did not always take the easy way. Some days the easy way was not on offer, and some days I refused it out of a pride I could not have explained to anyone, least of all to myself.

  63. Young women in white blouses and wide red-trimmed folkloric skirts dancing in a Costa Rican street, a man in a white hat among them.

    V. Panama to California

    Costa Rica

    Girls dancing in the street in Costa Rica, skirts wide as wheels. Costa Rica abolished its army in 1948, and the region around it spent the following decades at war. Here they danced.

  64. A border worker in a respirator, goggles and rubber apron fumigating the author's loaded touring bicycle at the Nicaraguan border while an official holds it.

    V. Panama to California

    The Nicaraguan border

    At the Nicaraguan border a man in a gas mask fumigated my bicycle. Not me. The bicycle. Whatever I was bringing into the country, the government had decided it was riding in on the tires. The government was wrong, but it was confident, which is the main thing a government needs to be.

  65. The bell tower of a colonial church in Granada, Nicaragua, against a dark sky, a flag at its top.

    V. Panama to California

    Granada, Nicaragua

    A bell tower in Granada under a hard sky. The Spanish founded the city in 1524. In 1856 one of William Walker's generals, an American filibuster's army in retreat, burned it to the ground and left a sign in the ashes: Here was Granada. North of here, in Honduras, the soldiers gave advice at the roadside: if you are robbed, do not fight. They kill. It was said kindly.

  66. Steam rising from a hot asphalt road between green trees in El Salvador, a bus approaching in the distance.

    V. Panama to California

    El Salvador

    Steam rising off the asphalt in El Salvador, the rain going back up almost as fast as it came down. The heat rode with me all day. I drank water by the gallon, and none of it ever came out the other end; it went straight back into the sky with the rain.

  67. The author sitting on a seawall above the Pacific coast of El Salvador, his loaded bicycle in front of him.

    V. Panama to California

    El Salvador

    The Pacific coast of El Salvador, nine years after its civil war ended. In high school I was such a pain in the ass they would not let me take third-year Spanish; apparently the language had to be protected from me. By Mexico I spoke it. Nobody at the border asked for my transcript.

  68. A cone-shaped volcano in the Guatemalan highlands rising out of a sea of cloud.

    V. Panama to California

    Guatemala

    A volcano standing out of the cloud. Guatemala's civil war ended in 1996, after thirty-six years and some two hundred thousand dead, most of them Maya.

  69. The whitewashed church of San Juan Chamula in Chiapas, strung with festival pennants, a crowd at its doors.

    V. Panama to California

    San Juan Chamula, Chiapas

    At Chamula the Tzotzil Maya pray on a floor of pine needles, among candles, pox and Coca-Cola, and a priest comes only for baptisms. Inside, cameras are forbidden, and some have been smashed. This was taken from the square, where God permits it.

  70. Carlos, an eighteen-year-old from Managua heading north toward the United States, smiling in a white T-shirt among green foliage in Chiapas.

    V. Panama to California

    Carlos, Chiapas

    Carlos, eighteen, from Managua, pushing a rusty bicycle up a grade in Chiapas with a Coke bottle for a canteen. The coyotes wanted five thousand dollars to get him to his cousin in Miami, so he was riding. On a bus, he said, they ask for papers; on a bicycle the police think you are a peasant going from one village to the next. He had done it once already. The federales caught him a few kilometers from the border and sent him back to Managua. For two years I had called my journey a quest.

  71. The moon rising over a stepped stone platform at Monte Albán in Oaxaca.

    V. Panama to California

    Monte Albán, Oaxaca

    The Zapotecs leveled a mountaintop for their capital around 500 BC and abandoned it more than a thousand years ago. The gods left. The moon still keeps the appointment.

  72. A small blue roadside chapel strung with paper flags among columnar cacti and bare trees in the Mexican hills.

    V. Panama to California

    Mexico

    A roadside chapel in the hills, strung with paper flags, the cactus standing guard. Along Mexico's roads the saints have small houses, and so do the dead, and both are brought flowers.

  73. A volcanic cone rising over dry golden grassland and low hills in central Mexico under a blue sky.

    V. Panama to California

    Central Mexico

    A volcano standing over the dry grass of central Mexico. The Aztecs held that mountains were vessels full of water, the houses of the rain gods. By then I believed in nothing but the next town, and the water bottle.

  74. Wooden crucifixes laid out for sale on the hood of an old car parked by a pine-lined road to the shrine at Chalma, Mexico.

    V. Panama to California

    The road to Chalma

    Crucifixes for sale on the hood of an old car, on the road to Chalma. Pilgrims walk to a cave where the Aztecs prayed to the god of caves; soon after the conquest, the story goes, Christ appeared there in his place. An old man passed me carrying Him in a glass box as long as his back. God is a verb, Buckminster Fuller said. Here He is the walking. Darwin wrote of caged birds that throw themselves at the side of the cage facing their migration until they are bare and bloody. Our ancestors walked for ninety thousand years and settled only eleven thousand years ago. I would like to believe it was only that, a bird against the bars. An instinct would excuse a great deal. But a bird does not keep a journal, or call its restlessness a quest.

  75. An empty two-lane highway running straight to the horizon through the Vizcaíno Desert in Baja California under a deep blue sky.

    V. Panama to California

    The Vizcaíno Desert, Baja California

    The road into the Vizcaíno Desert, lined with blown tires and broken glass. Out of the nothing came an engine's roar and a crack: a maroon Ford Aerostar, doing well over a hundred kilometers an hour, took the mirror off my handlebars. A centimeter closer and it would have taken the handlebars, and me with them. It stopped a hundred and fifty meters on, its blue tarp flapping, waited until I was almost there, and drove away. I said a few choice things in Spanish and camped behind a dune. The next morning I passed the same van in a ditch, blue tarp and all.

  76. A highway sign welcoming travelers to Tijuana, in Spanish and English.

    V. Panama to California

    Tijuana

    The last sign before the border: working for the common good. A customs officer asked the purpose of my travels. I had no answer he would write down. Where a border would not open, I had bought a ticket over it. Carlos could not. It took years to see that the ticket was part of the story.

  77. I did not know I was seeing the last of something.

    One never does.

    The road, in words From the beginning Field Notes from the Middle

    © Robert Foster  ·  Cycle Nomad  ·  @cyclenomad