Born on Sunday 6th November, 8lbs, and totally awesome.

www.charliecliveclear.com

As a direct result of our last journey around the UK, we are about to start the next epic leg of Going The Distance. The sidecar has been replaced with the moses basket, and our average number of miles covered per day will drop to zero. We were profoundly affected by the conclusion of the UK journey – especially our meeting with the Bowls Club in Launceston. I dug out the blog post from that day – still on goingthedistance.co.uk.

(mc:) Our last day in the saddle began with a brief trip to Dunheved bowls club. We met Brian and Rhona (40 years together), Ron and Mavis (50), Edward and Gloria (51), Bernie and Mary (47) and Colin and Julie (35)
So with 223 years of marriage between them, they had more combined experience than any other interview on this project. We covered a range of topics; from bowls to arguing….But they clearly remember the wedding day, and the birth of their children and grandchildren. It’s more important to enjoy what you’ve got, than to get what you want”

The other thing they mentioned, which we didn’t recount in the blog, was the timing of it all. If you want to be a grandparent at 60, then you need kids around 30. It’s just maths. It’s not whether you’re you think you’re ready for a baby now, you’ll never think you’re ready. But it is something you need to get on with at some point soon to have a family to enjoy when you’re old. And it is that family that will help you Go The Distance.

So with that in mind, we’ve got on with it and here’s the result.

I’ve found that once you start writing a blog about significant life events, it’s hard to stop..

Have a look at www.charliecliveclear.com if you want to see the next leg of the journey.

Hello Friends of Going The Distance!

It’s been a while since we were last in touch. Back in August we asked you to watch our ABC piece on Going the Distance; and I think some of you did – we had 4.1 million viewers in total. Hurray!

After interviewing 120 couples through the Americas between June 2009, and April 2010 – we realised that we had only scratched the surface of the subject; everyone we spoke to offered us different advice, and each story was an inspiration. What’s more, having spoken to everyonw from Americans to Argentinians about the secret to lasting love, there was a nationality we missed out – the British – the very one that’s most relevant to us. We were left wondering how couples in our own country make their relationships “go the distance”.

So on January 1st 2011, we’re going to set off from John O’Groats, Scotland, on a 6 week Going the Distance adventure around the UK. In the cold and driving rain (ah, for the heat of the Mexican desert!) in search of the secret of British love, and to find adventure on our own doorstep. This time though, we have some support in the form of our friends at FreshOne (Jamie Oliver’s production company), MatchAffinity.com (who, like us, are trying to find out the secret of lasting love) and as before, Ural motorcycles. We’ll even be accompanied by a director and a cameraman!

So if you have any advice for us, or even better if you know a couple who we could meet who may be able to tell us the secret of a lasting relationship, then please let us know.

Finally, we’re relocating our activity to goingthedistance.co.uk – where you’ll be able to see our latest film, and track our progress in January.

To help us answer the question: “what’s the secret to a lasting relationship?” either join the facebook fan page and share your secret, or tweet your secret using the hashtag #secrettolove

Lots of love, literally,

Mike and Alanna

They flew us out to New York, we met with Drs Helen Fisher and Lucy Brown once again, and we even had another brainscan – meaning that we have now had 3 scans over the last year.

The programme, entitled Secrets of Your Mind, aired on Thursday 19th August on ABC, hosted by Cynthia McFadden.

Here is a link to the programme (it’s in two parts):

Part 1

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Prime/love-tested-extreme-trip/story?id=11420276

Part 2

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/love-survive-20000-mile-journey-11441944

The brief was to create a short film entitled ‘Courage’. It had to be no longer than 3 minutes, and it had to contain no less than 20% stock footage.

Mike enlisted the help of Ben Harrex at Final Cut, to cut the hour and a half long interview we had with Leonard and Janet down to precisely 3 minutes. And Rob Hughes, an expert in video archiving, then selected appropriate stock footage.

Last night, on the aptly named Courage beach, we watched the Top 10 films of the 45 entries from directors and production teams around the world. The calibre was much higher than we anticipated, with teams filming complex shots, hiring skilled actors, and sometimes adding many effects in post-production.

To our delight and overwhelming surprise, our film won gold. Beating an amazing  Japanese entry and last year’s winner of Cannes Lion Young Director of the Year from LA. We are over the moon, and want to say a huge thanks to Ben and Rob, the music guys at Human Music, the sound at Factory studios and the film was graded at MPC.

The work on Going The Distance continues, and here is the latest trailer for the project:

Before we disappear into the gargantuan task of going through all the footage we have filmed for Going the Distance (around 200 hours in total), we just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone out there who took the time to be part of our journey. Both, of course, the people who gave us their time, their thoughts and their intimate and cherished love stories, but also a huge thank you to you folk out there who have taken the time to read about what we have done.

I think I said from the very beginning that I’m not a particular believer in blogs – I read a statistic that suggested that over a million blogs are written worldwide and less that 1% of them are read. By anyone. Which is why I started the mad adventure that is Going the Distance with a couple of bulletpoints a day. But slowly, inevitably, I was beguiled by the heady lure of daily self-expression, and the entries got longer and longer… So thank you so much to everyone who took the time to wade through my ramblings (often written from the sidecar, or a few days after the event – I never once watched back the footage so they were done from my memory rather than cold hard quotations – which the book will be)

Which brings me to my final farewell. We had the experience of our lives, and now, we have the pressure of trying to make something of it… I’m taking 5 months to write a book, and Mike is going to work through the footage. We will be trying to pitch the documentary idea out to try and get funding (normally this happens at the start of the process, but we will be pitching for post-production funding) so we’ll be working our butts off to try and get Going the Distance on television.

If that does happen, it would be likely to  be at the start of next year, 2011. If we’re lucky… I’ll post any developments on this site, but nothing in between, so if you’d like to know how we’re getting on, sign up to an RSS feed from this site and you’ll be updated when I finally have news. If not, please do just drop us a line at mikeandalanna@gmail.com.

We have loved hearing from you guys with your thoughts on love and your endless encouragement for the two of us. Thank you so much, and with that, I sign out.

Gone the Distance. xx

Well, I can’t believe this is finally it. Yesterday was a whirlwind (after 7 hours of sitting on the plane/waiting for luggage to be unloaded/elbowing other passengers in the bunfight for hotel vouchers, we finally got to sleep at 3.55am), and it has somewhat shifted the focus from the enormity (in my head) of our return to simple relief. I’m really looking forward to getting home. I have moments when this really disappoints me – the wishing away of the last month on the road, which now pains me to recall – but I also am just bursting with a childish excitement to see all the faces which I have missed so much over the last 8 months.

One change that I feel, and that I hope I can retain, is finally a sense that London is my home. I kicked and screamed my way through my early 20s, desperately wanting to live in seemingly more exciting or different global metropolises (metropoli?!) believing that somehow I’d feel more fulfilled, more challenged, more interesting, abroad. I fixated specifically on New York because I had my handful of very close friends there and every time I went, I threw myself into its captivating energy.

I believed myself to be bigger than London, wanted to feel more international, less normal. But now I know, with a certain pride and a strong sense of contentment, that London is my home. The wanderlust, the desire to be somewhere else, the sense that everywhere was more interesting, which gnawed away at the better part of my first decade of professsional life is now sated, I hope for good. It’s almost as though (she says, self indulgently, sleep starved) it’s taken me these 8 months of being away, working my guts off with Mike, meeting people from such amazingly different backgrounds and hearing such personal details of their lives, to realise that really people are pretty similar wherever you go. And the people I know best happen to be in London.

I’ve been blown away by the people that we have met on the Going the Distance journey. In a way that no other travelling experience has let me understand before. This project has been an amazing way of opening the lid on people’s lives – people from so many backgrounds, so many ways of life. I honestly feel privileged and blessed to have had this experience, and I hope that it has enriched me in a way that no amount of real life could have. The subject of love has allowed us into people’s hearts, and my own heart has swollen with the love that we have felt from people at every step of the way.

I realise I’m descending into a cheese fest here, but my faith in and love for humanity has grown beyond anything I could ever have expected. People are, by and large, wonderful and I feel blessed to have been able to go out and experience that. Every country has overwhelmed us with its warmth and generosity, and going home, I feel a certain obligation to express that in what we do with all that we have filmed, but that said, I’m so proud to have met every single person that we have found (and who has found us) along the way. There’s lots of love out there, and it’s really made me feel good about the world.

So, going home. Friends and family are what make home, and God, I’ve been reminded how much I love my lot. Going back for Mike’s mum’s 60th means that the whole of his family will be together for the weekend, we’ll meet baby Eva for the first time – Mike’s brother’s daughter, born in October. Not to mention friends who are now married, other friends with new babies, friends who have suffered loss, my younger brother getting engaged! Time to get back to real life now with its highs and lows, its mundanity and routines, and the nest of friends and family.

New York has been a perfect quarantine for us before we head back to the wonderful madness of the UK. I have friends who I love in New York, one of whom gave us her sumptuous flat near Union Square, and we have spent time catching up with old friends, laughing and generally behaving like we have never been away. After 8 months of living with virtually nothing, feeling like I was becoming less materialistic (“All my crap can fit into two small bags. What more could I possibly need when I get home?”), there really is nothing like New York for restoring a rampant consumerism.

After the relative mental difficulty of Buenos Aires, New York has been a breeze. One week here and it feels like nothing has changed, like we never left here to set off on our self-indulgent odyssey.

Except of course that I got a cold the minute we landed.

That’ll happen after returning from 8 months of summer to piles of snow on the pavement. But I have basically been a snot fountain and felt shit for our entire time here. Hey ho.

We’re now in the plane. Sitting here. At the stand. After initial delay, we taxied out to the runway, then just as we got to the front of the queue, the captain came on and said that we had to go back to the stand because there was an issue with the de-icer. Now, an hour and a half later, the snow is inches thick on the wing and gathering at the base of the windows like some cheesy Christmas scene. It’s difficult to make any shapes out beyond the wing. We’re not going anywhere.

We wake up to heavy heavy snowfall. Not cool.

The real curveball today was devised entirely by me: I have organised an interview with an economics professor at Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It’s a last minute plan – like everything on the Going the Distance trip – a friend of mine forwarded us a link to a New York Times Article on the evolving state of marriage, with contribution from our much loved Dr Helen Fisher.

Professor Betsey Stevenson, PhD, is a professor of business and public policy. She’s written a number of papers on the economics of marriage and has created a Marriage Calculator based on US census data over the last 50 years which gives individuals their percentage likelihood of divorce.

The statistic that 50% of marriages in the UK (and pretty much the Western world) end in divorce has been the driving force for this entire journey – we wanted to find out what makes marriage last. The opportunity to interview a US economist who could talk about that statistic, why it’s not entirely reliable, the changing dynamics of marriage – all without subjectivity, simply by analysing the numbers – was an opportunity not to be missed. Which is why we found ourselves hauling every single item we owned from New York to Philadelphia in the heavy heavy snow. Only to be there for 2 hours before returning to Newark to catch a plane.

But she was worth it. 100%. Our last interview on the road for Going the Distance was an absolute cracker. She was fascinating, talking about the evolution of marriage from one of shared production to one of shared consumption. In essence, that a couple 50 years ago chose each other on the basis that they would be establishing a small factory (he goes out into the market, she has to run the home and raise the children) and now, the model has changed so that it makes more sense economically for both partners to be earning (it costs less now to buy clothes from Walmart than to make them at home) and with both partners financially independent, marriage now is about sharing the fruits of the work. ie people chose each other now based on shared goals, opinions and leisure activities, whereas it boiled down more to choosing a business partner in this game of life.

I’m not doing her justice with this garbling, but needless to say, she was superb. Thoroughly worth the schlep out of state!

They arrive at the flat at 10 and set up around us. For our interview, they are doing green screen – they haven’t yet decided what they want the background of the couples to be.

Though I’m looking forward to the interview – someone will actually be asking us questions! And hopefully not just the same old questions we got all the way down (which we got good at answering in Spanish) but new ones – I’m actually a little nervous about having to come up with decent answers. This ain’t no Bolivian children’s TV.

Mike has been great at calming me on this front. Every interview we have done for Going the Distance, someone will ask “well, what IS the secret of lasting love?” and I haven’t got a clue. There are things that we have seen – like every couple has a unique love, no relationship dynamic is the same, there are no templates – but I have no soundbite answers. Mike just said to me that I should think of the journey as our ‘data gathering’ and now we need to go back and start on ‘data analysis’. What a job that’s going to be.

As ever, with this blog, I’m writing this more than a week after the interview so details which were so important and felt so powerful at the time are now hazy. That’s what the book’s going to be for, I suppose, when I’ll actually have watched all the footage again and had a chance to think about it properly.

That said, the interview with Sue was one of the most affirming moments for me in the entire trip. All the fears which I had harboured for so long about whether what we have done is worth it (or rather, how we are going to be able to do it justice) seemed to lighten: she asked us questions about how we feel about each other, what has changed, what we have seen, what we have learnt, why we married in the first place… all of which we answered with a candour and detail which I found totally surprising, given that for the rest of the trip, we have been so busy ‘doing’ that ‘thinking’ has not been an option.

I think the most extraordinary moment was at the end of the interview when Sue leant forward and said, “I just have to say one thing – you do realise that you two are not normal?” (we have heard that before) I laughed. She said, “no, I mean, that everything that you have said about your relationship, how you said that you both really thought about what marriage meant before you tied the knot – that is very unusual” We had spoken at length about why we had decided to get married (which is the main thrust of her documentary) and about our thought-processes that got us there (I confessed that I never even questioned that I would marry – I know that I would never have been strong enough not to marry, in the face of convention) She finished off by saying that the two of us have done more thinking in 8 months about our relationship than most couples do in a lifetime and that the two of us evidently have something very special. Which was uplifting to hear. Like everything, you can never know if your ‘normal’ is like other people’s ‘normal’…

After about 3 hours of the interview, we headed out to get shots of the two of us around New York. It was very cold, but it was great fun in many ways. These poor people had listened to so much of us warbling on that it felt like we were spending the day with old friends…

It’s difficult to write about the first interview because the aforementioned fellow who I feel real attachment to won’t let me ‘fess up the results of the first set of tests, housed in the famous envelope. So you’ll just have to wait for the book/the documentary for that one.

But the interview with Helen is totally fascinating. Not least because Sue, the Canadian documentary producer, is fantastic, drawing the extremely good Helen on questions about why marriage as an institution still exists at all if divorce is at an all time high, and if general confidence in the institution should appear to be fading. Helen, the biological anthropologists, talks to humans’ need to couple up. It lasts about an hour, and (given that it is 1am and we have been sitting in a plane waiting in vain to take off in heavy snow for 4 hours) I can’t remember much of it. But I’m delighted to say that we have every single minute on tape so I don’t need to feel guilty about dodgy grey matter. Again, it’ll make the book…

It’s around now that I start to feel rubbish. Really rubbish. Like little-kid-gets-flu rubbish. This feeling with last for the next 5 days.

The brainscan is scheduled to start at 9.45am at NYU’s Center for Neural Science. We have two hours and every minute of the session costs $15. Which means that there can be no arsing about. At all. Last time, Mike’s little claustrophobia attack gave everyone the willies because it ate into valuable time. Not so this time, we’re pros.

The CBC documentary crew set up all their equipment, and I’m up first. The fMRI scanner is a beast of a machine, located behind heavy locked doors at the NYU neurology department. It’s a huge block of metal with a hole in the middle, with a gurney which slides into the centre. It is basically a massive magnet.

For this reason, absolutely no metal is allowed near the scanner – earrings out, belts off, coins out, underwire bra off. I lie on the gurney, familiar with the process this time. Dr Helen Fisher is the hand holder at this point, getting a prop for under my knees, a blanket for warmth. Keith, the guru of the fMRI – he runs the machines and knows the brain well- gives me earplugs because the machine is violently loud. Foam is then put either side of my head to protect my ears further, then a Hannibal Lectur cage is lowered onto my head to hold it in position. Above my eyes is a small mirror which is angled so that I can see a screen at the back of the tube.

As I’m being slowly moved into the central hole, there’s a clunk. Disaster is only nearly averted as a quarter leaps from my pocket to the inside of the tube, slowed by the blanket. No blanket and I could have cost us all thousands…

Once the quarter is retrieved, I slowly glide into the tunnel. For the first ten minutes, they are just trying to get images of the brain without any stimulus. I lie fairly contentedly for a few minutes until I’m seized by the need to scratch my nose. Not cool. I breathe through it, trying not to move my head. I then panic that no images have appeared on the rear screen yet, so I wave my hand which is protruding from the base of the tunnel. No worries, I’m told. They are about to start.

The scientists are looking for neural activity in reaction to three sets of stimulus. Mike and I have provided three photos of each other to the NYU team in advance (of our first brainscan all those months ago). The basic idea is that there are three types of love in our brain: romance, attachment and sex.

We have to provide photos of the other one’s face which inspires those feelings. For romance, I have a black and white photo of Mike’s face smiling during our first dance. For attachment (the feeling of comfort and security with a partner), I have a photo of him smiling on a holiday in Beirut which I really love and inspires happy memories (I have to confess, I found this a hard sentiment to capture in a photo) and finally, of sex, a photo of his head on a pillow (also a very difficult one to do – “make a sexy face Mike!” “erm…”).

The brainscan works in blocks of about ten minutes. First romance, then attachment, then finally sex. The image of Mike in our first dance appears. I haven’t seen it for a while (well, 8 months since we were last here) and I smile hard then get tears in my eyes. Probably a good reaction, but you just never know if what’s happening in the old walnut during this thing is right. But generally, with the romance, I throw myself into memories of how I felt at the wedding, some of Mike’s most romantic gestures (he was surprisingly good at them in the early days – romance is, as you’d expect, very linked with the feelings of the early days. Dr Fisher later says that it is unusually to see strong feelings of romance last longer than around 3 years in a couple. Of course, there are wonderful exceptions) That said, there were moments on our trip which were magically romantic – as I lie on that gurney, I think of lying on a Scottish tartan rug in the deserted southwest of Oregon, with Mike beside me, staring up at the inky black sky alive with glittering stars, during one of the few summer nights of meteor showers when the sky seems to be striking matches, and feeling like my heart was swollen with love for this man as we talked for hours into the night before crawling into our own little world of the tent by our bike. Our little daily signal to tell the other that we loved them, whilst in the shared solitude of the bike’s long journeys, was something we learnt from a couple in Fairbanks: 4 squeezes which say I love you (2 for love – so, forgive the dodgy Morse code: 1 – 11 – 1). They taught it to us because they said that they liked to be able to ‘say’ I love you without other people knowing, and Mike and I have embraced it wholeheartedly. I squeezed my own leg in the formation (I would put my hand up onto Mike’s thigh as he drove, and he’d reach across and do it to my hand).

We were asked to provide a photo of someone who we felt totally indifferent about. This is a tough one (how do you ask someone if you can take a photo of them because you feel totally indifferent about them?) – I used a security guard at my clients’ building. I happened to remember him from ten years earlier when he was security during a brief stint I did at Warner Music so occasionally I chat to him. He’s a perfectly nice guy, but I feel nothing about him.

Romance: Mike’s face for around 10 seconds, then the ‘nothing’ face, then we are presented with a fairly large number (like 2035) on a white screen and, beforehand, told to count down from it in increments of 7. This desperate concentration basically flushes out the feelings of anything at all. Mike’s face again. ‘Nothing’ face. Number. Alternated a bit, but repeated 4 or 5 times.

All the while, the machine is punching the air around me in loud blasts as it ploughs through my brain taking images slice by slice. Particularly creepy when the eyeballs are in shot.

Romance over, onto attachment – same process with ‘nothing’ face and numbers but with the attachment photo this time. Attachment is a harder one to evoke. I feel it more strongly than ever now that we have finished this trip. A feeling of complete trust and contentment with one person. What swirls in my head during this time is a happy cocktail of shared jokes, laughter in good and bad times on the road, the peace that I felt in the sidecar when I looked up to his face and watched him driving, the thought of having children with him, the life we are building with each other, my love of being around him generally. I smile everytime the picture comes up.

As the scan goes on, I get sleepier and I worry that I’m not giving them the brainjuice that they need. Then I worry that this worry is going to throw the results out totally. Then I try and think of nothing and get back to the job in hand.

I’m mad.

Finally, sex. Now, this one is a bit different from the other two because it’s so physical. The first time we had our brains scanned all those months ago, I had terrible jetlag and was suffering from the aftereffects of the yellow fever jab was so feeling wretched and was very worried after the scan about the first two. But when it was time to think sexy thoughts, I really had no problem. I’m not quite so randomly horny this time, but I don’t have a problem. Apparently, that’s fairly normal and is why they leave this one until last.

After the sex block is over, they put on a DVD (of Planet Earth this time, of The Simpsons last time) for 10 minutes to get more of the control pictures of the brain. I fall asleep and only wake up when my hand falls off the gurney. Since the last time that we did the scan, they have got a new device which allows them to see where we look during the images. This new technology has opened the door to whole new studies where individuals are shown films and researchers monitor what part of the screen their eyes are looking at during certain frames – this could well dramatically change the way that we are presented images (surely if they know that we are concentrating on one corner of the screen in, say, a scary bit, they’ll make that corner more interesting? etc). In our case, however, they use it to make sure that we’re not asleep during the study. They are fine with me falling asleep at the end – otherwise they would have woken old koala bear here up.

I’m motored out of the tunnel, all good. I go into the study area on the other side of the glass, and Mike heads in. He seems much calmer than last time, and sure enough, he has no problems. In the hour or so that he is in the scanner, I chat to Helen about my feelingsduring the scan, which she documents. This time, she is keen to know how they compare to last time too. I tell her that attachment was easier to evoke this time. She is surprised – her hypothesis with us too is that we would return having fuelled our romantic feelings towards each other with the whirlwind and magic of travel.

The reality, I tell her, in my experience, is that travel is far from romantic. Yes, it’s about sharing experience and creating memories together but most of the day to day reality is not romantic at all – it’s practical even. It’s about learning to get a strong instinct for each other’s moods, about sharing the highs and, more importantly, the lows. Especially when Mike and I are sharing a professional dream here too, an all consuming project which we have both invested ourselves entirely in. The stress is daily and follows waves which are relatively unpredictable. My pride and my happiness in what we have achieved lies much more in the attachment area than the romance: what I now feel for Mike is a love much deeper than I could ever have anticipated. When we started, neither of us could understand how we could love each other more, but somehow we both do, and it’s because of the fact that we have shared EVERYTHING – from the random panic attacks, the desperate frustration at trying to get interviews or great shots, to the same thoughts.

And I say to her that I actually value attachment much more than romance. Romance, to me, feels like the cheap flirt of the family. The butterflies in the tummy at the start of the love affair, the fire that burns bright but not for long, the reaction that has people blind to faults, has people seeing only what they want to see. Attachment is the truth laid bare, it’s the eyes wide open, the acceptance, the feeling of total completion by another human being. It’s happiness and it’s my whole world.

She says she’s never thought of it like that before. The truth is that all three are important in a relationship, she says. And I say yes, but that I like the Big A the best. The other two are great but they are cheap.

In addition, we are being filmed by a Canadian documentary crew doing a programme on marriage. Specifically, ‘why do people still get married?’. They are talking to experts, and focusing on 3 young couples with different ideas about marriage. One of whom is little old us.

We land in New York, after a hideous 20 hour flight marathon from BA via Santiago and Toronto (?!), crash out then head out to meet Sue, the documentary producer and John, the cameraman, for dinner.

The dinner was exactly what my neurotic head needed. Having been very concerned in Buenos Aires that what we had done was of little interest to the outside world, Sue and John asked lots of questions, and listened to us chat and basically vent our concerns about what we are making as a documentary. Having both being in the documentary field for over 20 years, they soothed our troubled minds. Sue reassured us that noone really knows what they are doing (and anyone who pretends they do is not to be trusted…); that it’s vital – even though very very hard – to watch over every second of footage that you have shot because what you remember is always different from what you captured and you’ll be surprised (though it will take you ages); that we should give ourselves a break – and celebrate what we have, rather than berate ourselves for what we don’t. They listened, seemingly focused (thank you Sue and John) not to only our worries, but our naive methodology, and all in all, the dinner was the most useful and soothing that could have welcomed us to the city. After winging it throughout the trip, finally, we could have a heart to heart with the professionals.

I’m now on the plane back to civilisation and real life. A wave of sadness crashed over me as I took my seat on the plane, and I looked out over the beautiful bay of Ushuaia and cried and the thought of all this being over. Half tears of sadness – leaving the bike was much harder than Mike or I had anticipated, as I watched it pull away for the last time, again I shed a tear. Mike kissed the tank to wish it on its way, also for the fact that I’m cross with myself for wishing away the last month on the road, which now I long to do over (just as I knew I would). That said, they were tears of happiness too, at the thought of all the people that we have met along the way, all the places we have seen, all the things we have learnt. It’s been such an extraordinary trip for the fact that we are far from tourists, we never see the things that the travellers we meet talk about, but every single location we have passed through has been brought to life by the people we have met.

Mike and I spent our last night on the road, at the end of the world, arguing. And really pretty hard. I’d say that it was our biggest argument in months, in fact. After a day spent largely apart (he was working on the bike with Dean, I was translating the City Tour guide voiceover), we reunited for dinner, having bid the bike farewell, and the realisation of this trip being over having hit both of us in its own way.

I told Mike that though I had not put the results of the envelopes on facebook, I had emailed 3 of our friends to tell them what the envelopes contained. Mike was very angry about this. Why hadn’t we talked about it? He asked. The decision to share the contents of the envelope with anyone, he said, was one that we should have made together. I have never felt as strongly about what the envelope contains as he has, so it’s true, I should have consulted him. But I felt cross that he had had such a go at me. Inevitably, the argument spiralled and we found ourselves on a freezing cold, dark street outside a pub where we had planned to meet our friends to celebrate the last night on the road.

I’m guilty of silence in arguments. I don’t like to argue (a characteristic which is very unhealthy in relationships – arguments are vital, we’re told, for expressing and resolving differences of opinion) and so I tend to go very quiet. It’s horrible for Mike as he is almost totally unable to penetrate my cloud of stewing resentment. One of the other things we have learnt during this process is that while men experience a sudden burst of rage which passes, women’s neurological processes mean that they are unable to let an argument go so quickly and are left festering long after a fight is over.

Well, that was where I was. I felt so distant from Mike and like we had learnt nothing during these 8 months on the road. I felt like I was the one who relied on my friends (wanting so desperately to share the results with the loyal few who have followed us) and that he was able to be so much more distant, and calculating almost. I was, of course, wrong. We have learnt mountains about each other on this trip, and actually, arguments are almost the way that a couple learns. Mike really wanted to tell his friends to their faces. Which is a totally reasonable desire. He worries that people just aren’t going to be interested in what we have done once they know what that envelope contains – why not keep a bit of suspense for the return party? Fair enough.

The argument ultimately stemmed from our total exhaustion. Not just from the stress of the last week, but the stress of the last 8 months. And the pressure of what awaits us now. We live in a kind of shadow, under the terror of what now will become of everything that we have worked to create. Mike is much more practical about it than I am, but when I think about how little we have been able to capture of our own relationship dynamic (through lack of a third person to film us and our interactions as they happen), I get very stressed. I feel the pressure of all the people who have believed in us to make something of this trip. God, I hope we can…

At the beginning of the journey, Mike and I decided to test our relationship scientifically (as well as the inevitable test of 8 months on the road). We underwent three tests:
1. A brainscan at NYU to assess neurological activity in various parts of the brain. The basic idea is that 3 areas of the brain are responsible for “love”, and when I was shown pictures of Mike (and vice versa) that inspired activity in those centres, the scientists would analyse it to be able to tell us how we feel about each other.

2. A DNA test. The basic principle of this test is that pheromones play an important role in our choice of partner: we subconsciously try and choose a partner with an immune system as different as possible from our own, in order that our children might have the greatest resistance to disease.

3. Psychology. We spent an entire day doing various tests with a Gottman-certified therapist (Gottman is world-reknowned for his work at analysing relationships, and with one particular test, being able to predict with 94% certainty the likelihood of a couple staying together)

We put the results of these three tests into an envelope to be opened at the end of our journey. If the results are positive, the plan was to renew our vows. If the results our negative, we are considering divorce…

And today’s the day.
_____________________________________

The Big Day dawns bright. We’re ready.

We have found a beautiful old boat, the Barracuda, with an English-speaking Ushuaian captain, Danilo, who is empowered to renew our vows if the envelopes come out with a positive answer. He will be the one to open the three envelopes and read the results.

A local TV station wants to video the entire event and interview us. So we had a presenter and cameraman organised too.
Mike had organised for a local divorce lawyer, Oscar Vidal, to be present at the opening, so that he could be ready to initiate divorce proceedings if the results came out positive.

We bought a ring. I bought a plastic top hat and $5 veil and some heart-shaped balloons in case things went our way.

I got increasingly nervous as the hour approached. I’ve been very blase’ about the envelope, blithely assuming that it would be positive – and if not, well, hell, it was ignorable, wasn’t it? Mike has been more concerned throughout. He often talked about the Pandora’s Box factor – if something bad came out, how would we be able to forget about it? That said, even he was less concerned as we got further south – saying that he was so sure, so totally positive, that we are a great couple, that it doesn’t matter.

We arrive at the boat on the bike. Suits on, everyone ready. And we get underway.

Capitan Danilo

We’re in the back room of the boat, its panoramic windows open out on the city of Ushuaia. The captain, in full regalia, readies himself. We start with an interview for the local TV crew – how are you feeling? are you nervous? – the usual made-for-tv stuff. Then we stand sombrely in front of the captain as he works his way through the three envelopes, with us reacting to each answer.

After much discussion, Mike and I have decided not to publish the results of the tests. We’d like to

be able to tell you in person at our return party on March 13th in London. For those of you who won’t be there, I promise I’ll put them up here on March 14th, complete with pictures of the event – and our brains!

I can tell you though that they were totally fascinating. Again, more details to follow.

The blog doesn’t end there, folks. To your disappointment – not to mention my own.

The next stage of the adventure: selling the bike. Easier written than done, it would appear. I won’t bore the tits off you, but basically, it’s against the law in Argentina to buy or sell second hand motorbikes. And since Mike’s name is all over the documents, and the Argentinian computer systems, it makes sense not to cut any corners.

Argentina has really loved the bike. We have attracted crowds in this country bigger than any other that we have been through (probably exactly because second hand bikes are illegal here and import taxes on new vehicles from the US are through the roof so there are no Urals and nothing like them in this country). So when we put a For Sign sale on the bike here in Ushuaia, we were inundated with blokes interested in buying it. Really serious about it, but without realistic solutions on how to get around the law (“you could drive it across the Chilean border then we could ship it back in a truck” that kind of thing). Very stressful.

One man, Luis (who has turned out to be a blessing from heaven, and with whom we are now kipping), came the closest to having an answer. Classic vehicle registrations, border crossings, other ideas. Costly, but just about viable. We need to get rid of the bike before we leave because it’s Mike’s name on the papers, but even this was not the ideal solution. Lots more driving, which is the one thing we’re keen to avoid. Much as I love the donkey, nothing would be more depressing than having to spend days doubling back.

Just as we were beginning to lose all hope, fate intervened.

12km away from downtown Ushuaia, further along the wooden and winding coastline is the Parque National. 12km further into the park, the Panamerican highway ends as Argentina’s National Route 3 comes to a close, and a well-photographed sign. We needed a photo opportunity.

As we headed into the park, we passed a laden cyclist. As I mentioned before, Ushuaia is the great bottleneck of all the long distance travellers, so we pulled up beside him and asked how his trip had been. Turns out that he’s just arrived and planned to cycle to Alaska.

Dean is his name. He’s spent the last 4 years cycling up Africa from South Africa, arriving in Lisbon a few months ago. From there, he got a flight to BA with his bike, spent a couple of months learning Spanish in Montevideo, Uruguay, then got on a bus with the bike down here to start the great ride up South America.

Dean Fiore, new owner of the Ural, hands over the side panel to the old owners.

He pulled up beside the sign as we were recording our final piece to camera with the bike (much “I can’t believe we’ve made it and we’re still married” etc). We explained that we were done with our journey and looking to sell the bike. And he said, with a certainty which surprised even him, that he wanted to buy it. He was fed up of two wheels and pedal power and had been asking himself how he was going to motivate himself to do it all over again.

So that’s what we’re up to now. Transferring ownership of the bike over to him, sorting it with Ural HQ (who own the bike) and Alaska (who own Mike’s ass).

Boring but true.
That said, Ushuaia is an awesome place to be stuck for a bit (unlike Bolivia…) It’s a big enough city, perched on the bay at the base of mountains (after the flat nothingness of North Eastern Patagonia, nothing could be more welcome than topography). It all feels very Scandinavian, and I love a bit of Scandy. It’s the main set off point for Antartic boat trips, so there are lots of tourists, all with a whiff of adventure about them. The town (sorry, “city” – it needs that status as it proudly states that it’s the southernmost city in the world) absorbs the tourists well, and maintains its own outdoorsy character without drowning in its many tourist tat shops. I like it a lot.

We have found a sea captain who is prepared to read out the results of the tests, and renew our vows if they come out affirmative. I have spent the afternoon buying “Te Quiero” balloons and the like. Mike has found a divorce lawyer who is on hand for if the results are negative (Mike has been disturbingly excited about this). THAT will be tomorrow’s little update. With any luck, the write up will be a little spicier than this prolonged bike yawn.

We made it.

The Clears and the Russian pulled in to the southernmost city in the Americas at 7.35pm on Friday, February 5th after 31,591km, 15 countries and 207 days. Not to mention 116 couples interviewed and over 400 hours of footage…

I can’t really believe that we’re here. All those dark days of wishing that I could be back in a world with a roof and routine are suddenly distant memories as I contemplate life without the bike and feel not only real sadness about it, but almost panic.

Mike confessed to camera that it feels like the bike is the third (and most reliable) member of our marriage. It’s been the three of us the whole way down (bar a couple of weeks in Bolivia which was not the bike’s fault but our own). The bike has made this trip – it’s started conversations, broken down barriers, got us interviews – got us noticed! The thought of all that being taken away is currently so hard to consider that it feels like a weight on our chests, and the planned elation at making it to the end is considerably more muted than we could ever have expected.

Surprise surprise, a big day of driving. This time, 2 borders to cross. Chile owns the Magellan Straits, so we have to cross into Chile, catch a small ferry to Tierra del Fuego, drive for a bit then cross back into Argentina. We’re told that the borders aren’t a big deal (but they are – because coachloads of people are travelling this route so the queues are horrendous).

We don’t set off early enough to make it back into Argentina. We bump into a Quebequois motorbiker whose bike has totally died here in Rio Gallegos. He’s stranded. Fixing the bike costs more than its worth so he’s deciding what to do. We sympathise, and pray that our little Russian friend will make it the rest of the way.

The novelty of bikers in this part of the world is low. Admittedly, our 3 wheeled friend is still the centre of much attention, but we really are aware that we are reaching the great biker bottleneck of Ushuaia: petrol station windows are covered in stickers proclaiming, in myriad languages, lengthy 2 wheel adventures; the road is peppered with bikers coming towards us – returning from touching the end of the world back to the real world. As always, the biker code is strong: lights flash, hands wave – acknowledgement of shared realized dreams.

It’s proper cold now. Really really freezing. We’re wearing everything we’ve got. No rain, just cold wind. We make it to the ferry for around 6.30pm, dangerously low on fuel. The ride is short, cold, blustery but beautiful. Spectacular to watch the end of the American landmass slowly disappearing. Two bikers from Utah are kind enough to give us their spare fuel, which gets us to San Sebastian. It’s late but it’s light when we arrive at the border, we’re freezing, the Chilean roads aren’t paved. We decide to camp in the one hotel just before the border in a remote cluster of buildings. It’s warm and wonderful and very very welcome at the end of yet another long and cold day’s driving.

Day starts with an email – we’re front page of El Patagonico!

When we crossed the border into Argentina, we discussed the type of couples we wanted to talk to in this country. And from the beginning, we knew that we wanted to investigate the other side of the Falklands story.

The Falklands War started on Friday, 2 April 1982 with the Argentine invasion and occupation of the Falkland Islands and South Georgia, and ended with the Argentine surrender on 14 June 1982. The war lasted 74 days, and resulted in the deaths of 255 British and 649 Argentine soldiers, sailors, and airmen, and three civilian Falklanders. It is the most recent conflict to be fought by the UK without any allied states and the only Argentine war since the 1880s.

The Argentine soldiers were largely young conscripts from across the country. Fearing a long siege, the Argentine army restricted food supplies to its soldiers and there are many stories of huge cruelty within the Argentinian army. Many of the young men were sent to fight against the British trained forces with only 2 hours of training on how to work their guns. Mike recalls, in his military training at school, the leader of the training talking about the horror of having mortally bayonetted an Argentine soldier in a Falklands trench during combat.

The memory of the war is very alive in Patagonia. In fact, it’s very alive in the whole of Argentina, but throughout Patagonia, there are monuments, flags and signs proclaiming “Las Malvinas son Argentinas”. Talk to anyone and they have an opinion about it. People talk about the war and its memory as an open wound.

We phoned the biggest veterans’ association in the state of Santa Cruz, based in Rio Gallegos, the Asociacion Centro de Veteranos de Guerra de Malvinas “Soldado Jose H. Ortega” (named after the first soldier from the Santa Cruz province to fall) and they invited us to their headquarters for 1.30pm today.

We arrive at the small building, expecting to meet with a secretary, explain what we are doing, him suggest a couple, then we arrange a meeting. Not at all. We enter the small room to find it full to bursting with men sitting around a table, perhaps 20 of them. The walls of the room are covered with black and white photos, posters, photos of faces, the paraphernalia of war, flags. I find it very emotional, to be honest. The idea of war is so horrific, and these men are all still relatively young (in their late 40s, early 50s) even nearly 30 years after the war. Something about the fact that they are there, laughing and chatting, unified by the horrors of an experience which changed every one of them 28 years ago, and they have welcomed us - from the nation which they fought against - into their sanctuary, makes my eyes well up. I find it very emotional, and I choke as I talk. Later they explain that the war was politically motivated, it’s not individuals they have a problem with.

It’s not immediately clear what is going on. It turns out that it’s a press conference, eventually. A local man is going to run a marathon on the Falklands islands for the veterans, and they’ve called a press conference. So we’re part of the press for a bit. It’s a bit confusing.

Finally, the crowd clears and we ask about couples. There are two couples in the room, and both agree to be interviewed. One married after the war, the other before.

Rosy and Fernando met 3 years after the war. Fernando was 19 during the war, and was a professional soldier rather than a conscript. They met at a dance, she liked the cut of his jib. They started going out and married after 3 years, they have 5 children.

Fernando says that the hideousness of war has made him appreciate every minute that he has. He says that post-Malvinas war, many couples divorced. He said that men were so affected by the war that they simply couldn’t care about their wives. He says “I’m lucky that she understands me. The pain that we have stays with us. The wound that we have does not bleed, but it’s deep within us. And as time goes by, with her and with my kids and my grandchildren of the future, our life becomes increasingly positive”.

She says that as a couple, they are three: him, her and the Malvinas. The war is something which is always with them, and she has become very active in the association too. They continue the fight to return the Malvinas to the Argentina.

Teresa and Nicolas have been married 30 years. They were married before the war, and Teresa had a 2 year old son and a 3 month old baby when war broke out and Nicolas had to leave to fight. He, like Fernando was a professional soldier. He’s older than Fernando and was a higher rank. (One of the things that the association says is that here in Santa Cruz, they are all friends, rank doesn’t matter – whereas in other provinces, ranks of veterans often only associate with other vets of the same rank).

Nicolas and Teresa both thought that he was leaving for a training exercise. It was only when he had gone, and she was taking the two baby boys back up to be with her family that she saw the demonstrations of support for the soldiers and the Malvinas cause. She couldn’t believe it, she felt vulnerable and alone. She starts to cry at the memory and Nicolas puts his arm around her and holds her head close to him.

He was able to send her postcards every two weeks. There was one point when she had no news of him and again, she sobs at the memory and said that she thought he was dead.

When he got back, he didn’t want to talk about what he had gone through. Still, to this day, when his children ask him about the war, he tells them to go and talk to Fernando and other friends from the veterans association.

They say that the biggest thing that they have is their children. Like Fernando, Nicolas agrees that after what he has been through, he realises what is important in his life. His children – 6 of them – are his whole world.

We’re just burning up the miles now. I take my place in the sidecar, wrapped up like an onion – in the absence of correct cold weather clothing, Mike and I have opted for layers. So I shoehorn myself into the sidecar like a puffed up Michelin Man, do up the sidecar cover and settle in for the long haul. Mike puts on his cheapy Costan Rican wellies, all the jumpers we have, the waterproof trousers (every little helps) and off we set for 8 hours driving. iPhone is fully loaded with all our favourite podcasts and off we set into the windy Patagonian wilderness.

Thankfully no rain. We’re just in “get this done” mode, not really thinking about what awaits us at the end of the journey, just head down, drive on…

Rio Gallegos is a reasonably sized city. We plan to spend two days here because we want to find Argentinian veterans of the Falklands war.

As we drive into town, looking for a place to stay, Mike swerves suddenly to the side of the road. “Oh my God! I have to get a photo, that’s hilarious!”

Tit Icecream. Oh how we laughed. (NB The Jacksons staring at us in the window. They’re everywhere)

Claudio, the journalist, organises a local interview for us. He’s the first journalist in the whole time that we have been on the road (there have been around 15) who has helped us to find an interview in any way, let alone organise one for us.

Petrol’s the story in Comodoro, so petrol’s the couple in Comodoro. He worked for YPF, the now-private petroleum company based in Comodoro and seen all over Argentina, she looked after the kids. They have been married for 49 years, but both seem surprisingly young. They laugh, lots and lots. It’s brilliant. Mike is twitchy because we have a really long way to drive to get to San Julian today, so we keep it quick. They met at a dance, she liked the look of him from the get go. My favourite thing about them is when I ask about what their arguments are like. She says that they shout at each other, and go into different rooms to blow off steam. I ask how long they don’t speak for, she says “oh, not long” and he says “a couple of years…”

Got to get on with the driving. It’s starting to get cold now, but the little trio (Clears and Russian) pushes on.

Long long driving day. We’re just trying to cover ground now, and are traversing the barren Patagonian wilderness fast. Mike is going great guns, driving hard even though our topspeed is seriously lowered by the headwind and we are buffeted constantly by those winds.

Not actually our guy (Mike defended his hit and run saying that it was better not to know)

There’s nothing for miles and miles and miles. Except, I’m sorry to report, one armadillo harmlessly crossing the road. Mike, blinded by a visor scratched by months on the road, fails to see him and mows him down. I mourn silently in the sidecar for an hour.

We’ve taken the east coast of Patagonia to get to Ushuaia. It’s the most direct but by far the most boring of the options on the table. The west, the famous route 40 (reputedly one of the world’s most beautiful drives), snakes along the lower part of the Andes taking in Swiss-loveliness in Barriloche, glaciers in El Calafate, dramatic beauty all the way down. The east, less so. It’s coastal and flat. Winds whip across the vast plains and pummel us unremittingly.

We eventually make it to Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina’s petrol capital. It provides a third of the country’s petrol (Argentina is entirely self sufficient for petrol), driven north to BA to be refined.

As we drive into town, we are pounced on by two locals (“Oh no, Jacksons…” we thought) It turned out that they were a journo and a photographer from the local paper. They were looking for a small story to fill a whole on a slow day, but when Carlos heard our story, he said that it was much bigger than he thought. So we did a full interview and appeared on the front page of El Patagonico the next day.

Gaiman is a perfect little village. The sun blazes, a fat river runs through it flanked by lazy willow trees.

The mad thing about it is the fact that it is a Welsh settlement. Dragon flags emblazon signs, flags and buildings; many of the written words are in both Spanish and Welsh, and every so often, you’ll hear the gentle lilt of spoken Welsh. Very bizarre.

I’m afraid that I’m going to have to write more about this when my brain is not totally hollowed out by 8 hours on the bike. We got a great interview with the town’s most beloved couple with 58 years of marriage under their belt and both fluent Welsh speakers.

Alvina and Virgilio Zampini, despite their surname, are pretty much as Welsh as they come in these parts. Well, Virgilio (as the name might suggest) is son of an Italian father, but his mother is pure Welsh. Alvina’s parents came over on the 1860 boatload from Wales. She grew up speaking Welsh and still speaks Welsh today to her children and in her home. When we asked in town who to interview, everyone without fail pointed to these two: married for 58 years, both have written detailed books about the Welsh story here in Patagonia, one of Alvina’s books is 200 pages of detailed family trees of each of the families in the Welsh settlement.

We knock on the door of their home. It’s opened by a well-dressed, kind-eyed elderly gentleman. We explain what we are after (“This is a very unusual request, but we hope you’ll indulge us…”) and he smiles patiently. After we finish the shpiel, his wife arrives and asks us into her home, then to repeat our request. It turns out the kind-eyed Virgilio suffered a serious stroke in 2002 and has not been the same man since. That said, he seems to me to be very with it – he has full mobility, helping Mike with stepladders and the like. He also seems to understand everything, though his wife explains that he will only ever say small amounts.

We interview them about their story. Alvina grew up in Gaiman, speaking Welsh at home, and went to BA to study to be a nurse. She left behind a fiance, though when she returned, he had married someone else. Cheeky blighter. At that point, she met her first cousin’s son, Virgilio, who had just returned from the seminary at Rome. With the dispensation of the church, they were permitted to marry (as we flicked through the scores of family trees, it was obvious that fewer than 10 children per family is a rare thing). They married and moved to teach at a school for orphans where no one else wished to teach. The two of them lived in the wilderness with no electricity or running water for 4 years, but loved it. They had each other.

They had 3 children, moved back to Gaiman where Virgilio became a history teacher at the local school. This allowed him to write his books, he studied to get his masters in the evenings which meant little time for the family, but again they got through it. He taught at the school until his stroke 8 years ago.

Alvina is small and incredibly warm. She rests her hand on my arm at the end of every sentence, she refers to me as “querida” (dear one) from the moment we appear in her life, and generally, I can imagine she is a wonderful grandmother. When she speaks in English, which she speaks fluently but says she has little occasion to use, she speaks with a charming Welsh accent. She’s wonderful. She talks to Mike and I about the arrival of the Welsh in this harsh land where the winds blow hard and it rarely rains. The Welsh got the permission of the Argentinians to settle and cultivate the land, and they were the first settlers of this land – even the indigenous people were based on the West coast of the South American continent. The Welsh established themselves, and made a go of it. Some moved across to the more fertile, more Alpine Western part of Southern Argentina, near the Andes in a settlement called Trewellyn, but some stuck it out. Totally fascinating. The village is lovely too, I can see why it would be an attractive place to live.

The couple are enchanting. Though Virgilio speaks little, his eyes suggest that he understands, and he will often look over at Alvina with total adoration, then lean his head down on her shoulder, smiling. She refers to him as “Rubio” (the blond one) and looks after him without smothering him. She says that he is not given much more time to live, but that he’s better now than he was after the stroke itself – though not like the man he was before, a fierce intellect. There is so much love in this home. When I ask for advice, Alvina says she can’t give advice, every couple has its own secrets. And in that, she is not wrong, but she is adamant that even after 58 years, she knows no more about the secret of marriage than we do.

More driving. The wind now is so strong that it is pummelling us from the west. All we can do, as we are blasted and Mike has to apply every ounce of dedication to moving us forward (his cheek is lifted and twisted by gusts of wind), is think about Mark Beaumont doing this on a bike. With no hard shoulder and a sidewind which is taking 30kmph off our speed.

We eventually arrive in the picturesque Welsh village of Gaiman.

After another long driving day of real heat and flat, endless landscapes, we make it to San Antonio Oueste. The first time we have seen the sea since just after Nazca in Peru, and the first time we have seen the Atlantic since New York. Amazing, we’re finally covering serious ground!

The Atlantic - actually in Puerto Madryn, but the sea was harder to find in San Antonio Oueste

We leave the armadillos and head into town to wait out the worst of the heat with a bit of email catchup. During which time, a text comes through from Mark on our English mobile saying that he has broken a spoke 15km outside Santa Rosa and needs us to collect replacement ‘nipples’ for him (the bits that hold the spokes in place). Fine, glad to help. Except that all shops, especially in this heat, shut for a huge chunk of the middle of the day for siesta. Thankfully, as we ask for directions to a bikeshop, a man on the street says he knows of a shop which is right beside the owner’s home, so we can just ring the doorbell and wake him up. Which is what we do: Mike is asking for nipples from a man with his nipples out. (After Mike tries to ask for ‘pezones’ – nipples in Spanish – to the man’s discomfort, it turns out the Spanish word for bike nipples is “nipples”, pronounced ‘nipp-lez’).

We catch up with Mark – again! Shame! – about 30km outside town. Even with a broken bike, he can shift it. Mark, post-this Aconcagua climb, is a lot more like us in his attitude, and with the heat and the broken bike, we all decide to head to the National Park 5km down the road, write the day off and spend the day with some beer. (Well, we do. Mark has a glass)

Swimming in the disturbing cloudy pool, beer and chat. A great evening with the great company of Mr B – unusual for a man who spends months with only his own company to be so fascinating. Just in case we didn’t say earlier, Mark holds the world record for the fastest cycle round the world. When he puts his mind to something, he’s pretty damn good at doing it.

At one point, Mark says (to me), “Do you ever miss female company?” to which Mike replies, in a heartbeat, “Yeah”. At which point the two of them fell about laughing. Git.

The bastard was that both Mark’s bike and our own got thwarted by the espinas (thorns) which fall from the trees in the park so both of us have to replace flat tyres. Very irritating.

We leave Mark to finish his awesome feat and head off to the windy south.

One of our ambitions here in Argentina is to get an interview with a gaucho couple. A full on, costume-wearing old school Argentinian cowboy and his wife. My father helped us by getting hold of the rural association here in Santa Rosa, in La Pampa, and asking them to help us find a couple. They came up with a suggestion and so we arranged an interview.

Only when we arrive do we realise this is not exactly ‘on brief’: a wonderful couple, but young, who run a dairy farm but certainly don’t have gauchos on their farm. Hey ho, lovely people and a nice chance to see the local countryside.

They keep lots of local animals because they work with local schools and the children come to see the animals. And so it is that I meet my very first armadillo.

I’m in love.

In Spanish, an armadillo is a “peludo” – literally, a “hairy”. And hairy they are! First, our new friend Ramon brings out Marta, a large female armadillo. She’s curled in a helmet-sized ball and he holds her up by her claws to uncurl her. He plops her down on her feet and she just sits quietly. Ramon tells us that they are native to La Pampa and they eat chickens. At the side of their armour, bony rib-like extensions grow out which he says they use to cut the chickens’ necks once they have leapt on them. It’s hard to imagine the sluggishly docile Marta leaping on anything, even the chickens agree as they stroll leisurely round her.

Then Ramon brings out her little son, Ernesto. I’m gobsmacked by how adorable this little fellow is, scarcely bigger than my palm. When Ramon puts him on the ground beside his mother, he shoots off like a little bullet and the chickens and geese scatter with a flurry of panicked sqwawks. Ramon quickly scoops him up. Ernesto is not mad keen on this so curls into a little ball and promptly fires out a poo. I then get to hold him. More poo. This is my kind of guy.

Ramon then shows us his favourite trick for the kids: putting a chicken to sleep. He picks up a big black hen, takes her neck and forces is under her wing, he then holds her tightly with both hands and, with his arms stretched, he rotates her in big circles. Her head emerges reluctantly at one point and Ramon shoves it back under the wing and starts the process again. After about a minute of rotating her round him, he puts her on the ground and it is as though the chicken is dead. He lifts her leg up and lets it drop heavily, completely lifeless. The chicken remains in this state for about 2 minutes, then lifts its head out from under its wing, open its vacuous eyes, orientates itself bewilderedly, then wanders off. Extraordinary. Ramon explains its dizziness that does it, but that the kids genuinely believe the chicken is asleep and they love it.

3 wheels bad, 4 hooves good

We do an interview with Erica and Sergio who run the place. They’re both blond, good-looking and 3 beautiful Aryan children run around the place. It’s not really the crusty-faced gaucho who we were hunting for, but hell, why not do an interview since we’re here. 11 years of marriage after 8 years of dating. They first met when she was 14 (hence the 8 years of waiting) and he was 16. She never ever wanted to live on a farm, but somehow he convinced her and they live on a gorgeous place. Last year, they decided to take guests too, so have opened up a little spare house where visitors stay and live on the farm with them. The morning we are there, a French couple are staying and they have just returned from a ride across the Pampas to start the day.

The two of them laugh together often, say that setting the farm up has at times been very hard, but that it’s all good. They have three children: 2 boys (11 and and a girl, 5. The boys are both Argentinian champions at triathlon in their age categories. Pretty rad. Sergio is a triathlete and at the end, he likens marriage to an endurance sport saying that there are great parts of it when you feel like everything is going well, and there are harder bits where you have to put your head down, focus and get through them together. I like that analogy, having been a marathon widow for a while when Mike was training for the Marathon des Sables 2 years ago. Not, mind you, that I’m an endurance athlete!

We catch up with Mark Beaumont, the man doing the same journey as us (in the same time) but on a bike. Oh the shame of that sentence… “we catch up with Mark”. Here is a man who not only cycles like shit off a shovel, but has managed to climb the two highest peaks in the Americas (Denali in the North, Aconcagua in the South) – and still he’s ahead of us. I blame Bolivia.

On this boiling day, he’s cycling in the bright sunlight and going pretty damn fast. His hair is considerably bigger since we saw him last, apparently the producer of his BBC programme wants continuity. Plus, Mark can’t be arsed to find someone to cut it.

We set up a few shots and film him then agree to meet him in the nearest town, Santa Rosa.

Mike then heads into town to find a mechanic. Mike and his mechanics. He leaves Mark and I for a few hours while he changes the jets back to sea-level (125 / 40) – he acknowledges that he should have done so earlier (bad boy). He also fixed the silencer of the exhaust – which had been hanging out like a haemorrhoid  for the last couple of hundred kms. And changes the oil, motor, gear box and transmission.

Now time to cover some ground. The bottom chunk of Argentina just stretches on and on and on with little happening between settlements. We need to put some serious driving days in so that we can start to cover it. So off we go.

Driving days are fairly dull to report: I’m down in my little bath-shaped world, Mike is navigating everything that the road, the weather and the locals throw at us. I’m in charge of what we listen to – a headphone splitter means that we can both listen to the same thing. We love our podcasts of late – the hours and hours of driving pass much faster when divided into hour long chunks of riveting chat.

The difficulty with this batch of driving days (to and from Cordoba) is the heat. The temperature is a sweltering 39′c which makes for very sweaty days in the sidecar. The wind blowing into our faces as we drive is oven-hot and there’s not a cloud in the sky.

I enshroud myself in nuclear-bunker-wall quantities of suncream.

We pitch our tent just off a petrol station forecourt and pass a night filled with the rumblings of trucks and the crapping of birds on the tent. Good times.

Camping at gas station, Malena. View of tent.

Camping at gas station, Malena. View from tent.

Ale’ left us. We knew the moment would come, but it was deeply sad as we watched his little motorized 250cc hairdryer whizz off down the sunny Cordoban streets.

We had arranged to have lunch with Mike, the Englishman we had met at the Argentinian border. He was staying at a lovely looking 4* hotel called The Windsor in the centre of town. When we arrived, he insisted on treating us to a room for the night. What utter utter bliss: a bed wider than 3 pillows’ worth and so enormous that Mike and I swam in it.

The four of us, with Mike’s girlfriend Lidy, headed to the home of the best asado in town and settled in for the afternoon. We then stumbled back, watched a film, and slept like logs in an ocean of bed. Bliss. Thank you Mike.

Mike and Liddy, driving into salta

Jackson – a noun and a verb. Definition: a random human being.

That’s it. A random human being. I had the pleasure of hearing Austin using the word in Moab, Utah, when we were looking for someone to take a photo of the four of us (with Lois, his wife) and he said “let’s ask this Jackson here” and pointed to a guy at a nearby drive-thru cash machine (which is a blog entry in itself, but not now…)

The reason that I bring this up is that ARGENTINA IS FULL OF JACKSONS. I love the place, don’t get me wrong, but they really really love the bike. Every single time we stop – to get petrol, to get directions, to ask about a hotel – the Jacksons SWARM. Mike left me to buy a bottle of water a couple of days ago and when he came back, there were 15 people around me. Amazing. “De donde vienen?” is always the opener (where are you from? – though with badly spelt Spanish) then it gets on to ‘where are you going?’, ‘how many cylinders is the engine?’ (these Jacksons know their shit) and ‘what brand is this?’. All of which, I have finely polished answers to in Spanish.

The intransitive verb use is “to be Jacksoned”. Mike will sometimes get back from paying for petrol or whatever, and say “sorry you got so Jacksoned”.On the whole, Mike gets really stressed out by the Jacksons whereas I tend to suffer fools (Jacksons) gladly so end up being the one who answers the endlessly identical questions. Such is marriage, folks, each one has their role…

We drive all day from Simoca to Cordoba. The day is blindingly hot: 39′c. We’re with Ale’ and later British Mike and his girlfriend, Lidy on their rented Transalp cross our paths and we end up in convoy. All good. The driving is long and flat, but the sun shines with gusto and the heat feels Southern European.

Ale’, Mike (Clear) and I have organised to meet up with our biker friend, Sergio. Ale was with him when we met them both in El Alto, outside La Paz, and we all travelled together for a few days on the way out of Bolivia. Sergio, who is an architect in Cordoba, had promised us a true Argentinian parilla (BBQ) at his place.

We arranged to meet Sergio just off the city’s huge periferico so that he could lead us to his house. There he was, leaning against his car, looking so urban, so un-biker, so unlike the man who had left us a week before on his 650, dressed in black bikegear. Here he was a normal person, in his normal car. Virtually unrecognisable.

Allow me to digress for a minute here. When Mike and I knew that we were going to do this trip, we went along to a long distance motorbike talk at the biker hangout, the Ace Cafe in Park Royal, northwest London. We decided to go by car as it was rainy and potentially icy, so turned up in my grandmother’s purple Corolla wearing normal clothes, to be greeted by a SEA of motorbikes and people clad in leather. I have never been so intimidated in my life. I thought we were going to be killed. I felt so out of place, I hated every minute of it. It reminded me of how i felt for 2 years with braces.

But the thing that I didn’t know then that I know now is that bikers are part of the one of the kindest, more community-minded groups that I have ever been lucky enough to be part of. Bikers wave to each other when driving, bikers greet each other in petrol stations, bikers talk to other bikers in restaurants and on the street. Like JOrge in Santa Cruz who saw us on telly and came to find us to invite us to have dinner with 30 bikers who’d love to know our story, bikers love to exchange tales.

Dr Helen Fisher (who is the key to this whole mad adventure of ours – she did the original brainscans with neurologist Dr Lucy Brown) has this theory that there are four types of human beings: explorers, builders, negotiators and directors. She uses that to calculate compatibility in romantic relationships, and one of her findings is that explorers can only date explorers – they have both to have that hunger for new experiences (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Fisher_(anthropologist).

Well, bikers are kind of the same too.

Everyone who has done any kind of distance biking (that can range from a weeklong road trip away to round the world twice, etc) The kind of person who is prepared to drop everything and set off into the horizon is the kind of person who is going to get on well with someone else you is also prepared to do the same. All along the route, we have ended up gathering bikers, becoming part of bigger groups which then disperse as people go their own ways at their own speeds, but friendships are made, advice is given, and it’s generally totally wonderful – an honour even – to be part of this community. They’re not intimidating at all.

That’s just the leather…

So, back to Cordoba. We get to Sergio’s house and he is obviously a man who knows how to parilla. He has two fires going, one is laden will burning hot coals, the other is lower and awaiting action. Which he quickly provides in the form of a mountain of meat. We spend a wonderful evening eating our body weight in meat and generally being smutty in our basic but adequate Spanish.

Oh what a difference 7 months makes. I have lost a fair chunk of that bounce. And the worst for both me and Mike is my moods. They change on a dime. I’ve become a timebomb, a gorgon waiting to scratch at any moment. I can’t even navigate them – I’m usually fairly self- aware, and if I think I’m slipping into a fiery laguna of irrationality, I’ll warn him to stay away from him and that none of it is his fault. Not now. For example, this morning, we were doing our usual thing of fannying about for HOURS before leaving. We knew we needed to do some internetting: site needed updating, we’d been out of contact for 5 days which led to a pile of emails. So we were sitting in the hotel lobby merrily internetting. After about 4 hours of this, I suddenly, without warning, snap. “We have to go. We have to go now. I can’t handle this.”

Mike to his gleaming credit is inhumanely patient when his wife is replaced by a firebreathing sucubus of doom. “Ok” he replies calmly and swiftly starts to pack away. He’ll make gentle, unpatronising enquiries as to what may have precipitated his wife’s descent into Evil, but he also knows that communication is futile, and every word uttered is like a joust with the devil.

For my part, the rage suddenly erupts. I think a bit contributor is the lack of any kind of exercise in my life. Mike drives the bike which requires deep concentration but also a lot of upper body strength – this being a Ural with sidecar, you don’t lean into your turns like on a regular motorbike, you pull the entire weight of the bike with your arms. I, however, just sit and fester in the sidecar, eating and sleeping and hurling the occasional insult.

Like a kind of Miss Piggy meets Oscar the Grouch.

It’s really hot. Yesterday it got up to 39 degrees centigrade. That’s whopping. And sweaty.

So no chance of me doing any exercise till it cools down a bit, but I’m hoping that Little Miss Lardy Arse Toxic Chops might retreat into the shadows when I eventually do.

Anyway, there’s my Thought For The Day, folks: I’m just a little grumpy. My lesson to relationships out there – men, just back off. It’s not your fault, but it rapidly could be.

Driving at dusk is foolish. Night is on the way, and generally it makes sense to have found lodgings while there is still the light to do so.

But it can be breathtakingly magical. The driving in Northern Argentina has been some of the most beautiful that we have done: red chiselled rocks to lush green cascades of valleys – all paved and dreamlike, and it’s hard to stop just because the day is thinking about stopping.

It’s summer here, and the landscape and atmosphere are like the best of the south of France: the breeze blows warm, the twilight is alive with smells and sounds. As the sun sets, and I look out across miles and miles to the horizon, the sky is rippled with cloud formations that a London girl knows nothing of, accustomed usually to seeing small bursts of grey skies peeping out from between buildings.

Leaving Bolivia, above the distant horizon every night, we’d see moody dark swells of storm patches, lit dramatically by angry lightning bursts. Now here in Argentina, it’s the hot crespucular descent of summer evening to night. On a motorbike, I feel like we’re the only people in the world as the wind gushes up past the step of the sidecar and strong into my face. I love it. Moths throw themselves into the beams of the Russian, the faces of people light up in the darkness as they walk along the dusty sides of the roads. There’s a silhouette of trees along the horizon against the gunmetal blue of the sky, and the serenade of cicadas to accompany the confident growl of our trusty and beloved steed.

I don’t mean to meander into the realms of exaggeration, but Argentina really is perfection. It has surpassed all my high expectations, leaving me quite dumb as how to begin to describe how lovely it is.

After a day of driving with Ale, we crawl into Simoca, a small town, dusty road, kids play football in the bright lights of a municipal football ground. We crawl into bed, exhuasted. Tomorrow to Cordoba.

We spent last night in a campground in Argentina’s northern wine heaven, Cafayate. As I said, it’s the height of summer and the central plaza is alive with that wonderful relaxed air of summer holidays, of misty cold glasses of local wine, of warm tanned skin, of different ages finding their own fun. As a gorgeous resort town, it was heaving with people. Cafayate has three campgrounds, all heaving with people, tents cheek by jowl.

After a boozy night with others, including Ale’ who had recovered from a dodgy tum to be the “authentic caipirinha” making life of the party, we crash out. And I awake to find that I have been stung on the eye by a mozzie. Great look. Especially if you’re trying to convince people that your husband’s a wife-beater.

Cafayate is wine country. The Salta wine route is marked efficiently with signs, the roads flanked with uniform rows of cascading vines. It’s picturesque. Our challenge was to find a wine couple. There are tens of vineyards so we hoped it wouldn’t be too hard. And in the end, it proved to be third try lucky.

Just to the north of Cafayate is Animana’, also part of the luscious and fertile Cafayate valley. Every hundred yards of the main road, a winery beckons tasters. Past the major winery of Animana, at the side of the road, looking like a small village French deli with green wooden doors, is La Bodeguita. Painted on a large barrel outside the door is the proclamation that it was established in 1928, and that it makes vinos artesanales.

We walk in, hopeful. Behind the counter is an older lady, She stands in front of a wall covered in wooden shelving which houses a world of deliciousness: alongside the bottles of wine, olives, breads, cakes, jars of capers, anchovies.

After we have told her what we are up to, she says that she has been married for 50 years but her husband is not well. He suffered a heart attack 3 years ago, and today his lips are swollen as a result. (This is my weak Spanish, I’m afraid. She may have offered a reason, but I didn’t get it) Her son could do it, but he has been married only 2 years. Come back tomorrow?

But that’s not the wya GTD works. We always leave everything til the last minute, and we’d like to start on the great journey south to Cordoba this evening. Is there no way we can interview her and her husband today? No, he’s not well.

At this moment, by the kind of luck that we have felt blessed with all along the way, her husband shuffles out from the corridor leading from the back of the shop to their house. He is extremely affable and says he’d love to do the interview. And so it is that we meet Juan de la Cruz of La Bodeguita, and his wife, Rosario.

Juan’s father established the Bodega in 1928, and Juan grew up around the world of wine in a village down the road. He and Rosario met at a dance when she was 16 and he was 25. In the early days of their marriage, they were poor. Though Juan was working with his father at the vieyard, he had to take another job as a mechanic to support the family. They have two children, a boy and a girl, and their son Carlos is now taking over the place, making it a three generation affair, nuch to Juan’s pride. The family had to work hard to find the money to send him to viticulture school, but Rosario says, it’s been wonderful because now the vineyard is a mixture of Juan’s experience and Carlos’ theory.

The Bodeguita uses all traditional methods, the grapes are trampled by foot then pressed in the same presses that Juan’s father used. They make 5,000 bottles a year – a small amount, admits Juan, but he doesn’t want to compromise any of the techniques or the quality to make more. He’s fiercely proud of their product and the area, and I have to admit (as we taste the cabernet sauvignon), it’s delicious. (Though I confess I’m far from discerning)

Rosario explains that the fact that Juan is alive has defied everything that the doctors have told him. He should be dead and she considers it a gift from God that he is not. We laugh about Juan telling God that it’s not yet his time. Rosario has a very strong faith, and her eyes light up as she talks about the fact that Juan is still here. She puts it all down to God.

When we ask for advice from their 49 year bank of experience, Juan quickly says the most important thing is that a couple is that they distance themselves from their parents and parents-in-law. He says that if a couple has a problem, if they share it with the outside world, it will just get worse. Only a couple knows what’s going on within.

This is one of the pieces of advice that the experts have repeatedly given us. Only a few real people have given it, but those who have have been adamant about its importance. It’s one which is particularly interesting to me because my parents have been quite involved in this trip. Not only are they the only people to have come out to visit us en route, but my amazing father has also been helping us with researching and finding couples. My father and my husband are very different human beings (I’m in the lucky position of loving my dad enough not to need a father figure – I married my best friend really) and sometimes on this trip I have been pulled between to different life philosophies. Mike is pretty laidback, my father is more of an organisational whirlwind. Most of the time, the two can coexist without difficulty, but when the two are pulling in different directions, I feel the strain. There is of course, no malice on either side, but I have to pull away from my father and back towards my young foal of a marriage and the new life that I have chosen for myself. I find it interesting that this is a phenomenon that exists both for other couples that we have met along the way, but also that it is recognised by the experts.

We knew Salta was going to be good. After the hell of the Bolivian roads and the ballache of the border crossing, the first asado in La Quiaca suggested that Argentina was going to be lovely haven, but Salta really is the jewel. The drive from La Quiaca to Salta takes a day, and it was one of the most wonderful days driving we have had in months: the landscape takes on a European fell: majestic cyprus shoot up from the abundant green.

Our merry trio (of us and the wonderful Brazilian nutter, Ale’) gathered 4 additions: an Englishman, Mike, and his Thai girlfriend, Lidy (on the road for 2 months on a great rented Transalp) and two Canadians, Dave and John, both doing roughly the same as us. There’s a certain pomp to travelling in convoy with other bikers. 5 bikes speeding down the highways certainly turn heads, especially when the bike in the middle has a sidecar. I felt like we were in a cavalcade. We went through valleys with some of the tallest cacti in the world, we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn (Mike took the opportunity to mark the moment in his own special way). Lunch was a meat-heavy affair – the meat here is perfection. Steaks which offer blissful little resistance to the bite, melting perfectly.

We arrived in Salta at the end of a long but exquisite day, exhausted. The usual rigmarole of bed-finding (when there are many folk involved in the decision, it takes a while), then blissful sleep.

Wake at 8.30. Hope to be on the road by 10am. Is that so much to ask? Apparently yes: breakfast takes 45 minutes to arrive. Even though we’ve ordered toast, we’re in the very hostel we spent the night in, and we’re the only people at breakfast. Dude.

Mike decides to take the bike to a mechanic again to get the exhaust refitted. Apparently the road from here to the Argentian border is even worse that the road from Potosi. Frankly, none of the three of us is quite sure how that can be the case given the quality of the roads yesterday (Mike said it was the toughest riding he has done on this entire 7 month journey), but if Bolivians are saying it, jeez, it must be true.

When we get back to the mechanic to pick up the bike with high and secure exhaust (one of its two pipes), Mike notices that the sealing screw of the transmission oil is gone. Which means that the reservoir will be filled with all the dust of yesterday’s journey. Oh shit. So I’m now typing outside the third mechanic we have asked, Mike is with the mechanic, they have cleaned out the chamber, which apparently was filthy, replaced the oil. Mike is now going to take it round the block then they’ll replace the entire oil once more.

Then we’re going to go to the Promised Land of Argentina.

Later: oh my, oh my. Really nothing I can type can begin to capture the experience of travelling on the MAIN ROAD between Bolivia and Argentina. We knew that Tupisa was only 90km from the border. 90km really is chump change – on decent roads it’s less than an hour. It took us 3 and a half.

They are rebuilding the road from Tupisa to the border town of Villazon. Which means that the entire 90km is a mud/dirt track which weaves and winds, dips through rivers, over large stones. HELL. About half an hour into the journey, we were greeted with a large ford. The road dipped maybe a foot into a river red with mud. So as not to flood the exhaust, we went through at quite a lick. And got DRENCHED. The sidecar filled with muddy water, Mike was blinded by the surge. Oh God, we’re now going to be wet and muddy for the next 10 hours on the road. NOT COOL, BOLIVIA.

The road was miserable but we got there eventually. Then it was the turn of the border process. It took 4 hours to cross the border, and actually, it was the Argentinians’ fault. One man types slowly, with one finger, to register all details about all vehicles entering and leaving the country. Peculiarly, he works between two offices on either side of the entry road – half an hour in one, then half an hour in the other. So when you’re in the queue and he changes sides, you know you have at least another half hour to wait. We still have Ale’ the mad and wonderful Brazilian with us so at least the wait is filled with laughter.

When we are finally through, we head immediately to the best asado in town (I spent the hours doing my homework…) The restaurant is a striplit little place at the side of the main Ruta 9, but the owner smiles warmly as we enter (haven’t had that for months…), takes our order swiftly, and shortly afterwards the most delicious meat I have had on this entire trip arrives. We rejoice, involving the whole restaurant in our love for Argentina.

Things are on the up.

Sergio sets off early, leaving us with the wonderful chilled out and generally upbeat Ale’. After the usual fandango of breakfast (“no, we don’t have milk. No you can’t have juice.” and it arriving 45 minutes later), we hit the road.

The first half of the day is tarmacked road. It’s one of the most beautiful drives we have done in South America. We weave along windy roads overlooking vast stretches of altiplano, the colours change from greens and yellows to reds and browns then back again. Breathtaking. Llamas pepper the landscape, herded by bowler-hatted cholla women carrying babies on their backs. It’s the stuff of cinematographic legend.

Then the tarmac stops. Bear in mind this is the main road between Bolivia and Argentina, and the road is like a dirt track leading from a house to its outhouse. For 8 hours.

Dust clouds regularly enshroud us as massive trucks pass us. Every bone in our body is jolted with constant but irregular vibrations as our trusty and beloved Russian steed is thrown by small rocks and ripples in the road. The exhaust pipe falls off. We’re in the middle of nowhere, the sun is blazing down and the pipe itself is hotter than hell. We drive 20 minutes to the nearest cluster of houses. Mud houses, one of which is a llanteria (a tyre seller. He obviously knows that this road is going to drum up some good business). Llanterias are everywhere along the Latin part of the PanAmerican highway. They distinguish themselves with a large black tyre stood up at the side of the road with the word “llanteria” (llanta = tyre) painted large on them in white. I think there are more llanterias than restaurants, genuinely.

The shop is built of what appears to be wood and mud. It’s hard to tell because it, like us, is covered in dust. There is a woman sitting on a small block of wood outside the door to the place. She looks older than time, a face wisened with lines. One side of her mouth bulges with a bolus of coca. She chews sporadically, a thin trickle of dark liquid staining the right corner of her mouth. She squawks manically. She’s drunk, pointing and flailing, chewing all the while, spluttering at us.

The mechanic largely ignores her and gets to work, replacing the rubber holding the exhaust pipe in place. I decide to wander off for a wee. The ground is dusty and littered with dried thorn bushes. I tread as carefully as I can to try and find a suitable hiding place to derobe (there’s nothing elegant about a woman in a workman’s overall trying to do a wee). As I walk, I feel the thorns occasionally pierce through the rubber red Crocs which I so love. A powerful pain. Then comes the blood, erupting out of the sides of the Crocs, dripping on the thirsty dusty ground.

I sit down for the clean up operation. Local unctions are offered (Alexandre even endorses one of them) and I work my way through tissues to tidy up the copious blood (only to find the smallest, most rubbish little wound in the eye of all that blood). My coca-chewing heckler friend is going at me hammer and tongs by this point. I’m sitting near her and she is shrieking and pointing. It’s a little off-putting, if I’m completely honest, reader.

Back on the road. God, it’s long. Poor Mike and Ale have to navigate it. At least the view is good. Darkness starts to fall. The exhaust pipe falls off again. I lose a shoe. And the desire to be in Bolivia for any more time.

The final push into Tupisa is achingly slow. The road is terrible, dusty, hilly. It takes an hour to do 30km. We arrive in the town at 9.30pm in total darkness, having left Challapata at 8.30am, That’s one hell of a day. We’re absolutely covered in dust. It’s everywhere, on all our bags, in our hair, on our faces, in our teeth. Then a much-craved shower. Mike pretty much passes out with fatigue.

The bike is back. How we have missed it. Nothing compares to the freedom of your own transport: being able to move, to explore, to move on. We have missed the bike more than either of us could possibly have thought that we would. To be on a road trip and not able to cover ground caused us some of the lowest lows of the entire trip so far.

For my part, our month of killing time in Bolivia has expedited my desire to go home. I was chatting to another traveller who has been on the move for 10 months. She said that at 8 months, she just felt tired, and all the people she has spoken to agree that 8 months mark the critical threshold. For my part, it has been 6 months: we left the UK on June 21st 2009, and at around Christmas, I started to feel a strong desire for the routine of my life back in the UK. It’s not that life on the road doesn’t still hold moments which take my breath away, experiences which I will never replicate, views which I hope to burn into my mind so that I can recall them in my darker moments packed into an overcrowded London Underground tube train on the way to work – yes, all those elements are still part of the thrill of the journey – but now, I wake up tired. I sigh much more (not really a sigher in normal life). It takes a lot more to shake my soul out of its low-level travel coma.

I think one of the reasons this gets me down is that I am in no doubt about how lucky I am; how I’ll never have the chance to do this again; and how boring real life is. Why is the grass greener at this point, when the grass of the altiplano is some of the greenest I have ever seen? Reason versus emotion on this one. My rational head says, “wow, Bolivia!”, my soul says, “Are we there yet? I want to watch some telly in my flat and have drinks with my mates”. What an ungrateful fiend I am.

As you may have sensed through our combined ramblings on this blog, Bolivia has been really really hard. It’s a poor country – we had been warned of that, and to be honest, that’s far from being the issue. It’s the attitude. A “no can do” attitude permeates the entire country. People are ready to say no long before they consider saying yes. We have got “no”s from waiters, from gas station attendants, from hotel staff, from people at the side of the road… Don’t get me wrong, ‘no’ in itself is fine, I realise there are times where the restaurant serving breakfast is not going to have milk, or the petrol stations are not going to have any petrol (usual), but the blank and totally unapologetic faces across the entire country really chip away at one’s desire to be here after a while. Food always takes 45 minutes or more to arrive, no one can ever give directions, children never smile when we wave or say hello. It’s sucking my will to live. Sorry Bolivia but I’m craving Argentina. Not for the civilisation of the experience, but for the civilisation of the people.

That said we have met some exceptional people here in Bolivia, the hotel where we stayed in La Paz, the Hotel Osira, has been an amazingly positive experience. They went out of their way to help us to get the package, in a way which we really have rarely seen in this country. As we left, we hugged them goodbye, and headed up to El Alto, with me and all the luggage (“the weight”) in a taxi, and Mike easing the long-dormant bike out of hibernation and back onto the hills of La Paz. We made it to El Alto, the sprawling and poorer suburbs of La Paz (if you’re rich, you live low. La Paz is a bowl and El Alto sits on the lip of the bowl and beyond onto the Altiplano).

In El Alto, we met two bikers at one of the few petrol stations with petrol. Sergio, an Argentinian, and Alexandre, a Brazilian. Despite our warnings that we, with all our weight and our recently-out-of-retirement clutch, would not probably be going as fast as their regular motorbikes, they said they’d be happy to travel with us. So we set off towards Potosi, about an 8 hour drive away. It was 2pm so we knew we’d be unlikely to make it, but aim high and all that.

Annoyingly, we lose our tank bag, filled with biking (and life) necessaries like flourescent jackets, headtorches, survival candles, brand new bike goggles. Grrr. Fell off the back of the bike when we forgot to replace it after filling up the tank. That’s what happens when you forget the routines of life on the road and go soft on public transport for a month.

Our new friends proved to be great travelling companions. Great company and we kept up with them nicely. Gratifyingly too, we happily laughed away in Spanish, our one shared language, and both Mike and I had a real sense of how far our Spanish has come on this trip. This was friendship entirely uncompromised by language – smutty jokes, the usual biker banter, route planning – all without dumbing down. It was great.

We made it to Challapata – through rain and hail, and witnessing a storm on the horizon which was spectacular to watch -  it’s a small and very basic town on the main route south. More “no”s as we try to find a place to stay (“we only have a room with 5 beds and a room with 3 beds and you have to pay for every bed”), we finally settle back with beers under a basic striplight before bedding down in a very basic place with exposed electrics, brickwork and an unclosing communal loo door downstairs by all the cars and bikes.

As far as marketing goes, The Road of Death is a pretty clever name. Nothing like death to get the attention. I’m no thrill seeker, but everyone had said that when in La Paz, this is the thing to do: hire a mountain bike and cycle the length of one of the most perilous roads on the planet.

It’s a dirt road which runs from above La Paz down to a small town called Coroico, about 3,000m lower. The road is 64km in length in total, and is named The Road of Death for two reasons:
1. On one side, it plunges into the oblivion below. It’s carved into the foresty steep hills, has no safety barriers and the drop, in places, is sheer and up to 1,000m. You fall, you die.
2. It’s very thin. Wide enough for little more than a car. It’s name comes from the fact that it used to be two-way. I have NO idea how this could have been possible. There are few passing places, and even they are barely wide enough for two vehicles. It’s steep, and the thought of reversing to find a passing place gives me the shivers. Large trucks used to pass on the road, apparently letting wheels hang over the edge in order to pass. Many people lost their lives on the road.

It’s now pretty much only open for tourists. The idea is that you sign up for a day trip: you, and the countless other folk, are collected in rickety buses with the bikes on top and bussed up to the top of the road (which is now one way only: down). You’re then set free on the road for the 4 or so hours that it takes to ride it, then deposited at a nice hotel at the bottom for a cold beer and lunch, then bussed back to La Paz.

There was the usual TIB factor (“This Is Bolivia” – TIB is what we say when once again we are underwhelmed by the service culture here), but we eventually set off on the bus at around 9am. A low fog was hanging over La Paz, a city with some of the most temperamental weather systems on the planet. We headed up into the mist. Further and further up. Along a road which wound through imposing hills, like something out of the Lord of the Rings. We arrived at a point near a lake, snow capped peaks surround us. Roads very much asphalted at this point. We’re given our bikes (I’d made Mike let us get bikes with hydraulic brakes – at extra cost. Of course it appeared that they were no different from the others and in fact a rickety back wheel on mine meant we had to request a new one. But not before Mike melted my heart by giving me his bike to ride and him taking the dodgy one)

We were all given raingear. The fog was freezing cold and wet. Shortly it started to rain properly. I haven’t been that cold for years: as we cycled down, glasses were rendered useless by rain, fingers so cold that I could barely use the brakes. Still on the new road, trucks honked loudly as they passed us. I couldn’t see anything, I was sodden. I was not happy. Once again, I raged at the promise of Bolivia.

Buuuuuuuuuuut, I can confirm that it rapidly became one of the best experiences I have ever had in my life. As we dropped through the cloudy layer, the rain eased and it got warmer. We were in a group of 6 who, mercifully, moved at a speed which worked well for me – not too fast (large groups of flourescent blokey youth would shoot past at intervals). Mike and I weaved around each other, and I loved every single minute of it. It was exhilarating, but not so much that I was terrified (though any lapse in concentration would have had us plunging off the cliff). The terrain became more and more rainforesty – waterfalls cascaded across the road, the hyper green canopy draped down across our ride, the eerie fog layer prevented me from seeing right down into the valley below and from comprehending the full extent of the sheer plunge to our left.

After a month of being a bit tense, I finally relaxed and had more fun with my husband (who I generally have a lot of fun with, mind) than we have had for ages. It was such a rush, the scenery was so spectucular, not for nothing is this reputedly one of the most beautiful roads on the planet. I think it was amongst the most memorable days I have spent in my life. I loved every minute. The ride lasts a long time, we meandered down the hill, fast in parts, slower to suck up the views which greeted us on every side. Quite breathtaking. If you ever, ever find yourself in La Paz, this is an experience I would recommend with my whole being.

(Here are some fast facts I found about it online)

The worst year on record (1983) saw 320 people lose their lives in the gaping valley below, including the biggest single road accident in Bolivian history when more than 100 people were sent crashing over its near-vertical edge. The title of the ‘World’s Most Dangerous Road ’ was bestowed upon this transport route by the Inter-American Development Bank in 1995, based on the macabre ratio of deaths per mile. The ‘road’ itself is nothing more than a narrow sliver chiselled out of the mountainside – it’s unsealed, there are no barriers guarding you from the vertiginous drops and in places the rough, potholed track is only 3.2 metres wide. FAST FACTS Official name: Unduavi-Yolosa Highway Nickname: ‘World’s Most Dangerous Road ’ Location: La Cumbre – Coroico , Bolivia Length: 64km Altitude: 15,500 feet (start) to 3,700 feet (finish) Avg death toll: 100 people per year

Right. Clutch is in La Paz. Can’t be collected unti we ourselves go to the post office to get it. So you’d think we’d be on the next flight… well, not quite.

When we finished with the utterly gorgeous and entirely pneumatic Desiree Duran, former Miss Bolivia and Top 10 finalist in 2006 at Miss Universe, we headed out to catch a cab out to the Mennonite colony. Waiting for us at the gates of the studio was a man who greeted us. After we’d cleared up the fact that he wasn’t the taxi driver, he told us that he was called Jorge, and that he was a member of the Moto Club of Santa Cruz. He had seen us on TV just ten minutes earlier, and come straight down to the station to ask us to join the Moto Club for its fortnightly dinner the next night. The club is the only one in the city whose members all travel with their wives: it’s a motorbike club all about couples, and they’d love it if we could join them for dinner. 15 couples in total, 30 people. We agreed, delighted and astounded that anyone would bother to come down to the station to find us and make such an invite.

This was before we knew the clutch was in La Paz. When we found out, we phoned Jorge to ask if the dinner could be moved (not realising how many people were involved), he said no, but repeated that he’d love to have us there. So we decided to stay, instead of catching a flight back to La Paz early Wednesday morning, instead, we’d catch a flight back early Thursday morning.

Wednesday, despite initial laziness on our part and heavy rain, turned out to be a great day: we made an appearance on Bolivian national teenage children’s television, and the biker dinner was a blast, and for me, turned into my first ever baby shower (not, sadly, for me… I drank red wine to make up for it).

So, teenage TV. ‘Reel’ is a daily 2 hour programme for teenagers on PAT, one of Bolivia’s three big and slick national networks (the one we were on yesterday in the morning). They invited us back to do the adolescent show. The green suits were dusted off once more (arms were twisted at the Kawasaki showroom down the road) and the Kermit Twins were back in play.

Slick sets, slick (young) presenters, all pretty slick, as it happens. And we’re ten years older than anyone else involved in the production. One of the three presenters in 16. With pink highlights. The other girl has mezmeringly pert and massive boobs, making themselves known through the medium of a lowcut top. And the boy was a bouncy yet trendy walking ad for hair product. Then Granny and Grandpa Kermit show up. The make up artist’s first question to me is “can I make you look less tired?”. I’m not tired, I’m just already into my 4th decade on this earth.

We loiter at the back of the set, watching the three presenters flog various products as part of the show, then as a dance troupe of 15 year olds wows with breakdance-cum-lame-boyband-manoeuvres. Then us. The presenter has about as much clue as we do as to why we’re on the show, and tells the nation’s under 18s that we have driven to Bolivia from Australia. The film to explain our exploits doesn’t start so Hair Gel Hero plays for time while a decrepid hag (my good self) explains in ropey repetitive Spanish what we’re doing here. A sheep puppet with sunglasses on laughs at various points during my explanation. Wow.
Mike and I then head on to the biker dinner. It’s being held at a huge house, with waiter service and decorations on each of the 3 big tables. Immediately, it’s wonderful. Jorge, our guide to all of this, and his wife, Maria Renee, introduce us to everyone, as new people enter, they greet us charmingly, and soon there are 30 people aware of our mad story and talking to us about their own motorbiking adventures across this continent.

We interview three of the couples there. The first is the hosts, Luis and Marta. Luis has 13 motorbikes, which he introduces us too. He and Marta have been married for 36 years, and motorbiking has been a part throughout. Each bike has its own special merits, handles different terrain better than others. Marta is gorgeous, she looks about half her age, and loves being on the back of bikes with Luis. Her advice is to breathe in and savour the smells of the places you are driving through.

(more to come)

Apparently not.

Imagine “Good Morning” hosted by Kelly Brook – the most popular live national television show, that the entire country watches before going to work. Imagine being asked to speak, live, to millions of people in your (rusty) second language. Now imagine that you are asked to wear over-sized green kawasaki motocross racing clothes…

That’s the way my birthday started today. We had struggled last night to find a load of clips from our time in bolivia, and on the road, and after about 2 hours of searching, we left an editor to it to finish the job. We sat on the pleather sofas in front of millions of Bolivians. Once the interview was underway, all was well: Bolivian Kelly Brook was distractingly gorgeous, and having been promised hair and make-up to no avail, Alanna felt outshone by Kelly’s surreal TV beauty. She needn’t have worried though, as I think the Bolivian public were distracted more by our outsized lime green super-hero costumes. We got the standard questions – why are you doing this (one I often ask myself at 3 in the morning when I awake, worrying about the non-appearance of our vital clutch plates) who’s stupid idea was it anyway (one Alanna often asks me when we’ve broken down, or had a run in with a chicken bus). And what is love after all this (one I rarely ask myself, because when I awake a 3 in the morning, or have a run-in with a chicken bus, I look to my right, and the answer is right asleep in the bed, or in the side-car) But the TV answer of course is “you’ll have to wait for the book to come out” – or if they’re insisting, then you say something about giving, about working hard, or about respect. There’s much more to it than that, but again, you’ll have to wait. In the middle of the interview, a small bag was brought out and Kelly presented me with a birthday present. A bottle of aftershave. Lovely. Cue the jokes about how much I smell after a long day on the road. And a kiss (on the cheek sadly) from the radiant Kelly. Golly. I took the opportunity in the middle of the interview to implore the bolivian nation to help me find my package; for the Bolivian Postal Service to deliver it to the Hotel Osira today for my birthday. I’m not sure if there was someone with true postal power watching, but I like to think that my TV plea did not go unheard. Kelly’s final question was “and will you have kids when you get back?” Classic. And cue the classic response: “Alanna says this trip is my baby, and when we get back we’ll have hers.” And with that we were ushered off to remove our frog-suits, pose with some models outside the studio, and receive the attention of the public pounding down the studio gates. The public took the form of a fella called Jorje, who runs a suzuki garage round the corner, and he saw the start of the programme with his wife. and rushed to meet us at the studio. He also runs a biking club for couples, and thought it would be fun to have a dinner for us (and fifteen couples) tomorrow night, as guests of honour. And with that, we hopped into our awaiting car, and began driving to Colonia Chihuahua, a Mennonite Colony a couple of hours east of Santa Cruz, where I could find half of my birthday present.

And on the way there, as I type, I received a phone call, *the* phone call, from the Hotel Osira, La Paz, where the package is due to arrive. “It’s here” they say “You’ll have to pay a $50 importation duty – but it’s here” At this point the tax doesn’t bother me, and my birthday is very nearly complete, by 11am in the morning. Perfect, the mechanic can get the package today, spend tomorrow repairing the bike, have dinner with our new found biking couple friends, and we can be back on thursday in time to leave town before the end of the week.

However, the hotel manager calls back, to explain that, as is often the way in Bolivia, things aren’t as easy as they should be. The hotel is not a registered importation company, paperwork that will take them days to complete – and the only person who can collect the package from the post office, is myself, in person. She’s going back to the post office herself this afternoon, to try and bribe them. But I don’t have much hope. Customs here are notoriously difficult (just ask our other biking friends who spent 3 weeks waiting for their tires to arrive from Miami).

We arrive at the the Colonia just in time for lunch. Elmer’s parents (Ben & Agnes) were expecting us next door, and we sat with the whole family, including Ben’s other 2 daughters, about 25, and their youngest son, 12 years old. We passed small talk over the chicken and rice, and established that Ben had brought the family to bolivia about 6 months after the colony had begun in 1989. Before then, they had been in Belize, where Ben had found his faith. SOon after lunch the various members of the family dispersed to their duties, and I set up the camera ontop of a stool on the table (my tripod is with the bike in La Paz). Agnes spoke a smattering of English, no Spanish, all “Low German” – an early Germanic language which apparently bears little resemblance to modern German (though as a non german speaker, it was hard to tell). Ben spoke a solid English, after spending time with British soldiers in Belize. It was with those drunken representative3s of my country that his story begins, in the 1970′s. He was spending a lot of time with them, drinking, smoking and generally behaving like a squaddie, when his sister suggested that perhaps he spent some time with her, to see her Christian way of life. He laughed at her, but gave her lifestyle a go, and by 4pm that first afternoon, he said Jesus had shattered his heart of stone, and replaced it with flesh. From then on, he had his faith. He asked for guidance to find the right woman, and sure enough Agnes “came along”. One year later, they were married, and they had their first child, Milton. His advice to us was to let Jesus into our lives. He too is shocked by the statistics he’s reading about german marriages – that more fail than begin. That in a world without God, marriages fall apart. This is not something that can be argued with. The statistics do indicate that marriage based on a strong christian faith are ten times less likely to fail (something like 5% of serious religious unions fail, as opposed to the famous 50% of the rest of the population). So that was pretty sound advice. Love, according to Ben, takes three forms. Passionate love, between man and woman, “love” of things, and of doing things, and the love of God. And the love of God is the purest of all, and the love that can make a marriage work.

And with that, we filmed them outside, as we do with all of our couples, though in their case they didn’t want to kiss. He was clear that it wasn’t that he didn’t love his wife, nor that he didn’t want to kiss her in front of us – it’s just that a public kiss (on TV) spoils the love. So onto Ben and Agnes’s son, Elmer, and his wife Maria.

They had just moved into their house, so their furniture was sparse. But they had a couple of chairs to sit on, and usefully a table and a stool to put the camera on… Their 2 little girls, Silvia and Emmy, were beautiful – wearing light blue dresses, with pigtails in their blonde hair, and running about the feet their parents, smiling and laughing all the while.In a similar way to his dad, Elmer asked God to help him find a wife. It was then he noticed the girl working in the store, a girl who had noticed him long before, and it was then that he plucked up the courage to talk to her – to get to know her. They both liked each other – and so Elmer asked Maria’s parents. Maria’s parents had come to this colony from a old-style colony further south here in Bolivia. One of the colonies that still has the traditional dress (overalls for the men, and bonnets for the ladies), and the traditional horse drawn machinery, without tires. Maria’s family had seen the decline of their colony, that the youth had frequently deserted the group, and that such strict ways could not survive in this era. They heard of the successful colony, Chihuahua, moved there, and accepted a more relaxed way of life (headscarves instead of bonnets, tractors instead of horses – though still a formal Christian lifestyle). Maria’s parents agreed to Elmer’s proposal, and soon enough they were married, in the Chihuahua Church, in a very simple ceremony with their parents and close family. For Elmer (Maria didn’t speak that much) his advice was to make sure that we share everything, good and bad. He translated a nice saying for us, for Low German – to say “A problem shared is a problem halved, but a happiness shared is a happiness doubled” And love,  again involved God. God is Love, and he hopes that by sharing the teachings of the bible with us, that we can share these thoughts with many more, and that many marriages will be helped with our project. I hope so too, Elmer, I hope so too.

Which, after the humiliation we have brought upon ourselves on other national TV shows along the way, is no big deal. What is a big deal is that we have no bike, and no jumpsuits. Both are languishing, humiliated and broken, in La Paz, where we reluctantly abandoned both for Bolivian public transport. It’s like Clark Kent showing up for the interview when really they wanted Superman.

I find the pre-meets for TV very stressful. They ask us for footage, and we pathetically try to navigate the mountains and mountains of film that we have amassed on this journey, in the short time that we are given. I always panic. Nothing, it would appear, terrifies me more than looking like real tits on national TV. Or rather, given that we pretty much always look like real tits when we’re wearing the suits, when we look like totally unprepared and amateur real tits on national TV.

To be interviewed by this lady, Desiree Duran, former Miss Bolivia

I’m typing this as Mike works his way through the few files that we have with us here in Santa Cruz (the mega-external hard drive is back in La Paz safely stored from the destructive powers of public transport) – and trying to tell the story (they keep saying “we need an international edit! Make an international edit!” Edits take hours to make…)

It’s going to take a while. That we know of old. Telly is not an easy business, everything takes an age. Editing is the slowest process of them all – and we’ve only given them about 15 minutes of footage to reduce. I keep coming back to the fact that Mike and I are going to have around 400 hours of footage to deal with on our return to England. That’s almost bigger than the trip itself, and it’s scaring the crap out of both of us.

Oh my God, I think the production assistant is trying to get hold of uniforms for us from the local dress up shop. Oh. My. God. Clark Kent just put on Spiderman’s costume.

Ha ha! It develops. As Mike and I sit in a corner working through an edit (and me typing), a camera has just been shoved in our faces (our unmade up, unprepared, totally caught off guard faces) with a light blazing at us, and a microphone to our gobs. Weird weird weird. A ten minutes interview as we sit at our computers on a makeshift desk. I have NO idea what is going to come of that.

THE PLOT THICKENS FURTHER. We haven’t got our overalls and so the assistant has brought back GREY AND GREEN KAWASAKI MOTOCROSS WEAR for us to do the interview in. OH. MY. GOD. Nothing can explain how absurd we are going to look. NOTHING. But you should get a good chuckle out of it on the blog, peeps.

Sitting at lunch in Sucre, we told a handful of Bolivians we didn’t know about what we are doing. When we said that one of the questions that we ask every couple is “what is love?”, the high-powered Laila leant forward to me and replied, “Amor es Jesucristu”. She then went on to explain that once you can shrug off the dependence on human love and embrace divine love, unconditional and ever-giving, then and only then your life will feel complete.

Hmmm. Interesting. People don’t often volunteer a response to our questions without severe prompting. A little more inquiry on my part revealed that she passionately believes in Jesus, through her evangelical faith. She lives in Santa Cruz and runs one of the biggest TV stations in the country. She’s extremely nice, pious, and so Mike asked if we could come to her church service, and perhaps interview a couple from the church.

Right. So. First time I’ve been to church for a while. The Ministerio Jesucristu Luz de las Naciones meets every Sunday in the meeting room of one of Santa Cruz’s 5 star hotels. The service states that it starts at 10am. We scramble northwards to the venue for that time, only to find no sign of anyone. AT ALL. At 10.20am, Leila arrives with her gorgeous daughters and her sister, and the service kicks off at 10.30am. People are still arriving an hour and a half later. TIB (“This is Bolivia” – an acronym we have come to depend on).

The congregation is led by a couple who have been married for 26 years, Pastors Joaquin and Maria. Joaquin leads the singing to open the service. We sing around 10 songs in a row, repeating each of them as we finish it. It lasts about an hour. Funnily enough, it’s the first time I’ve been in church for a while, and interminable singing sessions used to undo me, but somehow I find it really easy to be part of. I don’t even notice the time. I just settle back, suspend all judgement – as is our way with Going the Distance, and let the love in the room wash over me. I’m singing along in no time.

Maria stands up to give the sermon, she mentions what we are doing and how delighted she is to welcome us to her church. She then talks about love, the importance of Jesus’s love over human love. She can recall verses of the Bible from the top of her head which are projected onto a screen for us all to follow. She’s an extremely good speaker, and I follow along even with my Spanish. The congregation loves her, the room by now full. 

So we ask if we can interview the two of them. After a great lunch with Laila, we head to their flat. They are both good-looking and charismatic, and the interview is a good one.

They met at school, Joaquin was working as a barista (as well as being a student there) and said that when he first laid eyes on Maria, he just knew. It was as though a light was shining on her, it was a though God was pointing him in her direction, he says. He’s always been one for going after what he wants, and from the start, he wanted her. Maria’s friend fancied him, but he asked Maria to dance and they danced all night together. Apparently, the friend was ok with it.

They’re 16 at this point. They didn’t see each other again for the next 3 months. Maria thought about him a lot, but their paths didn’t cross. Then one night, her friend pulled her along to a sports evening thing. Joaquin’s friend dragged him out of bed to it too – no shower, no clean clothes. And they saw each other again. And they have been together ever since.

They dated for 5 years before getting married. I asked about the proposal, and Joaquin said that it was so inevitable (and so often discussed) that the question itself was no big deal.

They married, were happy for the first few years, then Maria said they got into a difficult patch. She was shy, insecure – and looked to him for support. Support which perhaps he couldn’t give her: she needed to love herself before she could love him. She realised there was a part of her that was missing, then one day, she felt God. He moved her and she realised that only with the love of God could she realise what life and love really meant, it wasn’t fair to look to Joaquim to fill those gaps.

The two of them are Evangelical pastors. Maria has been for a very long time, since that revelation, Joaquin was a helicopter pilot but has since given that up to be a pastor full time. Their services are dynamic and their congregation appreciative. We had lunch with two members of the congregation who rated Maria as one of the best in Bolivia.

Maria and Joaquin tell us that there is a huge difference between a ‘pact’ and a ‘contract’. A contract is a secular arrangement which binds people, a pact is something which you enter into with your heart and soul, in the eyes of God, for a lifetime. You have to work at making that pact work, but it’s far far better than being alone. Joaquim said that divorce is like gluing two bits of paper together with thick glue, leaving it for an hour or so, then trying to pull them apart: it’s messy and both sides lose something of themselves to the other. Jesus is love, and he should help any individual to overcome any difficulty in any relationship.

My friend Dan is always prodding me to commit my opinion and my judgement to ‘paper’ in this blog. Well, as I have assured him, that’s not the spirit of what we do. Also, there is something amazing about being in the presence of real belief – and real love. This couple have found a way to live happily, and more than that, they are sharing that belief with others, and spreading that happiness. As far as I know, it causes no harm to any other being, and the people who have felt the love, feel with their whole beings, their whole lives. Many of the congregation wept openly, including Maria herself, when they thought about Jesus dying on the cross selflessly, so that we could live. The couple asked us to open our hearts to Jesus at the end of the interview. We repeated Maria’s words to beckon him into our hearts. I’m not going Goddy on you, dear reader, but I’m very happy to share other people’s faith, other people’s passion, other people’s love. It’s a blessing that I can’t describe when couples open their hearts to welcome us in, and I feel endlessly lucky to be part of this mad adventure.

Mike and I wandered round Sucre’s biggest chocolate factory agog, being given tasters at every stage, of every different type of chocolate. Mike, who is our resident chocolate addict (I’m a crisp girl, m’self), was in seventh heaven. But also filming, with a hairnet on.

Chocolates Para Ti is the brainchild of Gaston Solaris. About ten years, he decided that he wanted to set up a factory of some sort. His background was in industry, and so he decided to set up a chocolate factory. He started with 7 employees. The company is now one of the most successful Bolivian companies, exporting to various countries in South America - and the States – and employing around 130 people. 95% of whom are women.

So Mike and I arrange an interview with Don Gaston and his wife, Gloria. But first, we head to the factory for a tour. Hairnets and white coats, check. Much giggling from wife at husband’s headgear, check. Sweet sweet smell of gallons and gallons of molten chocolate, check. (Our tourguide, head of production, said that she and the workers are now totally immune to it and can’t smell it at all)

Two floors. Downstairs is where everything is mixed: the cocoa, the cocoa butter, the milk, the sugar. All the ingredients are Bolivian. Huge vats of chocolate are around the place. We peer into the chocolatey depths with glee.

Everything they do in the factory is done by hand. This is done to create jobs for the community. Some of which must be fairly stultifying, but are jobs none the less.

1. The chocolate is made by adding the various ingredients together then mixing them up.

2. The molten chocolate is poured into a vat, where a wheel lifts it up to create a constant flow unto the moulds for the chocolate. Excess chocolate is returned to the ‘bath’.

3. Moulds are shaken to make sure that chocolate is evenly distributed.

4. Dried chocolates are pushed from the moulds by hand, then wrapped by hand. There is a table of women working hard at wrapping bars of chocolates, feverishly, flawlessly.

5. Chocolates are then distributed, again by hand, into boxes. 3 of each type into each box.

They create different types of chocolates too – there are chocolate-covered marshmallows (all made in the factory); and chocolate-covered fondants (which were hardish when we got to taste them, like balls of icing sugar which then melt in the coming days so that they ooze from the chocolate shells when bitten into). The whole thing was pretty rad, basically.

We then left the factory to interview Don Gaston and his wife, Gloria. They are both on their second marriage, and have been together for 15 years. Don Gaston seems like a formidable man: not only does he run one of Bolivia’s biggest homegrown factories, but he has found the time to write a weekly column for various publications for 15 years which he has recently published entitled My Two Loves: My Cities and My Country. Sucre, his city, he celebrates on the front of each bar of chocolate that he sells: each type of chocolate has a photo of the exquisite Sucre on it. A little advert for his city.

Gloria, when asked whether she is the duena (boss) of the factory, says with a smile that she is the duena of the dueno! Love it. When we ask her what love is, she answers that it’s giving everything for the other person. She says that everything that she does is about making him happy, he smiles and says that he feels the same.

We then head to the wonderfully tropical Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia’s largest city out east near the rainforest and the Brazilian border – to a hostel with Simon, the captivating pet toucan, my newest love – also with a big beak and blue eyes.

Why the extremely self indulgent “grinning-idiots-at-a-gas-station” photo, I hear you all cry? Well, aside from it being another one of Arequipa’s finest photographer (Fernando Gygax)’s portraits of Team Going The Distance (see our flickr set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/goingthedistance/sets/72157622959050555/ ) it is also to acknowledge that here in sucre we interviewed ourselves. (With the help of our friends Judy & Sue).

Potosi was once the biggest city in the Latin American continent – comparable to London and Paris at the time. It exploded into history due to the discovery of an enormous seam of silver in its mountain. The Spanish used indigenous labour to tear the mountain apart from the inside, and silver streamed out into the streets of the city, into the hands of the conquistadors – and rapidly went to pay off Spain’s debts in Europe, failing to improve Spain’s own economy or industry in any meaningful way. The Spanish left thousands of dead Quechuans, and an empty mountain behind; such that today the mines are depleted of all the large and easy to extract silver, and the locals are allowed to mine what is left out of the mountain. Around 12,000 Potosenos work the mountain today, in conditions that would not even pass a 17th century safety test.

We met with Jorge, who had been a miner for 6 years in his youth, and now is a guide, and youth leader in the church. Jorge first went into the mines at the age of 13 with his uncle (then 18) They went deep within the the mine (the tunnel he took us into stretched for 1km into the mountain, and 200 metres down into the earth – so when he said deep, I was able to imagine something really quite a long way from the entrance). His uncle told him to sift through a pile of rocks separating the dark ones from the light ones, while he went off down a tunnel. “Wait here – I’ll be back” he said, as he disappeared off in search of more ore. Jorge’s gas light soon ran out, and he had no idea where he was.He sat for three hours in the dark, waiting for his uncle to return, which finally he did. As first days at work go, that’s a pretty tough start. During his six years, he witnessed some friends get lottery-rich with finds of silver, and other friends die trying.

He left the mines at the age of nineteen (the average age of the miners – most retire in their mid twenties) and began work as a guide. He met Lillian in a local church group, who helped him find God, and soften his macho ways. After fours years, they were married, and had the first of three kids. Lillian is still worried about Jorge’s work in the mines. It’s still dangerous, almost as dangerous as mining itself she says. Jorge told us of one time when he was taking a group down a large boulder fell from the ceiling of the tunnel, behind him, narrowly missing the first tourist in the group. Another tourist dropped a camera down a hole that Jorge hadn’t noticed before – jorje jumped down the hole onto the ledge that the camera sat on, and clambered out. A miner noticed him come out – and told him that the shaft was 30m deep. Not a fall Jorge would have survived if he hadn’t landed on the ledge. It is thanks to God, they both say, that he is alive today, and that they have found each other.

The life of a miner is one that Jorge was lucky to have escaped early on. He described the work like an addiction,  like gamblers who don’t know when to walk away from the table. While  there are many stories of the big winners (like the guy four years ago who found the last big $1,000,000 seam. He drives a hummer, has a big house in Potosi, and two more in Sucre) there are not only stories of those that lost (around 40 miners die a year), but there are many visible examples of those that are losing, slumped in the gutter next to the beer shops outside the mine, where you can buy 96% proof alchohol, supposedly just for offering the God of the mountain, but inevitably some of it ends up in the mouth of the miner. No female miners are allowed to work in the mine, and the society is inevitably macho. There’s graffiti on the walls (one collective calls itself “pulmones de metal”, lungs of metal, which adorns one tunnel wall, next to an enormous vagina…) and Jorge explains how the miners talk about sex all the time, and how there weekends aren’t complete without at least trying to bed one of the Potosenas – local women who admire the miners, who also hope to benefit from a million dollar seam that reveals itself to one in a million miners. Preganacies happen all the time without love or sobriety, and consequently the mines are like a Dickensian workhouse,  teeming with children of all ages, with no parents, and no shoes, relying on Jorge and other guides to bring food from the tourists who visit. Most of these children grow up to be miners starting as young as 10, because they are used to the harsh environment and are suitably small for some of the deeper tunnels. As we were driving away from the mines, I saw another drunk lying in the dust like a discarded shop mannequin, with two small children playing next to him – one of whom was trying in vain to smash a rock on the curb, in bare feet.

Jorge’s children, to the contrary, are smiling, inquisitve, beautiful kids, who at the end of our interview join their parents in their doorway, singing a local church song about God’s love.

An early start for the Clears, 7.30am alarm. Grunt.

Ingo and Cecilia have the shortest relationship of any couple we have interviewed on the trip. 17 days to be precise. The reason that we have bamboozled them into participating is that they are our freshest example of Love At First Sight. It’s the stuff of Hollywood movies, and we’d've been mad not to capture their total delight and having found each other, their besotted smiles, their general loveydoveyness.

Ingo is one of the big group of bikers we have so happily been hanging out with. He’s German, he loves salsa, he’s a very nice guy. He goes out dancing most nights, and on one of the nights, he went out to salsa club in Cusco. He’d been there a few days and made a few local friends, so he happened to be with a Cusceno friend. At one point in the evening, a Peruvian dance came on and everyone started to dance to it. Ingo, an experienced salsa dancer, didn’t know the dance, but gamely had a go at joining in. At which point, his Cusco friend suggested that he danced the dance with his female friend, Cecilia.

So Ingo and Cecilia started to dance together. The way Ingo recalls it, about ten minutes into dancing together, he and Cecilia looked into each others’ and he said at that point, he just knew. He said it was as though they had had a moment of profound connection. He is quick to add that neither he nor Cecilia is emotionally naive – both have had proper and meaningful relationships before. With one look, he realised that this was the woman for him. He said that he saw someone who understood him totally, and whom he understood.

They danced together for 5 hours that night, during which time they talked and talked and talked, and before the end of the night, they knew that they would marry each other.

That alone was enough to have me crying (NB Me – not just Mike) but the amazing bit really is Cecilia’s story. She is from Arequipa, but had been living in Cusco for 8 years with work. She had finally decided that she was sick of living there and wanted to move back home. So she packed up her life in the city, sent it back to her family in Arequipa and quit her job. The night that she and Ingo met was her leaving party – her grand farewell to Cusco before upping and heading back to her home town.

So when she met Ingo, and the two of them shared this amazing experience, and they talked about forever, Ingo asked Cecilia to come with him on his bike journey: the bike, like all of the touring bikes, can hold a passenger, they could buy all they needed, he wanted her on the road with him.

She said yes.

So the next day, the two of them spent the day trawling Cusco’s few biker shops to get Cecilia kitted out for months on road with a man she met the night before. She looks adorable in her kit – they could only find motocross padding, so she looks like a boy racer.

What an amazing leap of faith. I ask if they ever had any doubts, and Cecilia said that, from that first moment, it was so easy, effortless – and there was never any question. She phoned her mother, 10 days or so before Christmas, to say that she wouldn’t be back for Christmas with the family or New Year. Her mother was upset – “why?” Because of work, came the reply. Cecilia knew her mother would give her grief for her impetuousness.

When I asked what was going through Ingo’s head when Cecilia got on the back of his bike and they left Cusco, he said that he had tears running down his face in his helmet.

So here we meet them, two weeks later, so in love that it’s palpable. They don’t even speak each other’s languages – Ingo answers in English, Cecilia in Spanish. Ingo speaks a bit of Spanish, Cecilia can just about understand English, but doesn’t speak a word of German.

They are travelling down to Buenos Aires over the next couple of months, they will then fly back to Lima where they will marry in a civil ceremony. Then the hardest part, Cecilia has to stay in Peru to learn German to take a test before she is allowed into the country (given that she doesn’t have a job at the moment). It’s likely to take between 2 to 3 months, which both are not looking forward to, but they know they’ll survive it. They talk happily and naturally about kids, about moving to Germany (where Ingo has a great job – eventually, they may well move back to South America, which Ingo loves); for the moment, the only important thing is that they are together.

Cecilia is a beautifully happy person. It’s not difficult at all to see why Ingo fell in love with her, she’s gorgeous, so unfazed by it all, she talks about how little importance she puts on material things. She just smiles when I ask about how they get through all the usual shit of life on the road together – border crossings, tropical rain, being tired/hungry. She says that when it rains, she just hugs Ingo tighter. Which of course, he smiles at.

They are so adorable, it gives me goosebumps even writing about them. What’s more, I think they really have thought it through. It’s not just some teenage love affair, they are so totally comfortable around each other. God, I hope it lasts – and I really think that it will (for what little that’s worth).

www.heldontour.blogspot.com

(we are both working overtime to update the site and we have managed to double up, so we can’t be arsed to edit – so you get them both)

Alanna: 

2010 welcomed in in style: Potosi’s Rotary Club. Wilting burgundy velvet carpets lead up a central wooden staircase to the ballroom, set with big speakers and small stage for a band. The adjoining room is filled with tables for 4. It looks like it’s going to be a great party, and we duly buy our tickets for dinner and drinks, all included. There are 12 of us, three tables are joined, and we each get a ticket for the 9pm kick off.

Herding bikers is like herding cats. As the wise Aussie Judy pointed out to me, the kind of people who get on a bike and travel 25,000 miles are the kind of people who have pretty big balls. And who don’t like being bossed about. So getting the group to move at all takes some serious patience – so we eventually arrive at the club, and our table, at 10.15pm.

It’s totally empty. Totally. The tables haven’t been laid, the food is far from being ready, the waitresses are surprised to see us. What? New year is in a little over an hour and a half – where’s the pary? We sit down, have the usual Bolivian treatment of drinks taking half an hour and much confusion from the waitstaff to arrive, and then contemplate what on earth is going on. We drink, in merry solitude, for the next hour, and at 11.50pm, the first other guests arrive. Apparently, new year’s eve is a family thing, you only go out after dinner. So why have they all paid for dinner? Certainly the most surreal new year I have ever spent.

Great news comes in the form of my brother proposing to his lovely girlfriend, Penny, back home. Certainly the best thing about new year this year.

Mike: New Year, Potosi. Who would have chosen this town to celebrate the end of the decade? Fortunately we were accompanied by a multitude of bikers, and we decided to celebrate Bolivian style, by booking a table at the International Club of Potosi. A bit like a rotary club, old fashioned with wood panelled walls. Although it lacked the stuffy atmosphere, in that it had no atmosphere at all. It was only until 12.30 when the other guests arrived when we discovered that the Bolivian New Year is celebrated at home with the family. Midnight was barely recognised, although there was a band playing to an empty room just before. I asked the MC when midnight was exactly, expecting him to tell us when he would begin his countdown, and his response was that “it had probably passed”.  So we had to make do with our various watches, and a vague consensus that Johannes’ watch would be the most accurate (being German). Though sadly it had no second hand, so we just guessed and counted down at random. Since we had 3 bottles of rum on the table, and the desperate need to make our own fun, the subsequent high altitude hangover meant the first of January was a write-off.

After a particularly hellish introduction to the nightmare that is public transport (how we mourned our temporarily disabled Ural), we arrived in Uyuni at 0700. With very little sleep we booked onto a day tour of the infamous salt-flats. The travel agent assured us that we’d have a good time, with the 2 other Brits and an American in our 4 x 4, and after a flurry of disorganization, our jeep set out with us and our new Bolivian friends, a mum and her three sons. Which meant for a day of heavy Spanish chat couped up in a hot car.
 
The day was our first foray into organized tourism for a long time, and we were hearded from the “train graveyard” – admittedly a great photo opportunity – to an “artesenal market” – where we were ushered through various stalls of tat, until finally we reached our destination, la Isla de Pescados. An extraordinary cactus-covered blip on the famous stark white landscape. We had a surreal picnic on the island with the twin teenage boys, the mum, and Fabio her 4 year old son, and an ostrich who scared the bejeezus out of Fabio. There were, of course, a good fifty other jeeps, and their contents of 5 tourists each, which meant the island was far from unpopulated, but the views out over the salar were well worth it. It really is an amazing place, where the featureless landscape plays tricks with your mind (to the extent that taking photos of each other in different planes of perspective, was practically mandatory) Before we knew it, our time was up, and we were hearded back into the car, to drive 100km back across the awesome landscape, to Uyuni, where we stumbled onto our second bus in 24 hours. I quite agree with Eric Idle’s character, Mr Smoke-too-much, in Monty Python’s travel agent sketch:
 
“I mean what’s the point of being treated like sheep. What’s the point of going abroad if you’re just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea – “Oh they don’t make it properly here, do they, not like at home” – and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney’s Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White’s suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh ‘cos they “overdid it on the first day.”
 
Except for Kettering and Coventry, read Cochabamba, Bolivia. And they weren’t bemoaning the tea. And they certainly weren’t wearing cloth caps. But you get the idea…

The first of our brushest with Bolivian public transport. Bike left, maimed, in a mechanic’s workshop in La Paz, we head with reduced luggage to La Paz bus station for the overnight to Uyuni, where the largest Salt Plains in the world are located. The road is in two parts: 3 hours to Oruro on paved roads. Then 8 hours of “lesser quality roads”. Ok. We sleep for the first three hours, no probs. Then, when we hit the unpaved roads, it quickly becomes clear that sleep will be unlikely: the roads are dust roads, grooved into lots of uneven bumps. At times, we are thrown out of our seats into the seats in front. I have to say, I find it pretty hilarious. We are awoken, at 6.30 – an hour before our destination – by the bus driver turning on Bolivian panpipe rock LOUD. So loud that even the Bolivians are pushing their sleeping bags against the speakers, one in front of us holds his hands tight against his ears for the entire hour. Mike sits bolt upright and flaps his hands in indignation. I giggle madly. Again, unlikely to be what he needs.

Uyuni is high and dry. Dusty dry and very bright. Clusters of indigenous cholas (the women with bowler hats) and tourists define this place. We reluctantly get breakfast, find a tour and join the realms of other tourists for a daytrip onto the Salt Flats.

We interview Bolivia’s top international designer, Beatriz Canedo Patino. She uses only alpaca in her designs, is proud to represent Bolivia in everything she does, and designs Evo Morales’ wardrobe.

“Eezer goode, eezer goode, I’m ebeneezer goode”. He wasn’t familiar with the above song from the album “Boss drum” by the Shamen. But the Shaman had his own songs, and his own lyrics to sing when we met him in the outskirts of La Paz.

Our friend, Javier (see previous post), had sent us out with his favourite taxi driver, Miguel, to find out about the other side of La Paz. About a year ago, his brother had bought a new car, and he had accompanied him out to the Zona Alto Pura  to the line of Yatiri (Shaman) shacks – to bless his new vehicle. He thought that we could visit a Yatiri to tell our future (as we have done before with a tarot card reader in Redondo Beach, LA – though this time without flushing toilets) and to bless our journey and the rest of our future.

At that point, had our Yatiri been an employee of the Bolivian Postal Service, I could certainly have imagined the power he could have over the rest of our journey, in getting our new clutch to the garage in good time. Our first ritual with him was with the leaves of Coca. We gave him a bag of coca leaves, and he spread out his special cloth, and began chanting. As he did so, he placed several leaves meticulously around the cloth, (one representing wealth, one health, and one family) – then he dropped other leaves on top of these. They landed “light-side-up” – which is a good thing – and roughly parallel, also a good thing, so we are in for a good future apparently. The next thing for us to do was to make a sacrificial offering to pachamama, in the form setting fire to many white objects (llama fat, sugar houses/ cars/ penises to represent all those parts of life, coca leaves

(though technically green), and strands of silver ribbon – representing mineral wealth –    in a baking tray. Then we poured beer on the ground around the pyre. At each corner of the pyre sat a bottle of Pacena (also the sponsor of the Yatiri’s hut) – each one representing earth, wind, fire and water. Which we then shook up like F1 winners and sprayed around our pyre, then around the Pachamama shrine at the back, and another lump of earth with flowers on (by which point I had run out of beer). Then we stood sombrely watching the flames burn our houses, cars, penises, and mineral wealth, shook the Yatiri by the hand, and called it a day.

And then Miguel took us back through El Alto, and back intodowntown La Paz, where he took us to Calle Los Andes, to meet some masters of traditional clothing manufacturing. Bordados Chambi were one of the few shops open that day, that specialises in making masks and traditional clothing for the forthcoming February festival of the Virgen de la Candelaria, in Oruro, just south of La Paz.

The couple who ran the shop very kindly let us try on some Potosena clothing – representative of the town of Potosi. These included particularly guerrish hats and ribbons and flags, as well as some exceptionally curious spurs for me, that consisted of a  pair of small symbals, to alert the neighbours to my failed attempts at traditional dancing. (see right)

We went onto interview the duena,  - her husband was more reluctant, hiding in the shadows, while she talked about their marriage. One piece of advice that was particularly interesting – in that it is one of the core principles in Dr Judith Wallerstein’s book, “The Good Marriage” – was the importance of starting your own family, and making sure your old family does not interfere too much. It’s great to see the overlap of advice like that, that a Bordado in La Paz, who has most likely never read “The Good Marriage” intuitively knows the basics; and that these self-help books are not the only source of such wisdom.

Actual examples that have happened here in Bolivia, beginning with Christmas eve, aka, the lunch nightmare before Christmas:

Japanese restaurant, La Paz.

“We’re very hungry – what is the quickest thing to order on the menu?”
“The soup is very straightforward sir.”
“Great, 2 soups please”
At which point we were joined at the table by a german tourist who commenced a monologue of his travels for over an hour.
“Where’s our soup?”
“Just coming sir. 5 minutes.”
The waiter arrives 10 minutes later, carrying three soups.
“Great – finally. It’s taken you nearly an hour and a half”
“Oh these soups aren’t for you sir”
“Right, that’s it, we’re leaving”
Traditional Restaurant, La Paz.

“we’re very hungry, we’ve just waited for an hour and a half in a japanese restaurant, we’d love something quick and simple.”
“How about chicken and rice, sir?”
“Perfect. Could we get a chicken soup as well?”
10 minutes later, the chicken soup arrives.
“Thanks for the soup. That was surprisingly quick. And the chicken?”
“Just coming sir…” The waitress finishes her shift.
“Excuse me, I ordered some chicken half an hour ago and I wondered how much longer it would take.”
“Oh, five minutes I’m sure, sir”
“Right, well, could you hurry it along.”
Another 20 minutes passes.
“Hello – erm, the chicken – is it going to be long”
“Hold on a second sir…oh, the order hasn’t been placed. What was it you wanted?”
“You’re kidding me right? I’ve now been waiting for food in 2 restaurants for nearly 2.5 hours. Please help feed me. I have money”
“Sure, it’s a quick dish. Give us five minutes.”
20 minutes later I begin eating the chicken. With such rage that I struggle to swallow.
Eli’s, La Paz.

“I’d just like to place an order for chicken soup, as I am going next door to pick up a  burger from burger king. Could you prepare it, so it’s ready when I get back?”
“Of course sir, everything here is quick, you won’t have to wait”

I return from Burger king -

“Is the soup ready”

“The soup sir?”

“Yes I ordered a chicken soup from your colleague, who said I could pick it up when I arrived”
The colleague arrives.
“Ah, the soup. We didn’t prepare it because we didn’t know if you wanted rice or chips with it.”
“I don’t want either, I’d just like the soup”
“Right ho. Chicken soup then?”
“That’s right, chicken soup”
10 minutes later, the soup has been heated and is ready to take away.

Burger king.

I am second in line to place an order. The lady at the front, a cholla lady with bowler hat, many skirts, and a screaming child in hand, hands over a stack of at least 20 vouchers. The spotty kid behind the counter starts the process of logging each item, while printing a receipt for it and stapling it to the voucher to put in the till. He runs out of staples in no time, his boss comes over to help get the order to the kitchen, the till roll runs out, the queue behind is growing long and impatient. The cholla lady begins gathering the substantial quantity of food,and finally the spotty kid gets to the last voucher and looks up to take the next order from a cholla lady, with bowler hat and huge stack of vouchers.20 minutes later, I pick up my food – and head to Eli’s to pick up the soup.

Mario’s, La Paz.

There are six of us, all panamerican motorcyclists, all hungry for a spot oflunch. Our hotel recommends the chinese place in the corner of the square, as it is quick. We order 4 special fried rice with shrimp.

“Sorry, there’s no shrimp.”

“Could we have chicken instead?”

“Of course. And for you madam?”

“The two of us would like chop suey.”

I see the order on his pad – 4 x special fried rice, chicken.  2 x chop suey

While the food did arrive in a lightening 15 minutes; the special fried rice surprisingly did have shrimp on, one of the chop suey meals was spicy noodles with beef, and the other chop suey order was a fish. Just a big fish on a plate.

Chicken shop in Potosi.

“Could we have some chicken and chips?”
“10 minutes for the chips.”
“OK we’ll come back.”
10 minutes later.
“Are the chips ready?”
“The chips, sir?”
“Yes, that’s right, the one’s that were meant to be ready by now”
“Hold on a second” (she disappears out the back)
“They’ll be 10 minutes sir…”

La Paz is the highest capital city in the world, at around 3,000m. Potosi, where we headed afterwards is 4,060m, with its mines at 4,200m.

I’m usually a fairly reasonable travelling companion, but I fear that I have been pretty poisonous for my dear husband for the duration of our time at height. Altitude sickness has many friends – breathlessness is its closest ally, but sickness and sleeplessness are part of the gang. In La Paz, this meant that it was very hard to do anything apart from loaf about. Walking up stairs resulted in a old-man-chest-grab and bend-at-the-hip at the top, even getting out of bed would need a minute’s repose once on our feet.

The highlight of La Paz for me was leaping out of the wheezing bike and having to push it up a 45 degree angled hill. I pushed with every ounce of my being, then had to run quickly up to the next set of lights to do it again. It then took me 10 minutes, sitting on the curb, gasping, to catch my breath. From then on in, I have had a raspy little cough which would make Tiny Tim proud.

By the time we got to Potosi, I had a perpetual headache and felt like I had a strong flu all the time. We were there for 3 days. That’s a lot of woeful wife for Mike to deal with (he didn’t get the headaches or the flueyness). Mike himself woke up one night hyperventilating because he couldn’t get enough air. Conversations are peppered with momentary breaks where one or other of us has to take 5 seconds to concentrate on getting enough oxygen. Forget walking and talking…!

We’re now in Sucre, having dropped a kilometre last night in a 2 hour drive, and though I feel better, Mike and I are still wheezing…

The diagram to the left explains the operation of the Venturi principle, on which a carburettor is based. You don’t really have to understand how this works, to understand this “jets” thing. It was really just to scare off the wrong kind of reader…

The engine needs air (specifically oxygen) to mix with the fuel – for the internal combustion to work. This mixing takes place in the carburettor; and the engine is designed around a specific ratio of fuel to oxygen. When the oxygen level is depleted (at high altitude), the fuel supply needs to be constricted too, so that this ratio is maintained. You can restrict the fuel supply in the carb, by unscrewing and changing these small bolts inside the carburettor – which have thin holes running through them. Normal conditions merit a main jet size of about 0.125 mm, but in high altitude (of more than 2,000m) this should be reduced to 0.120. Which I didn’t do until the third day at altitude. Which means that on this drive over to the hostel, we were limited in power, and carrying all our stuff. And each other. So our total weight was about 800kg. Also, the streets of La Paz are a nightmare; the worst traffic I have seen in Latin America, means that most streets are rammed with carsd moving very slowly. That, and the fact that the streets are as steep as the best in San Francisco or a French Alpine town, mean that hill starts happened every couple of minutes. Now I am not a mechanic (as is probably apparent to Ural fans reading this page), but basic physics would suggest that steep hills, heavy loads, low power and high altitude would be a struggle for any machine – and especially the clutch. Again for the uninitiated amongst you, the clutch is what transfers the power from the engine to the gear-box and ultimately the back wheel. If there is not enough power (high altitude & wrong jets) and there is too much stress on the system (steep hills, heavy load) then the breaking point is the clutch.

Hence, up the third hill, the clutch starts smoking. We’re stuck in traffic, at a 35 degree incline, weighing 1450lbs. Alanna hops out (new weight, 450lbs. Just kidding…) and starts pushing. The clutch is screaming. The Bolivians are gawking. And we just managed to squeak over the crest of the hill, onto a level to roll down to the hostel and lick our smoking wounds. That night I studiously changed the jets without too much difficulty, got very drunk with some Aussie backpackers, went to bed, closed my eyes, and hoped that the bike would somehow mend itself by the morning.

We stayed at the hostel until Boxing Day, when we transferred to another hotel on the other side of town to be with our other biker friends. (by following a taxi who had the specific instructions to avoid hills) And on the 28th, we set out for the south, hoping that all was well. It wasn’t.

First up, the battery was dead. I had spent some time on Christmas eve fiddling with the jets in the dark, using the headlight to illuminate he matter. Silly. After our friend Judy helped us bump start the bike, we rolled very slowly forward. When I realised that my big foot had kicked off the supply pipe from the carburettor into the engine (which I hadn’t screwed on as tightly as I should have). While I sorted that without too much difficulty, the real trouble came when I still had no power trying to climb the hill. Alberto, a helpful passer-by and president of the La Paz Harley Davidson club, helpfully told me that the clutch was burnt out. And with that, we let everything (including my temper) cool down a bit, and took a circuitous (less-hilly) route to his brother’s mechanic’s shop  Where I filmed the following…

We leave Puno late in the morning (which is foolish because La Paz is an 8 hour drive away – and that’s not including border control).

Before we leave, we see the amazing site of a wedding outside the main church in Puno. The crowd of wedding guests has gathered on the pavement, a band of 5 mariachi-looking fellows is playing loud music, and the bride and groom are dancing. Nothing that special, I hear you thinking. Not until we realised that the bride was a chola, an indigenous woman of the region, with little bowler hat on (sombrero), the classic dress – though richly embroidered white for the wedding, and 2 black plaits down her back and linked together at the bottom. She is surrounded by other women in similar, if less ornate, attire, all dancing with their tradiotionally garbed men. A crowd has gathered beyond the wedding guests to witness the joyful event. Mike and I are the only gringos, I stand sheepishly on the edge, where Mike, ever the documentary maker, elbows his way through the crowd and points our huge camera at the couple to capture the moment.

The day is beautifully sunny, and we set off to drive around the spectacular Lake Titicaca. On the way, we pull over to get a shot of Puno, back across the lake, glistening in the bright sun. As we are doing so, a chola creeps out from the tumbledown house we have stopped beside to look at us. I take the opportunity to ask if we could interview her and her husband. Rosa, for that is her name, tells me that her husband is working the fields, but agrees to talk to us. I have to confess, dear reader, that I didn’t understand a word of it. If she was speaking Spanish, it was a slurred and garbled version far from anything which my low-level comprehension could make out. She did say, though, that love is for life. She then stuck out her hand and asked for a propina (tip). Fine, fine, have 5 soles.

The border takes hours. 3 hours. Mike disappears off to interact with an old man who regarded computers with total bewilderment but still had to spend his working day using one. I am left guarding the bike. Lucky for me, a fascinating character wanders up and starts chatting about the bike. It turns out he is a world expert veterinarian on camelidos sudamericanos. To you and me, that’s the term for the family which is comprised of llamas, alpacas, guanacos and vicunas.

He’s lectured around the world on these beasts, and was even lured to Italy to work on one of the many alpaca farms out there. I ask him all the questions I have ever wanted to ask about llamas and their littler friends:

1. Like camels, are they quite bad-tempered? Yes.

2. Like camels, do they have bad breath? Yes.

3. What are the occupational hazards of working with these type of beasts? Do they bite? No, they don’t bite. They spit, and kick. You can’t walk behind them.

4. What’s the difference between them all? Llamas are the biggest. They and alpacas are domesticated. Vicunas, the smallest, and guanacos, are wild. The animals are covered in hair, not fur, which is great for making clothes out of. Llama hair is the coarsest, then alpaca – with vicuna being the finest, and most prized. It can cost an absolute fortune.

5. He talked about how integral these animals are to rural societies in Peru and Bolivia. He said that it’s not possible to study them without understanding the role they play – entire families depend on them.

After another couple of hours of driving (in the dark, thanks to the spectacularly inept customs official who took an hour to press the “print” button on his computer…) we descended into the mighty bowl / bowel that is La Paz. First night hotel choices are always a struggle, we get lost, we’re broken with tiredness, and can’t make any decisions. So Hotel Berlina had our custom, until we could think straight in the morning, and head for where the fun was…

Fernando kindly offers to take photos of us, in suits and on the bike. Arequipa is nestled in between three volcanoes, the nearest and most prominent of which is called Misti. So we take photos with the splendour of Misti behind us as the sun gleams.

We then head to Santa Catalina, the oldest city-within-a-city convent in the world. It’s gloriously breathtaking, and extremely photogenic.

We then race back to the bike and set off for Puno, a city on the altiplano on the shores of Lake Titicaca.

Yet more family. Hurray! This time, family comes in the form of Diego Munoz-Najar and his wife, Flavia. Diego runs the oldest distillery in Peru, that of Anis Najar. He is the 5th generation Najar to be at the helm, inheriting the place from his uncle around 7 years ago.

Diego gives us a tour of the distillery. The Bodega Najar was established in 1854 when the first Najar came over from Spain, intent on distilling his own anise to Spanish traditions. The process remains remarkably similar to its early days: the anise seeds are added to the alcohol in wooden barrels and left there for a week or so to infuse the alcohol with the flavour of anise seed.

The seeds are then sieved from the alcohol, and the alcohol goes to be distilled – in the very same distiller that the company has been using since its inception. From there, the alcohol is distilled once again, this time using large vats, the secret ingredient is added, and the liquid is then bottled. Simple really. It’s just the family’s secret recipe that you’re missing and you could start up your own little anis place.

In fact, one of the headaches of running the place is just that: the black market floods the market with imitation Anis Najar. He describes the country’s attitude to commerce as “informal” and says there is little protection (and thus incentive) for legit businesses. In an effort to curb the practice of bottling cheaper, poorer quality Anis in Anis Najar lookalike bottles, the company has just redesigned its bottle. Which should give him a grace period before the counterfeiters catch up.

The reason that we’d pounced on this relative of mine (with much super sleuthing help from my father to track him down in the first place – and thus the rest of the family) is that the Bodega Najar also distils Peru’s most famous of drinks: Pisco. Peru’s very own, distinctive variation of Latin America’s ubiquitous rocket fuel liquor, aguardiente (“fiery water” which can mean any distilled spirit). Pisco is made from grapes. A bit like Italy’s grappa, or brandy, it’s clear and boy, is it potent. Named after Pisco, the city and port just south of Lima, the region in which it was originally made, the grapes are now grown and distilled throughout the south of Peru. An American, in the 1920s, created a way of drinking it which stopped it from tasting like nail polish remover, and made it both socially acceptable and very popular: the Pisco Sour (which has its roots in the whisky sour). It’s a cocktail of Pisco, lime juice, simple syrup, egg white and Angostura bitters or a sprinkle of cinnamon. I find it delicious, but it’s also got a real kick, and a real gift for hangover. But, with the llama, it’s one of Peru’s most famous exports.

Sadly, the bulk of the work for the botega’s Centenario Najar Pisco is done off site, away from the Arequipan factory. The process is similar to that for wine or the Anis. We did get to see it bottled though, and, of course, to try some.

We then interview Diego and his wife of 15 years, Flavia.

No interviews today! Bliss. So Fernando and Aurora take the opportunity to introduce us to the magical city of Arequipa. It’s colonial in style, with cobbled streets and beautiful buildings. Fernando Gygax is one of the city’s most reknowned photographers (he recently had an exhibition in Switzerland http://www.danielagygax.com.ar/fernando_gygax/), and as well as running his own publishing house, he proudly contributes to the magazine Pachamama which is filled with his exquisite pictures of Peru and the Andes.

He takes us first to a mirador so that we can see the city from above. We then journey down into the heart of its cobbled streets, and to lunch at newly opened restaurant Chi Cha (a celebration of Arequipan culinary tradition established by Peru’s darling of cuisine, Gaston – who we tried to interview countless times with his equally famous wife, Astrid). The food is delicious, the laughter contagious and we marvel at how much we are loving Peru.

It’s worth mentioning briefly that Aurora and Fernando have various wonderful pets. The first is Lola, a little white dog who is utterly captivating. Aurora introduced her as her baby, now that her two children have left the nest. In the garden, they have 2 birdcages: one houses 3 budgies, the other, a 22 year old, hostile male parrot from the Peruvian rainforest. From the very first moment that Piwuiche makes his first attempt to chomp a chunk out of my meaty palm, I’m smitten. He squawks with hostility as I approach, is always ready to bite, and glares at me with his beady eyes when I try to say hello. All of which render me helpless with adoration. I can confirm with pride that by the time we left Arequipa, he no longer bit me when I offered my palm, and he was quite content in my presence, so no more squawking. When Fernando takes him out of the cage, he’s good as gold, so I still have some way to go. Don’t think you’ve seen the last of me, Piwuiche!

People say that the drive from Nazca to Arequipa takes about 8 hours. Which means, without too much doubt, about 10 hours for us. It’s not the fault of the bike, but by the time you’ve factored in lunch, countless stopping to shoot the bike driving through the scenery, you do eventually add a fair whack to your total driving hours. So we pull into Arequipa in the dark. Never ideal. A taxi guides us through the darkened streets to the home of Fernando and Aurora, yet more tenuously related wonderful Peruvians. We immediately promise them that we won’t stay with them for longer than 3 nights. Promise.

We leave La Calera with heavy hearts. I’ve spent a couple of days feeling distinctly under the weather, and what a beautiful place to be nursed back to health. But it’s time to man up, pack up and hit the road. It’s HOT HOT HOT. And dusty. And when sun is blazing, suncream is on and the environment is dusty, our faces become FILTHY. Dust and pollution stick to the suncream layer and we finish the ride looking like one of Fegan’s street children. I particularly like Mike’s clown eyebrows, myself.

I’m still not feeling right, so Mike transports a sickly wife down to Nazca, site of the famous lines. I go straight to bed for the afternoon, Mike goes to take a flight over the barren landscape to see the ancient and mysterious line drawings from the air.

Mike here, hello. Sadly I can’t make Alanna write up my experience of the Nazca lines, as she wasn’t there. It was a fairly rapid affair (walked out of the hotel, bought a ticket from a man, who drove me to the airport, got straight on a plane – flew about for 15 mins, then back to the hotel). The lines themselves are worth every minute of the hour of my life (and $25)  that I spent on the excursion. There’s nothing that can be said in a second class blog like this (my bit anyway, Alanna’s writing is smashing…)  that begins to justify the enormity and some would argue the stupidity of the project – drawing huge images in the sand that can only be seen from a plane. Some have speculated that they are around 7,000 years old, some have speculated that “it’s the aliens that did it” (see spooky “Spaceman” line to the right). But generally everyone is stumped by the matter –  including the German archaelogist Maria Reiche, who devoted her life to understand the mystery. She has a statue of her in Nazca’s town square, (which looks a little like Eric Morecambe in drag, looking out to sea) so it wasn’t a complete waste of her energies. So good for her.

But really the highlight of the trip, that no tour operator can guarantee, is a vomming American student. She did know before we left that she could get a little sea-sick, so it came as no surprise after the geoglyph, “The Hand” that she reached for a plastic bag, and began wretching like a cat with a fur ball. I think the trouble with the incident is that I haven’t grown up, and that far from feeling sorry for her (who was sweaty profusely by the time we touched down), I had a hard time stiffling the giggles, and wishing that that was a bit more space in the light aircraft, so that I could film her better. Here’s a still of the back of her head. You’ll have to imagine the noise…

That night we meet Graham, Sue (from North Yorkshire, riding 2 up on a BMW 1200GS) and Richard (a bearded aussie, riding a V-strom top to bottom) – all bikers doing the Panamerican too – who  we ended up spending Christmas and New Year with.

Oh, and here’s the monkey I saw below. See it? And on the right is the one from Wikipedia, that’s a bit clearer…

It has no doubt not escaped your attention, you faithful few, that I have been very slack about getting posts up in the last weeks. For this, I humbly apologise. The reason for this tardiness is that Peru was a wonderful symphony of my distant relatives kept us perpetually entertained… But, by way of a small thank you, a belated happy Christmas, and a Promise-I’ll-Blog-In-The-Next-Day-Or-Two, here are some photos.

These beautiful photos were taken by another of my distant relatives, one of Arequipa’s finest professional photographers, Fernando Gygax. More to follow!

Mike and the hook

We were in downtown Lima, as it happens we were looking for Ricardo Badani, the man with the many wives. We’d been told that he had a women’s clothing shop in the centre of town, so we were hunting for it (turns out that the shop is long closed, but we didn’t know that, of course). We were packing up the bike, having not been able to find said shop. Mike was putting away the camera in the boot, which is always a pain in the neck: the entire boot has to be unloaded, the massive bag put in, and the items (such as sleeping bag, wet weather gear, charger bag, breakdown triangle etc) replaced. Mike was pulling out the bag when one of the many bungee cords which holds our stuff to the back. One flew up, and somehow – miraculously – managed to hook into Mike’s nose. It caused him a lot of pain, even drew blood.

I found it hilarious. That the hook, on its random trajectory at the end of the stretchy bungee, should hook into his nostril was perfect comedy. Not least because it was a neat little substantiation that his nose is slightly bigger than average size. I bit my lip and tried hard not to laugh. Tears welled in my eyes as I tried to be the concerned wife, instead of honking with laughter.

Mike was livid. He was in pain, we hadn’t found Badani, he had to drive, his nose was bleeding and his wife was laughing at him.

Happy days.
Alanna and the stairs

Needless to say, he got his own turn to honk with laughter at the suffering of his beloved – about 10 days later, in Arequipa. Staying with yet more fabulous members of my very distant family (we likened ourselves to Tarzan and Jane swinging through my family tree with abandon). They have a nice house, with polished wooden stairs. I put on a pair of socks, but no shoes one morning. FOOL.

I was coming down the stairs to join Mike at the bottom when my feet shot out from under me. I held on desperately to the banister, but it was in vain. I landed squarely on my not insubstantial right buttock, at Mike’s feet. I looked up at him, directly above me, winced slightly, and he made a very similar face to the one I had made not 10 days before: pathetically trying to demonstrate conjugal concern without betraying the wave of laughter quickly erupting within him.

There you have it folks. We are one of those couples who laughs at the other one’s pain. We try not to (rational brain trying to override) but we just can’t help it (good old schadenfreude whips love’s butt).

I’m in the sidecar. We’re driving from Chincha to Nazca along the coast of Peru, probably the last coast we’re going to see for a while since we have now decided to head inland for the rest of our trip, abandoning the desert wastelands of Northern Chile’s Atacama and instead curving in and up towards Titicaca, Bolivia and Northern Argentina.

We have just spent two magical days at the farm, La Calera, of Peru’s biggest egg producer. 4 million hens lay 2.5 million eggs a day. The farm employs around 1,500 people from nearby Chincha, prvinding much needed jobs for a town ravaged by earthquake only 2 years ago. The man behind the the farm, this entire massive enterprise, is Tayo Masias. He and his wife of 45 years Beatriz, live on a hacienda built by Jesuits in the middle of it all.

The couple have weathered many storms over the years, surviving assassination attempts on Tayo’s life and losing everything to agrarian reform, but they have come back stronger. Tayo, at our request, gives us a detailed and lengthy tour of the farm. Being urban born and raised, I find it completely fascinating. Tayo took land which no one wanted – desert land between the coastal hills which previously was prety much uncultivated, and he turned it into something enormous. As well as the chickens, which provide 95% of the farm’s profit, they produce tangerines, grapes, avocados and oranges. Last year, the citrus export from La Calera accounted for 40% of the fruit exported from Peru. Rows and rows of fruit trees stretch to the base of the sandy hills which rise up all around. Tayo loves what he does. he is constantly innovating and is proud to have been the one to introduce a lot of farming technologies used in Peru today from abroad.

One of his crowning innovations is the incorporation of biogas into the workings of the farm: the chickens’ guano is used to create energy, water and fertilizer for the farm. He has built huge tanks where the chicken shit is mixed with water and churned, the released methane and CO2 are then used to heat the chicken pens. The water, infused with the rich nutrients of the excrement, is then filtered and piped out to the growing plants. Tayo shows us how he has managed to use rocky land previouly deemed barren. The farm plants lemon trees into the dusty rocky land. The roots are tenacious and take well, they are nourished not by fertilizer, but by irrigation with this nutrient water. Once the roots have taken and the tree begins to grow, tangerine shoots are grafted into the sturdy lemon roots and so the tree grows from the rocks. Quite unbelievable.

During the time of agrarian reform in 1970, the government took everything from Tayo and distributed it amongst the peasants. Armed soldiers arrived at the hacienda one morning as Beatriz was sewing, and told them of the plans. Slowly, Tayo has built up the 2 hectares he was left with. He has gradually been buying back the land in the valley from the peasants, and the farm now stretches to 1,500 hectares.

The chickens are housed in cages which Tayo himself devised, all of which are built on the farm. The chicken buildings are numerous and extend up the hills into land which was thought unusable. Each pen houses 20,000 chickens, there are three per cage, and as they lay, the eggs roll down to a little tray where they are colected by hand. 2.5 million a day. The time of day that they lay, we learn, depends on the time of day they are fed. Usually, the afternoon feed will result in a morning egg. Brilliant, as regimented as a poo. 50% of the hens are red, 45% black and 5% white. The white ones lay the most eggs, but they don’t sell for much ($1 per chicken at the end for their meat), the red ones lay fairly well and are worth $3 per chicken for their meat, and the black ones lay the least well, but can be sold at $5 a hen at the end of their useful lives. The farm earns $2m a day and supplies Peru’s supermarkets with every single egg on their shelves.

Unlike in the States and Brazil, where corn is grown so can be bought cheap, Peru has to import its chicken feed. (Despite being the land where corn came from, says Tayo!) Which means that it is expensive, so Tayo has devised other ways to feed the chickens to supplement the corn he imports. Some of the chicken guano is laid out in the sun to dry, from which feed is created. (The smell at the places where the chicken shit is dried is overpoweringly strong…) This accounts for 10% off the feed of the chickens. He refines low grade fishmeal in huge tanks, improving the quality then incorporating it into the chicken feed which means that the eggs have Omega 3 in them. Japan, one of the country’s where La Calera’s produce is exported to, has strict rules about antibiotics and use of mediacation, so the chickens are not over medicated. Antibitoics are only used on the very small chickens.

We were taken to the housing for the chicks (1 million of the chickens on the farm are there for producing more chickens). The pen is enclosed (the chicks need to be kept warm – whereas older hens can be kept in the open air with only a roof). The smell is pretty intense, a musty, shitty smell. The workers are hard at work cutting off the beaks of the chicks. This prevents them from hurting each other later. 20,000 chicks have the points of their beaks removed daily by this team of workers. The procedure is swift and effective. Chicks are picked out of the group cages, held tightly, their beaks are then inserted into a small hole in a machine, a blade lowered quickly and the end is cut off. The worker then holds the remaining beak (now about 3mm shorter) against a red hot plate, burning it and sealing the new beak. The chicks are then administered with 3 innoculations and put into a cage with other stumpy beaked chicks.

Everything on the farm is done by hand, to create jobs, Tayo says. He is a hugely socially responsible boss. The other big employer in Chincha is a textile plant, employing 3,000 workers. Tayo’s whole approach to employment is that he wants his workers to feel proud to work for La Calera. He pays 3 times as much as the textile plant to the workers. Breakfast and lunch are provided to the 1,500 employees daily, and transportation to and from Chincha. He gives them all insurance and benefits. 2 years ago, the town suffered a devastating 7.9 earthquake which killed 500, and rendered most of the inhabitants homeless. Tayo decided to build houses for the workers, so he currently is in the process of constructing 1,000 homes for the workers of La Calera. And the houses are big too – 3 bedrooms and very comfortable. The government have encouraged the scheme and are helping to pay for it, but Tayo is stumping up a lot of the cash himself: every home costs the government $6k, him $2k and the worker a $2k mortgage.

That’s not to say that he’s adored – he has survived one assassination attempt, where he was driving on his farm and ten armed men leapt out and peppered the car with bullets (he says that he will always drive a Jeep because they saved his life), the passenger sustained wounds to his leg. And last month, when he drove into Cincha to pay the workers, he was held up and the robbed of the money.

For this reason, Tayo has always been reluctant to advertise the name of La Calera farm – the eggs have always been in unmarked boxes, the trucks un-named. But his sons, who now run satellite operation farms from the main one, have finally convinced their father that they need to become a well-known, well-recognised and well-trusted brand to be able to fend off competition which is threatening to emerge from the States. Up until now, Tayo has always said that he’d rather have his life than a huge brand, but now that Peru feels a little safer, he is prepared to surrender the anonymity he has had previously.

The hacienda is one of the most beautiful that I have ever seen. It can sleep 60 without difficulty, and in real comfort. Towels are monogrammed with La Calera, shampoo and shower gel is all tangerine scented and La Calera branded. It’s like an exquisite hotel.

Beatriz is beautiful, with big blue eyes and an ethereal and elegant manner. Tayo is more no-nonsense, but a great host. He has always been a sportsman, winning the world rowing championships 4 times in his 50s. Now his love is polo. He keeps 150 horses on the farm, all for polo. His 3 sons all play, and his 10 year old grandson has just been invited to Argentina to compete in a championship where his team came 2nd out of 65. His daughter is a world class ballerina who has just set up a dance company which harnesses the amazing talent of the children who dance for money at Lima’s traffic lights, and the company are set for a tour to the States. All in all, they are quite some family.

“Amor es dar”. Love is to give. Our interview with them is a good one. Beatriz is the intellect, always more introspective and with a hunger for knowledge. Tayo says “I have always been the work horse” and that, he says, was their greatest difficulty, but they have found a way to complement each other perfectly. Beatriz is great friends with Tayo’s younger sister Mani (married to my grandmother’s cousin, Bernardo and who we interviewed and stayed with in Lima – and who we adore!). So Beatriz met Tayo, 5 years older, for the first time when she was 7 years old. She was immediately smitten by his energy and masculinity. A few years later, when she was around 12 and he 17, he was winning rowing accolades and was well known. She says that she was a little fatty (“una gordita” concurs Tayo – a name he later starts to use for me…!) and Tayo was completely unaware of her existence. She, meanwhile, was collecting cuttings from all the newspapers and magazines he featured in, totally idolizing him.

In his early 20s, he was already working hard to make something of the farm. At that point, it had no electricity, no phones and was (and still is) 2 and a half hours drive south of Lima. He would spend weeks down at the farm, then come up to Lima for weekends. The lack of communication meant that he couldn’t arrnage his social life at all – so one weekend, he arrived in Lima expecting to go on a date with his then squeeze. but he couldn’t contact her. He was lamenting this to a friend who said, “why don’t you call Beatriz? She loves Brahms, like you”. “What? That little fatty?” he replied (though in reality, she was thin by this point – and very beautiful). So they went on a date, and so it went from there.

Tayo is a serious fellow. He says that he has always known what he wanted in life, and worked hard to get it. A few months after they started dating, Tayo had to leave Peru to do his Masters in the States. He spent the next year thinking about Beatriz, he wrote her a letter every single day, and he resolved that he wanted to marry her (“she had good bones, a good brain, and I wanted her to be the mother of my children”) so he came back and proposed to her. Ironically, she at this point, was reluctant. She was young, 17, and she was intimidated by the “hurricane” who was persuing her. She said her own mother was the same as Tayo, a strong and powerful force, and she just needed to think for a while about it. She relented, and the two of them have not looked back since. They have 4 children who are their whole worlds. Tayo says that everything he does is for his children, the farm, everything. He feels more pride for the existence of his children than anything else he has done.

His advice was to think about who you want to marry then go out and try and find them. He says that it should be a major decision, and not just someone you meet at a nightclub or party. At one point, he even gets a tear in his eye at the thought of losing Beatriz (having said beforehand “why would people cry?!”) A whirlwind force and his beautiful and brainy wife, fascinating.

We leave Bernardo and Mani, I cry hard… and so we hit the road. We drive via Sonia’s cevicheria to get a shot of the ceviche (heaven only knows how we managed to spend 3 hours at a cevicheria on Saturday and not take one single frame of ceviche…) then on to Chincha, 3 hours down the coast. On the road again!

What follows is an account of one of our most fascinating interviews so far. This project is about celebration and not judgement, so I’m going to detail the encounter entirely objectively and you can make of it, learn from it, take from it what you will.

There is a well-known figure here in Peru called Ricardo Badani. He is well-known because he has 6 wives.

Unlike the Mormon Fundamentalists in Utah with similar numbers of wives, the Badani family has no children. It is just the 7 of them, living together in a big house about an hour outside Lima.

There is one name which has always fascinated me about Peru: Fujimori. How can such a Japanese name be such a big part of a country’s recent history? From thousands of miles away, culturally and politically entirely ignorant, I found it hilarious, bizarre, and totally un-South American.

Alberto Fujimori, son of Japanese immigrants to Peru, was elected president of the country in 1990. His ten years were a tenure of both good and bad and he is now in prison. I need to spend some time on Wiki before I can fill you in on the juicy details, but all you need to know is that he is a big old cheese in Peru.

And so it ended in ignominy, anger and shame. Fujimori is now serving 25 years in a Peruvian prison, and the country moves on. But perhaps its future is once again Fujimori – this time in the form of his eldest daughter (and first lady, somewhat unexpectedly), Keiko.

Somehow, we manage to get an interview with Keiko and her husband of 5 years, Mark. We knew from the get go that we wanted to interview them (having, in our usual simplistic way, reduced Peru to ceviche, pisco and Fujimori), the difficulty was how to get hold of them. From our various contacts here in Lima, we sent out various appeals: one friend plays poker with Mark but only has his facebook details; Antonio Meier, mayor of San Isidro and wife of Gladys Zender who we interviewed, said that he would try to reach her through connections in Congress; a cousin of mine had a friend who worked in Congress who would also try, and finally, El Peruano said that they would help us to get hold of them. 4 leads, but still 2 weeks to yield fruit… Mark, a high powered management consultant, spends his working week in Arizona, and was only due back on the evening of Sunday night. He emailed me (the poker connection came good) to apologise profusely (and to offer to film themselves answering the questions) and say that he spends a chunk of his time away from the family home. Mike and I agreed a date, and decided to wait an extra 5 days in Lima in order to meet the couple in their family home.

Mark comes out to greet us. Instead of the corporate tough guy that I was expecting, he is more mild-mannered and kind from the outset. He laughs with us at the bike, and we head into the house for the interview. There are sounds from upstairs of little people (their littlest daughter is 5 months old), and soon Keiko appears from the kitchen. I like her immediately. She has a warm, smiling face, prettier than the photos I’d found of her on the web. She’s relaxed and open, and the 4 of us are laughing and chatting in no time. We choose to film them on a sofa, below a large painting done by Keiko. It’s very good, and she explains that for a charity event, she was partnered with a reknowned Peruvian artist to paint a picture which was then to be auctioned. She said modestly that she’s not particularly good at art, but that working with the painter (whose name I have currently forgotten, apologies…) was inspiring. It came to the auction and she wanted to buy the painting, she repeatedly raised her paddle, but eventually was outbid by a large bank. She was gutted. Three days later, the painting is presented to her father at the presidential palace, and she has had it ever since.

I explain that we are not here to grill her about her father or her political agenda, this is simply a celebration of love and we want to hear their love story. Given that she is planning to run for president of Peru in 2011, we promise that she can have right to edit any TV content we produce. Even at the end, she laughs and says that she is very happy to authorise us to use the interview. Mark’s spoken Spanish is still not entirely second nature, so we agree happily to do the interview with Mark speaking English and Keiko in Spanish.

Their love story is enchanting, like the stuff of Hollywood movies – a kind of real life Princess Diaries. When Keiko’s parents separated, Keiko became the youngest first lady in the world, aged 19 (?). Any notion of a normal dating life had gone out the window when her father was elected, and now she really didn’t stand a chance. She was known in Peru everywhere she went, and by her own admission, when boys showed interest, she was never sure if they were dating her or “Keiko Fujimori”, the persona.

Flashforward three years, and Keiko decides to go to the States to do an MBA. Columbia University was her first choice because it has a strong financial reputation and is located, of course, in New York. She and her sister head to New York for a couple of weeks to see the place. She is being shown round the university, and has just left one of the campus buildings, when a boy walking past the steps below her catches her eye. Handsome and with a captivating aura, she looks at him and the two make eye contact. Something sparks. For both of them.

Mark comes over to say hello and offers to show Keiko and her sister round, he then asks where they will be that evening. Keiko explains that they have plans to go to a local bar, and Mark exclaims, what a coincidence, I’m going to be there too (that old chestnut). He turns up at the bar that evening, Keiko and he talk all night, and at the end of the evening, he asks for her phone number.

Well, giving out your phone number when you’re the president’s daughter is not encouraged. And to strangers, it is strictly forbidden. Keiko’s sister is horrified and tells her that she can’t do it – such that Mark thinks that the sister really doesn’t like him. But Keiko has a good feeling about this guy and knows he’s going to call, so breaks all protocol and gives him her number. And indeed he does call, the very next day.

Keiko is a great cook, so before he even calls, she decides to cook a dinner in her apartment that evening (not least so that when Mark calls, which she knows he will, she can say casually that she’s cooking dinner for friends and why doesn’t he join?). Mark does indeed call, the invitation is made and he joins a group of them for dinner in the flat. Keiko says that Mark fits so naturally into the dynamic of the dinner, everyone really liked him (except her sister who remained extremely wary of him) and Keiko was entirely smitten. As was Mark himself.

The two of them start seeing each other regularly. Mark asks Keiko to change her flight, and she duly does, and the two of them are falling completely in love. All the while, Mark has no idea who Keiko is.

One evening, he is round at the flat, and he picks up a Peruvian magazine to flick through it. Keiko sister says urgently to her in Spanish “he shouldn’t be reading that magazine, it has a photo in it”. Mark doesn’t speak any Spanish, but he does understand “no” and “photo” so his ears prick up and he immediately looks to Keiko – “can I read it?” he asks uncomprehendingly. She says yes, of course, trying to dispel the tension and his anxiety.

He flicks through it, until his eyes fall on a picture of Alberto Fujimori, with the heading “President of Peru”. He looks to Keiko and says “this man has your surname…” at which point, the truth comes out, Keiko’s father is the president of Peru.

Suddenly, the rug is pulled from beneath Mark’s world. This wonderful, headstrong, fun girl he had fallen in love with had a whole history that he knew nothing about. He felt lied to, totally betrayed, and said, sadly and sternly, “I have to leave now”. He walked across the apartment to the door and was turning the handle to leave when Keiko ran across the room and begged him to stay. She said to him, “the girl you have met and got to know over the last few weeks, that girl is me. I think you love her, and I know I’m falling in love with you. Please please don’t go.”

At this point in the interview, Keiko is crying. They are taking it in turns to recount the story, and the effect for us is deeply moving and entirely gripping. Mike is crying too, of course, and Mark has welled up. Later, they will tell us that this is the first time that they have ever recounted this story to the press, and Keiko will say that she never cries, not even when her father was sentenced to 25 years in jail.

Back to the story, and Mark stayed. He, a regular – if very bright – boy from an Italian-American family in New Jersey, had indeed fallen in love with Keiko for who she was, and she had a chance to get to know him, and to fall in love with him, knowing that.

Well, then Keiko’s background had to come to the foreground. She had to return to Peru a week or so later. Mark accompanied her, but remained far from the glaring eye of the Peruvian press on that first trip. They had a chance to go to Machu Picchu, and for Mark to see a little of the country. He liked it very much – which was a big deal for Keiko, because she knew eventually, Peru would have to be a part of any future they could share together.

Keiko attended Columbia Business School, and she and Mark had two blissful years of relationship away from Peru’s curious eyes and her status there. They were just regular Joes, living life in New York.

Keiko’s father, meanwhile, had decided to return from his exile in Japan to face the legislative consequences in Peru. Keiko had to testify at his trial. Mark has got a very good job with a top consultancy firm, and the future of the pair looks good in the States. Keiko’s father calls her to him and suggests to her that she should consider running for office in Peru. This is a big big decision for the pair as it would mean them leaving the States and returning to Peru, leaving a life of relative anonymity for a life in the public eye. Keiko says she has to discuss it with Mark. Despite how difficult the decision was, Mark was in no doubt. (Mark’s mother was less sold on the idea – “you have a great education here [in the US], a great future and all you need here! Why would you return to Peru?!” she asked Keiko, before storming out of the house]. He could see that Keiko had a vital role to play in Peru, and the country needed her. He said that his own individual needs paled in comparison to those of 27 million people. And so Keiko returned.

She ran for Congress in 2006 and got the highest number of votes of any candidate. Mark took a 6 week sabbatical from his company and campaigned with her. The two of them are now gearing up for her 2011 presidential bid. Mark continues to work in consultancy. It’s easy to see that he is fiendishly bright and good at what he does. The hard part is that his work requires him to be away from his family during the week (he says that he tries to return to Lima as often as he can – once a week or once a fortnight). Keiko works really hard herself – the little girls have a long nap in the afternoon so that she can see them when she gets home later in the evening. Little Chiara, 2 years old and totally adorable, is over the moon to have her daddy home and doesn’t like to be away from him, only really smiling when she is in his arms. It’s hard, they say, but they are making it work.

Mark said it took him a while to get used to the press attention. There was one moment where he arrived at the end of Keiko’s bridal shower. The car pulled up and he opened the door, to be blinded by a wall of flash bulbs and questions. A gentle soul, he found it fiendishly intimidating and, disorientated, he walked into a wall. They hounded him with questions, and, speaking little or no Spanish, he said – and I paraphrase slightly, I apologise – “I think Keiko is the most wonderful woman in the world”. The hearts of a nation melted.

When we ask people what they think of Mark, the response is universal – gringo, but he seems like a genuinely good and nice human being. Which he does indeed seem to be – the boy from New Jersey whose mother makes delicious Italian meals (which she has now taught Keiko) and wants her son to be happy. He’s polite and kind, and so supportive and proud of his wife that it’s palpable.

When we ask people what they think of Keiko, the response is mostly positive, with some strong negative feelings (’twas ever thus with politics). People think she is a great person, a lot of people love her and think that hope rests with her. Some tangle her name with that of her father and inevitably, she is tarnished by that – though still, for some, that has extremely positive associations – the man who rid the country of Shining Path, needless violence and narco hell, and put it on the map.

A totally fascinating interview – both for the story of individuals, but the bigger role of the country.

As a result, we’re hungover. Very hungover. Bernardo and Mani, who we have come to see as our own parents and adore entirely, kindly offer to take us out for lunch to wash away the pain… So we head to a delicious and fabulous restaurant called La Botega de la Trattoria, a warm, big, friendly place serving absolutely delicious Italian food. We laugh, we chat, we have a great lunch with Bernardo and Mani. It’s like family away from family, they really have come to be like the warmth and support of family that we miss so much on the road. We then head back to the flat and curl up in front of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It’s like being home.

There is no doubt that the longer we have spent in Lima, the more we have grown to love it. When visitors first enter it, it feels big, unwieldy, dirty… but there are jewels hidden behind its facade. Don’t dismiss it, it’s worth giving it a bit of love, it will give it back.

– a brand new, all singing, all-dancing motorbike hotspot. It’s here that I have found out that I have been using the wrong word for Motorbike for the last 10,000km. “Motobici” means nothing. It means “Motorbicycle” which is embarrassing, given how many times I have used the word every day, and in national newspapers and TV interviews. Many people we met before arriving warned us before arriving – “Get out of Lima as soon as possible, it’s a dump”. Did we listen to them? Or did we stay in there for longer than any other city in the Americas?

We have stayed here for a pit-stop. And not a Silverstone style pit stop. A spectacularly slow and contorted exercise for various reasons. Firstly, the tires. The Ural tires are an unsual 19 inches.  Instead of shipping out a set of Duros from Seattle in advance (the sensible, but expensive solution), we spent a few days asking around town for the place to go. Finally, after a few garages, we ended up at Direlli tires (who sell Pirelli funnily enough).

These guys know their stuff, found me some 19” road tires, and gave me a T-shirt to boot. “Se necesita jockey para estos 100 caballos de fuerza” (“you need a jockey for these 100 horses of power”) Which I will wear with pride (despite the Ural only having a perfectly capable 40, it’s not a race-bike after all) .  After an afternoon at a Taller Mecanico in the La Molina (the kind of place the pizza-delivery boys get their work done) – we changed the spark plugs, cleaned the carbs, and the air filter, and the oil (including the 80/90 transmission oil at the back – though he over filled it and spent a happy half hour sucking it out with a short tube, spitting it out into the street and wretching like a cat with a fur-ball). We left him spluttering, on a spluttering bike and came back immediately to have him attach the gas hose to the carburettor. Not an authorised Ural dealer…

Back on the main drag of mechanics in Surco, on Av. Republica de Panama, we met Ricardo, a lofty fella of German (and British) descent, at his shop Moto Performance. He not only took us under his wing linguistically (with the clarification of the word Motobici) , but had a chat with boys in the workshop who agreed to work on our bike free of charge. Amazing. We (they!) changed all the tires, balanced the carbs, and cleaned the bike so well you can now cook an egg on the valve-cover and eat your dinner off it. Which may be necessary when we break down in the Atacama.

We also bumped into a Venezuelan called Carlos, who drove south to Ushuaia in winter with his girlfriend, and came back without her, again proof that long motorcycle journeys make or break relationships. After chatting to him for a while, we decided to change our route. He reliably informed us (having driven both routes) that the Central route (Bolivia and Northern Argentina) is better than the Western route.  Northern Chile, despite being an impressively beautiful expanse of the planet, is still a desert. A bit like northern Peru, but with even less in it. Bolivia is an entirely separate culture, and Northern Argentinian vineyards have more to offer the alcoholic traveller than the Atacama. So, like that, the next 7,000km have changed…

And we met with a retired Canadian military engineer, Wallace, who has been driving South from Edmonton in Canada – covering nearly 30,000km so far (with a few more detours than us). He got as far as Ica, a few hours south of here, and parked his bike in a hotel car-park overnight. The next morning, he found that it had been dragged, in gear, around 9 feet across the carpark. The transmission, the gears, the sidecar alignment etc, are all shot, and he has begun the lengthy process of taking the hotel to court over the damage of his bike. He (seemed!) delighted to get his hands dirty on a working Ural, and he accurately balanced the carbs, and checked the timing, and the sidecar alignment. He has also very kindly, supplied me with a new oil filter.

I also thought it may be time to pick up a bike jacket too. Not only are we heading into the cold, but Ricardo was shocked that I hadn’t been wearing any protection so far, and pointed me in the direction of a jacket that didn’t look like I was planning to drive a Kawasaki Ninja for the rest of the journey.

But there are gems, and we found one of them in the form of a reknowned cevicheria in the area of the city called Chorillos, which is south of the “posh” district of Miraflores, and on the sea. It has a beautiful boulevard (malecon) along the top of the cliff overlooking the seafront, which is lined with benches facing back along the shore to the main part of the city.

Tucked back from the main road, one road in, is arguably Lima’s most famous cevicherica, called “Sonia”. There are now hundreds of cevicherias in the area, but Sonia can boast to being the very first. She put the permit in to the mayor 29 years ago (when the site was still overlooking the sea) who granted her permission to establish Sonia’s – but behind a closed door. And this is the way that it remains today, unobtrusive on a small side street, just off Chorillo’s main drag. Everyone knows of the place, when we  stopped to ask people on the street for directions (our usual way of getting around), everyone pointed her out with ease.

Sonia and Frederico (“Freddy”) have been married for 49 years. When they met, she was 15 and he was 20. He was a fisherman, who had come from inland to make a living from the sea; she made ceviche with her mother. Somehow Freddy wooed her, managed to convince the mother that it was ok, and Sonia was 15 when she married him, and 16 when her first son, Freddy, arrived on the scene. She then had a daughter called Sonia (how confusing it must have been in their house with two Freddys and two Sonias!) then three more children followed. Freddy, the father, fished every day, Sonia would prepare the ceviche. After a while, she decided she wanted to set up her own place (Freddy was against it – which is another reason that it has a closed door – puerta cerrada). And it is now the place. The walls are lined with fishing nets hand made by Freddy, there is a gallery of photos proudly proving that all of Peru’s last 5 presidents have eaten there, as well as world famous chef Anthony Bourdain who travelled round the world sniffing out the best of the best, and Sonia ranked as one of them.

When we got to Peru, we knew that we wanted to include ceviche. It’s basically Peru’s national dish – certainly the plate that they are most famous for. Fresh fish is cut into cubes, then marinaded in lime juice, red onions with a bit of chili. The lime juice has the effect of “cooking” the fish with its acid. It’s very simple and absolutely delicious.

Sonia didn’t want any of her children to follow their father into the fishing trade. Freddy shows us his calloused hands and talks about how hard the job was. Now 3 of their children, headed by the first son Freddy (who we talked to to get the interview and who was utterly charming), work for the restaurant. And the two others run another cevicheria down the road. Competition?! I ask. Freddy says no, they cater to a different crowd: they are more stars and celebs, we are more politicians and businessmen. Sorted, then.

While we eat, a collection of old men start to gather around the piano. It turns out that the piano player himself is the brother of Compay Segundo, from The Bueno Vista Social Club. A man with a neat comb over and suit is playing the guitar, and one of Sonia’s sons is on the cajon (a box which they sit on and beat to create a drum effect). It’s totally captivating. Mike cries, in fact. Music fills the place, small children dance. It’s Peruvian and it’s wonderful.

What would they want with you two? I hear you ask. Well, the editor is a distant cousin, so she basically was pressganged into it by my wonderful “cousin” hosts. We drove up a hill in the Surco area of Lima, where we are staying, and had a photoshoot over the city.

Bernardo and Mani have got life sorted. They own a farm an hour outside Lima, where Mani grows the berries which she makes into jams and sells. They go to the farm 3 times a week for a night at a time, to collect berries and bring them into town. Diego, the youngest of their four sons, runs the farm (which grows much more than just Mani’s berries). And they have a boat. It’s on the water in Callao, a suburb north of central Lima, and the main port – it proclaims proudly – of South America. At the Yacht Club Peruano, a jetty stretches out into a calm sea peppered with little sailing and motor boats.

I love boats. Not that I can sail, but I love being on the water. And the sight of rows of little boats on the gentle swells of the Peruvian coastline makes me feel very happy. Bernardo and Mani are taking us out for a quick sail in their boat. It’s not a huge boat (and here is where I’ll expose my total ignorance) – maybe 25 feet, with two sails – but it’s perfect. We head out across the bay, Bernardo at the helm, through a regatta of hundreds of little optimists, all with 10 year old captains (apparently, Peru is regularly world champion in Optimist class sailing).

We interview Bernardo and Mani on the boat. Which is shit for Mike, who has to look through the viewfinder and subsequently gets pretty seasick, but great for the interview: Bernardo and Mani are typified by their energy and their joie de vivre, and getting them on the back of their boat is the ideal way of representing that.

Mani is a whirlwhind of energy. She is 65, but genuinely, she could be 30. She simply doesn’t stop, she laughs, and talks and enthuses and generally wraps people in her buzz. Bernardo is 15 years older, a spry 80 year old, but his personality is naturally calmer than hers. He was a dentist throughout his professional life, and Mani’s family were amongst his patients. She was coming to him for check ups when she was a 15 year old, so she always just saw him as the Doctor.

When she was 19, she rode a motorbike and had recently bought a small boat. She had just set up a small shop where she was growing and selling plants, and generally, she was the same whirlwind of life that she is now. Bernardo himself had just bought a boat, so the two of them started to talk about that. Bernardo asked her on a date (well, what he thought was a date, what she thought was just an invite to a party where he would have organised someone her own age for her…) and things kind of went from there. It took her a few dates to get the gist that he was actually want to date her, but it moved quickly from there when she did get it. He asked her to marry him within 3 months. And in January, they’ll celebrate 45 years of marriage.

What’s wonderful to learn about is their dynamic. Mani is the one with the big projects – the farm, her shop, her sons – she just doesn’t stop. Bernardo loves his music: he plays the piano and the violin exquisitely and sang for many years in Peru’s national choir. Their advice was that it’s really important to have your own interests, and not to be jealous of the other one’s interests. Mani loathed the operas which Bernardo loved, but over the years, she has gradually come to tolerate them. Bernardo is now a little more up with agriculture too… Also, they provide a nice balance to each other. Mani says that everyone who meets Bernardo adores him. He has a peace about him, a gentleness, a kindness and a generosity which make him wonderful. She, on the other hand, is the engine room. And it works very nicely.

We get back onto dry land, with sea air in our lungs and a fiendish hunger, so head to a popular restaurant called Pescados Capitales.

I’m sitting in a small motorcycle repair shop towards the outskirts of Lima. We’ve decided to give the bike, our trusty, uncomplaining steed, a little bit of love. Some new oil, a bit of a spit-and-polish, and hopefully some new tyres.

The shop is in an area of hundreds of mechanics workshops. They spill out on to the street, Mototaxis, exhaust pipes, glinting nuts and bolts. I’m sitting inside the shop on a plastic chair, there doesn’t appear to be any electricity – no overhead lights, but a small TV is blaring Mexican telenovelas at me so I must be wrong. 5 mechanics are crowded round the bike with Mike – never seen anything like this (“but it’s like an easy design of a Harley” apparently, so they are having no problems at all).
 
Lima has been a mixed bag so far. When we arrive in a new city, we always have a couple of days of tense, interview-finding orientation: asking all and sundry for inspiration, researching the names that we get, then making the tentative steps at contact – difficult in Spanish: emails are so impersonal and ignorable, but neither of us likes to be the one to phone and do the sell. We take turns at it. We now have about 10 different leads that we are chasing, no one has replied to emails or phonecalls, and we’re just feeling a bit burnt out. 

Though I’m now used to that initial tension as we desperately try to tell the story of a country through its couples – and the pressure to do justice to it, this time feels a bit different. I can’t really put my finger on what it is, but I’m just not as bothered, stressed or panicked as I usually am. Mike is stressed, but not to his usual levels. We discuss it and we come to the undeniable conclusion: we’re tired. Not just because of the powerful Pisco Sours which give us the daily Peruvian hangover, but profoundly. We’re 6 months down, and this routine is taking it out of us.

Who knows what’s going to come of all of this hard work? I think that’s the other thing which gets to us. We have to keep unremitting levels of determination, without any guarantee of return. I’m not despairing, like I was in Panama and early Bogota: now it’s just a fatigue. I’m enjoying the trip, but I’m just not as motivated as I was about the interviews. The little flame is going out, purely as a result of time and too little external support and recognition. Not that we need cheerleaders, but it would be really nice if a TV company phoned and said “we’ve heard about what you’re doing, it sounds really interesting…”

As well as the wonderful Bernardo and Mani, Mike’s great mate from university, Veronica, is half Peruvian, and her mother happens to be out here at the moment. We meet with Veronica’s cousin, Jonathan, who immediately gets the ball rolling on various ideas that we have had for Lima and Peru:

- we’d love to interview Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the ex-president, and her US husband, Mark. A long shot. Jonathan knows them so we send them an email, with huge hope.
- the Peruvian equivalent of Jamie Oliver is a man named Gaston, who has set up, with his wife, Astrid, a number of very successful restaurants both around Lima and in Latin capitals across the world. He trains young people from under-priviledged backgrounds to work as his chefs with huge success. Lima is very proud of this couple, lots of people suggest them to us. We manage to get Gaston’s assistants contact details from Veronica’s mother, but they are away for the next week and very busy in the run up to Christmas. Eek.
-Mike has the idea that we want to hunt down someone from the Inca Kola family. Peru is one of only two countries in the whole world where a national fizzy drink outsells Coca Cola – here it is a vibrant yellow, sugary fizz explosion called Inca Kola (the other is Scotland with Irn Bru). The Lindley family established the company in 1906, and recently sold it to Coca Cola…

These are all fairly long shots. And the longest shot of them all is Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the most famous living Latin American writers in the world. He spends most of his time in London, apparently, but for 3 months of the year, he is based in Lima. My cousin (let’s use this in the loosest possible sense – she’s part of Bernardo’s extended family) works for him as his assistant so I call her. He’s getting back from Mexico City, where he’s been giving a presentation, this Sunday. Next week, his diary is so full that he doesn’t even have a half hour slot to give us. She gives me his email to contact him directly.

What I would really like to do with Vargas Llosa is get his opinion on Latin literary love: the passion, the declarations, the customs of courtship. And perhaps the slightly less overblown reality of infidelity… He is also the master of social observation and political awareness, so it would be fascinating to pick his brains on Peruvian society. But, as I say, this is but a distant dream. Not only does he not have any spare time, but he’s unlikely to put his name to an independent documentary, when all he has to go on is my ropey Spanish…

My grandmother, Mary, was half-Peruvian. She grew up in Iquitos, in the Peruvian rainforest, with her British father and Peruvian mother. Mary then came to England when she was around 10 years old, and remained there subsequently, ultimately marrying my grandfather, Frank, a naval architect with Irish parents, who had started his career aged 14 as an apprentice at a Liverpool shipyard. My grandfather took a job in Genoa, then one of the biggest ports in Europe, at Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, and my father was effectively raised Italian.

All of which means that the Peruvian element of my family is buried. But not forgotten. I remembered proudly proclaiming to primary school friends that I was an eighth Peruvian; reading Paddington Bear with my mum and feeling a sense of pride that he was from “darkest Peru”; and telling anyone who dared to question my curious middle name “Donayre” (pronounced “Don-eye-ray”), that it was my Peruvian family’s surname. (Didn’t stop my best mate at school giving me shit about posh “Donayre kebabs”)

My grandmother didn’t really talk about Peru with me. To me, always a monolingual little Brit, she was simply a wonderful cocktail of languages and exoticism – my father said she could flit easily and totally fluently between Spanish, Italian and English – where his own father spoke stilted and uncomfortable Italian which made him, raised bilingual, squirm.

One of my favourite stories about my grandmother’s upbringing is one about “La Mano Peluda”. She grew up in bona fide rainforest: the loo was an outhouse, and more than that, it was an outhouse suspended above the rainforest canopy below. From what I understood, there was a set of steps up into the small wooden cabin, and the toilet seat framed the yawning expanse of forest ceiling beneath, so that sitting on the loo, one would feel the wind and the wildlife below one’s private areas, and perhaps hear the sound of the evacuation as it met with the foliage below.

Mary’s parents and servants would tell her and her siblings that if they were naughty, “La Mano Peluda” (The Hairy Hand) would emerge rapidly from the canopy and grab the children’s private bits violently.

Imagine the terror of hearing this as a small child. Sure beats anything my parents could come up with in London…!

So, for me, though I feel a total stranger to Peru (I studied Italian at university and have never spoken Spanish before), there is something about being here which feels familiar. Or, at least, like it should feel familiar. My grandmother sadly died on the day of my 28th birthday, in 2007, so I can’t phone her to chat to her my burgeoning conversational Spanish, nor to ask more about the places I should be going, the people I should be meeting.

That said, we still have links with the place. My uncle, Mary’s youngest son, married a Peruvian whose family all still live in Lima and has given me contact details. And my father has managed to track down what remains of our distant family here.

Bernardo and Mani are two of the nicest people I’ve ever met, let alone been related to. Bernardo’s aunt, Zoila, married Mary’s uncle (called Achilles Donayre – which is the coolest name I’ve ever heard…) and, this being Latin America, the families were all really close and knew each other well. Which is why Bernardo is stuck with me, his first cousin’s first cousin’s grand-daughter, all these years later.

The four of us go out for dinner together (Peruvian classics of Pisco Sours and Lomo Saltado) and exchange stories and laughter well into the night. It takes us about half that time to work out how we are related…

Brush ins with the police (Mike overtaking where it’s forbidden, twice), sandstorms and ceviche: we burn it down the coast from the glorious Huanchaco where I managed to convince my beloved husband to take a day off, down to Miraflores in Lima.

The whole thing takes 12 hours. Thick thick fog (typical of Lima – the Humboldt current delivers it to the city with glee) and some of the worse traffic we have seen so far. We sit for 2 hours in the rush hour darkness trying to navigate the huge metropolis, as polution coats our faces in a thick black layer. But we’re here now.

One wonderful thing happens during the day. We pull up to say hello to two bikers (there is a kind of unspoken code between the biker community, always an interest with each other) doing a similar route to us, Garry and Ron. While we are talking, a woman from the car repair shop we have stopped beside walks over to me and hands me a small, black carving of a head. She explains to me that it is Inca in its style and she’d like me to have it. I say, “how much?” to which she replies, “nothing, it’s a present, I’d like you to have it.” Extraordinary. I’m baffled at first – this doesn’t happen, ever – but then so so grateful. So we now have a very grumpy looking Inca travelling with us too, which I’ll always treasure. Until, of course, I realise I’m being used unwittingly as a mule…

Oh, and one other thing. We tend to be brutally heathen on driving days, ignoring all landmarks of any form in the name of getting to our destination – which mean that we miss out on cultural, archeological and geographical marvels. But we did have a quick peep at Chan Chan, the largest remains of an Adobe settlement anywhere in the world. We didn’t get out of the bike though, don’t be fooled…

Crappy hotel we stayed in in Piura had open gaps above every door. Which means that when the room beside you decides to watch TV ALL NIGHT, you’re going to get a shitty night’s sleep. That’s not entirely fair they didn’t just watch TV all night, they did have sex 5 times, (TV still on).

I’m in a foul mood. This happens if I don’t get enough sleep. Mike, thankfully (since we are driving 8 hours today) got a great night’s sleep, able as he is to rolll over and go straight back to sleep.

Piura is not the most charming of towns – we have found, during our various drives in Peru, that there is often a pile up of rubbish, landfill-style, at the side of the road, which makes for some very smelly patches (not that I’m not used to that with Mike…). But the PanAmerican highway is in the best state that we have seen it since Mexico, so no complaints there. Mike guns it and the trusty steed makes it to the utterly magical surfing resort of Huanchaco, just outside Trujillo, by 3pm. We get a room overlooking the ocean (and the surfers, more importantly), there is a canopy of bougainvillea for me to wake up to in the morning, and I manage to convince Mike that we should stay in this paradise for 2 nights rather than doing another long driving day south immediately. He agrees.

That evening we meet Luis, a Spaniard who lived in London for 5 years (so swears as much as we do), and the 3 of us dine together, then end up in a local bar for one of the most extraordinary evenings of our trip so far. The bar is a tiny, single room. It’s filled with people all sitting round in a circle, most of them have instruments of some sort or another – bongos, wooden pipe, guitar, home-made shakers, some killer voices… and together they spend a few hours just jamming. Mike and I sit back and take it all in. Along with the first Pisco Sours we have had since crossing the border. All good.

I’m sitting at the Ecuadorean/Peruvian border as I type. Waiting for a $1.50 fried chicken and rice to be cooked, as Mike wrestles with the bureaucracy of getting our beloved Russian into new lands.
There are little things about our day to day which don’t make it to print, because they are either forgotten in the days it takes me to write the blog, or because they have become so mundane, so quotidian, so damn normal in this migrant life of ours that I don’t think to write them down.

One such story which falls into the former camp is of me singing at the top of my lungs to Michael Jackson’s “I just can’t stop loving you” (female part) as we drove into Cumbaya, outside Quito, a few days ago in the dark. (We try not to drive in the dark, but often some setback or other – unforseen oil changes, poor roads, donkeys in said roads, etc – mean that we don’t make it to our intended destination before the sunsets. Foolish.) The traffic slowed as we reached a light, and only after I’d belted out “just tell me what else would I dooooooo” that I realised I not only had a pedestrian audience, but that he was clapping along with me. I often think about what would be my audition song if I found myself in the hell of an X Factor audition, and I’m not sure MJ would get me through to the next round. I’m more of an Elton John girl, myself. In fact, a vast Oregon wheatfield was treated to a particularly rousing “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me” where I did both Elton’s alto and George’s Greco-North London tones with gusto and expert accuracy. Really, I’m wasted in that sidecar.

Mike has a dance move – all shoulders – which he sometimes treats me to on the road. I’m not allowed to ask for it (then it is strictly denied) but with a judicious bit of DJing (maybe an uptempo salsa track, or a boppy bit of Jamiroquai) he might just be lured to wow me with his slinky torso. I live in hope.

Food’s arrived now. Fried fish and rice. What happened to chicken? I’m sure my Spanish isn’t that bad… I’m taking the gamble today and eating the tomatoes. The first vegetable (fruit?) that’s gone into my gullet in days. That’s one of the really tough things about life on the road. The routine of the grub is intense. Chicken and rice for lunch everyday.

The other thing which I haven’t mentioned thus far is how filthy our faces are at the end of a day’s driving. Mike’s eyebrows look like they have been kohled on, like a clown. I have just wiped the sleeve of the suit across my face and blackened the part I wiped with. The diesel burning vehicles here belch black smoke out, and if we are trapped behind them, it can sometimes be hard to breathe. My hands are permanently filthy, nails get black by the end of a long day on the road.

Depressingly, it’s starting to get hot again. We have descended from the heights of the hills and are getting lower and lower as we near the coast again. This is, of course, the equator and its tropics, my sweat glands have had a nice break, but now it’s time to get real again. Real sweaty.

It’s later in the day now. Things got bad once we crossed the Peruvian border: the sides of the roads were soon littered with junk – plastic bags, plastic bottles, general garbage. A wasp flew into my face on the drive and left the stinger in my face. Much flapping and not happy. Then, half an hour later, Mike too got stung, twice. On the leg. Again, much flapping. Thankfully, we didn’t crash.

To top it all off, the road at one point became a ford. A deep ford, crossed by a river of thinly disguised sewage. He paused, revved the engine, and we headed to cross it – as Mototaxis and small cars were doing before us. I thought I’d film the traverse on our little HD camera. The depth was much more than it first appeared. The sidecar was flooded, the camera died and we were left sodden in stinky water. (which is why I have no images of the Peruvian border to share…)

I love Peru.

The Valley of Longevity, that’s what this place is called. People just live and live and live – it’s famous for its old people. 40 years ago, it wasn’t uncommon to see people of 110 or 120 years of age. The setting is exquisite (nestled in a green valley, surrounded by verdant and fertile hills) and life was always good to these people. The life-expectancy has dropped hugely since the arrival of cars and the outside world in them. But there are still lots of old people around. We came here because we wanted to find an old couple who we could get advice from. We hoped to find some over-100s, but despite much enquiry, we can’t find one. However, married couples in their late 80s abound, so we interview two of them.

The first is Leopoldo and his wife, Soleda. They have been married for 56 years. They used to live in a finca in the hills outside Vilcabamba, but sold up and moved to a pleasant little house on one of the main roads in the town (on Avenida dell’Eterna Joventu, as it happens). They laugh a lot together. Our only issue on the interview front is that Leopoldo is going deaf, which always makes the interviews very difficult. We asked them for an interview, then went back to our hostel to get the camera, during which time the two of them changed into Sunday best.

The second couple, Vicente and Vicenta, have managed 52 years together. They are 86 and 84 respectively, and their faces wear that age. They are both captivatingly lovely people, much laughter, many smiles and much warmth exudes from them. They live in a small village called San Pedro up the hill from Vilcabamba. A village, which they tell me determinedly, has been independent from Vilcabamba for the last 10 years.

The two of them both grew up in the town and have known each other forever. They got together in their late teens but only married late (she was 32). I couldn’t make out the reason for this, sorry readers. That’s dodgy Spanish for you. They only have one son, and two grandsons. Which, by Ecuadorean standards, is a titchy titchy family. I ask about this – Vicenta very nearly died in childbirth. They had to get a donkey cart to take her to Loja (about an hour’s drive on the bike away) and there she had to have a caesarean. After that, Vicente got himself sterilised. Was it hard to be surrounded by your friends and neighbours with many children? I ask. Yes, it was, they reply. Children are the most magical thing that can happen to a couple, and to only have one was very hard. In fact, that was their advice to us, have children. I, of course, delight in that advice!

While we were in Vilcabamba in the morning, asking all and sundry if they knew old couples, and being sent from place to place, we met two ex-pats who live in Vilcabamba. (I can see entirely why they would: it’s beautiful, laidback and filled with bright and interesting people). One, Ann, has just lost her husband – and great love – of 20 years. A widow, still broken by sadness. So much so that even my hardened documentary heart can’t find it to ask her if we can interview her as our first widow. The second, Mike, is a Brit who has been there for 6 years. He was a junkie and a drop out, then his mum won the double rollover on the lottery, each of her kids got 2 million quid, and he basically went to the place he’d wanted to live all his life (he read about it when he was 7 and had wanted to go since).

From Cuenca to Vilcabamba today. The wonderful thing about driving days in Ecuador is that they are always a lovely temperature (like the best of English summer days – sunny but not too hot, with a lovely breeze) and the scenery is totally spectacular. Very green, hilly and interesting. Love it. Would really really recommend Colombia and Ecuador to anyone with even a twinge of wanderlust.

The article about us came out this morning. Which led to a couple of phonecalls from US ex-pats. Always nice to chat to people about what we’re up to. (I’ll publish the article when I get hold of it)

One little known fact about southern Ecuador is that this is the home of Panama hats. NOT Panama. A grave injustice – caused by the fact that the Ecuadoreans shipped them up to the canal from which to sell them around the world. So Panama got the cred, and not Cuenca, Ecuador, the very epicentre of the trade.

We wanted to hunt out a Panama hat couple. Like the embroidery collectives of Northern Ecuador, there are many indigenous workers involved in the trade, and we had a lead similar to our one in the north, but it didn’t work out. So we went to the museum anyway, tried on some great hats (and some funny ones) and learnt about the trade.

There are different grades of Panama Hat – Standard to Super Fine – classifications which describe the fineness of the dried leaves woven to make the hat. The women who make the hats can make about 2 or 3 standard ones in a week, but a superfine one can take up to 4 months. Like the embroiders, it is work they can do in their own homes, around their children and their lives.

They then sell the hats to the factories, which then bleach and press them into shape, and finish them up for sale around the world. London is the biggest market, our wonderful guide Ifrein told us. And that the French have unusually small heads.

As you know, readers, I burn like a peach, so I have purchased the most exquisite hat which I have sent home, ready for my summer gardening forays.

Next up was an interview with Dr Juan Cordero and his wife, Anita. Juan is a history professor at one of Cuenca’s 7 universities. This is a small town, famed for not only its Panama hats but its culture. It’s Ecuador’s little pocket of poets, artists and generally the creative folk of the country, we’re told.

Dr Juan Cordero is the country’s former education minister, and has been married to his utterly lovely wife, Anita for nearly 40 years. Despite looking fabulous, and having been a minister’s wife up in Quito for his term, Anita is not mad keen on being filmed. She laughs as she tells me that she could talk the roof off a house until a camera is turned on her, then the words get stuck in her throat and she just freezes up. Either way, they are the most wonderful couple to interview. It’s utterly jovial, and we hold the interview in their house, which is at the back of the museum that the two of them have founded together in the centre of Cuenca, Museo de las Culturas Aborigenes. It’s been a lifetime’s work which they have shared – born of a shared passion for collecting items. When we ask what love is, Juan says that it’s about shared passions – and being prepared to make sacrifices. He says that they used to have to forego family holidays in order to be able to afford some artifact or another. But because they both believed in what they were doing, they could do it together. Now the museum is the largest collection of its kind in Ecuador, a fact of which they are both very proud. It really is a great place, built around a courtyard, and the kind of place – not unlike Cuenca itself – that you could spend days in.

I then dragged Mike out to the nearby Banos where there are volcanic hotsprings. We had hoped to find an economic widow – someone whose husband had left to work illegally in the States or Europe (Spain, Italy or France, usually), but we had no luck. So had a nice dinner instead.

The first of Pepe’s victories is Dr Nicanor Merchan, editor of the local paper, El Mercurio. Not only is he fiendishly accomplished, but he is also a passionate motorbiker, having done the Panamerican himself and manifold other mad biking adventures including the Himalayas. All 3 of his sons have some sort of National Motocross title, and bikes are very much a way of life for the Merchans.

We do a bit of a trade off with Dr Merchan – we interview him for our documentary, one of his guys interviews us for the paper. Dr Merchan’s wife is away, so it’s just him, so we decide to grill him on Cuenca and on biking. His wife doesn’t like to bike – how does that work? It’s his own special alone time. We ask him what it is about biking, and he replies that biking is life. It’s the way that he feels totally at one with the world around him, how he drinks in the great landscapes of the world. One time, he and his son were biking across the Himalayas. The snow was thick on the ground and they were wrapped up fully. In the distance, on the white landscape, he saw an orange dot. As they approached, he realised that it was a monk, wearing nothing but sandals and an orange robe.

They pulled up beside him, and the monk nodded peacefully, blessed them both and they hugged, managing to communicate across the language barrier. Dr Merchan said that it was one of the most moving and memorable moments of his life. You simply don’t get experiences like that without bikes, he seems to suggest.

We then meet Dolores, wife for 40 years of one of Cuenca’s most impressive residents, Edgar, a doctor who has set up a mobile surgery unit in which he travels the south of the country, doing much needed surgeries for free to the rural and urban poor. He loves Cuenca with his heart and soul and never considered living anywhere else. He met Dolores in Miami (she is a blonde nurse who he worked with in a hospital) and before he could marry her, he had to ask her if she would return with him to Ecuador, which 40 years ago was a fairly different place. He is the dean of the university, he was health minister for the government, and he and Dolores know everyone in Cuenca, pretty much. But he is away with the mobile surgery unit, so we can’t interview them.

So Dolores takes us to the home of her best friend, Diana, and her husband of 40 years, Tommy. Diana, like Dolores, is a US expat, married to an Ecuadorean. She’s a New Yorker and feisty, I can tell immediately that I’ll enjoy the interview.

Tommy headed to New York when he was 19. He didn’t speak a word of English and didn’t even really know where he was going. He got on a bus at the airport, then wandered around the part of New York he thought his uncle lived at. He was lost. He looked at people’s doorbells and eventually saw the name “Lopez”, assuming they’d speak Spanish, he rang the bell. Diana opened the door, didn’t speak any Spanish, but got her parents. Who happened to know Tommy’s uncle. And it went from there – Tommy’s uncle asked Diana to show him around the city, they slowly fell in love (and got better at each other’s languages – now they flit happily between the two). Effectively, Tommy married the first person he met in New York. Tommy has a husky contagious laugh and a smiling face and we all laugh our way through the interview. The two of them built their life out in Cuenca, have 4 totally bilingual kids – 2 in the States, 2 still in Cuenca. I always marvel at relationships which began with a courtship with different languages. How did they know that they were right for each other? Diana said that Tommy made her laugh from the get go, and she just knew they were great for each other. Lovely jubbly.

Cuenca is a beautiful little town – cobbled streets, small buildings. We’re staying the heart of it, and able to wander around without having to mount our trusted steed.

As we leave the hostel to get some breakfast, a man crosses the road and starts asking us about the bike. The Ural Effect, we’re used to it. But as we explain what we’re up to, he becomes animated and from then on in, takes us under his wing and starts to organise interviews for us. What a dude, thanks Pepe.

The hacienda is genuinely one of the most magical places I think I have ever been. It’s at the base of the Cotopaxi volcano, the land is green and lush, the temperature is sunny but breezy. The house is big but unpretencious. The outer windows are large, so the main rooms are bathed in the mountain light. The surrounding, tended garden is alive with colour and order. Bougainvillea cascades from the bowers surrounding the living room, a fish pond has fat little goldfish in it, and the wind moves the tall daisies around. Quite lovely.

Alicia is half-Swiss, half-Ecuadorean. She’s gorgeous, dark hair and eyes and a wonderful elegance. Valentin is her Aryan: blue eyes, lighter skin. He was raised in the Swiss alps as a farmer, and left around the age of 20 because he became disenchanted by the ills of 20th century society. He came over to South America, and started working on the haciendas out here, saying that the uncomplicated and uncluttered way of living suited him much better. The two of them had known each other in Switzerland, when both were with other people, but it was only when Alice asked Valentin to come and help with her ill father’s hacienda in Colombia that the two became really good friends. Alice later split from her husband, and the two of them ended up together.

Alice is wonderfully matter-of-fact- “this one I know is for life”. They have been together for more than 20 years, but Valentin is staunchly against marriage, so they remain unmarried. In fact, Valentin is staunchly against a lot of things. Humanity in general, seems to be a recurring theme. Alice and he have got the farm running (cows, fields, roses) which they run entirely as a fair trade, organic venture (rose growing is huge business here in Ecuador and in Colombia. It’s easy to buy tens and tens of roses for little more than a couple of dollars. Ann says that the foundation sees a lot of cases where children of workers (and the workers themselves) have contracted cancer from the pesticides which are used in the cultivation, and the work and pay is nigh on exploitation). They say that it doesn’t make them any money, but it keeps tens of local people employed. Furthermore, Alice’s daughter set up a school on the farm for 120 children of the nearby peasant villages. Volunteers come from round the world to teach there, they are housed and fed. We meet a jovial Irishman at one point…

Valentin is really sickened by the excesses of mankind. He sees how man just takes takes takes and it makes him really sad and angry. Despite his lapses into the occasional polemic, he is great fun and very very good company. He can laugh at himself (and Alice is good at poking fun at him too) and it makes for a very interesting interview indeed. We keep having to pull him back from the Ills of the World and back to his love story with Alice.

They make a great couple. On this trip, we have met so many wonderful couples with different types of love. I always love it when we meet a couple who I think we are similar to. They are good friends, first and foremost. They laugh, they discuss, they enjoy each other’s company. But they are also very independent, and different in ways.

Twenty years ago, Alice decided to study art. She had never done so before, and had never had any inclination to do so. Then one day on the hacienda, she had the urge. So she started having a go at it. Then she used to go to a workshop at the university and just work happily in one corner. And slowly, slowly, she has become brilliant at it. The exhibition in Quito is the first of her work, and while we are with her, she receives a phonecall from a UNESCO representative, asking for her work to be exhibited in Paris. She is modest, and laughs when I try and make a big deal out of it. At the moment, she spends three days up in Quito a week, and says that that’s how their relationship works well: they each have their own interests, and are never jealous of the time the other one gives to those interests. Valentin runs the farm, and will disappear off with his bike and the dogs for hours, and Alice is happy to let him go.

We have a most wonderful interview and subsequent conversation with these guys, meandering through Valentin’s apocalyptic and Malthusian forecasts and onwards. We eat beef from the farm, and are surrounded by vases of roses from the farm.  It’s really really sad to leave this magical place and these wonderful people. I really hope that Alice has the exhibition in Paris, it will be a great excuse to see them again.

We leave to drive to Cuenca, 3rd biggest city in Ecaudor and jewel of the inland south.

We leave Quito in convoy with our wonderful hosts. I get to go in the car for the one and a half hour drive south to a hacienda owned by Alicia, a friend of our hostess, Ann’s. The hacienda is an earthly paradise, and we spend the day with the 7 and 10 year old daughters of Ann and Gaston. Baby rabbits, chickens and dogs keep us busy all day, until we flake hard (how does anyone have children and have any energy at all?!)

Socially, he believes that successive governments – as is true with all of Central and South America – have led to individuals renouncing their own responsibility. Governments fail to deliver on their promises, and individuals moan about the rulers’ shortcomings. Instead of individuals realising their part in the greater picture and their own responsibilities. Ecuadoreans talk about their rights, rather than their responsibilities. Pages and pages of the law talk about the rights of the individual, and only one or two sentences will cover a person’s responsibilities to their society. THus, he says, people have become lazy and ungrateful. Which actually, you see in marriage a lot, he says, people give up at the first hurdle because they enter into the union with a “me, me, me” attitude.

His eloquence on this matter is such that I wonder why he isn’t teaching it. “Oh I do,” he replies. He is author of an book in which he takes the story of The Little Prince, ostensibly a children’s book, and dissects it for its rich lessons in life: how to love, what we to our fellow man, what friendship means, what love means.

We had no idea that he had published this book when the meeting was arranged (by our host’s neice, his student), but Carlos Freile is a brilliant interview subject. Fascinating and still very in love himself. We ask if we can interview him and his wife later today. And, to our delight and astonishment, he agrees.

We leave Carlos Freile, knowing we’ll see him again later in the day, and head to the Baco Ortiz children’s hospital to film the work of the Sol Y Vida Foundation. Having been turned away from filming in the hospital yesterday by a vile witch of the “computer says no” school of bureaucracy, we have now filled in the necessary forms and are back to meet some of the little children going through their chemo treatment.

The chemotherapy room is fairly small – not a daunting hospital ward of a room, but a kind of a square waiting room with lots of natural light and brightly coloured murals. There are about 10 blue leather seats which can recline. They look like airplane seats – the material of business class but the size of economy class. on 6 of these seats sit children. Slumped, bored looking. They’re used to this, they’ve been doing it for ages. out of a canula in their hand comes a tube which stretches up to a drip above them. A parent sits beside them, also a bit bored-looking. Fridays are not busy, so there are fewer children here than normal.

Our first little man is sitting patiently in his chemo chair, parents with him, and his plastic superhero toy. He’s 6 years old. Ligia, the Foundation’s psychotherapist for the kids, waves and introduces us to the family who are willing to talk to us about the immense impact that the foundation has had on their lives, paying for the medication for the boy and basically working to save his life when without them, there would have been no hope.

Through a set of doors, there is a second room. It feels lighter, there’s colourful, small furniture, more painting on the walls, and not a trace of anything “hospitally”. This is where children come to play in between appointments, while they wait. They have lessons here too, the Ecuadorean government has a curriculum drawn up for kids in hospital. We meet the teacher who is adorable, and says her goal is to make sure this little room feels like a world away from what goes on on the other side of the doors: the pain, the chemo, the bored waiting.

A smiling three year old gives me a whopper of a grin, follows it up with a chess piece, then trots off to do some colouring in. She looks so happy and healthy that I turn to her mother and ask if she’s here because of another child. No, she says, her little smiling duaghter has been ill with cnacer for the last 2 years. But, thanks to help from Sol Y Vida, she seems to be getting slowly better. Mother and daughter spend every day at the hospital getting treatment. “It’s like a second home,” she says. But with a smile, as she waves at the teacher. In minutes, her gorgeous little girl is singing La Cucaracha, word perfect (with a little help from mum) as I dance like a loon, much to her giggling entertainment.

THere is one public pedeatric oncologist in the whole of Ecuador, she is the one who has to see and treat all these children. We meet her briefly, and arrange to come back in 15 minutes to interview her. Sadly, when we return, she is gone for the day. We later learn that she herself is undergoing treatment for cancer. There are people in this world who are truly amazing.

As we sit outside her office, we meet a man and his little daughter. She is 8 years old, and when she was 3, she was diagnosed with a tumour in her eye. She, like all of the other children, is adorable – and once she overcomes her initial hide-behind-dad shyness, she opens up, starts chatting and is very sweet. Her father talks openly to us about the miracle of the Sol Y Vida Foundation – how it has saved the life of his beautiful daughter, and how it has supported him and his wife as he had to give up work to bring his little girl to the hospital. We leave the hospital, and rather than being broken by the injustice of the disease and these young lives, instead I feel uplifted at the amazing work of the foundation.

We head into the colonial centre of Quito. Time to get some GVs (that’s “general views” ” to you non-documentary making few who read this). For the first time, Mike notices a little purple crescent which is appearing in shot. It’s not on the lenscover, it’s not on the viewing screen. Mike’s really worried. But we get shots of the centre of town – it’s utterly gorgeous, and our friend and tourguide Luis gives us a masterful and thorough tour of the place.
While we are in town, we head to a sculture exhibition by an artist who we are set to be interviewing on Sunday with her husband. Her name is Alice Trepp, and for the last twenty years, she has been studying residents of El Chota (the black villages in the north of Ecuador which breeds world class footballers) and making sculptures from them. She makes moulds from which she then creates lifesize models – in bronze, fibreglass and, most interestingly, chocolate!

The exhibition is of lifesize fibreglass models. It’s uncanny, you half expect them to get up and walk around. They are breath-taking. More on Alice in a couple of days…

From there, we head to interview the wonderful Carlos Freile and his wife Lucia. Carlos was her history professor and is 20 years her senior. But they are very very in love. He refers to her always as “Mi Lucia” which I find utterly enchanting. He consults her, and delights in her. She obviously matches his intellect, and the two of them are still radiantly happy – 30 years and 3 sons later. It has to be quick, the interview, so we wrap up. Carlos has given us his answers to our questions for advice and What love is. So we ask just Lucia to answer, and wonderfully she answers with exactly the same ideas as Carlos.

Finally, we go to Ventura Mall in the town of Cumbaya to make a short video for our host, who runs the mall. What a day. We make it back to our hosts exhausted, but with still enough energy for a quick acted rendition of “So Long, Farewell” from the Sound of Music with the girls (I’m the eldest son – “Adieu, adieu to yer and yer and yer…”, 10 year old Kim is one of the middle-sized girls “I flit, I flit, I fly…” and little Aileen is the tiny one “the sun has gone to bed and so must I” and Mike is utterly bewildered but gamely tries to be the eldest son before I have to step up from the role of Lisel – all this in performance for the parents/our hosts)

I want a kid. (A recurring theme on this trip)

Our hostess has asked us to give a presentation of our journey to her 10 year old daughter’s class. At one point, it was suggested that we’d be in the school’s 500 seater auditorium, but thankfully for us, it is scaled back to just one class of 30 because, inevitably, they don’t have an adaptor cable for a Mac to the projector. So every has to huddle round the computer as Mike and I burble our way through the Spanish presentation, being corrected every second sentence by a precocious girl in the front row.

From there we went into Quito to the Sol Y Vida Foundation, established 5 years earlier. Sol Y Vida is a charitable foundation which works hard to help  very poor Ecuadorean children with cancer (http://www.solyvida.info/). There is only one children’s hospital in the country, and within that, there is only one public paediatric oncologist. In public hospitals, care is free, but patients must pay for their own medication. This can run into tens of thousands of dollars in the case of cancer treatments, and the parents of these children are some of the poorest people in the country – indigenous field workers who, between them and their working wives and families, earn little more than $200 a month. Sol Y Vida works hard to get foreign donations to help pay to save the lives of these children who otherwise would die.

They have a staggering 80 children on their books. These children are referred to the foundation by the Baco Ortiz children’s hospital and arrive often believing that a cancer diagnosis is a death sentence. They meet with the foundation’s utterly wonderful psychiatrist, are evaluated, and then given both the financial and emotional support that they would otherwise never have received. The children, with their parents, often have to come from far away to receive their chemo treatments (all outpatient), some travelling up to 10 hours on public buses and horses to get to the hospital. Families often lose out on their earnings because of the time it takes to come to Quito to receive the treatment for the child. 

We meet a family whose 5 year old son, Tonio, has a tumour in his face. The family are poor, but they live in Quito. They have a 7 year old girl, Areceli, too, and the 4 of them sit on a sofa in the waiting area of the small Sol Y Vida office. We ask about their love story – the father, Jeraldo, was a teacher, and the mother, Araceli, his student. I don’t think the agegap is more than about 12 years, because the two of them still look young. Her childhood was hard, she is from an indigenous family who lived far away from Quito and worked in the fields. When she decided she wanted to go to school, she was sent to live with an aunt. It was hard, and when she walked into his classroom and first saw him, she felt a deep comfort in her heart which she hadn’t felt before – a certain, profound peace. He had noticed her (she is very pretty), and talked to his friends about her, but didn’t think that she would or could love him because he has a limp. He was wrong, she changed classes and their courtship began.

They had a lot of trouble conceiving. She was diagnosed with a tumour in her ovary, which she had removed but thought that she would never have children. When the little daughter arrived, they were elated. THeir little boy followed 2 years later. He was born with a small lump on his cheek, just below his right lip. She was concerned and went to see the doctor, who repeatedly assured her that it was fine. Only 3 years later did it start growing. Then they came into the hospital and little Tonio was diagnosed. A short while later, they went out to the country to visit the grandparents and the rest of Araceli’s family on the family farm. One day, Tonio was playing with his cousins, and managed to get hold of a machete. In a horrible accident, he cut off the ends of his third and fourth fingers. They were miles from any hospital, they had to throw away the end of the fingers – to Tonio’s horror. But really bizarrely, the ends of the two fingers have grown back. Nails and all! Little miracle fingers!

Though their experience sounds like a nightmare, they are gentle and kind. She references God a lot, and it’s clear that their faith has been a huge support throughout their son’s illness. The father talks amazingly candidly about how strongly he empathises with his son, as he was very very ill for the first few years of his life, with meningitis which left him with a badly withered leg. He can’t bear to see his son going through the same suffering. As he talks of this, he cried openly. I find it very hard not to cry during the interview. This is a family with so much love, the children are both so adorable, it is heartbreaking to hear their story. When we ask, at the end, “what is love?”, the little son, sitting on his father’s lap, says “Amor es mi pappi” – love is my daddy. At which point I start to sob.

We haul our still-sickly arses out of bed and into the Evel Knievel outfits: we’re off to be interviewed for a TV programme which airs weekly on Sunday nights in Ecuador and is one of its most watched programmes, called La Television. Our Spanish, still far from good, is getting better, so it was a laugh. We’re due to appear on the programme on Sunday 28th November so we’ll post that as soon as we have it.

We’re both struck down by Bum Wee. Today is spent mostly sleeping. Once again, Mike awakes with a black tongue (as he had in Mexico when he was last ill), but this time we get it on camera. Niiiiiiiice.

Our hostess has organised a dinner interview with one of the most prominent archaelogists in the country, and a collector of pre-Colombian art. We dine with him and our host (gingerly, on soup) and learn the background of this extraordinary country – and his extraordinary love life (just divorced his wife of 30 years – who was 22 years older than him. And that was the reason they split up: they found that the age difference when they were younger was not such a factor, they both had energy and passion. Now that he is 62 and she is 84, they are in totally different stages on life)

Ecuador is a hugely diverse country. In this one small country, they have thousands of species of frogs, more orchids than anywhere else on the planet and an unrivalled biodiversity. This comes from the geographical differences in the country. Famous for Galapagos, which is the jewel in its biological crown. But to add to that, it has coast, rainforest and mountains. Hemmed in by the Andean mountain ranges to one side, the coast on the other, it sits at the top of the cooling Humboldt current (which comes up from the south, then turns outwards to Galapagos – which is why they have penguins there) and at the bottom of the tropical Panamanian current. It has everything.

It’s cultural identity is a little confused: pre-Colombus, it was part of the Incan empire which stretched northwards from Cuzco in southern Peru, with Quito governed by the Incan kind, Atahualpa, and Cuenca by his brother (whose name I can’t remember, of course). When the Spanish came, it was part of Peru, then part of Gran Colombia (Bolivar tried to unify his native Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador) which is why they all have such similar flags (Colombia and Ecuador are the same except for the crest in the middle).

Which all contributes to a fairly profound identity crisis. A great representation of this is the Panama Hat. Product of Cuenca in Southern Ecuador, but sold through Panama of old, and thus given that name. Panama Hats are only made in Cuenca (or at least, the real deal) yet who knew?

The people from the mountains (including the Quitenos) have a strong rivalry with the people from the coast (including Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil). The costenos think the people from the mountain are dullards, the people from the mountains think the people from the coast are brash and fast-living. Even now it’s its own a country, it feels divided.

We meet up with the collective of indigenous women who are part of the Mi Mariposa sewing collective. When an order comes in, they meet at Hortensia’s house to get their orders from the efficient Hortensia, then they head back to their own houses to complete the work. One of the things that is really good about the embroidery work that these women do is that they can do it in their own homes while being mothers, wives, homemakers.

The 9 or so women sit outside Hortensia’s house, on her uneven and dusty patch of grass in front of the house, clustered around the tree roots and occasional building materials which they can sit on. They sew contentedly while children scamper about, and dogs wander in and out of their company. All are dressed with the classic hats, gold necklaces and ponchos.

The sun shines, and the view is totally magnificent. The skill of these women, their willingness to work hard, it’s been a fascinating encounter – and the Mi Mariposa products are totally gorgeous!

On the way to Quito, we cross the ecuator. 0’00 latitude. Are we really only half way through the journey?! There is a monument to it, and it’s fascinating. More on this to follow (since I was left to look after the bike and Mike spent half an hour going round the exhibit)

We head to Quito, to a suburb called Cumbaya, where we are staying with friends of Mike’s cousin’s wife. We arrive, greet the family, and within 20 minutes, the whole house is plunged into darkness.

Ecuador is largely powered hydroelectrically, and this year, the rains simply have not come in the volumes needed to meet the country’s electricity demands. Which has meant that the government has had to impose scheduled power cuts across the country. People are warned when the cuts are coming, and entire neighbourhoods plunge into darkness for 2-3 hours at a time. During the working day, places are without electricity for 6 to 7 hour blocks. Our host tells us unequivocally that the ineptitudes of the current government have played a huge part in these cuts.

A great mate of ours, Katherine, set up a business about 2 years ago called Mi Mariposa. The indigenous women of Ecaudor are reknowned for their embroidery skills, and Katherine has employed a collective to make and embroider her designs for children’s clothes. 12 women are part of this group, and they are headed up by a lady called Hortensia. We are driving to Ibarra to meet and interview Hortensia and her husband. 

La Esperanza is a village just above Ibarra, the big town. The streets of La Esperanza are cobbled and uneven, and it is populated almost entirely by indigenous families. Ladies in hats, with long dresses and shawls, and gold necklaces round their necks, wander the streets, with children in tow and babies strapped tightly to their backs. The village (and Ibarra below it) nestle in the base of a huge valley, so they are surrounded by green mountains. The earth is slightly fatter at the equator, so the tip of the snow-covered mountain we can see from our bedroom window is the furthest point from the centre of the earth, as it sits pretty much directly on the equator.

The light is perfect and clear, the temperature cool, the grass green. It’s magical. We pass a market in a small square in La Esperanza. About 15 stalls are set up, each manned by a cluster of indigenous women. The stalls are strewn with examples of the beautiful embroidery that these women do: table clothes with tightly embroidered flower patterns, matching napkins with embroidery of all colours and designs, children’s clothing, knitted jumpers, men and women’s designs. An array.

We ask for Hortensia, and are directed to a small but well turned out woman in her mid 30s. She is manning a stall of her own embroidery, and we chat. She and her husband are perfectly prepared to meet us that evening so we make arrangements. I wander the stalls as Mike films (much excitement to appear in the film, he is endlessly pulled to see this or that design at the various stalls). I look for little girls’ dresses for our various goddaughters and find some that I like.

The designs are wonderful, the little dresses are totally adorable. I’ll post a link to Mi Mariposa designs as soon as I have it! Great Christmas presents!

There’s an area in the far north of Ecuador, near the Colombian border, called El Chota. It consists of about 3 or 4 villages, very poor, inhabited by black Ecuadoreans. Women stand outside houses, washing clothes, and children and chickens run round the dusty streets.

Everyone knows everyone, there are few phones and a strong sense of community. We pull into the first village we arrive at, Carpuela, and find a smiling woman, washing, with her 3 children around her. She laughs and laughs at the sight of our bike, and even harder when we give her 3 children a ride.

The reason that we are here is that we have been told that these communities breed world-class football players. Men like Augustin Delgado and Ulises De La Cruz. The parents of whom still live in these villages, so we thought we’d hunt them out and find out a little more about these unlikely petri dishes of football talent.

For Delgado, the lady points towards Juncal, a village further back along the PanAmerican highway. When we arrive there, we ask the first family we see, all sitting out on the street in the Sunday sunshine, about where Delgado’s parents live and they say “sure! just up the road! our son will show you!” so he hops into the sidecar, I balance on the side, and we head up into the heart of the village.

“Delgado’s dad lives in that house there,” he points. Hmmm. Only his dad? “His mum lives in Ibarra” (the nearest big town) “they are separated”. D’oh! How about his brother? “Also separated”. De La Cruz? Not from this village. Anyone else? Edmundo Zura’s family lives just up the road.

Edmundo Zura plays for the Ecuadorean national team, and was a star player in the Cup of the Americas in 2007. He lives and plays in Quito at the moment, but has been playing for an Australian team, Newcastle, in the last year. Interesting.

So he guides us to Zura’s family home. A long line of people are sitting on a long step outside the house, all just hanging out together on a Sunday morning. Children immediately crowd around the bike, and we become the centre of attention. We ask about Zura’s mum and dad, who are there in the line up of family members, and they are happy to do an interview. Zura’s brother then points and says that Zura himself is just over there. And sure as hell, there is a tall, good-looking guy walking towards us, who immediately offers us juice.

And bonus! He’s married! He and his wife have come to visit for the weekend from Quito. And they’re happy to be interviewed! I love it when a plan comes together…

Nothing moves very fast here. So we don’t get down to work straight away. Edmundo wants to nip into Ibarra to get some money out, and he’s taking his dad. So they hop into an incongruously huge and blinging SUV and leave us to chat to the (huge) family. Turns out that the parents had 16 children, 12 of whom survived, and now have 30 grandchildren. All of whom want a ride on the bike. Which keeps Mike busy for the next half hour…

The place feels totally incongruous with our experience of South America. The colour, the sounds, the laughter. It feels like a little pocket of Africa in amongst the largely indigenous north of Ecuador. It’s probably a good time to talk about the inherent racism in this country, there are strict strata and it seems everyone is wary of everyone else. With the black population being very much at the bottom of them all. The black population in Ecuador are largely centred around the coastal city of Esmeralda on the coast. Legend has it that a slave ship was sinking off the coast there and the slave cargo swam to freedom and settled in that nearby town. The villages of the El Chotta area are a very rare inland offshoot of that.

We ask why the area produces such good footballers and Zura replies that it’s the perfect environment for it: the weather is great (always sunny, but not too hot), the ground is ideal (dusty but not too hard) and the kids are able to spend long hours, barefoot on the dusty terrain kicking a ball around. Add their innate physionomy to that and you have a recipe for football greatness.

Zura’s father is a farmer. The local area is hugely fertile and basically, everything grows, so there’s much to do as a farmer. He wanted Zura to follow him, but Edmundo had other ideas, being obsessed with football from the very beginning. His parents have known each other forever, both being from the same small village where they still live, so Juncal is all the family has ever known. They are Catholic and strong believers, and their family is everything to them.

Zura is 25, his wife 21 and they have been married for 8 years. They have one little dude of a son called Elkin Ronaldino. Joanna likes being the wife of a footballer (not least because his body is perfection… I lasciviously run my hand over his 6 pack like the desperate, old hag that I am), they obviously earn great money in Quito, and Elkin has a great childhood there. They come back to see the family once or twice a month. Sundays are particularly special, Joanna says, because the whole community comes together around the football field, women talking, men playing and children kicking balls around.

We’re back to driving. We want to get to Ecuador today so we spent yesterday and all of today on the road. It’s some of the most beautiful driving of our trip so far, unexpectedly verdant and hilly. The road hugs the edge of the rippling, velvety green mountains and we weave our way through the clement, almost Swiss, setting for miles.

The morning starts sadly for me. I get news that the father of one of my closest friends back in England has died. I had been struggling with uncharacterist homesickness for the couple of weeks after Costa Rica, and the thought of my dear friend going through this makes me want with all my heart to be back with her. I’m so torn, because on the one hand, I know that I’ll never have the chance to do a trip like this again and I should be relishing every minute of it; on the other hand, I long to be able to give her a huge hug, and that thought overrides the experience I’m living through. Her father was a wonderful man, a stoical, charming Brit, and a figure throughout the nearly two decades that she and I have been friends.

I spend our drive in deep thought, ruminating on the man that is now gone and what my wonderful friend is living through right now. Head in England, body in Southern Colombia. Disorientating and hard.

There’s work to be done. We come to a town, Pasto, which actually seems Swiss: nestled in a valley, surrounded by green hills and Milka cows. Sunny, but with a cool, Alpine breeze. We pull into a petrol station and make enquiries, and a local lady takes us under her wing. It turns out she is a defence lawyer in family law for the State. We have a number of errands which she helps us with (yesterday, we appeared in a surprisingly long article in the national paper El Tiempo, so we manage with her help to find a copy of that and then to laminate it – to brandish at future non-believers) We then ask her if we can interview her on the state of divorce in Colombia.

She talks about the rise in divorce in this country, the negative effect it has on children, the lack of seriousness about commitment from the start, the occurence of domestic violence and infidelity. No cold hard stats, but a very interesting interview nonetheless.

We leave Pasto, and Colombia, totally smitten. What an amazing country. The people are warm and friendly, the place works well and knows what it’s about, the world of drugs we’d heard about is so far from the truth of our experience that I want to holler from the rooftops that everyone should come to Colombia. I loved it.

Cali is famous in Colombia (and beyond) for two things: cosmetic surgery and salsa. We wanted couples who represented both – I wanted to learn how surgery can change the dynamics of a relationship; and about the intensity of a couple who dance together.

When we got back from the interview with Sigifredo yesterday, we went back to our hostel, spent the usual few hours on the internet trying to follow leads for these two stories. It’s tens of phonecalls (with Mike and I bartering over who has to speak Spanish), lots of internet leads, asking people we meet for ways into the city – places to go, names they have heard of, etc. We’re still on a high from meeting Sigifredo and his wife, so we go for a celebratory pizza. Mike starts chatting to the waiter and asks about ways into the city’s vibrant salsa scene, and he brings the owner over who says that he doesn’t know about Cali’s music and dance scene, but a friend of his does. An Englishman named Will Holland, a successful “music investigator”, recording artist and DJ, who heads up a group called the Quantic Soul Orchestra. He has married a Cali girl, Ariana, and moved out here for good. One phonecall, his wife is up for it, and the interview is set.

So that’s where we start the day, with a famous English DJ and his gorgeous wife. Will is famous for his blending and experimenting with different music from around the world. He was in Cali because he was looking into the musical styles of Colombia, and had been here a few times. On the last night of one of his trips, he was talking in English at a bar, when a girl heard him talking English, was intrigued, and came over to introduce herself. Ariana meets Will. Both of them were in relationships at the time (albeit that they were a bit wobbly) so this was not a romantic meeting, simply a meeting of two people interested in the Cali salsa sounds.

The way Ariana tells it, she was with a girl friend that night at the bar. When she said to her friend that she wanted to go over and talk to the gringos, her friend refused adamantly to join her. Foreign men have a bad reputation in Cali for having flings then leaving the women behind, and the friend steadfastly refused to get involved, even catching a cab home when Ariana walked over to say hello.

Will and Ariana ended up talking, then going dancing, then Will leaving the next morning. They chatted over Skype, and with huge phonebills, over the ensuing months, and eventually ended up together. Neither was particularly keen on the idea of a long-distance relationship so one day, Will just decided to move to Cali. They married last November, like us.

I asked them about the culture clash of their relationship and how it worked. Ariana has all that sexy energy of a Cali woman: someone raised in a hot city, in a world of salsa. Will seems pretty damn British (in a “best of” way, rather than that being an insult which it can of course be). But they seem to bring out the best in each other: Will can salsa (“which is lucky!” says Ariana), Ariana is happy to travel round the world with Will’s DJing, and they speak a happy cocktail of Spanglish in their house. Will said he had to get used to the role of the huge Latin family in Ariana’s (and now his) life – coming from a small standard British family. Sunday morning salsa parties with everyone from the grandparents down to the little ones… Will is also so passionate about Colombian music that he has been able to introduce Ariana to cultures within her own country (like the Pacific coast scene) that she was unaware of. Which she loves.

Ariana says one of their strengths is that they know what they don’t like doing with the other person and are strong enough in their relationship to say it. She doesn’t like hunting for records with Will, and did it in the early days of their relationship, but now is totally happy to leave him to it.
….
Mike and I have our roles on this trip – and, since we have reached Latin America, we have both worked on the research (where I did most of it in the States). But Cali really is a triumph of Mike’s making. He did all the work for Sigifredo, he chatted to the waiter to get William & Ariana, and he is the one who suddenly receives a call from Dr Belman Galvis, one of Cali’s most famous cosmetic surgeons, at the D’Corpus clinic, to say that he’d love to meet us. Right now.

Mad dash. We’re a shambles. But Dr Galvis is all over what we are doing and has arranged – completely to our surprise – 2 couples where the woman has recently had surgery to talk about their relationships. Amazing. We shift the furniture around in the waiting room to try and make it look like home (2 different homes) and away we go.

The first couple, Bernardo and Mariamelia, have been married for more than 20 years. Over time and the birth of her two children, she started to put on weight, and she kept on putting on weight, until she didn’t really remember who she was. Her kids are in their early 20s now, and one day, she talked to her husband about the idea of surgery. He was supportive (naturally! Though it is a fair amount of money…) and was with her throughout the whole process (a tummytuck/liposuction) – from first consultation to coming round after the operation.

She looks good, there’s no question of that. When she said she was 45, I really couldn’t believe it. I thought, before they introduced themselves, that she was going to say 35. (Though she had that slight air of the Ageless Enhanced) I find this interview fascinating, if a little creepy. It’s clear that her whole life has been transformed by the surgery. She loses 20kg in one go and goes from lardy mum to hot mamma. She gets wolfwhistled in the street, she can wear nice clothes again, she feels wonderful and it shows.

When I ask her and her husband for their advice, she says that they are happier now than they have ever been before in their relationship. The sex is back (and it’s great), the kids are old enough that the two of them feel like they have fallen in love again, and they are like teenagers.

The second couple come in with their son, and the reason behind the surgery is that the woman wanted to get the same attention that she had when she was really beautiful and younger. She gingerly sits down alongside her husband and son, and they all beam with the joy that this miracle surgery has restored to their lives.

I’m going to put in my tuppence worth at this point. I am not a fan of plastic surgery in any way at all. I think it’s monumentally depressing that this is what the female gender has come to – that we’re all regressing to one ideal, that we no longer have the creativity to celebrate curves, nor the self-control to prevent curves becoming more than that. BUT there is something about the way that this woman is eulogising about how the removal of fat has transformed her life that for one nanosecond is convincing. Like a wide-eyed cult newcomer, I could see that yes, her selfesteem had been restored! Yes, her marriage was back on track! Yes, she was getting more out of life than she ever had before! But why couldn’t she have gone to a gym? And actually done some good to her body and mind? And why are the men small and ugly? Why doesn’t that matter?

One of the most interesting angles was the justification, by this fiercely religious society, for why they are allowed to tamper with what God gave them. We interviewed the doctor, and two couples, and each of them, without prompting came back with the answer that it is written in the Bible that the body is a temple – well, if the temple was crumbling, you’d want to rebuild it, wouldn’t you?
Now for the shame. And the giggles. We ask Dr Galvis to get out his black marker pen and to mark out on us what he would do if he could. I’m up first.

The black pen has rarely had such exercise. Dr Galvis starts by asking where my “areas of concern” are. I suggest that my love handles are enjoying the trip a little more than I’d like. So that’s where he and The Pen Of Shame start. He circles swathes of my flesh then loosely shades it to indicate the places where he’d suck fat from. My stomach gets a large circle round it, extending up over my non-existent 6 pack. Then he turns me round and my back is basically covered.

My arse gets a kicking too. He’d lift it up, he says, prodding away while Mike films the whole thing and (here’s my favourite bit) inject the fat he’d removed from my stomach and love handles into the upper part of the buttock. How Latin American! I’d get one of those ripe and juicy J-Lo butts.

Time to swap round. Hurray! Mike will get his time with The Pen Of Shame. He lifts his t-shirt and Dr G says “dude, you’re fine!” (I paraphrase slightly) “3 months in the gym and you’re laughing! Great bod!”. It’s difficult to describe at this point how smug the look Mike gives me is. Grrrr.

But Dr G isn’t done. He sits Mike down and says that he’d like to do a ‘little bit’ of work on Mike’s nose. Ha ha! Of course The Beak wouldn’t make it through these corporeal customs! The black pen traces its merry way down Mike’s nose (with much reference to unsightly dorsal lumps) removing about a third of its size.

Now, covered in black pen, it’s time for us to be released onto society. (I can tell you that I thought of the whole thing as a wonderful comic exercise, I was not for one second tempted to change my body in this way. A couple of months of running and gym when I get back and I plan to be back to how I know myself)
——-

Cali is Colombia’s southern city. It’s hot, it’s laidback, and life is good. And salsa is king. It’s everywhere. The music plays out from every home, every restaurant, every building; the word is splashed across walls, the spirit of the dance oozes from every Cali native. We ask elderly taxi drivers if they can dance “claro!” comes the reply. This is Colombia’s Salsa capital.

It is also home to one of the best salsa schools in the world: Escuela Salsa “swing Latino”. A team of about 30 people, aged from 18-30, compete internationally and regularly win everything. The big cheese couple at this school is Eduardo “El Mulatto” and his wife, Martha. 4 times world champions. They met through dance, they married, they dance together, they live below the school they run. They live for dance.

Getting an interview with them was not easy. Every minute of the day is dedicated to salsa. Eduardo was away, flying back from Bogota that evening. Martha, after over 10 phonecalls, suggested that we come down to the school and watch a rehearsal with the dancers.

Oh. My. God. Nothing I can write can do justice to the liquid hips of these 20-somethings, the precise and rapid movements all in time with each other, the confidence and raw sensuality of the dance. I sat watching, sheepishly, still covered with black marker pen will crept out from beneath my top.

Kids start dancing here in Cali as young as 2 or 3 years old. The great ones become part of the Mini-Swing team which itself is world reknowned, with 7 year old dancers taking home trophies snatched from foreign 15 year olds. We chatted to the dancers when they broke away from their strenuous practice, and they said that they live and breathe salsa. To be part of this school’s team is their life’s work – and they are prepared to sacrifice everything to remain there. They often rehearse until 2 or 3 in the morning, having started at 9 in the morning. Weekends are dance.

Interestingly, when I asked about the intimacy of dance and what kind of a relationship they had with their partners, they were adamant that it was purely platonic. It would never ever work if there was romance. Never. It would be uncomfortable and no one would ever risk their dance with a confession of attraction.

Which is why couples are rare, and great couples are rarer. The dancers all revere Eduardo. As his car pulls in eventually, a hush runs across them and they run to the balcony to watch him arrive.

I don’t really know what we are doing here. 8 members of the team is heading to Trinidad and Tabago at 4am the following morning (it’s now 10pm) to be part of a world salsa expo. Eduardo, arriving back just now, clearly has other things on his mind. We promise to be quick. And so we get a quick but great interview in their flat below the school, with their 5 year old son, a little dude called Marvin, in and out. They met through dance, and dance is their life.

When I say that the dancers in their team say that being in a couple is really hard, they agree, but say that it brings an added intensity to their salsa. It takes a lot of work though – effectively, they live and work in extremely close proximity and they have to work to make it work.

I ask Eduardo what is dance and he says immediately “love”. I then ask the 5 year old Marvin who says delightly “el baile es plata!” (dance is money). They’ve certainly done pretty well from it…!

We got a call around 11am from the assistant to Sigifredo Lopez, saying that we should go to his house immediately for an interview with him and his wife, Patricia.

Elation.

I’m very aware that this blog doesn’t – can’t – convey what we do in between driving and interviewing. It makes for dull reading, but it’s very very hard work. I mentioned briefly that in Bogota, Mike had found the name of a Colombian charity which works with kidnap victims. He wrote them a long email in Spanish, we then went to their offices to try and get a meeting with their head of marketing. Once she’s listened patiently to our story, she tentatively suggested that Sigifredo Lopez might be interested in participating, as he is familiar with the media and he is arguably Colombia’s most famous FARC kidnap victim. We left her on a high, but then heard nothing back, she phoned three days later to ask if we were with the BBC (always dubious… though we tried to pitch the idea of our film to the BBC, they weren’t interested in commissioning it – they did say come back with the finished thing, but this far from means that we are “from the BBC”), then nothing: emails bounced, phones weren’t answered, and then she was out of the office. So we went to Sigifredo’s site: www.sigifredolopez.org, on there was the name of the press contact, so we tried her, further stalling, then the 11am phonecall.

So we got an interview.

Sigifredo Lopez is from Cali, a town around 400km southwest of Bogota. He background is in law, and in 2002, he was working as a legislator for the government. It was a regular day at work when suddenly, men in army uniform ran into the building telling everyone that there was a bomb, and they needed to evacuate the place. So people filed out of the building onto a waiting bus. When the doors of the bus were closed, the “army” officers identified themselves as FARC soldiers and informed their passengers that they were being kidnapped. And so the nightmare began.

12 men were driven deep into the forest (outside its towns, Colombia is basically virtually impenetrable forest). They stayed in no one place for longer than 2 or 3 days, moving from camp to camp, intent on never being discovered by the outside world. The goverment doesn’t even know where to start in their search.

Sigifredo was a loud and disruptive captive. He made trouble for the guards, and so they took him away from the rest of the group and placed him solitary confinement: an area away from everyone else, but within the same camp. It was during this time that one of the guards heard a noise in the undergrowth, and the guards became nervous. This fear drove them to shoot the group of 11 captives. All 11 died. Sigifredo, kept away from the rest, heard the loud gunfire, but it was only weeks later that he found out that the rest of the group were no longer alive, by long-wave radio.

He was taken prisoner in 2002, and released 7 years later in February 2009. The images of his release are images of the power of human hope, and are some of the most moving and powerful I have ever seen. His two sons, who he had last seen aged 12 and 14, had grown into men in his long absence and who now hugged their father with pure joy. He has become a symbol of the fight for peace in Colombia, and now wants to run for government to take his message to the largest audience. He is also writing a book about his experience.

He still lives in Cali, with his mother, Nelly, his wife, Patricia, and his two sons, Sergio and Lucas. But now he has 3 bodyguards who go with him everywhere. We arrive at his house and are greeted by his mother. We sit and wait for something to happen. We’d been told to get there for midday, but it’s just us and his mother for 20 minutes, until his wife, Patricia arrives. 15 minutes later, Sigifredo returns. The thing that strikes me immediately is that he is just a guy. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, not least because we’d been so excited to get this interview, but he’s a guy with a warm smile, a kind air and a tendency to sit comfortably in his chair. It was a pretty powerful way to feel at the beginning of the interview. This wasn’t a Terry Waite-style strong, silent sage who has God, this was just a man, the kind of guy who it would be great to get a beer with. He’s funny, he laughs, he’s a very interesting conversationalist. It makes me feel that this could happen to anyone.

He comes in, has a lot of energy. By his own admission, he’s just excited to be alive. Deadlines, stress, nothing matters all that much to him now – he has survived hell and nothing can compare to that. We explain our project, and he starts talking, excited. He had was allowed few books in the jungle, but one of them was an English dictionary which he read in minute detail. He has a very impressive vocabulary as a result, but laments not being able to create sentences, and his accent, never having learnt to speak it.

There is some confusion on our part about lunch. Sigifredo has evidently come home for lunch, and frying sounds and smells from the kitchen make it seem like lunch is on its way. So we decide that we will wait until after lunch to do the interview. We have a great chat with Sigifredo, who talks about everything on his mind – and we’re acutely aware that we need him to save this for the actual interview.

The best way to get a great interview, we have found, is to arrive and start rapidly. People are much more candid with total strangers, bizarrely, and the energy of the act of meeting buoys the entire interview. Introductions are always filled with laughter (because of the folly of traversing the entire length of the Americas on a motorbike, voluntary MRIs, the polygamists and the porn stars that we have met, etc) which is easy to carry on into the interview. If we’re going to have a meal, we tend to have it afterwards, if at all.

Well, lunch is being prepared. Do we get 15 mins of interview, then continue after lunch, thus interrupting the flow? Or do we hold out, make small talk over lunch then do the whole thing afterwards, even though Sigifredo has to leave fairly soon after lunch? It’s a difficult one to call, but we decide to go for the latter. We have a delicious lunch with the entire family (minus one son) and the bodyguards and some friends who have wandered in, Mike and I try to keep the conversation going without exhausting interview questions, and then eventually, an hour later, we sit down to interview.

Our sadness is that the energy has changed. Everyone is in the post-lunch torpor, not helped by the intense heat of the afternoon and the broken A/C. Sigifredo’s eyes are half on the clock, and we know that we don’t have as much time as we’d like.

That said, we did get a good interview with him. Sigifredo and Patricia’s situation has to be the most intense imposed upon a couple by external factors that we have seen on this trip, if not recent global history. Patricia, over the entire 7 year period of Sigifredo’s absence, received 3 notifications that he was still alive. 2 towards the beginning, 1 later. As she recalls the time while he was away and she was left to raise her two sons, praying that he was still alive, and largely forgotten by the state, she cries.

It’s very rare that couples where one member has endured a kidnapping remain together after release. Ingrid Betancourt is no longer with her spouse, the 3 US men who were with her are no longer with their wives.

As Patricia puts it: “I’m not the same Patricia, he’s not the same Sigifredo”. They are having to get to know each other all over again. An act which takes immense patience and love. What a case study in the power of love to heal, to restore, to be worth waiting for. We leave amazed by the human spirit.

The day dawns bright, hangovers abound, and a big drive is on the cards: after 5 fabulous days in Bogota, we are heading south to Cali. Leaving the perfect climate (we’ve rejoiced at being able to wear jumpers again) and heading back to the heat.

Every Sunday, from 7am to 2pm, a large chunk of the roads in central Bogota are shut down. It’s the most wonderful initiative – called Ciclovia – which gets the city walking, running and cycling. Though it thwarted our exit from the city somewhat, we eventually drove past hundreds of people, happily pushing prams, rollerblading, carrying their dogs on their bikes… all on the main roads of the city. And it’s initiative of the wonderful Mr Mockus – changing “the software, not the hardware” of the citizens of Bogota.

The road from Bogota to Cali is famously very very uphill for the first part, and very very downhill for the second. All, naturally, on single carriage roads with the freight trucks of Colombia passing along them. Time for me to attempt to get technical for a moment, at high altitude, the bike struggles to get sufficient oxygen for combustion into the engine. All that’s required is to change the jets (which regulate the amount of oxygen which enters the engine), but before you do, whatever bike you ride will wheeze like an asthmatic donkey. And this ours did. The trusty Ural, yet to let us down in any way, did not much enjoy climbing to a height of 3,300m without us taking the time to change its jets. Yet it patiently weaved its way up winding roads, overtook laden lorries, and rumbled along merrily.

We eventually pull into a deserted hotel just outside the PanAmerican town called Melgar. A swim in the pool at dusk, then we settle down to celebrate our first anniversary in front of a DVD on the computer and some happy reminiscing about what we were doing this time last year. We got married in Italy, on the Ligurian coast on the north, in a crumbling villa overlooking a bay. Without wanting to lapse into the inevitable cliches, but doing so anyway, it was the happiest weekend of my life, and sitting with a cold beer at the end of a long day of driving, I was very content to think about it all over again.

Miguel Caballero is not married, nor necessarily in a couple (secretary wouldn’t confirm) so we couldn’t get this into the doc, no matter how tenuously. But we did go down there, interview one of his senior blokes, and try on the clothing. Surprisingly lightweight considering what it protects you against. Mike tried a huge, bulletproof flasher mac; and me, a more casual sportsjacket. Niiice.

(They also supply military gear, bike gear, and other stuff. But the James Bond bling is what everyone’s really interested in. In fact, if you type Miguel Caballero into youtube, you’ll see a whole load of people being shot by the man himself, proving the safety credentials of this charming leisurewear)

Well, we had hoped, when we arrived – and panicked – in Bogota, that we could get a few key interviews which we felt would be an interesting representation of Colombia – both the stereotype and the truth. After 5 days here, I don’t think we could have dreamed that we would been able to get as many great interviews – and to top it all off, we managed to talk to a Colombian guy incarcerated in the States for 7 years for trafficking 20kg of cocaine. And his wife.

Biggest coup of all was that he was totally willing to speak to us about it. Though he has asked that his identity remain secret on the film and on the web. So fuzzy faces all round, and a fascinating tale of DEA entrapment of a relative innocent to follow…

We’ll call our interviewee S. And away we go. S was born in Colombia, but was quickly whisked to Miami where he was raised. His father was part of the Colombian embassy over there, so the family were automatically granted papers and right to be in the country. After a few years, the marriage soured, the Colombian ruling government changed and the father was called back to Colombia. The mother and her 5 children decided to stay in the States. The only issue with that was that none of them had the legal papers to do so.

There are ways of dealing with this – basically, they could never leave the country. When S got to an age where he could work, he acquired false papers and got a job to get himself through aviation college. He was working at a restaurant where a Colombian client would come in often. Turns out, unbeknowst to S, that this guy was a very, very wealthy Colombian, part of a one of the biggest drug rings in history – the Cali Cartel,  which the DEA was cracking down on. So much so, in fact, that they put a number of DEA informants into the restaurant to work as waiters alongside S, though he was not aware of it.

The Colombian was naturally suspiscious of people, but really liked S because he was Colombian, so always asked to be served by him. He tipped really well, so S was always pleased to do so, and gradually, the two of them struck up a friendship. S started hanging out with him, going to parties, spending a lot of time with Colombians in Miami, something which he had never really done before – never having been back to Colombia, since he couldn’t leave the country. He really liked it, despite speaking English with barely a trace of a Latin accent, he said he always felt very Colombian, and it was a thrill to hang out with his countrymen. He also said that the drug dealer guy was a great guy – really nice, kind and great fun, not at all like the distant, menacing bad guys surrounded by heavies you see in films.

Meanwhile, he had become good friends with one of the other waiters – one of the DEA plants (not that he knew). The plant asked S to introduce him to the dealer guy, and they all – and other waiter informants – became close, but the guy always trusted S above all because of the Colombian connection (the DEA plant S was friends with was half Eskimo-half Canadian). S is 19 at this point, he’s naive, enthusiastic and trusting.

The Colombian approaches S with the offer of deal: for $140,000, all S has to do is drive a car, laden with 20kg of cocaine, from Miami to the Canadian border (but not across it) where someone would pick up the car. Easy peasy. Or so it seemed. The DEA informant, interesting, had set up the deal with the Colombian, so he’d get a huge chunk of money too, but the Colombian didn’t trust him as much as he trusted S, so he wanted S to come to his place alone, then S agreed to pick up his friend afterwards. The two of them had talked for hours about how they would invest their earnings: they wanted to set up their own restaurant together, which they’d planned to the last detail. S was naturally dubious about the deal, but just couldn’t walk away from the kind of money which might finally make him legit in the States.

He was taken to a house, and shown to the car. “The back of the car had a fake compartment – like the stuff you see in the movies, well, it’s for real.” Around that compartment, they had coffee and syrup in casing, to prevent detection by sniffer dogs. S picked up the car, drove away from the house and went round the corner to pick up his friend. Two minutes after which, the car was completely  surrounded by DEA officers.

Still S had no idea that his partner-in-crime was an informant. This guy gave a totally convincing performance of shock and terror, and the two of them were taken to the DEA detention offices, and interviewed separately, and the first he knew of the DEA guy’s true role was much much later.

S was terrified. He was both scared, and so gutted that he’d been caught after 2 minutes! He was about to be put away for drug trafficking, yet he’d never even reaped any reward for it. That was what he kept thinking – how unfair it was that he’d got caught on his first time…

The mandatory term at trial for drug trafficking is 10 years. But the DEA offered S two options for a shorter term: 1. He could become a DEA informant, and be out again immediately as long as he worked with them. 2. He could accept full culpability for his role in the plot, and go down for 5 years.

S knew that he was completely guilty. “The thing was that there’s a law in the US that says you have to have a mental predisposition prior to first contact with a government informant in order to be guilty of a crime. Although I am 100% guilty, I did not have that predisposition”. ie. when he first met the DEA informant, he was not involved in any way with the drugs trade, and it was only through the guile of the DEA officer (suggesting the deal with the Colombian in order to catch the Colombian, and tangling S up in the middle of it) that got him into the deal.

So his position was immovable: he refused 1. on the grounds that he would never do what his “friend”, the DEA informant, had done to him to someone else, to ruin some random person’s life; he was not prepared to admit his guilt (2) without fighting the case for his own entrapment.

The issue with taking the case to court is that it came with a minimum term of 10 years. Just for going to court. So by standing his ground, and he became determined to fight the beast of the DEA (he had spent the time up to his trial studying law, which he continued when inside and is now a qualified paralegal as well as other qualifications).

To muddy the water further, the Colombian was part of the notorious Cali drug empire, so S’s name became tarnished with that brush. The mere association carried huge implications for S’s trial – despite his protestations that he hadn’t even heard of that gang. He battled and battled, and eventually was given a term of 7.5 years. The DEA didn’t concede to entrapment, the judge believed him to be guilty and yet, he was awarded less than the minimum term, a fact which he strongly believes suggests their recognition that his involvement in the deal was that of a relative innocent.

He went to jail, and for the first year railed against the autorities. He felt that they had basically taken a good guy (who admittedly had fallen in with the wrong crowd, but who had been tricked) and put him somewhere bad, and now it was time to earn his badness. So he fought the authorities at every step, fell in with the worst of the crews in the jail, brewed prison liquor (a revolting sounding process involving grapefruit juice, bread and removed lightbulbs to ferment the thing with the energy source) and months spent in “The Hole”, a dark room not bigger than the one single bed it contained, where he’d pace backwards and forwards, do headstands, beef up. And read. So here was where the big change happened. S started to read the books around him.

After a year of being off the rails, he cleaned up his act. It coincided with a prison move, so he was able to start again. This time, he got in with the Imam inmate of the prison. The Islamic prisoners had their own group, one which didn’t get involved with the violence, but who were left alone on the grounds that they were pretty hard in their own way and kept themselves to themselves. At this point, S embraced Islam. He read the holy texts, and was a really ally of the Imam. He grew his beard and studied with them.

The next phase of his incarceration saw his beard get longer and longer, and him withdraw further from company. Still studying, reading and determined to use his time inside for improvement. He applied to study by correspondence course at a local educational institution, but once they found out that he was not legally a US citizen, they declined him. His grades were better than any of the other students, so he managed to come to a private agreement with the tutors, so though he couldn’t collect credits, he still was able to participate in all classes and have his work marked.

By this point, he’s livid with the US government, he’d prefer to be extradicted to Colombia than life in the half-light of not having the rights of a US citizen. But they didn’t do that. So 68 months later, he left the US prison, left the US for good, and returned to Colombia, a country he didn’t know, with no one he knew there (apart from his estranged father who was living in the Amazon) – and a family trapped in the US, and him trapped outside it.

The interim years are as filled with adventure as the ones before it (though this time it’s all legal), but we ran out of time with him. The story that I can tell you is that he is now happily married to a Colombian lady, and they have two gorgeous little girls. S’s mother unexpectedly appeared from the back of the flat at the end of the interview. Her own mother was very sick, so she returned to Colombia, knowing full well that she would never see the States again, and she now spends a lot of time with her granddaughters. And S has made a good life for himself in Bogota, so our hero is ok.

He’s a very compelling storyteller. He has the occasional twitch in his arm as he recounts the lengthy story. His candour is so engaging that it’s easy to lose oneself in his lifestory, it was only the fact that we were late for our next deadline that meant we had to leave.

I told him to write a book. I doubt I have done any kind of justice to his story here – there is much more detail to be delved into (grapefruit liquor made from bread? Imam immunity? Syrup and coffee casings? Gang segregation inside, etc).

Despite us wanting to find a drug story in Colombia, the stereotype is not the norm. The people here are fabulous – warm, open, generous – and the country is awesome. Roberto Palacio, the writer who we met on Friday, said that the Colombian government had come out with a statistic, in the last couple of years, which suggested that 12,000 Colombians were involved in the drug trade. Many of his US friends couldn’t believe that – surely it was more than that? Roberto countered with – ok, well, let say it’s double that, no, double that, hell, say it’s more like 250,000. That’s still much much less than 1% of the population. And yet the entire country is tarnished with this brush. It’s something I have talked about with everyone – how the image from outside is dramatically different from the truth of the country – and taxi drivers, waiters, friends, interview subjects and hotel/hostel staff alike roll their eyes and say that it makes them very sad to think that’s all their wonderful country is known for.

We leave our 3-interview-day behind us (a whopper, but what a corker!) and go out to Bogota’s most famous restaurant, a place called Andres Carne de Res (www.andrescarnederes.com/) about half an hour’s drive north of the city. It’s one of the best nights out I have had anywhere on the planet. If you find yourself in Bogota, make sure that you make it north to Chia (there’s one in the centre too, we later learnt, which is newer and smaller) to a crammed Swiss chalet style huge world of glowing red hearts, wooden benches, and the best meat you’ll eat north of Argentina (though I’ll get back to you on that one…) We danced until the small wee hours, bumped into an old friend randomly, and loved every minute of it.

He’s such a fascinating character that his life bears summarizing (thanks Wiki):

• Born in 1952 to Lithuanian immigrants in Bogota.
• Considered a child genius, he could read by 2.
• An accomplished polymath, he is a mathematician, philosopher and politician.
• Rector Generale of the Colombian National University from 1990

(Lots and lots to say about Mockus, a fascinating, brilliant, honorable man and the woman who could satisfy that intellect – but I need to go through the full film. It was one of the most memorable of all our interviews – the objectivity of a philosopher to analyse the profound adoration he feels for his wife)

Herman drives a taxi when he’s not at sea. Which is how we met him. He’s a very friendly fellow, and lives far to the west of the city. We go to his home to meet him and his wife, Blanca. They say that they are very traditional – Blanca is the homemaker, and has been at home with her boys throughout their lives. They have a wonderful open-door policy and throughout the interview, friends and family arrive to be fed. Herman explains that women are expected to do all the cooking and cleaning here, and Blanca does that wonderfully. There certainly is a strong sense of homeliness in the place, and the sons drift in and out, always hugging and kissing their mother as they come and go.

Blanca and Herman grew up very close to each other and have known each other all their lives. Blanca’s parents died when she was 12, so she was raised by her traditional and distant grandparents and the community around her, and was left to be mother to her many younger siblings (her brother Gorge even came round to be fed during our interview). She wept as she talked about her childhood. Herman admired her strength, and liked her maturity. They married early, aged 21, and had their first son shortly afterwards. Blanca lives for her children, that is very obvious. She says so, too. She loves being a relatively young mum, because she is great friends with her sons as well their mother.

Their dream was to have a place of their own. But money was scarce, so when their first son was 16 months, Herman took a job on a ship as a merchant seaman. This meant that he was away for 9 months at a time, he’d then come back for 3 months and head off again. Blanca lived with his mother during this time, a relationship which was very close. Herman said that it was of great comfort to him to know that Blanca was with his mother, a woman who loved her like a daughter.

Herman was at sea when his second son was born, and didn’t meet him for another 9 months. This carried on throughout the childhood of the two boys, and Herman admits that, though he loves those boys, he did not have much of a role in their childhoods, and they are much more their mother’s sons. 10 years after the birth of their first son, when the two boys were 10 and 8, Blanca worried that her boys would grow up and leave her, so she and Herman had another son, now 20. By the time he was born, Herman had taken a step back from sailing so was a much stronger presence in his life, something which must create a curious dynamic in the home.

When asked for advice, Herman talked about loyalty and God. Loyalty can’t be easy for a sailor, but he was insistent that it was key to their relationship. This felt much more traditional as a relationship, Herman earns, Blanca raises the kids, but the house is filled with people and love, so something is definitely working. He has been back for a year and will go away again in 6 months or so, but it’s easier now the children are older.

Mike told me afterwards that Blanca had been very worried to have foreigners in her house, that she hadn’t before. She brought glasses of water out for us nervously on plates. But I only found this out after we’d left. I thought she was a warm and generous hostess.

We spent some time in the Relationships section of the local bookstore, and found a book which sounded both interesting and very entertaining, so we set out to get an interview with its author. The book is called Sin Pene No Hay Gloria (a play on the Spanish “no pain, no gain” – to become “no penis, no gain”) and with it, the author, Roberto Palacio, sets out to investigate the male psyche. It’s written in the form of many entertaining essays about male complexes, and their history. When we meet him, I suggest that he’s a bit of a male Carrie Bradshow, and he loves that. He says that men don’t spend enough time thinking about what’s going on in their heads with relation to sex (not like women) – they are normally just labelled as “simple” in that department - and actually it bears some investigation.

I have to confess that I have not read the book. I have promised myself that it will be the first Spanish book I read, so expect this blog not to be updated for another 6 months or so… What I do get from it is how entertaining it is. Roberto Palacio taught philosophy at the National University for 18 years, so he’s fiendishly bright, but this is his first foray into print. He researched the book for a year – and took real care in its writing – saying that despite the light tone, he wanted to get lots of information across.

One of the issues that we have encountered in Latin America is that what people say about their love is not necessarily true, but there’s no way to get to the real core: Despite their grand declarations of love, and sweeping romanticism, many Latin men marry one woman, then happily engage in affairs. One person we met in Leon, Nicaragua, owned a factory and said that some of his workers will merrily sit around talking about their various families scattered around town. The women know about each other – it’s almost like a polygamy. Even among wealthier couples, mistresses are not uncommon.

So we took the opportunity to talk to Roberto Palacio about this, as the voice of Latin male psychology. He confirmed that this was indeed commonplace. A chunk of his thesis too, hinged on the violence of the Latin American past being linked to male sexual frustration. Again, I have to confess that I got a little lost in the Spanish of it all. He was fascinating, and we talked for much longer than he had said that he could (he had planned to go to a talk at the University an hour after we arrived, but said that he was really enjoying the interview so decided to sack it off)

Better still, we got an interview with him and his wife, Veronica. Laughter is what characterises their relationship, and again, it’s a pleasure to be around them. They met in their late 30s, Roberto had come out of a 6 year relationship, Veronica was single and a friend suggested that they meet. Another blind date couple! When I asked Roberto what it was about Veronica that he liked, he said that “she was desperate, it was great”. Exactly the kind of response Mike would give about me…

The palpable thing that you can see with couples who have met and married later, is their own individuality. Having lived their 20s and 30s without each other, they are very confident of who they are. I always really like these interviews because there is a maturity in the relationship which comes from a strong involvement of the rational (not some hot-headed teenage romance, instead a considered coupling). They have a gorgeous little girl Gabriella, who hadn’t had a nap so wanted a little more from Veronica than our interview would allow… But it did mean that we could get a great interview with Roberto. Again, we felt so pleased to have met these two. A great couple and the kind of people who I really hope we will cross paths with again.

Still on the hunt for good Bogota stories, we set off for the offices of Fondacion Pais Libre, a charitable organisation here in Colombia which works on behalf of the hundreds of kidnap victims in Colombia. We meet with the Head of Marketing and ask about finding a couple who have lived through the horror of kidnap. She has some ideas and promises to call us back in the next couple of days.

Our big interview today is with the British Ambassador to Colombia, HMA John Dew, and his wife Marion. They are our first interview with a British couple, which at once makes it feel very familiar and very foreign – after all the Latin proclamations of adoration, the more circumspect British expressions of affection come as quite a contrast.
 
John and Marion met in Islington, North London, when Marion interviewed John to be a tenant in a big house shared by 6 people. She said that, though not a believer in that kind of thing, she definitely had a feeling during that first meeting that she would marry him. Their courtship progressed slowly, friends first then a couple. John was then told he would be transferring to Venezuela, and, realising that the Foreign Office was far more generous to married couples, they decided to marry. Not least so that they could go there together.
 
And so it has been from there on in: postings every few years, to Dublin, Madrid, briefly London, Cuba (I can’t imagine how many times he must have been referred to as “Our Man in Havana”…) and now Colombia where they have been for a year.
 
Funnily enough, the interview didn’t follow the usual form, I think precisely because they were English. Rather than going straight for the real content, we rather conversed in good old fashioned Brit style – so the discussion meandered and I came away entertained and informed, but with questions that I wished I had asked.
 
I really wanted to know what strains diplomatic life puts on a relationship: just as you get settled, news comes that it’s time to move; so often the couple have to be representatives of the UK, how does that affect them (public and private personas)? When they arrive in a new place, are they very dependent upon each other? Do they get homesick?
They said that actually it is much harder leaving a place than arriving in one. On arrival, there’s the excitement and energy of finding out about the new city, meeting the new faces in the Embassy; generally, they move as a pair, and think in quite a similar way. Whereas everyone has a different way of leaving a place: some people start to wind down months beforehand, some days or even hours; everyone has different rituals – things they want to do or say or people they want to see before they leave, and it all gets quite fraught.
 
Marion talked about the importance of little routines which they keep, no matter where they are. Coffee and cheesecake in a lovely patisserie – they find one in their new city – every Saturday morning. I liked that thought. Mike and I are the same, we try to keep little things the same wherever we are, though sometimes they get abandoned in whirlwinds of stress – the very things which should not be abandoned. The delight of the weekly Adam and Joe podcast (Mike) and This American Life podcast (me). The weekly attempt to listen to Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time podcast (5 minutes max).
 
They don’t get too homesick because they keep their home in North Oxford. Mike, being North Oxford born and raised, then spent a long time with Marion chatting about places, faces and traditions, which inspired a bit of homesickness in him too.
 
They have been here a year, living in a spectacular walled residence in the middle of the city, and are getting to grips with the place. It’s quite different from their previous posts because of the high levels of security: it’s one of only 7 British positions in the world with an armoured security detail. Between them they have 5 bodyguards who are with them wherever they go. The Ambassador travels with 2 cars always – one to block traffic and check for ambush ahead of him  when he sets out , etc. They say that this has changed their experience of the place – for good and bad. Good: they can go anywhere in the city and worry about neither parking (the volume of cars – and traffic – is huge, the government even has the rule that only certain numberplates are allowed on the roads on certain days) nor security (they don’t have to avoid the sketchier areas because they know they’ll be fine…); but they don’t get to know the place in that way that driving your own car and getting happily lost on your own helps you to.
 
The Ambassador talked about the diplomatic role the UK plays here. I asked about drugs (a topic which all Colombians despise talking about because it tends to be the first thing that foreigners ask them about) and he said that  60% of cocaine in the UK comes directly from Colombia, what a statistic. Corruption is rampant, and justifiably so, a Colombian official had explained to the Ambassador that  drug traffickers have huge  resources to offer,  the equivalent  would be a  UK traffic warden being offered 100,000GBP  not to  issue a ticket. Not even an oligarch could turn that down… Ambassador Dew concluded by saying that the bigger deal is the human rights record here.  Over a thousand cases  are being investigated of government soldiers killing young men, then dressing the corpses in the uniforms of guerillas to up the army’s quota. (Our later interview with recently released FARC kidnap victim, Sigifredo Lopez, confirmed that the government is not as active with internal issues as it could and should be). The Ambassador was  convinced that international interest, help, support for Colombian human rights defenders, and where appropriate pressure, was effective as a catalyst for change. It was tempting for many middle class Colombians  to turn a blind eye to  the more intractable problems of their otherwise beautiful and westernised country (cities certainly).

We left the Ambassador and his wife to head further south in the city. We had a meeting with the Professor of Colombian documentary film and TV at the National University of Colombia, Carolina, and her husband, Professor of Economics at the same institution, Ivan. They have been married for 11 years and have a 6 year old son, David, who appeared in an all in one pyjama suit which was the coolest thing I have ever seen.

Carolina and Ivan are still very much in love. They are one of those couples which are a total pleasure to be around, they radiate their love for each other and have a great laugh while they are at it. Their love story, too, is totally wonderful: the two of them were in a choir in Bogota. When the choir first met, three of the ladies quickly decided that they liked Ivan, so the race was on… Carolina was in the loo and overheard the other two talking about how they felt about Ivan, so she knew she had to act quickly to stake her claim.

By her own admission, she’s very shy at this kind of thing, so it took all the guts she had to approach Ivan and give him a small box of chocolates. The other two women witnessed the gesture, and the die was cast. The only problem was that Ivan was fairly clueless – he said that it just never occurred to him that a woman so lovely would be interested in him. So he said thanks, put the chocolates into his pocket (which broke her heart) and wandered off.

So she mustered all the courage that she had and tried again. This time, she gave him her number. Then she waited, and waited and waited. 2 weeks passed and still nothing. Choir practice came around again, and she went over to him and said quietly, “Ivan, would you mind coming to the shop with me quickly? I have a headache and need to get some tablets.” So he came with her. The minute they were outside, she said, “why haven’t you called?! I’m not the kind of person who gives my phone number to every guy she meets!” At which point, Ivan finally got the message. And they started dated. They were engaged two months later, and they’ve been happily and totally in love since.

The bit that I really loved about their story was that one year prior to their meeting, Carolina had been in Israel at the Wailing Wall. She wrote a list of the characteristics she wanted in a perfect man and she rolled it up, put it in the wall and prayed. She said that the list was long. The first thing she wrote, because she was rubbish at her own finances, was that she wanted an economist. Then thinking that she wouldn’t want to be stuck with a man who only used the left side of his brain, so the next point she put on her list was “creative, an artist”. She then went on to list characteristics (kind, generous, honest, funny, etc). And slipped it into the wall.

One year later, she meets Ivan – an economist who writes and performs music – and sings in a choir. He woos her by writing her songs (of which he has now written her many, saying that she is his muse). And every single thing she wrote on that list is true in Ivan. They are so delighted to be together, it is contagious. With a story like that behind them, they feel that God intended for them to be together, which is incredibly binding (we have seen this over and over again in Latin America). They laugh, they delight in David, and it was a total pleasure to meet them.

Carolina is candid about her need for creativity in a partner. She says she can’t imagine life without the joy of music, art, museum, literature. She can’t see how couples who don’t have that in their lives can get the most out of life. The two of them certainly get the most out of everything they do, it’s inspiring. She spent 8 years researching and writing a book on the history of Colombian documentary film. He did his PhD at Warwick so they lived there for 2 years, and they happily chat to us in English – though the interview itself is in Spanish. He even gets out his guitar and plays us 2 of the songs he has written her. Halfway through David potters out in his little jumpsuit, and says he wants them to come to bed because he can’t sleep without them. What a happy little family.

Mike and I were legally married one year ago today, in East London. We have chosen for this not to be our wedding anniversary (somewhat bizarrely) and instead to go for November 8th, our big Italian wedding day. Mostly because 8.11.08 should be easier for Mike to remember…

Bogota sits at 2,600m. Which is why it has such a lovely, cool climate. And why we feel sick as dogs for the whole of our first day here.

We do our usual thing yesterday of arriving in a new city and panicking that we have no leads. (People often ask how we find the couples that we interview – well the answer is twofold: internet and panic). We spend the morning squabbling about who can use the one internet connection, try and find out as much about Bogota as we can, then try to find people who capture that. Ideas on the table are a guy who makes bulletproof clothing, the British Ambassador and his wife, we’d love to get something on drugs or kidnapping (truth behind stereotype stuff), an Colombian author who has written a collection of funny essays on the penis (!), and we’re trying to get something with the Colombian paper. All distant dreams at this point. Panic.

So we go and see Michael Jackson’s This Is It after firing out emails to all and sundry. Great film. Great cure for severe altitude sickness.

The flight is a dream: it can cover such distances! In such a short time! With a roof! And air-conditioning! And I can watch telly! Bliss. We arrive in Bogota, get money out, abuse the arrivals’ free wifi and then head to collect the bike from the cargo terminal.

Easier said than done, apparently…

We left it in a warehouse on the outskirts of Panama’s International airport with a company called Aerolinea Cargo Pack. We were told to head to the offices of “LAS” at Bogota airport, as they are the sister company in Colombia. We eventually find the offices (after the usual trawl around all the cargo warehouses in the vicinity of the airport). Mike talks to the man, and of course, he can’t get the bike until he has dealt with customs. Customs is a 5 minute cab ride away. There are no cabs. It’s 20 minutes on foot. Off Mike sets.

Two things are for sure at this stage:
1. It’s much much easier to be in charge of your own travel arrangements, rather than at the mercy of others. (Come back bike! All is forgiven!)
2. The weather in Bogota is wonderful. It’s sunny and breezy. Bliss.

We get the bike and we head to a friend’s sofa in town. Bogota holds much-needed promise.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS A LONG EXPLANATION OF A BAD DAY. THERE’S NOTHING ENLIGHTENING IN IT, NO COUPLES’ STORIES, NO WISDOM ON LOVE, IT’S JUST A RANT. SO PLEASE DON’T FEEL LIKE YOU HAVE TO READ IT.

The above,in quotation marks, was as much as I could write as I wept in Panama City’s airport. It’s now Tuesday, a day later, and with the objectivity of a good night’s sleep and a few hundred miles between me and Panama (writing in Bogota), I know that I won’t be able to recreate the severity of the reasons why I felt such total, all-consuming and black despair.

The day seemed (naively) like it was going to be hard work, but doable:
- Mike: get dollars to fly the bike cargo from Panama to Bogota (the cargo company was asking for around $1000 in greenbacks)
- Mike: having tried to book flights online for Bogota (for us to follow the bike there), and realising it wasn’t possible with a UK credit card, needed to find a Avianca office to buy flight tickets from Panama to Bogota. Preferably today.
- Alanna: update a week’s worth of blog (looks piddly in comparison with the Spanish admin hideousness Mike needed to do. Took me the same length of time, depressingly)
- put bike on plane
- get selves to Colombia

Mike sets off on the bike and leaves me in the seedy restaurant of the place we are staying in. The bike had to be at the Cargo Terminal of Panama’s Tocumen airport by 2pm to be checked in for its flight that evening. We had been told that, with traffic, the journey to the airport can take 2 hours. Mike didn’t have a watch (the strap fell off that very morning). He got back to me at 1.10pm.

He was unspeakably stressed.

He had tried 10 ATMs and 3 banks to try and withdraw the dollars we needed. The night before, knowing that HSBC cards only let you take out $500 every 24 hours, he had taken out that amount. But it was not the previous day in the UK. So he couldn’t get any more out. Our other card is an American Express card. Which you can get as much money as you like out on, but none of the banks he went to, nor the ATMs he tried, accepted AmEx. And the Avianca offices said that all the flights today were full.

Mike’s stress is as ignorable as a slap in the face, so I caught it. We packed as fast as could, set off for the airport, with Mike cursing like a trooper the entire way. Terrified we’d be late for the cargo office, stressed that we didn’t have the money we needed for them to ship the bike, stressed because we wanted to fly to Colombia that evening but didn’t have tickets. Just a red hot, raging, stress vortex of doom. I tried really hard to be the sane one (!!). Of course there’d be a Bureau de Change at the airport where we could buy dollars on the AmEx, of course the traffic would be ok, of course we could try and buy tickets. It didn’t matter if we didn’t make the flight tonight – 2nd Nov is Dia de la Patria in Panama so we’d get some great parade shots, etc.

But nothing calms him down when he’s like that (to be fair, I think it’s as stressed as I have seen him on this trip so far). So I turned off the intercom between our helmets and tried to keep myself calm.

1.57pm. Make it to the airport. Turns out the Cargo Terminal is about a 20 minute drive from the airport. Through the dumps as it happens. Mike, like coiled spring, overtook everything on tiny winding roads, cursing like a trucker all the way. It started to rain (surprise surprise). The cargo terminal is not easily navigable and we drove around, lost and desperate for 15 minutes. Finally we find our girl. She’s calm, she’s wonderful. She says that we can pay the missing dollars when we arrive at Bogota (of course it would be preferable to be paid now, but no worries if not). This should be the end of the stress.

But we don’t work like that. Remember it’s 2.30 and we haven’t had lunch. And we are rubbish without food. Mike makes the mistake of calling AmEx to ask if there’s anyone at the passenger airport who will take AmEx. He’s on the phone for 10 minutes and eventually transferred to a dead number. That soothes him immeasurably, as you can imagine.

With the cargo lady’s permission, we head to the airport to try and get money out on AmEx, try to buy tickets for Bogota, try to eat. Worth saying that the early, gentle drizzle is now a full on, fat dropped, ignore-me-at-your-peril tropical rainstorm. The sky is dark grey, the visibility is low as a result, it’s humid as hell so very sweaty, and no raingear in the world can keep you dry on a bike in the face of this liquid assault.

We shake off the wet. I make us eat first. Canteen grub. (Though it’s worth pointing out at this point, that I’m delighted to be in the airconditioned, dutyfreed, international hub of the airport. Love it. Have missed these babies as we’ve sweated our way across border patrols)

Then to Avianca. No space on flights today. But maybe, if you come back at 4.45pm (in one hour), we can get you on. Buy tickets. To bank. Don’t take AmEx, natch. Back to bike, back to warehouse. We gradually get the bike sorted (knowing that we have to be back at the terminal in 20 minutes and the drive takes 20 minutes). The underground office has 4 people typing in it: the lovely lady who is busting her balls for us, and 3 other rabid facebookers. When the nice lady asks Facebook 1 to order us a cab, she hands over the cab number. Then looks very sullen when asked to call it. “Computer says no” there are no cabs. Have to get a lift from nice lady half way, then we try and find a cab. I fall over in the pouring rain and land on my kneecap, grazing it. Things are not looking good for our heroes.

Back to the airport. Soaking. To the Aviancar desk. 5.01pm (NB flight at 6pm). There’s no one there. We ask. People ignore. We ask again. We’re told to queue for customs. But with no boarding pass, say I, child of standby travel, no cigar. Mike sets off to find the neckless troll who sold us the tickets in the first place. He’s ushered into a small back office where said troll dwells. He asks – “is there space? Have we made it on the flight in an hour?”. “No!” says Henry’s Cat. “I said you had to be here at 4.45pm and you are here at 5.02pm. You are not allowed on the flight.” “but we have an hour…” says Mike. “No”. And she turns back to her troglodite friends and the discussion is closed.

So our bedraggled heroes crumple. We descend to arrivals to try and find a hotel near the airport (we’ll fly the next day at midday). But there’s no one at the hotel information desk. The attendant who said “she’s in the loo” shuffled off after 25 mins with still no sign of “her” – that must be one massive turd she’s a droppin’. Eventually, a security guard says there’s a hotel nearby with a courtesy bus. We wait at the side of the road for it to arrive, it takes half an hour. I cry. It all just feels too much: the incessant rain, the heat, the “NO”s, the weight of what we have taken on, the relentlessness of this whole thing. I’m just so tired. So tired of working this hard this ceaselessly, so tired of being soaking with either sweat or torrential rain, tired of listening to people for hours and hours, tired of living out of a tiny bag, tired of putting on weight like a midWestern lardarse, tired of all the uncertainty the future holds – why are we doing this? What will come of all this hard work?, tired of the fact that we’re only half way through. All of this manifests itself in silent tears. I start to hate Mike too, for sharing this exhaustion with me, for – ridiculously – always using the “tu” form in Spanish instead of the “Usted”, for everything. (you can see how reasonable I was being)

On the courtesy bus, we find out the hotel is $115. That’s pretty much more than we’ve spent on all the hotels in the whole of Central America… Bastards. And the wifi doesn’t work. And our room is the furthest from reception (and reception is the only place we can phone/wifi) and it’s all just shit. And the rain just keeps raining. Fat, hard rain.

We head back out to the Miraflores area of the City where our next couple live. They have been married for 11 years, both are on their second marriage and arrived with kids in tow, so the marriage started with 5 kids. Pablo worked for the APC (Panama Canal Authority) for 38 years. It’s one of Panama’s biggest companies, employing 7,000 people directly (and countless more indirectly through tourism, restaurants, museums, etc) and much of the country’s youth aspire to work for it. His wife, Marisa, also works for the APC as an electrista. And to our delight, she is fully qualified to operate one of the little locomotives which guide the supertankers into place in the locks. (“Tommy Tow Trucks”). Uniting two families of teenagers who have been raised in totally different ways is enough to separate even the hardiest of loves, but these two somehow managed it. Marisa talked about how the 3 sons, raised by their single father, had very boyish ways about them (flipflops and bare tops the norm, coming and going from the house as they pleased) but that they managed to work it out between them, with a lot of love and a little diplomacy (the parent of the relevant children would tackle whatever issue arose). Her piece of advice for lasting love was that, when you find yourself engaged in debate with your beloved, decide whether the discussion about a topic which is going to affect you for life, or just a passing foolishness. Then react accordingly. Invariably, nothing is that important…

The firemen burst into unprompted life at around 6.10am. This is not an hour which the Clears can recognise. Nonetheless, there is no chance to going back to sleep. With a bit of fannying about, more references to Sex Max, and a quick chance to interview the entire squad on “Que es el Amor?”, we set off with the ever-famished and big-haired Mark to find a big breakfast (he eats the meals of 8 men).

I force Mark into the sidecar, the helmet barely fits over his now-massive Einstein ‘fro. Then we part company. Him to cycle to his boat down the canal (lucky sod) in 3 days and us to drive to Panama City.

We have yet another meeting with friends when we cross paths with our favourite South African BMW man, Chris, and his gorgeous wife, Melissa (references to Barbie and Ken abound). It’s speedy, seedy and sweaty. But we promise to cross paths in Ecuador.

And so Mike and I head to Panama City. The rains come, natch. We are now listening to Mr Norrell and Jonathan Strange on audiobook which is totally absorbing and helps the hours fly by. Even in the rain. Once in Panama City, we check into some local shithole and head immediately to the Miraflores Restaurant north of the city, where I promptly am rendered as excited as a child.

The Miraflores locks are one of three sets of locks of on the Panama Canal. I really have never seen anything like them in my entire life. The canal is busy day and night. Supertankers queue up across the bay to traverse the canal (which takes them about 10 hours, across the three lock systems and various lakes along the way). The supertankers are pulled by locomotive engines, genuinely like Thomas the Tank Engine, and guided (with usually about one foot to spare either side) into position for the locks. Out floods the water, the huge vessels sink and then glide on to the next awaiting lock. I’m speechless with excitement. Which doesn’t happen often, let me assure you. If you have any doubt about where to spend your next well-earned holiday, come to Panama City and spend a happy couple of hours in this restaurant, it’s one of the most extraordinary things I have ever seen.

The day dawns bright, and many tears are shed by the various Boylan women as the little Ural heads off into the distance towards Panama and a day of PanAmerican driving.

The border provides the usual hilarity (through gritted teeth) of 15 documents to be filled in, and hundreds of locals to be paid off. Mike stands at a window, ostensibly at the front of  the queue, with a lady who serves 10 men behind him by reaching through the window for the documents of the people behind him. He, naturally, found this a calming and rewarding experience. “How many more hours have I got to wait?” he asked her in Spanish. She held up her palm to his face. “What?! FIVE hours?” said the ever-cheeky Miguel. Howls of laughter from the gathered crowd. Moments later he was invited into air-conditioned comfort to begin the lengthy process. Nothing like turning the locals against their bureaucrats.

Day of driving. The usual sweat and rain. We make contact with Mark Beaumont who tells us that he is “at the firestation” in San Felix. As we pull up, to the amusement (perhaps bemusement?) of the firemen, it transpires that Mark is spending the night in the dorm with the 10 men. And we are invited too. Just little old me and 12 men. In bunks. Grrrrrr.

I get down to ribaldry in no time, asking if they have a naked calendar, and quickly establishing with the Jefe (the chief) that his man Jose was the young buck who had earnt the much coveted title of Senor Febrero (why February was the dream month, my dodgy Spanish couldn’t discern). One of the merry men whipped out a packet of Sex Max, “para problemas erectil”, which brought with it a fresh wave of chuckling.

Sleeping with that many men was exciting (“poke me if I snore” said Mike as he clambed up on the bunk above me. Sexy sexy). I didn’t really sleep, having given my parents all the camping gear to take back to the UK, I froze in the airconditioned dormitory.

My parents embrace the Outdoor Life with a ne’er-before-seen gusto. They started Wed by waving heartily to us as they set off on a 2 hour rainforest walk. (All this is in direct contrast to the behaviour of the two GTDers who are supine and intend to be for the full 48 hours) Two hours later, they appear sweatier than it was previously thought that humans could get, puce and cursing the vine-ruptured and steep walkways which penetrated the jungle. They had little time to grumble to our passive selves before they had to leave for their horseride through the jungle and down along the beach. Again, they leave with a smug wave and cheeky grin. Again, they return broken and shadows of their former selves. The horses, when they emerged from the jungle overgrowth, saw the expanse of the beach and both bolted with everything they had. My father has only just started to ride, my mother’s horse shot sharply sideways when it saw driftwood – both of these fillies were at top gallop speed, and my parents could do nothing but cling to their manes with determination and terror.

Thursday morning brought with it a whale watching trip for the intrepid Mr and Mrs B. 4 hours of floating on the high seas and not a whale to be seen. The captain of the 5 man vessel took over 35 phonecalls on his cellphone though. My parents loved that.

The day starts with a curveball: Mark Beaumont, the man cycling the same route as us (incidentally, in the same time), needed two parcels collected from San Jose and delivered to him on the road. Mike and I have become mates with him and his team so offered to do it as it just about coincided with our trip and seemed a nice excuse to see Mark and say hello. Little did we realise that he’d be miles away from us at this point, and that my parents had kindly offered to put us up in a Costa Rican paradise for two days to give us a bit of a break. Mark and paradise seemed mutually exclusive.

Realising that we had to get the package to Mark, we set off in convoy. Mike and I on the bike following my parents in their massive beast of a 4 wheel drive vehicle. It is not long, of course, before the heavens open and the wrath of Rainy Season is upon us. My parents are not taking all this very well. A full day of driving, in the rain on very potholey and hilly roads, trying to catch up with a man they don’t even know and even less feel that they owe a favour to… So I suggest we stop at the next wonderful resort, deposit the parents, Mike and I then take the car and drive to catch up with Mark who is an hour and a half further down the road. Relief from all. Parents stop at blissful Cristal Ballena resort in Uvita on the Costa Rican coast, Mike and I can race down to Mark and we end up having a muchly entertaining if barely edible dinner in Rio Claro before we turn around and head back for 2 days of general, undiluted loafing.

(the reason that this seemingly mundane update has made it on to the blog is that tempers really were very very frayed today. I think it was very nice for Mike and I to realise that what we are doing – namely driving for 8 hours for one day, stopping and interviewing couples on other days – is enough to drive most people a little bonkers. After only two days of it, my parents were a little fed up)

Well, Bloody Nora, I’m 30.

Breakfast celebrations: cards, presents and ridiculous headgear. Thank you so much to everyone who managed to thwart the postal strike and get cards to my parents for them to bring out. I spent a very happy half hour working my way through cards and presents. My wonderful mates Freddy and Emilie sent a package full of banners, glitter, balloons, all subtly emblazoned with my new age. In that way that all the hues of a Sesame Street Special are subtle… Mike had spent the previous week panicking because, given that we spend every waking minute of the day together, he didn’t really have an opportunity to hatch any kind of surprise. So the two of us plodded down to the hotel giftshop and he got me a pair of turquoise earrings.

We then leave the wonderful Lost Iguana, and drive to San Jose for an interview at the Finca Rosa Blanca inn and coffee plantation with the owners. Glenn and Terri have lived there and run the place for the last 20 years or so. They are San Francisco (well, Oakland) natives who first went on holiday to Costa Rica 30 years ago when people scoffed them and asked why they would risk their lives, and that of their newborn daughter, by voyaging to such a dangerous and unknown place. Needless to say, they loved it, came back and raved about it to Glenn’s mum, who then decided to buy a patch of land and build a house. The plans became rapidly inflated and the house was too big just to be a private residence so Glenn’s mother had the idea to turn it into a hotel. She very sadly died suddenly fairly soon after she had got it running, and Glenn and Terri were bequeathed it in her will. So they left a cold New York winter behind and embarked, with two young daughters, on a life in Costa Rica. The place is gorgeous, they decided that to feel like real Costa Ricans, they should use some of their land as a coffee plantation which they run sustainably and with all the principles of Fair Trade for their workers. Glenn now tours the world as a lead advocate for sustainable coffee farming.

As a couple they are really interesting because they are great fun and obviously have a riot together, but they are the first couple we have interviewed who freely confess that they love to argue. Or rather, not that they love it, but that they do argue often and that it is a big part of their relationship. Terri admits she is “glass half empty” and the realist of the pair. Glenn is more the optimist who leaps into things without thinking too much about them. Terri loves to travel, Glenn is a resolute homebody. These, and many other things, mean that the two butt heads (they recounted how difficult external contractors find it at the beginning of projects with them, because they often end up with total and extreme differences of opinion which they air loudly in front of the new workmen…) But they’re brilliant and it’s plain to see how much fun they have. One of Dr John Gottman’s findings, when he came to analyse relationships with the intense scrutiny he is famous for, is that couples who fight are – despite what we’d all assume – the ones who are going to split up. It’s the WAY that couples fight which is the indicator for the future success of their relationship: couples who argue in a healthy way will, at some point in the conflict, throw out a lifeline to the other person, a light attempt at humour, or an outclause from the argument, if you will. Couples who are on the road to ruin demonstrate one (or more) of Gottman’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (namely criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling) in their arguments. (I’m not doing his groundbreaking research any justice by summarising it as I am from a small table in a dingy Panama City restaurant, but if you are interested in reading more, Google John Gottman and the 4 horsemen and a plethora of info pops up, here’s a decent summary: www.chinnstreetcounseling.com/zomerland/zomerland_8.shtml)

As an example, Glenn and Terri related an anecdote of when they were outside a supermarket, arguing violently in the carpark. Both were irate to the point of divorce, Glenn terminated the argument by storming off towards the supermarket. As he got through the doorway, Terri kicked the back of his shoe so that he tripped and fell. And from a crumpled position on the shiny, striplit floor of the supermarket walkway, he started laughing and the two of them collapsed in fits of giggles. Argument over.

We then wento on to interview a very different couple: the CEO of Costa Rica’s biggest coffee producer, Cafe Britt, and his wife. What an interview! What a sage and wonderful couple! (more to follow)

I’m exhausted so flake out early. Birthday was breakfast, am now too old to enjoy the day.

A full day of no driving and total relaxation.  My father, ever the researcher, had found a dream hotel cut into the hillside of the rainforest, a place called The Lost Iguana, www.lostiguanaresort.com. For a birthday present, he treated us to a suite which looked out over the Arenal volcano, an active peak which has a constant plume of smoke and fairly regular lava eruptions. (We saw neither though jet-lagged parents were up early enough to snap some awesome shots of the peak)

We spend the morning walking through the rainforest on a suspended walkway. The path weaves through the overgrowth as vines, roots and branches frame its way. Streams of millions of leaf-cutter ants wobbling their way with heavy cargoes of rough-edged leaf chunks cross our path. The sun is shining (very unusual) and the sweat flows in abundance.

Then to a butterfly garden where butterflies as big as wrens flap around. I watch one happily inserting its long and bendy proboscis (oooh Matron!) into a slowly rotting orange. The markings on the wing of the biggest butterfly replicate a small mammal’s eyes, complete with white lines to give the impression of 3D. Extraordinary.

Mum, Mike and I spend the afternoon drinking beer at the pool bar in the tropical rain feeling like we were in a Wham! video. (Natch, my lifelong dream)

We then interview the fabulously-named Johnny Calderon and his wife, Marion. Johnny is a biologist and rainforest guide, and they are childhood sweethearts. They have known each other since she was 3 years old, and they have been married for 11 years, with a 10 year old son, Daniel, and a 3 month old, Santiago. Very cool people with a wonderful attitude to life (and living in the shadow of a very active volcano – “beautiful things are often dangerous” says Johnny cryptically). When asked what love is, Johnny picks up the wide-eyed Santiago who’d been nestling in the crook of his arm and says “This is love!” and the whole family beam. Very sweet.

Holy hell, Batman. We’re going to have an audience. And not just a news audience, people, a real live studio audience. We’re booked to appear on Nicaragua’s number one talkshow, Margarita, te voy a contar…

We arrive at the studios at 2pm. On time, for once. Bike parked, into the green room for hair and makeup. Canal 2′s news team quickly ask if they can interview us, so we are ushered outside to the bike for an interview on Nicaraguan news.

News Interview over, we head back to the green room for finishing touches to hair and make up. Helmet Hair tamed by baffled looking Nicaraguan lady who had never ever seen hair as thin as mine… Margarita gives us our questions to look over (interview going to be in Spanish, time to practice) and leaves us alone. Filming on the show starts, but we are not required for about another hour. Which means that the two of us are left alone with a dictionary, our rubbish Spanish, and a whole lot of time to work ourselves into a panic.

It was like waiting for a Spanish GSCE oral exam, knowing that you hadn’t done nearly enough preparation, and that in fact you weren’t going to be asking directions to the town hall to a solitary man in a room but instead answering questions in front of a live studio audience of 100 and potentially a nation of Nicaraguans.

Finally, we were brought out on stage and sat down beside the charming Margarita. I think the audience were fairly baffled – not at all sure that two Brits with a poor grasp of Spanish was what they signed up for. And we were away. Mike remains convinced that he wowed the crowd with his flawless Spanish, dancing through jokes about local musicians and polygamists with a polyglot grace which I’m not sure he possesses. He’s making the edit of the event so no doubt it will be vetted to tell that very tale.

Either way, he got some great laughs out of the audience. I engendered pity, and all in all, the audience seemed to engage with the idea and we got our hand shaken a lot as we left the studio. Interestingly, the audience all formed a long queue to receive a cake as they left the studio. Methinks they might have been bribed to sit through our interview…

Once we’d finished with the interview yesterday, we headed to Granada for the night. It’s one of the most wonderful towns on our route – it has the same vibe as Antigua in Guatemala (colonial, slightly touristy, very laid back) but is smaller and on the shores of Lake Nicaragua. Mike spent a summer during his university career on the Island of Omatepe in the middle of Lake Nicaragua, studying the behaviour of capuccin monkeys, so this was all his old stomping ground. We stayed in Hotel Granada because he remembered it, and I had to endure much reminiscing. If you make it to Nicaragua, please make it to Granada. It’s totally lovely. We made some new friends last night, and managed to get contacts for yet another great interview this morning.

Maria and Evan own a bar called Nectar. An absolute corker of a place on the main street from the town to the lake, the road where most of the gringos hang out. Maria is Nicaraguense and when Mike told her what we were up to, she suggested that we interview Jose Joaquin Quarto, a nationally recognised historian and political activist, recently awarded a national prize for his work, and married for 62 years. And she organised that we did.

Another astounding interview. He’s a formidable brain, and certainly on the history of Nicaragua. He even spent time incarcerated for his beliefs during the civil war. He credits his family (9 children) as his greatest ever accomplishment, and the courtyard of the house has its four walls lined with hundreds of photos of the family, mostly getting married.

He talks to us for a while about the history of Nicaragua, then he is joined by his wife of 62 years, Gladis. We have another very moving interview about love, marriage, and the role of God in the union. Jose and Gladis lost one of their children, and Gladis says that it’s the hardest thing that she has ever had to endure. They talk with so much pride about their 22 grandchildren and many more great-grandchildren, it’s a wonderful thing. I have to confess, once again, that my Spanish didn’t get all of it, but I did make out that love at this age is not like love in youth, but that it’s equally precious.

So three days in Managua was not necessarily on our To Do list. But, as it happens, it was worth it though we did have to work through some major frustration (and all last week’s X Factor videos on Youtube. Mike angry.) Firstly, we managed, with the help of a bloke we met in Leon, to get an interview with the host of Nicaragua’s top talkshow, Margarita te voy a contar… Margarita and her husband, Alejandro.

Every Saturday afternoon, the show airs to the nation. And Nicaraguans tune in in their millions. Margarita is like an Esther Ranzten, with smaller teeth and many more years on her side. The show is human interest – with elements of Surprise Surprise  (long lost relatives), and Candid Camera meets Hearts of Gold. She has a very strong faith, and as such, the interview with her and her husband was hugely celebratory and thankful for what they share. I have to say, I love these interviews. The role that God plays in a marriage down here in Latin America cannot be underestimated. It’s like a foundation for everything. Perhaps it’s hugely reductive to say that God’s presence means that they argue less (one of the many flaws with our one hour interviews is that they only tell us what they want to tell us – so we never get to hear or witness the arguments) but all of them talk about how they are bound together, feeling more secure in their ultimate destiny because of the presence of God.

When we asked about her fame, Margarita said that it is nothing like as invasive as fame is in the States, and that she is able to have a totally normal life when she is out of the studio. Occasionally she is stopped on the street for autographs, but she loves that, and no paparazzi will follow her around.

I loved her advice which was to have some sort of physical contact with your other half every day – whether it’s a hug, a kiss, or even just a pat on the back. I force Mike to give me a kiss and a hug every morning (I have to say, this seems to be getting harder and harder as the trip goes on…) and despite his general disdain for the gesture, I do feel it gets the day off to a good start.

We spent a fair amount of time in Leon just mooching about. The thing about covering all this distance is that you need R&R afterwards (and what better way to R&R than to go drinking with a South African?).

Prior to our arrival in Leon, our Head Researcher (read “only researcher, my dad”) had contacted the University of Leon’s English department, with the idea that they may be able both to help us find a couple and to provide a student to act as translator. Both of which they did fabulously, a huge huge thanks to the head of the faculty, a genial and generally wonderful man called Francisco. With his star pupil, Ulisse, we headed out to the suburbs of the colonial Leon, off paved roads into narrow mud streets lined with single story dwellings. (I’m making this sound more dramatic for effect, natch).

Gorgonio and Soledad have been married for over 50 years. He is friendly, but has trouble walking. His small and sweet-faced wife is now almost totally deaf, something he says is one of the hardest parts of the marriage now. We wanted to find out about how the family, and their relationship, had been affected by the civil war. He managed to bypass it by keeping his nose down and working the fields. Again, God was an important part of this marriage – and family felt like the most important thing in the lives of this couple, something which we have felt increasingly as we have headed into Latin America.

We get back to the hotel, pack up our stuff, say goodbye to Team Leon (Francisco, Ulisse and the faculty secretary who found us Gorgonio and Soledad) and set off with Chris. Our loud, blonde, Jaarpie Jiminy Cricket. We picked up another pan-American biker on the way into Managua, Phillippe, and tucked into lunch.

Now for 3 long days in Managua. Not the most inspiring of places. Our hearts sank as we waved goodbye to our biker friends as they left us for Granada, and we started on the road to setting up our next interview.

We set off “early”. This means 9.30am. No matter what we do, we don’t seem to be able to get our shit together enough to be able to hit the road. The plan today is to cross from El Salvador briefly into Honduras then out, as soon as possible, into Nicaragua. Honduras, by all accounts, is not a wise place to be at the moment. There are major political rumblings, the ousted president has smuggled himself back into the country in the last few days, and it’s generally not a wise place to be.

As we pull up to the Honduras border, we come up behind a BMW GS1200 Adventure. The bike of the pros (or rather, the people who think they are pros. Wooooooo). The Ewan and Charlies of this world. It’s beautifully rigged with slick Touratech silver panniers, lots of chrome accessories, and a rider in the full, correct kit. I see the Floridian numberplate and the blond hair curling up under the helmet and my heart sinks. Oh God. Some minted Yank.

Hearing English, the rider turns, takes off his helmet and strolls over. Oh God. He flashes a wide smile, and starts yakking with a thick South African accent. We’re ok. He too is heading across two borders to Leon, Nicaragua. He’d been in Honduras before and been mugged, so was happy to have company for the second crossing. Meet Chris. A South African who has been living in the States for the last 18 years. (“I’m a bona fide African American”) He set up a successful construction business, married a US girl and lives in Fort Lauderdale. He somehow managed to convince his wife to come with him on the trip down to Ushaia from Canada. She has rheumatoid arthritis which requires a bi-weekly injection – the medication for which needs to be refrigerated. So Chris set to work in his garage creating a tiny fridge which could be rigged onto the bike. So successfully was his design that Touratech have asked him to create a prototype which they can then look at manufacturing commercially. What a legend.

He and his wife (and I think there’s much to be learned here…) are taking a year to go down to Ushaia then back up through Africa (Mike’s dream!). But, here’s the deal, she does 6 weeks on, 2 weeks off – flying home to Miami (or up to see friends in New York), when she gets fed up, or they get fed up of each other. They are both party-loving, independent individuals, and it seems to be working perfectly.

With Chris, just moments after the fight

I’m left alone guarding the bikes as the boy negotiate the paperwork. I’m in a huge crowd of Hondurans, bustling and trying to sell stuff. After about 20 minutes, a woman walks past and mumbles irritated at me. Another local woman comes to my defence and a fight ensues. My defender is waving a broom at the now spitting and hissing psycho lady. The whole crowd (of maybe 100) is cheering and woooooing at appropriate moments. Finally the “puta” who started the whole thing is shooed away by the jeering crowd and the threat of a broom. I thank my little saviour.

It was the first time we had ridden with another rider, let alone someone on a BMW with an engine nearly twice the size of ours, with half the weight we are carrying. Chris danced in and out of the traffic, smoothly overtaking as the BMW beast acceleration glided him round cars and trucks. We are basically a car. Overtaking is very hard because of the weight that we are carrying and the limited acceleration as a result. 

That aside, the ride at dusk into Nicaragua, pink sky throwing the volcano into silhouette, was one of the most spectacular of our trip so far along La Ruta de los Volcanes. Just breathtaking. We have about half an hour of this scene then the lightning starts in the distance. Nearly continuous flashes of light which illuminate the clouds in front of them. It’s now a race against the weather – which we naturally lose. In the tension to beat the weather and keep up with Chris, Mike clunks into a Chicken Bus which stops in front of us, taking out the indicator and light on the sidecar. Another trip to the mechanic… The heavens rip open and deposit such volumes of rain that even the pocket of the poncho I am wearing becomes fat with rain (it’s zipped shut with a flap over the top to prevent this from happening); we have to ride through deeps rivers which have appeared on the roads. We were only 10 minutes from our destination in Leon, but in ten minutes everything we own is rendered sodden.

We then go out into town with Chris, once we’re dried off, and head to the backpackers’ bar. Where we naturally meet friends of Chris’ from Antigua (which seems to be the centre of the Central American backpacking world). We sit and do the classic thing where it’s not conversation but people retorting with their own travelling stories, trying to outdo each other. I liken it to the way graphite is formed. Layers that are tightly bonded, but nothing holding those layers together. So the layers slide over each other as the pencil of conversation moves on regardless of what went before. A slightly laboured metaphor, but you get the picture.

There a number of international schools in San Salvador, designed to catered to the wealthy middle and upper classes of El Salvador. People who live in gated communities in the capital, who drive BMWs, and who (chose to) see little of the country around them. The children of these people need to be educated, so they are dispatched to either the American school, the Lycee Francais, the British school, the German school… you get the idea. Well, it just so happen that we’re staying with a friend who teaches science at the British school. So Friday night is spent, after we leave the couple and their exquisite, gated property in the hills, with a collection of teaches from said school. All people our age, and drinkers. We meet in a great bar called La Ventana, where we happily get drunk with the kind of bawdy Brit banter which we haven’t had for a while. We then go clubbing, San Salvador style. Somewhat bizarrely, all the clubs are located in shopping malls. So hundreds of people are milling between various clubs, all located between clothes shops and the usual mall fayre. Very bizarre.

Either way, we wake up with hangovers. Time to hit the papusas, methinks. Neil, our awesome host, takes us up to the top of the volcano to check out the crater. Then to a fat lunch with, natch, papusas.

Highlighted by flash of lightning in pitch black night (check out the science specs)

Before the rain, a volcano on the way to San Miguel

We set off late. Of course. But what a wonderful morning of tourist bliss. Head to San Miguel, El Salvador’s 3rd largest city and on the way to the Honduras border. It, of course, absolutely pisses with rain once again and we arrive, like drowned rats, in San Miguel. I make Mike watch So you think you can dance? and then The Devil Wears Prada. All is well with the world.

Our room looks out over the sea. The rolling waves are peppered with the black spidery forms of tens of surfers waiting for the right break. The vista is framed by palm trees, and for the first time in a very long time, it feels like we’re actually on holiday.

Mark is a fascinating character. He’s intense and focussed in that way that you’d expect from a man who has cycled the world in record time. But he’s also great company, entertaining and very interesting. Not what you’d expect from such an athlete (I remember when Mike was training for the Marathon des Sables. His chat disappeared into a vortex of “personal bests”, “calorie requirements” and sleep). We’ve had our ups and downs with regards to how we feel about him – when we first heard about what he was doing (the same route, in the same time and that he had total funding and support from the BBC), we were floored. We were in Vancouver and we spent a day in relative silence and despair, contemplating the likelihood of our film going anywhere, when we were doing a lazy man’s version of someone else’s. But we slowly picked ourselves, tightened our proposition (very much on the love stories, the couples, the experts – rather than a intro to the places we were visiting along the way, which is what he will be doing so well – with a team of BBC researchers behind him) and we came to thank him for being a bit of a talisman. When we crossed paths with him in Utah, it was fabulous. We laughed, got on very well, and resolved to see him again.

Mike goes to the local mechanics to fix the punctured inner tube. He comes back speechless – blown away by the artisanal skill of these guys. Without any of the accountrements of US tyre shops, this little llanteria turned useless rubber into fully operational wheel in less than 5 minutes. For a bill of $3.

Next appointment is in San Salvador, the national’s capital. A city living in the shadow of a conical volcano. Of course we set off later than we intend to, and of course we are driving into the darkness. But no matter, this time we live to tell the tale. We head to a spectacular house, on a hill looking out over San Salvador, owned by a writer, Evangelina, and her husband, Mario, a former industrial rice farmer – from what I could understand, before the civil war, one of the biggest rice producers in the Americas.

The place is like a palace. There’s an entire room devoted to Mario’s love (and competence) of hunting: the floor is covered with animal skins – leopards, deer, erm… – the walls alive with heads of buffalo and antelope; with the centrepiece being a chandelier of antlers. Made by Evangelina herself.

They have 7 daughters. The family is exquisite. Evangelina, with some basic maths, must be in her 70s, but looks sensational. We later meet her 50 year old daughter who genuinely looks younger than me. Evangelina writes for the national newspaper, El Diario Del Hoy, and did a piece of the factors in lasting marriage (her own marriage is 52 years old), which is how we found her (with our Wonder Researcher, Mark Boylan). But her and Mario’s story is much more interesting than we could ever have hoped: Mario lost everything when the revolutionaries seized his huge family rice farm and left him with absolutely nothing. The family went from wealth to poverty, moving to a tiny place where the 7 daughters all had to share few rooms. I have to confess that my Spanish wasn’t quite up to understanding all the details, but Mario freely and sadly admits that it took him decades to recover.

When I asked them how they made it through that time, how their marriage survived, Evangelina said that often crisis drives couples closer together. They had to fight together against the world which had dealt them such a cruel blow (Mario’s farm of course was misrun by the new, land-hungry owners, and the productivity fell away – part of the bigger picture which contributed to the lack of food in the country. Added to this, a blight had attacked rice crops across the Americas, and Mario was at the fore of research to cultivate a variety of rice with resistance. All that research was lost). Evangelina talked about how marriage is like a boat. You have to build something really sturdy before you set sail, and to be ready to be tested by the calm waters and choppy seas which await you. God, of course, is at the tiller, helping you chart a path through these waters. I liked the analogy, personally. I like the fact that you need to be sure of your craft before you set sail, and that you are at the mercy of elements far beyond your control. I just need to understand a little more of the Spanish to bring you more wisdom.

As an aside, they served pupusa, a traditional El Salvadoran dish. It’s their version of the tortilla – only thicker and often stuffed with cheese, beans or meat. As I worshipper of all white foods, I can attest that the cheese pupusa is one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten. Cheese in baked into the bread so it’s one large, doughy, squidgy lump (not unlike myself) and it’s perfection.

Well, campers, the high of meeting and successfully interviewing Rigoberta Menchu is short-lived. We have to hit the road for El Salvador. Nothing crazy about that, I hear you say, it’s only about 4 hours from Guatemala City to San Salvador. Well, yes. But not when you travel like the Clears travel: nothing works as easily as it should. For starters, it takes us ages to leave anywhere. So we’re still buffooning around (writing emails for research, making phonecalls to sort stuff in San Salvador, Skype-ing my parents) until 2pm. Then we set off. Then the heavens open. Again. Big, fat drops of rain which overwhelm us and blind everyone.

We stop in a Burger King in the ‘burbs (a Burber King, if you will) and I GET RECOGNISED by the lady serving me. Yes, people, our appearance in the national paper, Prensa Libre, means that along our route, people know our story. This is my 15 minutes of fame! All hail Warhol! We hide in Burger King, read the article and lunch (standard issue burger for lunch. How depressing. These are the bits that you don’t hear about).

Back on the road when the rain eases up a bit and we head on to the Guatemalan border with El Salvador (a bridge across the Rio Paz). It’s better than the one with Mexico, but still it takes ages. And, of course, while we’re at it, darkness drops like a black inky curtain. Sub-optimal. I’m tense because we still have 200km to drive. Mike is trying to be upbeat, but I become toxic so I warn him, and put in headphones to spare him any ludicrously unjustified wrath. And it’s then, right then, that the tyre gets a puncture. 5 minutes into El Salvador, on a steep ascent, in the pitch blackness, in the middle of nowhere, miles from where we are hoping to get to (which happens to be dinner with Mark Beaumont, the cyclist doing the same route as us for the BBC). NOT COOL. That bloody carter key (all you buffs out there should know what I’m talking about – because I don’t) – the same one which took 20 minutes to get out in Yuma, takes half an hour this time. All it is is a tiny little pin which hold the wheel in place. It’s tiny. And irrelevant. And a pain in the arse.

Sorted eventually, arrive with Mark at 11pm. Too late for dinner, but there’s always time for beer. Good to catch up with him – last time we saw him was Moab, Utah. Very nice to talk to someone doing a very similar thing.

Unbelievable. Guatemala’s most famous woman agrees to an interview with us. We head to her home in Mixco, just outside Guatemala City, and settle down to interview Rigoberta Menchu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 1992 and her husband, Angel. (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1992/presentation-speech.html)

I can’t possibly do this interview justice when we are racing out the door to get to El Salvador now, but I don’t think I have met such an inspiring woman for a very long time. She won the prize for her efforts to bring the struggle of indigenous people in Guatemala, and now the world over, to the fore. Her own story is one of immense suffering, her family were tortured during Guatemala’s fierce civil war, she was exiled alone to Mexico, and continued to campaign. She won the prize in 1992. She is, in some ways, as controversial a choice at Obama – though in a different way: elements of her autobiography were thrown into question when an anthropologist went sniffing about. That aside, there is no doubt that her entire family were slaughtered around her, and she has endured suffering which very few can know in their lifetime. Yet she has been able to take those experiences and use them for the positive, to try and eradicate indigenous suffering and poverty.

The interview, as we expected, was inspiring. She talked about her work, her dedication to bringing peace and understanding, and about her own love for Angel and the importance of it in her life. Angel talked about love in the Mayan tradition, and his advice was some of the most sage that we have heard so far (“love is every moment of every day. It’s the ups and downs, the victories and the failures, the laughter and the tears.”). What an amazing experience. Not for the first time on this trip, I’m am totally flawed by the people that we are meeting.

Today feels better. We have an interview with the national paper, Prensa Libre and we have a planned interview with arguably the most famous woman in Guatemala. It’s all going to be ok… Except that these highs and lows are not doing much for my hope that I’m not bi-polar.

We spent 3 hours in the afternoon being interviewed by the biggest paper in Guatemala, the Prensa Libre. They filmed us driving round the city, then pulled up in the main square to do the interview. The most amazing thing occurred. We were told that Guatemalan people (the “Guatemaltecos”) are very curious. So when the interview began, and he had us leaning against the bike, with us in our suits, , camera pointed at us, a crowd started to gather. By the time we had finished, there must have been 25 people gathered around us in a circle listening to our interview and asking their own questions. This in turn prompted two other news crews to arrive to interview us. It was a frenzy, a totally brilliant frenzy.

After that, the reporters took us for lunch in the bustling market. Hundreds of people selling everything from fruit to local curios and we ate chillis rellenos and drank fresh lemon juice – delicious things that we’d usually steer well clear of for fear of the mighty bum wee.

We then decided to go to Antigua, the ancient capital of Guatemala. A few people, and the guide book, said that it was worth a visit, but we don’t normally have the time for tourist stuff (weep) because of research and driving, etc. But bloody hell it was worth it. If you come to Guatemala and don’t go to Antigua, you have missed the most exquisite city I think I have seen. Without doubt, a highlight of the trip so far. Nestled at the base of a forested basin, with cobbled streets, exquisite buildings, lovely shops – and a fair few tourists, but not so many it’s in any way oppressive. It was gorgeous. Lovely dinner together in candlelit courtyard. Loving being a tourist.

Day of hell. Worst yet, I think. 45′c, bureaucracy of bike crossing borders, swarms of men trying to “help” for money at the border, 2 tropical rainstorms of biblical proportions (turns out that nothing remains waterproof in those conditions – and the sidecar doesn’t look like a bathtub for nothing…)

Weepy wife at end of day. All just too much. As we get closer to the Equator, the sun sets very quickly, so we’re suddenly plunged into blackness – and left doing the one thing which everyone has advised against: driving in the dark. As we enter Guatemala City, we of course get horribly lost (not that we have an actual destination, but just that we are aiming for a half decent hotel, me having been sodden and seated for most of the day). When we get to a hotel which seems ok, we check in, it’s ripe with faded glamour. Things don’t really work. Promised wifi doesn’t work. Have to move rooms. Don’t have an interviews for Guatemala lined up. It’s late, we’re both broken by fatigue, it all feels insurmountable. What are we doing? Two people, with the help of only my tireless father, on their own trying to make a documentary about love. The biggest subject out there. The fact that everyone has an opinion about it is both a blessing and a curse. We have bitten off so much more than we can chew… how can we dismiss entire countries with only one (if we’re lucky!) interview? Are we really capturing the soul of Guatemala by doing an interview with the local paper and grilling the hotel security guard? The thought of going home overwhelms me. I’m exhausted. I don’t speak Spanish. We still have so far to go – not to mention the interviews we have to arrange. We haven’t even hit rainy season. Please, Mikey, can we go home?

Sorry folks, I will update this. Basically a long day of driving. But I just don’t have time to now. But we did stay in a cool place – an auto-hotel. They have them all over – a room with an ensuite garage! How cool is that? Don’t have to spend 20 minutes unpacking bike – garage door locks!

The name of the place we were heading to, Tehauntepec, caused us to get into a massive fight. Or rather, for me to be a massive bitch to Mike. Leaving Oaxaca, the road to said place is not immediately clear so we had to ask directions 3 or 4 times. Each time, Mike asked about “TehuantepIC”. On the 4th time of asking, I got very quiet, then when we pulled up for petrol 5 minutes later, I told him that I thought he was rubbish at languages because he seemed incapable of remembering pronunciation. And vocab, for that matter. A completely unjustified attack, given that he is the team’s Spanish speaker. An hour passed in silence.

We became friends again when Mike gently extended a hand down to the sidecar, to let me know that he’d forgiven me. What a guy. I have promised not to be mean again, he has promised to try and remember words. Ah, compromise, thy name is marriage.

A day of driving the high, windy roads out of Oaxaca to the south west. It started to feel very tropical – lush green forests, and humidity. To top off the tropical feel, it started to piss with rain. Only the third time we’ve seen rain on the entire trip. Out with the sexy wet weather gear, much to the amusement of a passing truck full of lads who jeered and laughed at the mad sartorial scramble happening at the side of the road as the heavens opened.

No doubt we’ll see more rain during the rainy season in the rainforest.

Yesterday was a long day of driving to get to Oaxaca from Mexico City. When we arrived in the city, it started to rain and I became increasingly venomous towards Mike. Good days and bad days – and invariably we only have each other to take our rage out on. Basically, we take turns. Extended periods of time in the sidecar make me volatile; Mike tends to be pretty distant and snappy in the mornings. Fun fun fun.

Saturday in Oaxaca, we head to the Dona Rosa pottery workshop, south of Oaxaca in a place called San Bartolo Coyotepec. Valente and Rafaela have been married for around 46 years (it took them a while to remember). Valente is the son of the famous Dona Rosa who developed the process for making Oaxacan black pottery, famous around the world. The local clay, used for pottery since pre-Hispanic times, cooks to become a matte grey. What Dona Rosa realised was that if the clay is rubbed with the flat edge of a quartz stone when it has been drying for a fortnight or so, the top layer of clay comes off to reveal a shiny surface. When cooked in the kiln for 8 hours (less than the usual 15-20), it comes out a beautiful and totally unique shiny black. No varnish, no paint needed. The workshop sits behind a large courtyard lined on all four sides with hundreds of items of all styles, shapes and sizes made of this pottery. Some gorgeous stuff. Mr Clear firmly told his wife that the lovely fruitplate she was coveting (for $15!) was definitely not joining Team GTD.

The biggest news of the came from back home: Mike’s elder (only) brother, Phil’s wife Bex gave birth to a baby girl, Eva Louise Clear. The first Clear girl to be born in over 100 years (the last one, Peggy Clear, was born in 1908). Much jubilation and tears from a little, homesick outpost in Oaxaca. Thank God for Skype, at least we could talk to Mike’s parents – the brand new grandparents – and we hope to meet little Eva on Skype in the next couple of days.

That night we stayed in Oaxaca with yet another representative couple of the US ex-pat community – a friend of a friend of a friend (remember our whole connection with this warm and generous community started with a 3 minute conversation outside a bike shop in a cloudy suburb south of Seattle, when the kind Janis offered us a place to stay with her sister, Barb (the wonderful!), in Mazatlan).  So, to Patty and Don. Married for 35 years – and they took off on a BSA motorbike shortly after that marriage, so they were ripe for advice. Originally from Missouri, Patty prepared a mid-Western feast for dinner of pot roast pork, mash, biscuits and gravy. Followed by pumpkin pie. Took a while to get to sleep, we were so full.

We’re back on it! A fabulous day and what a way to end our time in Mexico City.

Sadly, I haven’t got time to write a full update, but here are my bullet points:

- Interview with the Bishop of Mexico City, Excmo. Sr. Dr. Florencio Armando Colin Cruz (the Cardinal is the big man here in Mexico – and a frontrunner for the Big Job recently, apparently, and he has 3 henchmen Auxiliary Bishops, of which Colin Cruz is one) Absolutely sensational interview. I had tears in my eyes at times. We asked him about the Catholic ideal of Love, what makes a great marriage, how the church prepares couples for marriage – and supports them in times of marital problems. He delivered superbly eloquent, articulate and flawless answers. Totally sold (I told him that he should polish his elbows and get in line for the Head Man job) even though I’m not a Catholic. In fact the closest I get is a very lapsed father.

- To Basilica de Santa Maria de Guadelupe. This is a very very important place for Catholics as it is the site of the only Church-recognised apparition of the Virgin Mary in the Americas. I’ll do more homework on this and update this. A woman shuffled past the half mile of crazy vendors of every notion of religious relic (“genuine pieces of the cross”) – and past us – on her knees to get to the church.

- That was in the far north of the City and the next interview was in the far south. And this is the biggest city in the world. Mike and I are down with the Mexican Metro. Looks and smells just like the Parisian one. So do the armpits.

- Interview a luchador. It was one of the things we really wanted to do here in Mexico City and it looked like it wasn’t going to be possible, but at the last minute, he comes good. “Crazy Boy” is his name and we grilled him on his fascinating life of two halves: the fame, adulation and fawning groupies of his masked existence, and the total anonymity and search for real love of his private life.

- To a Mexican housing estate to interview a couple who are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary this Saturday. Tears all round as they talk about how they’d die without each other – what would be the point in going on? – and how much they love the family they have created. Deeply moving and very wonderful. Again, a strong sense of faith plays an important part in their marriage, and a very strong worth ethic.

- To Reuters to pick up the footage they sent out to newspapers and TV stations nationwide. We get there by Metro and as we surface onto Reforma, the main road through town, we land smack in the middle of a huge demonstration by the electricians of Mexico City. The atmosphere was electric. We were shocked. (Sorry, too good to miss) Hundreds and hundreds of riot police waiting for trouble.

- DATE NIGHT! Somehow in the midst of the busiest day we’ve had in weeks, we manage to get to an Italian restaurant for a little marriage time. We squabbled quite a bit earlier in the day (Mike: “we should’ve taken the Metro” when we’re stuck in thick traffic on the way to the Luchador.  Me: “Should’ve! Should’ve! It’s always bloody “should’ve” with you!” Rational, as ever.)

- The journalist from El Universal, Mexico’s national paper, calls for a phone interview. It’s difficult because it’s our first interview in pure Spanish (though our Spanish is far from pure). So it takes an hour and a half – Mike does the whole thing. At 1am, I lose my cool and start shouting about going to bed. Again, rational.

I think today might just be our lowest day yet. We spent all day chasing potential leads (an author, a wrestler) across the city only to find at the end of the day, they all came to nothing. Add to that the reporter for El Universal failing to turn up for our arranged 6pm interview and you have a day which amounts to nothing at all and two very very low GTDers.

BUT we did have one highlight of the day: we went down to Coyoacan (Frida Kahlo’s birthplace) to meet with the AAA – publicity company for the Lucha Libre Mexican wrestling. We were ushered into the waiting room before our meeting. There were no seats available. The 3 sofas could in total probably seat 10 people. The highlight of the assembled lardies was a pair of men – both large, of slightly different complexions – and their DWARF WRESTLER MINI MEs. To be honest, I don’t know why we’re complaining about today. Any day with a dwarf is a good day.

Well. The day starts with a phonecall saying that Reuters Mexico would like to interview us for Reuters TV. Woo hoo! I rush to don some slap (in vain), and we head out to meet the team of 4. Thus the Evel Knievel suits and the bike are caught driving around Mexico City, taking in the sites, and each of us is interviewed individually (Reuters’ policy, apparently – not for turning, even when the documentary is about couples), all with the Angel Del Independencia in the background.

I talk slowly and inarticulately. Not, I suspect, the surest of first steps on our thousand mile path to world domination. (Having said that though, Mike rocked)

In the evening, our wonderful host Roberto takes us to meet a gay couple he knows. Sadly, they are not delighted by the thought of me scrawling their intimacies up here (they are, however, happy to appear in the documentary, so another excuse to tune in whenever we make the thing). They have been together for 26 years and we had one of our most wonderful interviews so far, in that they were both so good at talking about the situation in Mexico in general, then setting themselves in that context. My ropey Spanish even let me understand about 80% of the interview, and anything I didn’t understand the amazing Roberto happily and flawlessly translated (NB A Puerto Rican with the best bilingual abilities I have ever seen. Normally with kids who grow up bilingual, it’s very difficult to translate because they’ve never been taught, for example, that una pareja = a couple, for example. It’s just a couple. But Roberto is a master. Also an environmental consultant. Have made him promise that when he does a TED talk, he’ll comp me a ticket). Alongside the wonderful interview, they prepared a breath-taking meal of traditional Oaxacan, pre-Spanish delicacies. In the picture, (clockwise from guacamole at the top): guacamole (where would we be without it? Not Mexico, that’s for sure); the coup de grace chapulines which are tiny fried baby grasshoppers. Hundreds of them, like sprinkles you’d put on a cake. But slightly not. You can see all their bits: legs, thorax, head. They are harvested in nets, then dry fried, and the taste is unlikely anything I’ve ever encountered before, kind of salty, kind of bitter, kind of important you don’t think about what you’re eating. The way that you eat them is by taking one of the tostadas (in photo, bottom right), layering it with refried beans (in photo below said grasshoppers). You then add some of the cactus leaves (with tomato and avocado) as pictured bottom left, then sprinkle the chapulines on top liberally. It’s totally delicious. But just don’t dwell on what exactly you’re crunching on.

(PS Shoot me now for being one of those people who takes photographs of the food they eat then posts them. But this particular time, I had a couple of requests to see the grasshoppers. Apologies to the rest of you)

We interview Lyn on love in Paztcuaro’s town square. She never wanted to be a “wife”, saying she wanted a wife of her own, and so resisted Edward’s proposals – which started 3 hours after they met in a bar, and continued at a rate of one a week for 4 years. Finally she acquiesced and married him, and they have been totally happy ever since – expats by nature, they started in Guatemala, moving to Thailand for a few years, then back to Mexico, all over their 16 year relationship.

They had a plate made depicting their story with traditional Mexican skeletons

She said she called her mother after she got married, in Carson City, Nevada with their 10st St Bernard dog as a witness, “Why didn’t you tell me it would be like this? It’s magical!”. She loves being a wife now, and says it’s not 1+1, but being “to the power of two”: anything they believe they can do, they can do. Nothing can stop them. Though Edward is now ill and has to remain on constant oxygen, and is unable to leave the house. It must be incredibly hard on both of them, I say, and she agrees – but demonstrates no less fervour in her deep love for him. In sickness and in health indeed.

We have another massive day’s driving (I think this may be the theme for the next few months, certainly the next few weeks as we try to get to Panama for October 26th, my 30th birthday). We stop briefly in Morelia, another very very beautiful city, then onwards to Mexico City (“DF” as it is called – districto federal”)

First, we get very very lost in a place called Toluca, an hour outside Mexico City. Signs from the Cuota direct us towards Mexico and lead us into the impoverished suburbs of Mexico. Not ideal. Our host, awaiting our arrival, has the good grace not to inform us of his concern over texts we are sending each other. One hour later, and dusk, we find our way back from the backroads onto the Cuota.

Mexico City is MASSIVE. Still the biggest city in the world, we are told. It sprawls. Really. In such a way that even the locals get lost, let alone the Brit idiots without a map (or a GPS. RIP – in Vegas). But what a great city. It’s alive the minute you enter it. All gleaming skyscrapers and monuments. The traffic, as we have been warned, is solid. Apparently the Mexican government lets cars with different number plates in on different days to try and calm it, but it doesn’t seem to be working particularly well. The one bonus is that, as we sit in very sluggish traffic, a taxi driver draws level with us and yells out in Spanish “you’re the couple driving from Alaska to Patagonia! I heard about you on the radio in Guadalajara!”. Fame, how unexpectedly you knock.

We arrive late to our host, a friend-of-a-friend (which has very much been the theme of our time in Mexico. This time, thank you Flo), Roberto, who we go out for dinner with and generally celebrate the joys of this great city.

Another day of driving. The distances just don’t seem to be getting any shorter… This time from Guadalajara along the Cuota (paid highway – always very good quality roads, though expensive) to Patzcuaro, an utterly beautiful city between Guadalajara and Mexico City. We’re staying with friends of Barb’s: Lyn and Edward. Edward, a Vietnam vet, has a lung disorder so is on oxygen and unable to move about much, Lyn is a bubbly and slightly hippy Canadian. They prove wonderful hosts in Patzcuaro: Lyn gives us a detailed tour of the place.

So what’s the story of Guadalajara? We ask. We need to get a couple before we head on, and today is the day to do it. It’s the birthplace of Mariachis (but no joy there, grrr). But the centre of the world of tequila is, as you might imagine, Tequila. And it’s an hour outside Guadalajara. So today’s mission is to find a couple involved in the tequila business. Advance phonecalls yield nothing, so we set off joined by our friends Carlos and his brother Davide, to find a tequila story.

Tequila country is green, with rolling hills (we later learn, an aged volcano valley) lined with cornrows of blue agave plants. I was nervous. Coldcalling for interviews is hard enough, but just turning up on people’s doorsteps – and not speaking the language. Well, it was going to be a toughie. 

The place which we had found online but been unable to contact was called Los Abuelos, with 5 generations of experience behind its name. Surely, with that kind of family credentials, it must have a couple tucked away somewhere? Well, no. Buuuuuut, it did have a totally fabulous owner (divorced) called Guillermo Erickson Sauza (of the famous Sauza tequila family, hence the name) and a rich history of enmity and love conquering all. AND Guillermo speaks perfect English, looks like Paul Newman and gave us a perfectly-gravelly-voiced tour of the place. As it turns out, it’s the only tequila manufacturer who is sticking to the principles of 100 years ago, and the results are hugely palatable – velvety deliciousness a world away from the salt-encrusted Shame Fuel of my student years.

So, for today’s “what we have learnt” (the bifurcated blog of tourist and el amor)- tequila production in a nutshell:
1. The blue agave plant is the one favoured for tequila. It delivers a softer taste so wins out against its 120 cousin agaves (the green agave is used for Mezcal).
2. Once planted, the agave grows 3 new leaves a month. They are usually harvested after about a year.
3. The leaves are cut away from the pineapple-like centre – this is where the good stuff is. Once the leaves are cut off the base, the bases are collected and delivered to the distillery for processing.
4. It goes into the oven. They use steam and cook for 33 hours, caramelizing it and turning it from the white of the outside to the brown of the inside.
5. This is where I’m going to start to get hazy (relevant grey matter weakened by ensuing deluge of the final product). The agave is then shredded in the only electrically operated machine in the entire Los Abuelos distillery. 
6. Oh God, I’ve realised I have nothing like the vocabulary to describe what happens next. But basically, it’s put in a circular well in the ground, where it’s crushed by a revolving millstone, dragged by a horse (though in this case they now use a tractor). Two men push the agave around to ensure that it is fully pulped. This process takes about 7 hours.
7. Water is added to the well, the agave is washed and the wood fibre is removed. This takes about 3 hours, then once its drained, its pumped up into wood vats for fermenting.
8. The brown “mosta” (must) is fermented with yeast (the only additive at any point) for 3 and a half days. It then becomes “mosta muerta” (dead must).
9. It’s then double distilled. As its cooking off the must, the first thing to rise is the alcohol. At its first pass, it’s about 25% alcohol. This is called Ordinario. (It’s like taking the water out and keeping the alcohol, with a filter) They make 10,000L in a day.
10. This clear liquid is then run through the second set of stills (copper pot stills). After this, it’s tequila.
11. It then goes to the tanks (blanco) then to the barrels for the reposado and anejo.

Blanco is the plain and simple tequila. If you’re taste testing tequilas, you always use the blanco because it’s the base stuff. I suspect it’s what has blotted out most of my university career. Reposado (literally “reposed”) goes into barrel and remains there for under a year, normally about 9 months. Anejo (aged) lives in the barrel for over a year, but less than 3 (after that it becomes Extra Anejo).

We head into Los Abuelos’ tasting room, set deep in candlelit caves set into the agave hill. Quite breathtaking. Mike, he of dodgy tum fame, is coersed into tasting with me – and Guillermo who really enjoys what he makes, evidently. The blanco is a good tequila. None of that burning, poisonous sensation of “quick quick, hand me the f”cking lime!” tequilas. It doesn’t need a chaser at all and goes down a treat. The reposado is lovely, more of a kick, but still not a burn. And finally, the anejo, the punchiest of the hattrick, is more in the tequila vibe. But totally palatable at room temperature and without a chaser. Really very good indeed. Perhaps my alcoholic arch-nemesis and I will become more contented bedfellows in future…

Los Abuelos wins 99% of the taste tests it goes into. The way they make the tequila is totally unique, using all the old traditional, laborious methods, and it really pays off.

Los Abuelos is called Fortaleza in the States, and is waiting to make its European debut. But what a tequila! Awesome.

Well. Kind of. A photographer and journalist from the daily local newspaper, El Mural, comes round to meet us. We have a half hour photoshoot, where he asks for “besos”, and we pose in front of Guadalajara’s Monumento a los Ninos Heroes, precariously parked on one of the city’s busiest roundabouts. We are then interviewed (in direct sunlight on the roofterrace because Mike thought it was a great shot and wanted to film. Sweaty.) by Rebeca, a journalist at El Mural, for about an hour (sunburn to prove it). Good questions, good chat, good fun. Or should I say Guad fun.

Carlos then takes us to the football: a derby of Guadalajara’s lesser two professional teams, Atlas v Los Estudiantes. Flags bought, buckets of Sol and we’re ready to watch. Atlas is the more popular team (though we’ve been told we’re Estudiantes so we know who we’re hollering for). The chants and dances are coordinated – but sadly the Mexican Wave attempts never make it past our stand. A Mexican Wave in Mexico! Denied! Atlas win (boo), Mike and I are tipsy and still totally rubbish at Spanish, and we pass out early.

We head from the 40 degree heat, 83% humidity of Mazatlan towards the wonderfully cooler Guadalajara. The former was a lovely coastal town, but Guadalajara is a raging metropolis: Mexico’s second biggest city. As we enter it, at dusk, we can already feel what an awesome city it is. Not least because our hosts are the party-loving, English-speaking, fab sons of a man we met at a petrol station outside Los Mochis. Carlos, soon to be launched in a Mexican boyband called Sonus (you heard it here first), and his younger sister live in a penthouse in the old part of Guadalajara. And it’s awesome. 4 students live in the flat; it has designs and photos on the wall, dirty washing piled up in the kitchen sink, and some of the most amazing views over the city. We arrive, there is a houseparty raging on the roof terrace (one of the housemates has turned 20 – how old do we feel?!), we drink with some Aussies then head out with the boys. First, to another birthday party where we meet and chat to people from Honduras, El Salvador, Equador… (all have been made to promise places to stay later on), then on to a slick, urban, London-like restaurant (you can take the kids out of media wankerland…), then on to a salsa club where Carlos and his girlfriend (both professional dancers) wow us. Quite a welcome to this place.

We interviewed the couple who run one of the restaurants on the beach. They have been married for 34 years, they have 6 children (4 of their own, 2 adopted) all of whom live and work nearby, they had many grandchildren, one of whom – a little dude called Emilio, 3 years old – was happily running around the restaurant and in the sand. It was our first interview in Spanish, and it seemed to go pretty well. Mike is conversational, and I’m pathetically Italian – speaking as much Spanish as I know (little) and filling in the many gaps with Italianish. Mike kindly pointed out that instead of saying “puedo” (‘I can’ or ‘can I..”), I say “pueblo” (village). Confusing no doubt. Village ask you a question?

Lety and Felipe were totally wonderful: warm, devoted, and very Catholic. God was a big part of their lives: if they go through a tough time (as they are economically now), they pray to God. When we asked what advice they’d give us for a strong marriage, they said “respect and work hard”. And you could see that they did, they had built a thriving restaurant up from nothing, and done it together. Lety said that Felipe had got better over the years at opening up to her and sharing his frustrations, rather than – as he used to in the early days – storming off and raging on his own. The family was very very important to them too. They are very much all in it together, and what a cracking family they are.

We’ve made it to Mazatlan. Whilst up in Auburn, Seattle, Mike parked up in front of a bikeshop, leaving me in the sidecar. This is a usual state of affairs as I’m usually buried in stuff and getting out is not easy. But it does mean that I am fully vulnerable to the Ural Effect: people starting conversations. I am happy to do this – and this particular time, I get chatting to a biker couple. When the wife hears about our route, she says that she has a house in Mazatlan, and her sister lives there. So, 2 months or so later, we descend upon the wonderful Barb in Mazatlan. The house is a haven, Barb has set up a couple of interviews for us, and she insists that we actually get some holiday while we’re here.

Our first interview is with Greg and Gude: a couple who have been married for 41 years. She is Mexican (and 6 years older than him), he is a California surfer dude of the 60s. When they met, Gude had never seen the sea, she grew up on a rancho inland and was one of many children of a poor family. In fact, they talked about the first time Gude’s father (now 99) saw the sea (he was 87). Tears streamed down his face and he said that he could never have imagined that God’s work could be so beautiful. He asked Greg what the “little mountains” in the sea were (the waves).

Gude and Greg’s story is about bridging two cultures, about the resistance Greg received from Gude’s family, about the cultural differences which colour their own relationship. Greg talked animatedly about how he had to work hard to teach his kids that they needed to be punctual, how it is NOT OK to be an hour late for appointments, Mexican-style. She talked about how she needed to chill him out – he was raised by German parents who didn’t allow speaking at dinner, who wouldn’t feed any child who was one minute late for 5pm dinner (“this is a house, not a restaurant”). Greg gave us a great piece of advice – never compare your relationships to other people’s: noone can ever know what goes in between two people, and every relationship is different.

Now, this is where the blog must bifurcate slightly (Oh no! I hear you say, not a bifurcating blog!) as we are now in Mexico, and there’s the down right different element to get in – a “travel blog” if you will. I have no plans to bore you with “then we saw the most amaaaaazing sunset” but I thought I’d put down the things which stick out. And the thing which sticks out about Mazatlan, beyond the fact that it’s a gorgeous seaside town, with a seafront boulevard to rival Cannes or Beirut, and the home of Pacifico beer, is the phenomenon of Banda Music.

Banda really has to be heard to be believed. It came from this part of the world – the state of Sinaloa, Mexico – in the 1880s, and if you can try to imagine, it has its roots in the overlapping of Mexican music with German polka music. Yes, indeed, it sounds just like that. Greg had a story that a German ship was shipwrecked, they raised up the rusted and broken instruments and played them like that. It really sounds like a group of muppets hitting, banging and blowing any metal they can get their hands on. We went to a restaurant popular with the locals (and no gringos) to hear it in action. I ended up, in my crappy Italianish talking to a blind guitar player for half an hour, who is a favourite with the narcotrafficantes because he can play at their parties and not see any of their dealings.

We start the day with an interview with the local Sonora paper, El Imparcial. They interview us for about an hour and take a photo of us in suits on the bike. It then appears on the front page of the paper. Arriba arriba!

Time to turn up the heat and cover some miles. Our dodgy tyre has cost us valuable days, so it’s time to burn it to Mazatlan, and our next rest stop with a friend. Captain Mike bravely says that he can cover 8 hours driving, so off we set. In the midday heat, the temperature gets up to 45 degrees C. It’s bastard hot. We’re totally drenched. No roof, no A/C and no respite, we cover huge distances listening to A Short History of Nearly Everything.

We take refuge from the 1pm sun in McDonald’s in a seaside town of Guayamas, where a friendly American comes up and starts chatting about the bike. Ah, the Ural Effect, we know it well by now. But it turns out Chris is a Jehovah’s Witness, here from Oklahoma with his wife, to lead bible groups and spread the word of the Witnesses. He and his wife, Rachel, agree to an interview. They are a young, sweet and earnest couple – he’s around 24, she 21. They have real belief in what they are doing, and they have a strong marriage as a result.

We asked them about the foundations for the marriage and how important their shared beliefs are, and it seems they are everything. The young couple met when Rachel was 18, and the two of them were working together on the construction of a Kingdom Hall in Oklahoma. They eventually got together and marred about a year after that. They spoke with the fervour and passion of the religious, and it was nice to see how it bound them together (in the same way that Mike and I are bound by a forced faith in the Russian Burro we ride). We heard their sweet love story, asked questions to get to the bottom of stereotypes (door knocking? “Well, if people don’t want it, that’s no problem, but we want to share the word”; refusing blood tranfusions? “if there was no other way, I would have to let him die. But we believe we will be reunited after death”) and the thing which we really took away is that Rachel and Chris were required, before they married, to think hard about the practical elements of their forthcoming marriage. Not wedding, marriage. Watchtower publishes a small book called The Secrets of Family Happiness which requires the spouses-to-be to think about tough topics like what happens if one spouse gets ill? How many children? What if we have an unwell child? What happens if a parent gets ill? Though I’m not religious myself, this seems to me like a very good idea: forcing young lovers to think about the practical side of an impending union. A lot of the advice we’ve heard from experts and couples alike is that shared goals, and mutual understanding is vitally important. In fact, Dr Gottman has devised an exercise for couples in crisis where couples are required to talk about their ideas on key things – ranging from “how do we celebrate Christmas?” right through to “what are my ideas on God?” etc (sadly, we couldn’t fit the cards on the bike, so I’m doing that from memory, but you get the idea) But that’s my thought for the day (Oh God, I’m Jerry Springer now. One Reuters article and I think people are actually reading this gubbins…) strip back the lovey dovey and think of it as a business partnership for a second: where do you want to be in 10 years? What do you want to achieve together? Is it travel? Is it a big house? Is it a menagerie of kids? Is it a lapdog and no talk of little people?

BEST BIT OF MEXICO SO FAR: I take over driving the bike for a while to give Mike a bit of a break. I find the bike very heavy, and I’m quite a nervous rider. I spook quite easily (turning to the right can be hard for a weakling) but for short bursts, Mike can kip in the sidecar and feel a bit restored. After half an hour, I pull over – ill-advisedly on the run up to a right hand turn, so Mike and I can swap places. Mike decides to take a piss. At the side of the road. BIG MISTAKE. This is against the law in Mexico, we learn. A policeman comes over and starts rabbiting in Spanish. Mike speaks Spanish, but not perfectly – what he did glean was that the policeman said “it is an offence to our pristine and beautiful public highways that you whipped your cock out and took a slash”. Much threat of being taken down to the station. Until $5 sorted it out. Saweet.

Mike Clear and Alanna Boylan went on a blind date together on Sunday, September 25th, 2005. What better way to celebrate than in the baking heat of Mexico? Mike and I tuck into a fajita and a Pacifico beer then potter around downtown Hermosillo, which is very lovely.

Bike needs attention so we head to the nearest Ural dealer to the Mexican border, 87 year old Red, in Sierra Vista. With any luck, we’ll actually cross the border today…

Whilst Mike is fixing the bike with Red, I coerse the Indian owners of the motel we are staying at to appear in our film. They represent a crucial missing piece of our marriage discourse: the arranged marriage. They have been married for 24 years, and agreed to do a quick interview with us (sadly, it ended up being only about 10 minutes). Those 10 minutes were not a great advert for arranged marriage… They said they had no regrets, because that’s what society expected of them, but they wouldn’t enforce (inflict?) an arranged marriage on their daughter.

They were introduced by a mutual uncle (by blood on one side, by marriage on the other), and they met for the first time after the marriage had been arranged, at the uncle’s house. Neither could remember the moment they first saw each other – which seems strange to me, surely that was a massive moment? Maybe it was something they blocked out. They said that arranged marriages could work because no one was left on the shelf… The one thing which we did learn from them, though it wasn’t the most uplifting of romantic thoughts, was that any marriage could work if you work at it. These two worked hard at the motel they ran together, and they lead a life which works for them. Not sure I’m totally sold on arranged marriages though. Not sure she was either.

Damn and blast. We get a flat tyre just outside Yuma, Arizona (as in “3.10 to…”). It’s pitch black, we’re on the side of a major highway, and Mike’s already been driving for 5 hours.

Much sweat later, new tyre is on the back of bike. We realise, despondently, that our dream of making the border tonight (in order to make for a whole day’s driving in Mexico the next day) is over. We limp back into Yuma.

The biggest story in San Diego, without doubt, is the story of the border, and the thousands of people who try to cross illegally everyday. In fact, on the very next day, Tuesday, 3 trucks carrying 74 people burst through the border at Tijuana resulting in gunshots from the US authorities, and 1 critical injury.

We really wanted to be able to tell the story through a couple separated by the border, or one who had struggled across the border and made the American Dream work. It’s proven to be the hardest story to crack of our entire trip, and we have, shamefully, had to give up.

We contacted a representative at the Mexican Consulate in San Diego who put us in touch with representatives from 3 charities who work with the immigrants, specifically, trying to prevent the two deaths a day which result from people trying to cross the border. We started by trying to track down Rafael Hernandez, founder of a group called Angeles del Desierto: volunteers head into the borderlands to leave food, water and sometimes clothes for those stuck out there (http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=21518) Rafael and his wife are now US citizens, having come across 21 years ago. We organised an interview – joy! – but at the last minute, Rafael had to pull out to make a trip into the mountains on a rescue mission. When we spoke the next day, his wife was no longer with him, having to go north to be with her ill sister. We were crestfallen.

Hours later, I receive a call from Enrique Morones, San Diego native and founder of Border Angels. www.borderangels.org, inviting us to come and hear him talk at the San Diego Activist Group meeting. Border Angels does food and water drops in the desert to save lives of illegal immigrants, but also campaigns politically to raise awareness of the plight of Mexican workers (and what drives them to make the treacherous crossing), and the importance of Fair Trade. One of the issues high on his list at the moment is that of Friendship Park (www.borderangels.org/friendshippark.html), an area established by First Lady Patricia Nixon in 1971, on the US-Mexican border at San Diego-Tijuana where families divided by the border can go to talk to each other, hug through the bars. Since the US government vowed to strengthen the border a few years ago, the park has been closed because of the added 3 layers of wire fence which now separate families. Campaigns now rage to reopen this vital and important link between two worlds.

Enrique gave us a contact in Tijuana, Micaela, who runs a refuge for people deported from the US back to Mexico. I spoke with her in the hope of finding a couple who could tell the border story, but she said that she only had single women in the refuge at the moment. We left San Diego deflated by our lack of luck in being able to tell this story – we will try in Nogales, but it’s unlikely we’ll have much luck with the short time frame we are operating under.

We meet Arielle Ford, author of  The Soulmate Secret: Manifest the Love of Your Life with the Law of Attraction. Arielle met her husband, Brian, in extraordinary circumstances: she manifested him. It sounds new age and weird, but she’s extremely convincing on this matter… and she’s not some wooden-earringed, long-armpit-haired hippy, she’s an extremely successful publicist credited with launching the career of Deepak Chopra, among others.  The basic idea of manifestation is that you put all your energies into imagining something, in a really positive way. Not “I want”, instead – in the case of love – thinking of all the love you DO have in your life, rather than the one love that you don’t.

13 years ago or so, Ariel decided that it was time to find her soulmate. She compiled a list in her head of all the things she wanted this person to have, then she visited the Hugging Saint in India. When she was hugging the saint, she said outloud what she was hoping for, the saint smiled, and after that Arielle started to have dreams about the person. One of which suggested that this person needed to let go of a person called Beth.

One month later, she flies to Portland with work. A friend of her colleague offers to pick her up (though never having met her), so she gets off the plane and is met by a man she has never met before, Brian. As soon as she sees him, she feels something very strongly. She suspects, just a little, that she’s going mad because she hears a voice which tells her that this is the man. She says nothing, the day rolls on, then later that day (where they are working hard on the booklaunch of another writer), Brian turns to her and says, “you know I have met you before”. It turns out that since Arielle had met the saint a month before, Brian had been having vivid dreams in which Arielle would appear. He also had a relationship with a woman called Elisabeth which he was stepping away from. Arielle and Brian were engaged 3 weeks later, and remain passionate about each other 12 years into their marriage.

It really is quite extraordinary to be around them. They exude a positive and all-encompassing energy which is almost intoxicating. I’m a bit of a sucker for all this kharma stuff – but even Mike is listening intently to their story. They talk very compellingly about attitudes (whether you like the manifestation and mysticism, the idea that people should strive to be happier in daily life is convincing), and it’s clear to see that the relationship that they have is very strong and healthy.

They are both high-powered individuals, in a very 21st century world, who have made time for individual and shared spirituality. I joked with them that we’d only find people like that in California, and they agree, but there is something about them that I do feel Mike and I can learn lots from. One of the things Dr John Gray talked about in his book is about how marriage has evolved and one of the struggles is that working women have to balance the masculinity required in the workplace with the feminity required in a relationship. And the same is true of men, they too need to find a way to augment their feminity to bond and understand their partners better.

These two have worked out that balance. Arielle is feisty and an achiever, but she takes time at the end of her day to purge that inner ball breaker (she calls it her “smiling and dialling” self). She takes a hot bath, pets a cat or goes for a short walk. Brian, equally, finds time to tune into his wife at the end of his day. He talks about preparing himself to listen and be there for her. Whatever they are doing is clearly working. Whether or not soulmates exist, the fact that both of these two believe that they have found their soulmates is the key to their success. They both put a lot of love and nurture into their relationship, and they are handsomely rewarded.

We are also rewarded because they make us a delicious dinner, and we happily watch the Emmys together.  

The day starts with our kind hosts, Ben and Dave, agreeing to take footage of the bike on LA’s mean streets. We drive around, with Dave driving a truck in front of us with Ben sitting in the back of it like a dog, filming our every move. What dudes.

The two of them, with their guitarist Isaac, form together The Lincoln Bedroom, http://www.myspace.com/lincolnbedroom.  

The Lincoln Bedroom

They are just in the process of finishing up their first album, Broken Record. Rest assured, punters, that as soon as we are allowed to use their music, it will appear on every edit you see.

After 2 weeks of some dizzying ups, and some very low lows, we leave LA.

Our next interview is with a couple in Culver City: Dr Lula and Carl Ballton. They have been married for 40 years, and we managed to get hold of them through their church. After we spoke to Hill Harper about the decline in black relationships, we wanted to talk to a happily married black couple to get their views on the matter. We arrive an hour late, which means that I am extremely tense, overly apologetic, and the Balltons, justifiably, are dubious about what awaits them. Never the best start to getting people to open up.

It turns out that it doesn’t matter at all. They talk at length about their relationship – they met young, married quickly because Carl was in the draft for the Vietnam war – and have been very very happily married for 40 years. When Carl heard that he was going to be posted to Delaware, he realised that he had to propose to Lula quickly – he did and they were married a week later on Thanksgiving. The entire community chipped in – making the food, the dresses, the ornamentation – and they ended up having 300 people to their Chicago wedding.

Again, they are a couple with a great dynamic. I have had feedback from discerning readers who would like a bit more criticism in this blog, but genuinely – and I apologise! – that’s not really the nature of our interactions with people. They open up their homes and their hearts to us, and we take inspiration and advice from them for our enduring relationship.

The most extraordinary coincidence about meeting the Balltons is that Lula has just published a book of advice to her daughter on her wedding day, advice designed specifically to aid matrimonial harmony, called 50 Saturdays Before You Say I Do. Lula had no idea that we were coming to talk about their love stories and advice, we had no idea that she had just had the book published.

She wrote the book as a present to her daughter, and gave it to her a year before she got married. Each Saturday has a different piece of advice for how to make the marriage work. When her friends saw it, they loved it and wanted a copy – and so it was that Lula, and her daughter, decided to publish it. I can safely say, of all the books that I have read on the subject of marriage, all crammed with advice and ‘How to’s, this is the most charming, wonderful and sage of them all.

She has written in the most charming and motherly way – so that the advice is not cold, hard advice from a PhD who, in general, has been through divorce or is quick to make a self help buck, this is written with all the love of a mother to her daughter on her wedding day – from the point of view of a woman who has had a very very happy marriage, through good times and bad, over 40 years. As soon as I can access the server with all our footage on it, I’ll copy up a couple of the “Saturdays” advice.

When asked about what they thought about the decline in black relationships, the couple became animated. They said that it is entirely natural that the poorest segments of society suffer a higher rate of divorce because of adverse external factors, and when black people are given opportunity – like the Balltons themselves – they are in a much better position to be able to buck the statistical trend. Fair enough point, but I wondered whether we should have found a black couple who had made it work from a generation below. Once again, despite the fact that we work all the time, I regret not being able to work a bit harder to find a younger black couple to interview alongside the Balltons.

One of the things which I get crap from my husband for is my deep love of US trashy magazines. Every week, I delight in buying People Magazine and US Weekly. As Mike says often, this habit rots my brain. But very occasionally it has its advantages: when it comes to US celebrity, there’s nothing I don’t know. So when Mike’s mate Brett said that he was going out with Catt Sadler, from E! Entertainment’s Daily 10, I was starstruck. Mike, ever the bloke, had no idea who he was referring to.

Catt, it turns out, is totally wonderful. A genuinely warm, lovely person and mother of two boys despite being reed thin. She and Brett have a fabulous love story and agreed to share it with us. They are four months in, and they are completely smitten, so we got them as an example of the “limerance” phase, when lust and passion still burn strong (oh how we yearn for those days).

They met on a plane. Both had been working out at the Indy 500 races in Indiana, and were heading back to LA. Brett, whose company sponsors one of the teams, had had a great week of high octane schmoozing, and Catt had been hosting an E! special engagement out there. Brett had been assigned the same seat as a large, hostile woman who immediately attacked him when he asked if that was her seat. To avoid her onslaught, he then moved to stand at the side (beside Catt’s seat). Catt, seeing him standing like a lemon, said that he was welcome to sit beside her until the problem was solved and he got a seat. He ended up staying there, the two of them clicked immediately, and they talked for the duration of the 5 hour flight.

The next day, Brett sent Catt a large parcel of goodies for her and her boys with a note saying “Here’s my phone number, but without the last number…”. He heard nothing for a week, and was thinking that Catt was not only not interested but actually rude, so he called a week later with hostile tones and left a message on her machine. At the exact moment that he was leaving his terse message, Catt had headed down to the shipping department at E! to collect a package from friend of hers and found, to her simultaneous delight (huge package for her from Brett) and horror (she realised that it was likely that it had been there for a while without anyone informing her about it), that she had received something from Brett. A tense phonecall between the two ensued, until the issue had been cleared up. And the rest is history. And it’s all in Catt’s blog – it just so happened that she had been asked to write a blog about relationships (how Carrie Bradshaw) for the summer. www.944.com/blog/personalities/cattsadler, so Brett became the “APG”, airplane guy – and she tells their story much better than I do.

It was fun to be around early love. Brett and Catt are still totally smitten, and they giggle, finish each others’ sentences, laugh playfully and flirtily with each other. I asked how it was for her being a known face – does she get approached by guys for the wrong reason? – and she said that she has had some guys just want her for arm candy, but refreshingly, Brett didn’t know who she was when they met. The other thing she said was that in her job, she reports Hollywood breakups and relationship scandals day in day out, so it’s easy to feel jaded – and yet here she was totally in love. It was wonderful to see.

We meet with one of LA’s top divorce lawyers, Stacy D Phillips, to hear about divorce and Proposition 8.

She’s a real powerhouse – named one of the Top 50 women in Los Angeles law – and has represented many celebrity clients in their divorces: Bobbi Brown (ex-Mr Whitney Houston); Darcy LaPier (ex-Mrs Jean Claude Van Damme); and Erin Everly (ex-Mrs Axel Rose).

We wanted to talk to her about divorce rates in California being especially high, about how she feels about divorce (it turns out she’s divorced herself, and an absolute advocate if it gives you the oomph to make life better) and about the passing of Proposition 8 (Californians were recently given the option to vote for or against gay marriage being legal in the state. They did, and they banned it, to the shock of many – and the disappointment of Ms Phillips. She does, however, feel that this is not the last we have heard of the matter).

The wall in her huge, corner office is covered with accolades and photos with Clintons and Gores. Stacy is fiendishly bright, and has often been honoured for her services to womenhood – she’s very good at playing a man’s game without sacrificing anything of her feminity. I was in awe from the get go. She obviously sees a lot of acrimony in her line of work, but equally, being able to offer empathy as well as counsel is valuable in the field of divorce law. She says that divorce is extremely painful, but that it is not necessarily a bad thing to do: it offers individuals a chance at happiness, it can be incredibly liberating once the initial pain has passed, and she delights in setting her clients up with friends.

She is author of the book Divorce: It’s All About Control, in which she details the 6 causes that she sees of divorce:

1. Money
2. Children
3. Health
4. Loss of love/intimacy
5. Growth (professional or personal)
6. Fear (physical, emotional, psychological)

It’s true that divorce is not always a bad thing, and it was very refreshing to hear it from her. It made me wish that we had had more success at finding someone in California – a Liz Taylor type – who had been divorced countless times. The challenge now will be to find one in the more Catholic South America…

Mike’s personal project for LA was to get a pornstar couple. So while I was running around trying to get celebs and experts, Mike was conversing endlessly with representatives of Porn Central, the San Fernando Valley. Elation gleamed in my husband’s eyes when he found a porn couple who have been happily married for 13 years.

What a couple they are! Nicki is the same age as me, 29, and Josh is a little older at 33. The two of them are high school sweethearts. They grew up in smalltown Florida, got married when Nicki was 17, had their boys and settled down to live happily. A few years later, they went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras with a group of friends. They had a fairly debaucherous time and when they got back, one of Nicki’s friend suggested that she supplement her nurse’s income with some stripping at a club. This she did, and really enjoyed it. She’d work the weekends and earn more in one weekend than her entire monthly salary as a nurse. So she jacked in her nursing job and started to do it properly. The clients loved her, and she and Josh decided to make some amateur videos of her (now worth thousands!) which she could sell to the clients for $20 at the end of her encounters. They cost Josh $1 to make and they were selling like hot buns, so to speak. She was doing so well at this that someone in the porn industry saw the videos and asked her to come out to the world’s porn capital, San Fernando Valley, to make a movie. She did, it went very well and now she’s one of the biggest stars in the porn industry. Josh is a porn director – he occasionally performs, but prefers to be behind the camera.

So, LOADS to learn from these two about handling jealousy, the difference between physical and emotional love, and how to keep our sex life spicy…

Nicki is one of the loveliest, sweetest women that we’ve met on this trip. She’s a doting mother, a loving wife and a keen horserider – so we met at her stables where she keeps two horses. The extraordinary thing for me (given that Mike had pretty much surrendered all powers of objectivity at the door…) was that she as so lovely, had such a laugh with her husband, and to all intents and purposes was so normal. Granted, her boobs were the size of babies’ heads, and something funny and distracting was happening with a big nipple – but she was someone I would genuinely be friends with.

In 2006, she was diagnosed with leukaemia. Really really serious leukaemia. She ended up spending 10 months in hospital, during which time one of her sons turned 9 and she was only able to touch him through a plastic bubble which she was forced to live in. Josh had to go back to performing, so Nicki talked about how hard it was to be very very ill, and to have Josh come in to visit her in hospital knowing that he had had sex with other women – in order to pay the hospital bills. What an amazing couple to come through that. She said that was the hardest time for her. Josh equally could see how heartbreaking it was for her, but found himself with no options. The one thing they did say was how amazing the porn community were: porn stars babysat the kids as Josh came to visit Nicki daily, they rallied around to raise money for the cause, and now are very supportive of the charity which she has set up. They even had a star-studded event at the Playboy Mansion to raise funds for her.

In terms of what we learnt from this couple ourselves – Mike learnt that porn stars are real people, I learnt that pretty much anything is possible if you are able to laugh with your partner. Nicki and Josh laughed their way through the interview – they had a great, secure dynamic – which I suppose you have to have for a marriage to survive in an industry like the porn industry (it’s very very rare that relationships survive in it).

(Nicki has a nightly show on Playboy radio: http://www.playboy.com/world-of-playboy/radio/)

One of tests we’d always hoped to add to our arsenal of compatibility forecasts was that of a psychic. With a bit of hunting, I found Lorrie Kazan in Redondo Beach, www.lorriekazan.com. Before we met, Lorrie asked us for our full birth names (that’s Michael Russell Clear and Alanna Margaret Donayre Boylan which we had to share with the viewing public) and our birth date information.
Her place is small, tidy, with seabreezes. And 2 cats. Lorrie was remarkably normal for what she does. Or rather for what we were expecting. No Mystic Meg or crystal balls here. She said that she’s always, throughout her life, been an empath (such that she feels what other people are feeling) She went through a phase of telling people what she could see for them in their futures , but that stopped when she realised people found it creepy – and that she could use that energy much better if she focused it on people who actually wanted to hear what she had to tell them.

We had hoped to get her to take our readings and save up the infomation to tell the camera when the two of us left the room. It quickly became clear that was going to be very difficult, as a lot of it relies on a conversation. So we just went for it. Now, I’m a total sucker for this kind of thing. I find an hour of chat about me, me, me very nice (not least because of how much listening I have been doing over the last few months), and I’m totally prepared to take life advice from a total stranger. Mike, however, came to the whole thing with a healthy dose of scepticism. But damn she was good. Even Mike crumbled a little towards the end. She started by saying that she doesn’t believe that the future is set in stone – so she’s reading more on how we are now than what will be.

What I loved about it was that she got Mike and I bang on. Mike – the pragmatist, the one with the energy and the spontaneity, the engine room of our relationship; me – a little tougher to crack, bossy sometimes, love Mike lots… You’ll have to wait for the film for her predictions, but looks like I might grow a beard.

Hill Harper is extraordinary. I have to confess that I only knew of him as the coroner-turned-CSI, Sheldon Hawkes, on CSI:NY. But that is only the tip of the iceberg – he is an actor, an author, a black activist and a contemporary and friend of Barack Obama.

He graduated from Brown University, then Harvard Law School, then from the JFK School of Government at Harvard. He is now, obviously, an accomplished actor – but he also uses that as a forum for encouraging and inspiring black children. He has written 3 books, Letters to a Young Brother, Letters to a Young Sister and The Conversation.

“I want young women and men to have knowledge of the things that can bring them true empowerment:  education, a strong sense of purpose, compassion, confidence and humility…” – Hill Harper

Mike and I were in Borders when we saw his latest book, The Conversation. In it, Harper turns his attention to understanding the decline of the black relationship (well, relationships in general, but the black relationship specifically). He starts with the shocking statistic that in 1966, 83% of black children were growing up in 2 parent families; and only 40 years later, in 2006, that figure had plunged to 31% (and this statistic is unique to black communities – the same is not true of Hispanic, Asian or caucasian communities). He sets out to try and understand how black male-female relationships could have soured to such a huge extent, to the detriment of black society. Without male role models, young black children see only rappers and basketball players as role models, which gives them a very skewed vision of success.

His business is not to find the reasons behind the decline (though when asked, he cited a number of potential causes: the arrival and epidemic of crack cocaine amongst African American males; the effects of the Vietnam war; the legacy of the familial separation of the slave trade) but to try to inspire the conversation between black men and women which can start to heal the rifts which have grown between the genders. The book is fascinating: he starts by taking the various stereotypes (men: black women are gold-diggers, nags, see interracial relationships as a sign of status; women: black men are lazy, unfaithful, etc) and discussing them with groups of people. Then slowly, he suggests ways that the genders can come together to discuss these misconceptions and be more realistic about their expectations of relationships. It’s a very inspiring and realistic book.

We wanted to talk to him about the state of black relationships (he is says that all relationships can benefit from having the conversation as relationships of every colour and creed have declined, but there are factors in addition to the everyman issues which affect black relationships specifically), and then to find a black couple in a loving relationship to find out what their advice is, when their relationship has lasted against the odds.

Our interview with Harper was fascinating. He is extremely bright and takes his position as a black role model very seriously. He does a lot of work with kids and has established a mentoring foundation called Manifest Your Destiny, www.manifestyourdestiny.org, specifically aimed to inspire youth to succeed. As we left him, I suggested that perhaps he consider following his great friend Barack into politics and he laughed and said it had often been suggested…

Mike was in LA with work a few years ago, and a friend put him in touch with his friend, Brett. Mike dropped Brett a line this time and it turns out Brett is going out with the gorgeous Catt Sadler, presenter of the Daily 10 on E! Entertainment channel. We have a fun dinner with the two of them: Brett is hilarious and Catt is totally lovely. Being a devotee of the show, I am in awe. Natch.

Dr Pamela C Regan, Professor of Psychology at California State University and author of The Mating Game. And she’s totally awesome.

She is Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Social Relations Lab at California State University, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Minnesota. Her research interests are in the areas of close relationships and human sexuality, with an emphasis on passionate love, sexual desire, and mate preference.

She was one of those rare serendipitous finds – a friend of Mike emailed on Monday morning with an article by her, I dropped an email on the offchance, and here we are sitting in her living room the next day. And she’s totally fab: she teaches undergrad students, which makes a difference to us because it is her business to know what everyone out there is writing about relationships. So we are able to ask her what she thinks about the work of all the people that we’ve met, a summation of the work being done in the field at the moment, and to basically get her to gel all of our interviews with experts together in one fell swoop. On top of that, she’s one of the nicest and most fun experts we’ve met en route so far. An hour long interview turns into a 4 hour siege of her house. Brilliant stuff, we were delighted – it was also the first ray of sunshine that LA has granted in a while. We can leave the States now knowing that we have got some really good stuff.

Jeff and Walter live together in the hills of Silver Lake, LA. They met online 10 years ago and have been together ever since. They both freely admit that they were pretty easy before they met, just up for a good time. And yet here they were, the vision of domesticity and love, and they talked about it lasting. What prompted the change?

It’s easy to see immediately that the two of them are very well suited to each other. They laugh lots, gently mock each other, and have a natural domestic ease which makes them very easy and fun to be around. Jeff was about to turn 40, and they were opening the doors to their immaculate house to their mates.

I think what really struck me about this interview is that there is no certificate, no social code, no expectation holding them together – and they are together and remain so despite that. They choose, no ifs or buts, to be together – nothing holds them together in terms of society’s expectations. Surely if people choose to be together, don’t just fall into it in manner of every other heterosexual marriage, they should be allowed to have that union recognised by law? Am now very anti-Proposition 8 indeed.

Erin and Davey – our long-distance lovers turned Mr and Mrs! An email courtship, and totally romantic story.

They have an energy which I’m not sure that Mike and I ever had – and I think it comes from the fact that, because of their distance apart and what it takes for them to be together, they are their own little unit.

They met about ten years ago, at someone’s party, or someone introduced them, or they crossed paths, or something equally hazy. They thought little of it, until about 3 years ago, Erin was working on a project and needed to get in touch with some advertising folk. She dropped her mate in London a line on MySpace, and as she clicked on his page, up popped a picture of Davey. Erin remembered that he too worked in advertising so send an email to him too – asking for his help, prefaced with a “you may not remember me, but we met very briefly some years ago…”. Davey replied by saying he was too busy and important to help, and Erin thought he was a bit of a tit. He then did get back to her, to which she replied, and a romance quickly developed. When they tell the story, it sounds like You’ve Got Mail: both would really look forward to receiving emails from the other, they never had to wait longer than a day, and they poured their hearts out over email, and being really candid about how they feel about everything.

The natural next question was how it was when they met – it’s very easy to be totally candid over email, but how was that moment of real awkwardness when you come face to face with someone you know really well (they corresponded daily at least for 4 months) but is a total stranger physically (Davey only had her tiny picture on MySpace to jog his memory). They had arranged a meeting in Venice Beach when Davey was over on holiday, and Erin was in LA for work (she lives in New York, he lives in London). Neither had told their friends the backstory, and they met with others around. They talked for 4 hours, with Erin’s friend saying afterwards “who is that guy? You have real chemistry with him…”. They ended up in James Beach, the very bar where we met them to interview them.

After the meeting in LA, there was no doubt in either’s mind that they had something really special, so from then on, they would commute to see each other in London and New York. It was exhausting, and as the end of the weekends would dawn, one would have to sneak out early in the morning so as not to prolong the agony of goodbye.

It was really inspiring to see a relationship where they had had to choose to be together against the geographical barrier. They could have given up at any time, but instead persevered until Erin finally agreed to jack in her job and come over to the UK to see if they really were meant to be. She couldn’t work, and she didn’t have many friends, so her life consisted of sitting in the flat as Davey left for work. It sounds like it was a very tough time for her – she left family and friends behind, but the two of them never had any doubt that the love they share is worth it. And that, I think, is part of what you feel when you’re around them: a completeness, a sense of having to give up a lot to be together, a real conviction in what they have.

It was great for Mike and I to take some of that away with us. I have no idea if we could have survived separation – Mike is terrible on the phone, so we tend to limit our conversations to less than a minute. But there is something similar in our 24/7 dependence on each other now – though perhaps that’s not comparable, because we are both out of our comfort zone, whereas in Erin and Davey’s marriage, one (or both) of them will always be away from home. I just don’t think I could make that sacrifice for Mike, or at least, I’m glad that I have never had to – our lives are very intertwined. As I type, they are currently waiting for Erin’s British visa so that they can return to the UK for their London wedding. They were having a bit of a nightmare with it, so fingers crossed it goes through…

A snapshot of just some of the wise words we have collected from the great and the good:

1. Dr Helen Fisher: Biological Anthropologist, Research Professor at Rutgers University Author of Why We Love and Why Him, Why Her?
2. Dr John Gottman and Dr Julie Schwartz Gottman. Co-founders of The Gottman Institute. Co-authors of over 40 books including John’s bestseller,The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
3. Dr John Gray: Author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, Bestselling relationship author of all time with over 40 million books sold
4. Dr Judith Wallerstein.  Psychologist, researcher and divorce expert. Author of best-selling The Good Marriage
5. Dr Pepper Schwartz: Professor of Sociology, University of Washington. Author of 12 books including Love Between Equals: How Peer Marriage Really Works
6. Professor Stephanie Coontz: Social Historian, Professor of History and Family Studies at Evergreen State College. Author of Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage
7. Dr Dan Wile: Couples therapist, developer of Collaborative Couples Therapy. ”Wile is a genius and the greatest living marital therapist” – Dr John Gottman
8. Eric Holzle. Founder of Scientificmatch.com. Website dedicated to matching couples through their DNA
9. Dr Diana Wiley. Sex Therapist and Gerontologist (aging and sexuality). Expert in sex over 40

Our unending quest for interesting approaches to making marriage work takes us to Northridge, north LA, and Jeff and Kris. Married for over 20 years, no kids, and big players on the LA swingers scene for the last 10 years or so.

Mike and I, after the prudish debacle of the nudists, were determined this time to ask all the questions which popped into our heads. Jeff and Kris were fantastic: totally open, funny, charming, and as a result, we got a great interview. We asked how they got into swinging: after 12 years of marriage, they heard about a swingers dance and thought they’d go along. After all, they could leave if they didn’t feel comfortable. From the dance, they went on to a party, and both ended up having sex with other people. They really enjoyed it, and their involvement went from there. They said that it’s unusual for a couple to take to it so quickly, normally people dip a toe in the water over a period of months before committing to The Lifestyle.

There are public and private parties. Public parties tend to be more tentative affairs - with the couple usually staying together and working to find another couple they are both attracted to. Whereas at private parties (usually with the white collar great and the good), people are much more relaxed, they tend to know most people, and it’s not unusual for the couple to split up for the encounters.

When I asked about jealousy, Kris said it was simply not a factor in their relationship. She and Jeff are comfortable enough with each other and the lifestyle to know that they’re ok. Other couples sometimes set up rules, and other swingers know to respect and honour other couples’ rules. One thing that is always true in the swingers community is that no always means no.

They said that swinging had had an immensely positive effect on their relationship: they both felt hugely more self-confident (you have to be confident to make the most of swinging – they said that you can usually tell a swinger by how outgoing they are), they got lots of inspiration from encounters with other people which they could bring back into their own love making (sex between them never gets stale), and they feel stronger love for each other, realising that they have a strong and loving relationship as the foundation for their play.

We asked about chat up lines, and they range a fair bit apparently. They can go from (the worst) “everyone else at the party has turned me down, you’re my last shot…” to Kris’ usual “hey, wanna play?”

Kris oozed a confidence and sexuality which I could see would make her hugely attractive to other men and women. One of the things about swinging, and the nudists had said the same thing, is that the basis for a good party is that the women have to feel comfortable. If they are, then it will work. It seemed to me that women actually get more out of swinging – Jeff said that men at first can be disappointed with the reality of swinging: women are much slower to trust a male newcomer, and couples will find that the woman gets all the attention and men don’t at all. That changes as couples find their feet, but it can be dispiriting for men. Jeff said that one of the really positive things about it is that everyone finds their level: Kris was more sexually adventurous, so she could exercise that.

When they started swinging, Jeff had started to read up on sex, and started to meet experts in the field of sex. So he decided to share all this fascinating learning and established The Erotic University, www.eroticuniversity.com. He created it on a real campus which lasted a couple of years, until it had been chased out of existence by the surprisingly prudish folk of LA, so he has now set it up online. Users sign up, pay a fee, and become students at a virtual university where virtual instructors deliver lessons on everything from poledancing to becoming an adult journalist.

The effect of meeting couples with different ideas about marriage is really positive on Mike and me. Without wanting to sound too cheesy, we feel lucky to meet people who can make us see behind the stereptype: it’s true of the polygamists, the nudists, and now the swingers. Not to say necessarily that we’re going to embrace these different ways, but it’s great to hear what’s going in people’s heads. And how content they are!

I’ve been stalking Charlyne Yi for a while now. She is the star of the film, Paper Heart, a documentary/drama about love – on national release in the States at the moment. She sets off on a journey like ours, across the States, to find out what love is. Like us, she meets with “experts” in the field: scientists, lawyers, couples. In addition to this, she and Michael Cera (of Juno fame) have a fictional romance. It’s an adorable film, and she herself is totally adorable.

She agreed to meet us before her stand up show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. Given how similar our project is to hers (though it’s not exactly the same… she was out to prove that love didn’t exist, where are Going The Distance is more out to find out about the dynamics of lasting love), we really wanted to pick her brains about her project.

She was fabulous. We asked her how she came up with the idea – and it was that, aged 19, she wasn’t meeting new people and really doubted whether she’d ever fall in love. So she wanted to go out and find out what love actually is. Her advice to us what that we shouldn’t listen to anyone else’s advice. Like us, she found that every love was different, no two stories or feelings were exactly the same, so what works for one person may well not work for another.

We then saw her show which was as quirky as she is!

One thing we’d wondered about doing when we hit LA was getting our teeth sorted out. When in Rome and all that. I have a yellowing cap on my front tooth which has been bothering me for a bit; Mike has the kind of mouth which compounds the Americans’ stereotype about British teeth.

So it was off to J.Lo’s dentist for us. Dr K sorted Mike out good and proper (before and after photos to follow when the caps are fitted on Monday).

The foecal wafts of San Simeon’s campground are a world away…

During this time, we interview one of LA’s many bit-part actors hoping to hit the big time: Dominic Pace and his wife, Geraldine. He has appeared as one-episode parts in various hit series such as Prison Break, Cold Case and Desperate Housewives. (His IMDB profile: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0655124/)

We wanted to know what kind of a strain living in the shadow of a dream puts on a relationship. Dominic is the manager of a great restaurant on Sunset Blvd called Ketchup, www.dolcegroup.com/ketchup, a funky, minimalist, all-American spot, a job which he is good at but doesn’t see as a vocation. Geraldine has just had their second child, Benedetto, 7 months. Managing a restaurant is stressful, having two young boys (Dante, 4) is also stressful, and Dominic was very candid about how hard he was finding the chaos of family life, not least with the calmer temptations of gorgeous LA ladies around (there were mild, unspoken undercurrents of an infidelity). They talked a lot about the future, one where they are a little more financially stable – perhaps he has hit the mythical, acting jackpot. When we asked him what love is, he replied with “I can’t feel it right now… Love will be when we have a little more financial freedom, when we have that freetime, we are able to connect again in complete peace, where we can be on the same page again”. I think it was one of the most honest interviews we have had so far. Not that other couples haven’t been honest, but these guys are in the middle of a really tough time, and they weren’t afraid to tell us that. Kids change couples’ dynamics dramatically – everyone had said it – but this was our first time seeing it.

We found a great couple who run a winery together. Seth and Magan Kunin of Kunin Wines (www.kuninwines.com), established in 1998, their wines get rave reviews. A great couple to represent Santa Barbara’s burgeoning wine industry.

They have just set up a tasting room in downtown Santa Barbara, so we met them there. It was alive with tasters, making the most of the Labor Day weekend to get their $8 worth of Kunin tastes. Magan is effortlessly gorgeous – without make-up, and with her 7 month-old daughter, Phoebe, on her hip. Seth is the master wine man, he’s knowledgeable, he’s passionate and he loves what he does. We get a great interview with them - Seth doing most of the talking, but with Magan adding really sage and eloquent points at junctions. They met through wine: she was distributing in Chicago, he making wine. Both were in their late-30s and never previously married, we were able to ask lots of questions about why they waited and why the other finally convinced that marriage could work.

We were then treated to dinner by some fine folk who happened to be tasting during our interview with the Kunins and who were inspired by the madness of what we’re up to.

California coast spectacular as ever. The only shame is that the rest of the world agrees and is proving it by converging on it over the Labor Day weekend.

Clears have to beg, borrow and steal to find campsites.

High point is at San Simeon: the last site at the campground. A disabled patch with no surrounding land, in the shade of the loos. Everytime the wind changes, Camp Clear is enswathed with the fumes of mountains of human waste.

Not that different from a regular night in a tent with Mike, I suppose.

I’m an adult. I am able to listen to people’s stories with empathy, ask interested questions, understand their choices. But it would appear that I’m not so adult when presented with a resort full of naked people. I started giggling at the very first willy.

We were at Lupin, near Los Gatos, California, the oldest clothing-optional resort in the US, to meet the couple who own and run the place, Glyn and Lori Kay. They are laid-back, hippy artist types, but this being Silicon Valley, they are also fiendishly bright and talented (Glyn was at Yale, with a Stanford MBA; Lori Kay is a very successful sculptress). They have been together since 1982 and married since 2001, with 8 year old twin girls to prove it.

It was Rob, one of the fabulous Ural mechanics, who suggested this couple to talk to. So we headed from San Jose to Los Gatos and headed off the main roads to find the place. We pull in and it’s immediately wonderful: yurts, teepees, tents; swimming pool, tennis courts, clubhouse; a great atmosphere of relaxation and holiday. Then one of the holiday makers wanders towards us in all his Meat and Two Veg glory.

Mike and I walk, our Knievel suits as usual attracting lowlevel attention, past the normal poolside, as a normal game of normal volleyball is underway. Normal children throw a normal beach ball to each other, and normal grandparents lie on normal loungers reading normal books.Everything’s normal, everything’s normal, everything’s normal.

But oh look, they’re all naked.

The long and the short of it is that we’re so busy trying to pretend everything is normal that we forget to ask Lori Kay and Glyn WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE NUDIST, especially on their relationship. The one bloody question that we were there to ask, the elephant in the room (if you will). Idiots. It’s only when we’re miles from the place and back to a fully-clad that we realise what fools we have been.

As for disrobing, we really thought hard about giving it a go, but there were a few things stopping us:

First up I had a Chernobyl sized melt-down about half an hour before we arrived, letting out a primeval scream when my dark visor flew off my helmet. Poor Mike detoured off the freeway, and back around to crawl along the hard shoulder in search of it. The intercom wasn’t working, I felt so frustrated at being cooped up the last few days in the office and again now in the sidecar, I was livid and couldn’t put my finger on quite why. So being charming with naturists moments later was a hard character shift, even for my schizophrenic self.

Secondly, we’re British remember? At school we’re taught that men have the anatomy of an action-man, and women that of a barbie. There are no genitals in Britain.

Thirdly, we were visiting an exclusive club. They had all earnt the right to be there in their special uniform, and they all knew each other (and each other’s anatomy) well. When 2 strangers turn up, especially newbies, it’s going to be interesting to see how they cope (and their new bodies).

Fourthly, they were all much older than us. No disrespect, but our bodies were likely to have been newer, tighter & firmer and more appealing than many of the others.

Last, but not least, Mike was worried about unconscious turgidity occurring in The Captain. Not, he says, due to the naked bodies all around him, but the combination of naked freedom being naturally erotic,and the fact that it would be (presumably) against the rules to show arousal. And The Captain doesn’t take orders from anybody (thoughts please gentlemen?)

Why didn’t we bring up these concerns with Lori Kay and Glyn? We could have had such an interesting interview – but we buggered it up by being uptight.

Ho-hum, better luck for the swingers in LA…

Time for the bike to get some lovin’ before we cross the border and any notion of a Ural dealer for 12,000 miles. We’re with Ski, the Ural supremo for California. What a dude. He has spent three days patiently teaching Mike yet more about the bike (after his early intensive tuition with Mickey in Anchorage). He and his wife, Sam, even graciously offered to put us up (I asked if we could camp on their lawn. I’ve become an arch vagrant…) and seemed happy to have us for an extra night when the tuning on the bike took longer and longer…

www.triquestcycles.com

Brown, Gray and Clear part company (much mirth) and we head on to Dr Judith Wallerstein, author of the US national bestseller The Good Marriage. Published in the mid-90s, the book is the product of Dr Wallerstein’s study of 50 couples in happy, long lasting marriages. It was the first time that anyone had approached happily married couples to learn firsthand the inner workings of successful marriages. As she says in the book, “the advice most couples get is still based on what therapists have observed in troubled marriages rather than what works for happily married people. But I insist – and my work shows - that you can’t build a marriage based on those that have failed. It’s like learning how to stay healthy from studying the dying.”

I love what this woman is saying. When I read about The Good Marriage during one of my long and often-tedious research sessions a couple of months ago, I knew that we had to get her for this film. We had exactly the same approach to the subject of marriage as she did: let’s find out what works.

From 1966 to 1992, Dr Wallerstein was a senior lecturer at UCBerkeley at the School of Social Welfare. Her background is specifically in divorce, and she set up a centre working with broken families and had set up a landmark study of  93 children of divorce over a quarter of a century - and had written books before The Good Marriage about the devastating effects of divorce on the children of divorcing couples, one of which called The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 year landmark study. Her theories are controversial, her most significant finding is that the effects of divorce on children are not short-term, but long-lasting, profound and cumulative. The children in her study view their parents differently and have lingering fears about committing to relationships.

But I put her divorce work out of my mind. It was this work that had lead her to question what makes a happy and “good” marriage, and that’s what we’re concentrating on. I read the book and every page resonated with what we have seen on our route, in our encounters with happily married people. In fact, as I explained to Dr Wallerstein when we met her, I basically wanted her to explain her book in as much detail – because it will be very very useful to us in our final film.

Her conclusions boil down to two lists. First, the classification of different types of marriage (4 types). Secondly, 10 or so tasks which a couple can contemplate in their own hope for a happy marriage. I’m not sure that I’ll go into them all now – this isn’t a relationship help site after all, nor is it my business to type up her work verbatim - but they are fascinating (and will all be in our final documentary!) All her thoughts are formed from the lengthy research which she compiled from the 50 couples she studied.

Our interview with her was fabulous. She is definitely not one to suffer fools gladly – a feisty, straight-talking older lady with strong opinions. Before we even met, when I finally – miraculously – found her home phone number online, she told me in no uncertain terms that I had to read her book before we met. “So often people come here and ask the most benal and mindless questions – like they haven’t read the book. It’s a waste of my time.” So I duly did my homework. I was nervous about the interview because I wanted to get so much out of her – lots and lots of what she says is totally relevant to what we have found.

I explained this to her, with due reverence, and she said “fine” and went on to relate the key content of her book (which she wrote 15 years ago, remember!) in perfect detail. We were amazed and delighted. What an awesome lady. She also lived in one of the most beautiful parts of the world I have ever seen. It’s like Portofino – huge, glorious houses clutter the hillside of a small promontory in Marin county. It’s where the wealthy of San Francisco now live (Dr W and her husband bought theire beautiful place in ’66) and the cars are blinging, the lawns are pristine, and the hillside is steep (so that everyone has their own perfect view over the bay, and it feels totally secluded despite the number of houses).

Mike and I leave delighted by the interview, and cross back over the Golden Gate to downtown San Francisco and the wonderful mates we are staying with. We’re totally in love with San Francisco, what a city. To celebrate our amazing day with Dr Gray, Martin & Josie Brown, and Dr Wallerstein, Mike and I head out for a Date Night (you’d be forgiven for thinking every night is a date night when we’re together 24/7 – but we’re talking actually taking the time out to remember that we’re mates…) in the ace city. Great meatballs. Happy days.

We have an interview in Oakland with Dr Dan Wile, a man Dr Gottman describes as “a genius and the greatest living marital therapist”. Quite an acolade from the great Gottman himself, so we knew we had to see this man.

Dr Wile talked fascinatingly about his approach to couples therapy and why it works. The basic premise of his work is that he works as a translator for couples who are having difficulties. He sits couples down and gets them talking about a topic which causes conflict. He then mediates the discussion, by listening to what each individual has to say, then repeating it in a way which takes out the passion of an argument. He’s been doing it for 35 years, with great success. He explained to us the theory behind the approach.

He then, spontaneously, offered Mike and I the chance to undergo a typical session of CCT. The issue that the two of us often have when we meet these esteemed experts in their field is that we have no issues. We’re newlyweds, so in events like the Gottman weekend, while other couples are weeping about longheld enmity, Mike and I are wondering if our scraps about what shelf to keep the eggs on in the fridge count.

(Cue caption competition...)

Dr Wile is patient with this concern and says we should give it a go anyway. And funnily enough, though reticent at the beginning, Mike and I find ourselves having a discussion about a recurring issue in our relationship. When probed, it really does seem that there is an underlying problem there. Everytime one of us finishing putting our point forward, Dr Wile kneels down on the side of that person and speaks for them, repeating what they have said in a diplomatic, succinct and reasoned way. He starts with “let me see if I have understood… what I think you meant was [...], is that right?” Because he’s so good at this, he always hits the nail on the head – summing up the point of view cleanly and quickly. He then turns to the other person and says, “well, how do you feel about that?”, sits back in his chair, listens, then repeats the process.

It sounds so simple, yet it really works. Without wanting to turn this blog into my very own written shrink, Mike and I have one recurring issue: he is a powerhouse of activity, and sometimes I feel guilty about not being able to keep up. If he puts his mind to something, he won’t stop until it’s done (working late into the night if needs be, and always to the exclusion of everything else – food, wife, chat…) I try to keep up but often can’t – and end up either feeling guilty about it, or feeling resentful. It’s an unusual complaint for a couple to have: that the man does too much, rather than too little… Anyway. We went through the CCT process – which revealed a lot about our underlying feelings on the matter, and also, how we argue. Dr Wile said that he thought that if we could maintain this way of discussing a matter, we were in great shape – lots of laughter, light relief when it got heated, and much willingness to compromise and find solutions. Very interesting. And hopefully useful when we get trapped in some bog further down the road…

We then met his wonderful partner, Dorothy, and interviewed them as a couple (rather than as Dr Wile, the therapist). Totally charming, they met only 5 years ago, when both of them were wondering if they really would never find love again – and they were like teenagers!

www.danwile.com

We cross the Golden Gate Bridge to get to the exquisite Sausalito over the bay. The views back on San Francisco are breathtaking on a perfect sunny day.

We are over there to meet Dr John Gray, the author of the most famous relationship book ever published, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. It was first published in 1992, since which more than 14 million copies have been sold. Gray’s basic assertion is that men and women are totally different, and if you can understand and navigate those differences, you have a better chance at a functional, happy and lasting relationship. He has since written many more books in the Mars/Venus series, with more detail for specific areas.

What a legend! I am prepped with questions on his book, Mars and Venus Together Forever: Relationship Skills for Lasting Love, but there’s no reason for me to be prepped… he gives the most succinct, articulate and erm-free 20 minute explanation of his thoughts on lasting relationships.

He talks fluently and articulately on the scientific reasons (chemical, physiological, sociological) behind the way that the genders behave, and gives advice on ways to get along best around those differences. To do it little justice but sum it up in a sentence: men need to feel appreciated, women need to feel listened to. So men need to come home and feel appreciated for the work they have done during the day, and women need to be able to unload to their men (NB men do not need to offer solutions – they should just make a show of listening and offering sympathy. Women just need to unload)

He definitely has done this before. He looks great, he sounds great, and he’s bang on brief. What a dude.

www.marsvenus.com

We then interview Martin and Josie Brown, authors of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Finding Mr Right. They have been married for over 25 years, and have worked with Dr John Gray for the last 10. Double whammy: relationship experts and a longlasting couple to boot. These guys are great fun to interview, they laugh lots, and we are pleased as punch to have met them.

Yes, Mike finally overcame his counterbalance demons and made it down the ‘crookedest’ street in the world

With the interviews in Sausalito across the bay, we had a chance to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and back. On the way out, it was foggy at the start and sunny by the end. On the way back, yet more freezing San Fran fog…

Yosemite is everything that they tell you it will be and more.

 3 days before we got there, the park authorities had started a controlled fire – which had got out of control, and had been blazing through the southern park of the park. Areas were closed, planes flew overhead to douse the fire.

Mammoth is fantastic, reeks of California – recycling bins, thin people, organic food… 

Ski resort in winter, centre for summer adventures. 

Mike and I reminded what lardy sods we are.

Relationship update: That night, in the tent, Mike breaks wind – and the first rule of camping. It’s a rotter. He’s in deep trouble with the wife.

We set off from Pahrump at 6pm, having waited out the worst of the heat. But it was still 38 degrees C…

So so hot. The little bike presses on in the face of baking headwind. It’s miserable. Even in darkness, Death Valley (which gets to 200 feet below sea level) remains a pit of heat. The mountains around it mean that it is a basin for the heat, keeping the hot air in. And do they ever. Everything was sweaty, from the soles of my feet to my eyelids.

Arrive late in Lone Pine – somehow Mike manages to keep driving for 5 hours – it’s cooler. Thank God.

We leave Vegas and head for Pahrump, 60 miles outside the city, to get to arguably the most famous of Nevada’s 26 brothels. It’s the only state in which brothels are legal, which would make the Chicken Ranch the most famous (legal) whorehouse in the States.

We had set up an interview with the manager of the Ranch, but when we arrived she had been called away on an emergency and hadn’t had my number to let me know. In her absence, she had forbidden us from filming a tour of the place, and we could only talk to girls willing to be talked to. Our hearts sank.

One girl was prepared to talk to us, and have her voice recorded, but not to appear on camera. Well, that could work. Not much to look at for a documentary, but we could have lots of shots of the outside of the place, etc. We asked her about two things in relation to love – how her job affected her love outside the place (she is married and has been for 8 years), and what kind of love the clients want. In answer to the first question, she said that she was adept at separating the two worlds: work was work - purely physical and all about the money; as for the clients wanting love, in her one year’s experience, no one had ever wanted to pay to spend the night or wanted to ‘spoon’ with her. They wanted her purely for her services, not the voids in their hearts which she could fill.

At one point during our interview, a bell jangled and the girl excused herself – she had to go for a Line Up. Everytime a customer comes in, the girls gather in a line for the client to chose which one (or two) they want. I asked her if this was like being back at gym class and being the last one picked for a team, and she said yes – but that you get used to the fact that people come in with an idea of what they want. Girls can work either 12 hours a day, or 24 hours. If it’s the latter, they get up at all hours of the day or night.

We were preparing to leave when another girl entered the bar. Gorgeous and vivacious, once she knew what we were doing, she said she’d be happy to appear on camera – she had a history in porn so her face was already out there, she figured. An articulate and feisty 25 year old called Trinity, she had been at the Chicken Ranch, and other houses all around the state, for 7 years. She was divorced already, with two kids. But she recognised that her timeframe for making money in the game that she was in was limited, so she left her kids with family and came to the Ranch for months at a time.

Girls move in to the Ranch. They are given their own rooms for their stay which is where they entertain their clients. There is a reception area where line ups happen (and we weren’t welcome to see) and the bar area, a lowlit, small room with a pooltable in the middle which takes up most of the space. Small tables with stools around the edge of the room. Above the bar (an old school, mirror-backed bar) there is one girl’s photo, the Sweetspot of the Week. When I asked the girls about the effect of having that photo up (it changes every week), they said that it definitely generated more business.

Business is the core of the place. It felt safe, and all the girls we talked to (about 4 in total, though only one on film) liked working there. The Ranch was fastidious about testing, they all had panic buttons, and they said that all the girls and management got on very well. Meals are provided for the girls – to all in intents and purposes, it’s an all girls’ boarding school with a small twist…

Trinity was great. Outspoken, gorgeous, and very savvy. She said unequivocally that “love doesn’t exist in a place like this. You leave love at the door”. She said that some of her clients did pay to spend the whole night with her, and long connections with individuals (once a month over a period of years) would of course foster attachments – on their part. She only saw this as a way to make money. She recognised that she had a talent and she was good at making money from that talent. I really liked her. She recognises that she’s getting on (saying that this game really ages people – wearing heels perpetually it gets to your back, etc) and thinks this will be her last year at it. She wants to be a mum to her kids. She has plans to set up her own business, and I reckon she’d be great at it. Bright girl, no shit. She has an idea to produce porn, an industry she knows well.

The place wasn’t nearly as seedy as I had thought it would be. The few men who pulled up on the alarmingly bright August afternoon in baking Pahrump (it was about 45 degrees C) did look a little seedy. But not scabby – just a bit sheepish. But then, I suppose you’re never going to walk with your head held high into a whorehouse, no matter who you are.

Enough of this tourist malarkey. Time to get down to business. We set up 4 interviews in a day, with a Cirque du Soleil show in the middle of it. Ambitious.

12pm: Graceland wedding chapel http://www.gracelandchapel.com/ (celeb couple: Jon Bon Jovi and his wife)

Meet with manager, Brandon Reed, and Elvis. We grill them about the kind of people who marry there (65% Americans, last year Brits top of the international pile, but the Germans are just pipping us to the post this year), how many of them there are (around 25 weddings a day, business better with the recession too) what they want (Elvis!), how they want it (fast – 15 minute ceremony, and cheap, about $300), how often Elvis gets his arse pinched by the just-married wives (lots)…

2pm: Little Church of the West http://www.littlechurchlv.com/ (celebs: Cindy Crawford & Richard Gere, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Dudley Moore)

More serious interview with owner. Again, questions about the kind of people who choose to get married there (pretty normal, as it happens, lots of package tours, most organised well in advance), weirdest things he’s seen (not much, though themed marriages are increasingly common), etc.

4.30pm: Rabbi Mel and Dr Micki Hecht www.weddingofficiantlasvegas.com The classier end of Vegas weddings…

Meet Rabbi and Dr Hecht in suburban Vegas. They are pillars of the Vegas community and have been married for 26 years as well as performing hundreds of higher end Vegas wedding ceremonies. They are a great couple, had some wonderful thoughts on love and Vegas. Micki was a good friend of (the real) Elvis.

7.30pm: Cirque du Soleil’s O at the Bellagio

Mike and I were both Cirque du Soleil virgins. And given that there were 6 CdS shows on the Strip, we decided to give it a go. It just happened to fall on one of our busiest days interviewing yet… It’s a feast of world class acrobats, divers, synchronised swimmers. Jaaamazing.

10pm: Teagan Presley, pornstar, Love Boutique

Every 15 year old boy’s fantasy: we met a pornstar. Signing copies of her latest DVD. Ask her and her boyfriend what love is. Apparently it’s something about being comfortable enough with each other to walk in and start doing your make up when the other one is doing a poo. And being comfortable enough with yourself to be able to date a pornstar (“but honey… I only do girls now…”)

Just kidding...

Alanna with make up! I'm female, who knew?

We wander, slack-jawed and neon-dazed, around the madness of Vegas. 5 hours of walking the miles and miles of air-conditioned, gawdy, ghetto fabulous corridors. Hmmmm. Vegas.

At the end of it all, Mr and Mrs Michael Clear go for Date Night. Mrs C puts on her glad rags, does her face, and holds hands tightly with her beloved as they happily stroll to a fancy pants dinner at Tao at the Venetian. Magical. Very nice to spend time with my husband rather than my chauffeur/colleague/director…

Another day of driving. This time along the historic Route 66, so we’re flanked by old school diners and quirky places along the way. Seligman, it turns out, is the inspiration for the Pixar movie, Cars. The author broke down there and ended up staying – setting the film on a town which was suffering as a result of the huge highway which bypassed it.

From there to the Grand Canyon caves (our first tourist activity). Then to Vegas! Via more rain. Really really heavy rain. We have to pull over to a gas stop and unload the entire bike as fast as we can. Fat Americans stand by the doorway, pointing.

Not helping, not even moving out of the way as two sodden Brits lumber in with bags and bags of stuff.

It calms down eventually, so we head on to Vegas. Cross the Hoover Dam in darkness, lit up like a space station. Then we finally hit the bright lights of Vegas and the faded glory of the Sahara Hotel and Casino ($25 a night…)

As we leave the reservation (with some speed – desperately hoping no one would demand our camera), we see a wall of sand on the horizon. Will a resigned despair, we realise that it is making its way towards us, fast. It is, in fact, a sandstorm. We brace ourselves as we near it, finally hitting a wall of wind and sand hard as visibility plunges to about 10m.

The going is slow back to Tuba City, 45 miles away. The topspeed of the bike, face on into the wind, is about 40mph. When we finally make it back, we take refuge in Subway, and suddenly the rain begins. It’s horizontal and violent. Fat, aggressive drops which permeate every part of the bike. Our plan to make it to Vegas by the evening trickles away, and the two of us become ncreasingly fractious.

Storms rage inside and out of the restaurant, as Mike and I launch into the most aggressive of our own fights so far. He is nervous about riding a long distance in these conditions so disappears into his own thoughts, leaving me confused, sodden and livid. As we put on our raingear, we’re not speaking. We set off into the driving rain like a cork being thrown into the wind, rain everywhere, barely able to see for the thick drops on our visors.

Miraculously the storm clears after a miserable half hour. Prompting our own storm to clear. As the sun tentatively peels the clouds apart, we head to the spectacular Grand Canyon for some top of the line tourist activity. And what a place it is. Totally and utterly breath-taking.

Still intent on making it to Vegas (it’s 6pm at this point, and Vegas remains 350 miles away), we head on out. Friends again, thankfully. But only make it another 120 miles or so to Seligman on Route 66 and bunk down for the night with pizza and beer.

Now that we have the consent of a Hopi couple to partipate, the two of us leave Tuba City in the Navajo Nation and set off to a neighbouring reservation about 45 miles away at Hotevilla.

The Hopi are American Indians people who primarily live on the 12,635 km² (2,531.773 sq mi) Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona. The Hopi Reservation is entirely surrounded by the much larger Navajo Reservation and has about 7,000 people on it. According to Hopi oral tradition, the Hopi are a gathering of diverse groups representing clans from different areas, now identifying culturally as one group of people with a single language.The Hopi  religion is anti-war. To be Hopi is to strive toward this concept, which nvolves a state of total reverence and respect for all things, to be at peace with these things, and to live in accordance with the instructions of Maasaw, the Creator or Caretaker of Earth (that’s from Wiki, natch) Traditionally, Hopi are organized into matrilineal clans. When a man marries, the children from the relationship are members of his wife’s clan.

The whole weekend is one of festivities to celebrate the harvest. More specifically, it’s the Butterfly Festival. “The Butterfly Maiden is represented as a doll and dancer at the Kachina Nature, Earth and Weather spirit celebrations in August. Her headdress (which all the girls wear) is adored with corn and butterfly symbols to call forth a good harvest because butterflies are associated with the pollination of crops. Kachinas who come to earth bring rain and good harvests and they are invoked in dance and rituals” (from Fabulous Creatures, Mythical Monsters and Animal Power Symbols, by Cassandra Eason)

We entered the reservation and it immediately felt other-worldly: the roads were no longer paved, inside the bike wobbled over soft sand paths. Big cars were parked everywhere, outside every house, alongside the sand tracks. The houses were rundown, children and people were everywhere. We were the only white faces in hundreds of Hopi faces. Stalls selling granita, embroidered rugs, dresses littered the route to the slightly ramshackle central square.

We park beside the main square and hear the loud noise of chanting and the jingle of bells. Promptly we are told to move the bike because the dancers will be coming down the road that we are on, so we shift it and race to get the camera out, eliciting sceptical looks from all around – white faces, Evel Knievel suits and the sidecar. I’m uncomfortable. But there’s little time to feel it as the loud procession works its way towards us.

There are around 200 people in the procession. All in traditional costume, with the Butterfly festival headdress worn by the girls. They move forward, then jump causing the bells around their knees to ring in rhythm, then repeat. The crowds watching are big, people are up on the rooves of the houses, clapping along. We film the dance with the big camera, meaning we don’t really blend in… The dance lasts about 5 more minutes, after which the procession disbands, and a handful of people warn us that filming is strictly not permitted by the Hopi elders, and we are lucky not to have had our camera confiscated and/or destroyed.

We scarper.

We then set off to meet our contact, Debbie, and her husband Carroll. They are in the process of building a nice, and big, house on the outskirts of the reservation. They live and work in Flagstaff, but spend spare time on the reservation. As we start the interview, they talk of the challenges of spanning those two worlds, and the effects it has had on their relationship. We got the strong sense that they were happiest on the reservation, though they have made successful lives beyond it. They met and courted in the usual US way – movie theatres and hanging with friends, but they had a traditional Hopi wedding. Carroll is very involved in the culture on the reservation, teaching the Hopi culture to kids on the reservation, meanwhile Debbie is keen to do the same with the outside world. They have been married for 36 years, and still seem to be going very strong. They laughed as they thought about their grown-up daughter learning about their courtship and marriage. A great couple!

• Set alarm for 5.45am to set up timelapse shot of the sun rising over the bike and the awesome goosenecks. Getting quite pro at this whole filming malarkey now.
• Sleep.
• Heat.
• More awesome shots of the Valley of the Gods. Spectacular. Utah very photogenic. Unlike dusty, unshowered selves.
• Lunch in Mexican Hat. There is ACTUALLY a place called Mexican Hat. (Because of a rock formation). Asked to leave after a while. Ha ha. We do tend to set up camp everytime we stop. Got the contact of a Native American couple who we will see tomorrow in Hotevilla on the Hopi Reservation. Delighted.
• Into Arizona, through Monument Valley, to Tuba City. Camping in carpark of only hotel. All class.
• Meet other Brits, all craving alcohol in this dry town. Clears, natch, have huge box of beers. Brits gravitate to our carpark wilderness like flies to poo. All beers consumed. Much talk of John Lewis, Marmite and other long-forgotten totems of Britannia.

• Spend the morning getting the most awesome shots of the bike with Austin. The man was not afraid to fashion a rudimentary harness from luggage straps and hang off the side of the bike to get some amazing shots.
• Lois and Austin have written a themesong for their journey “Come Ural With Me”, which we performed together. Pop video to follow…
• Loved seeing them. Was such an unexpected treat to cross paths with them both – they are proper round-the-world adventure motorcylists – but this time on a Ural. So many group shots.
• Mike and I feel rough from the sun so hide away for a bulk of the afternoon. Made the hard decision not to go to a Fundamentalist village – both of us feeling too unwell. Head to Gooseneck state park. Pitch tent in the dark.

From pine marten penises to how to avoid a crash, here are some of the things we now know.

We left Salt Lake to go and meet Austin and Lois, also in a Ural, in Moab, South Utah.

They have been journeying through the Southern States – so this is as far west as they are coming and as far east as we will go (for the moment anyway – the Mexico boarder question remains an issue) so we’re going to meet, video each other on the bikes, and have all the campground mayhem you’d expect from the kind of people prepared to travel huge distances in an absurd but wonderful vehicle, which people endlessly point at, which only travels at 65mph, which may not be conducive to conjugal harmony…

It starts inauspiciously. We leave Salt Lake City FIVE HOURS LATE. Even for us, that’s saying something. We passed a sweaty cyclist south of Moab, who they guessed (given that there are simply no other cyclists in the desert) may have been BBC presenter and adventurer Mark Beaumont (and star of those Orange ads..), en route to South America. An inspirational guy, with an entirely different experience of the road from Alaska. Check out his site: www.markbeaumontonline.com, and BBC blog: www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/cyclingtheamericas His book “The Man who Cycled The World” is in the shops now.

We knew about his trip, and have been hoping to cross paths with him at some stage. Mike and he share a mutual friend, so we got hold of his address, and – given that he was also in Salt Lake – tried to set up a meeting. We got an email reply to say that we’d missed him, but that he’d give a call when we could. Fair enough. So we set off, and about an hour down the road, on a winding road through the southern Utah canyons, there was a lone bike rider. Mike pointed, we pulled up beside him, and I hollered in my usual shy way, “MARK! MARK BEAUMONT! WE EMAILED YOU!” which I’m sure didn’t scare the crap out of him at all. A pair of Evil Knievel lunatics in a wartime-design motorbike and sidecar is totally normal. Only one machine gun rig on the sidecar away from tea and biscuits.

He indicated that we should drive ahead and pull over, and he joined us a couple of minutes later. What a dude! He goes like sh*t off a shovel, and didn’t even puff when he pulled over. I was being typically Alanna and gave him a hard time about the fact that he was doing it all on the BBC One dime and we hadn’t even managed to convince BBC back-of-beyond to commission us… (he was utterly charming in the face of my lady-like onslaught. Mike suggested that I might have been a bit full-on. I, natch, thought I was being funny).

We will try and cross paths with him further along the road for a proper chat, rather that an hour at the side of the freeway. But the dude is a legend. He did, when we asked him for advice on our trip, say that we were very very lucky to have company. He said he got very lonely on the road but that he was loving the trip. We hope to catch him in Mexico. And to leach his success, obv.

We met up with Austin and Lois late. But it was, of course, totally brilliant. Austin is still mad as a brush, Lois is the epitome of glamour (on a roadtrip?! It defies belief) and we ate, drank and laughed as we exchanged tales of burning up the States on our Urals.

Next up, we’re off to Vegas via Grand Canyon. More, as ever, to follow.

Another unbelievable day:  Having met the 30 year old husband of a plural family the evening before, Anne took us to meet a 50 year old patriarch. He had many more wives than the first man’s two, but we didn’t ask. Maybe 4, who knows. When asked how many children he had, he laughingly said that he didn’t know, but I think it was his media-savvy kicking in. His eldest child is 31, his youngest 8 months. Swarms of smiling children scampered around his big house and garden, delighting in watching dad and moms being asked about their family set up. 5 girls between the ages of 14 and 12 laughed together as a gang – exactly like I was at school, just that I wasn’t related to my closest friends. It was the morning after a family wedding so everyone was around, we met tens of people, all from this one family. The children were totally enchanting. All unique, all curious, asked questions, wanted to show me round, eager to show off.
The answers to our questions were less satisfying with this family, I think because the entire family came out to the garden to listen in. I had a stronger sense of the male patriarch in this family – he answered most of the questions, and in a way which was quite hard to penetrate. He was, however, utterly charming. His wives were quieter, and more traditional. One younger one wearing the oft-seen sculted top knot, and all covered reservedly. When I asked who was the mother of a specific child, he said that all the children treat all of the women as their mothers and that question is never asked around the home. One of the wives was the home mom specifically, one works as a teacher, everyone shared the work. Older kids look after younger kids, everyone has their tasks on the farm that the family have in their big garden in suburban Salt Lake.
The relationships between the man and his wives in this family felt much more traditional. When I asked how he courted one of his wives, he said that courtship doesn’t exist in Fundamentalist Mormon culture. Individuals pray to God for the answer and when it comes, they talk to their bishop, who will then sanction a union. The couple then gets to know each other, court, and fall in love (though they do not refer to an emotional love, this is an eternal love, sanctioned and ordained by God, love is based on commitment, emotion plays no role)

Believe it or not, this is not the entire immediate family.

They are very industrious, growing and canning a lot of their food. When talking about finances, they say that they do indeed have to be very frugal, shopping in bulk, coordinating it all with military precision, taking advantage of good deals. The kids don’t seem deprived though in any way. I asked them about their favourite flavour of pizza, and they do indeed have take out nights and sleepovers like any other children. They are homeschooled, that’s the difference. The younger husband we interviewed said that he had loved every minute of his childhood – who wouldn’t love having 5 brothers the same age who were all best friends and could spend every minute together?

Finally, Anne took us to the elderly patriarch of a huge family. He was also the leader of one of the Fundamentalist groups, having been disatisfied with the way that one of the other, larger groups was organising itself. We pulled up outside a huge red brick house, built in a U shape, with a basketball court to one side, baseball diamond behind it, large playground, rose garden leading to the front door. A jovial old man opened the door, huge grin, playful tone of voice. This was him. He explained that the whole house was built by members of his church and family. It had taken 2 years, but they had designed it themselves and it suited them perfectly. It really was a spectacular place.

He and one of his wives showed us round the place. She was dressed in a more traditional way, with long braid and shirt. But she had real presence – answering most of our questions with authority and fervour. They took us to the church that they gather at. A big room with a stage and seats for 200 or so. The school, also on the grounds and attended by members of the family, was putting on a play so various props littered it. The Fundamentalists believe that, among other things, Jesus had multiple wives and was a father. She refered to a passage in the New Testament when Mary and Martha were with Jesus, and one complains that she is having to wash the dishes whilst Mary can talk to Jesus. Not the behaviour of someone receiving a guest, more of someone talking to her husband.

They showed us the various different quarters which each of the wives had: all having their own private space for them and their children (though most of the wives had no children left in the home). It was huge and totally fascinating. He was utterly charming, again, great company, with a twinkle in his eye and a mischievous grin. Though I was really tired by that point, I was still totally charmed. We interviewed him and two of the wives and it was interesting to get the older perspective. A friend of his had died suddenly, and the church had suggested that he marry the man’s wives, so they had lived with him for 20 years. The eldest of these ladies had joined us for an interview. She was a fabulous granny figure, 84 years old, and treated her now-husband as a mate. They laughed together cheekily, and there was the suggestion that there were no sexual relations there.

In fact, at no point during meeting any of the three families did I feel like this was something to do with sexual gratification. As the woman at the conference were at pains to point out, if you want to get a lot of sex, why on earth would you get more wives? Surely you’d just play away from home – so that it was sex with no strings. Here the men are responsible for entire new families. It’s exhasting, expensive and not the easiest way to get sex by any means.

All in all, the whole experience was fascinating and eye-opening. I really did come away with the feeling that we should live and let love. These are families built entirely on love.

After 2 full and hectic days immersed in understanding the Fundamentalist Mormon culture, we return to our wonderful friends Johnny and Angel for the first alcohol in days, full of stories and facts and sit down to a BBQ and conversation late into the night.

- Then we drive to meet Leonard and Janet, members of the LDS church (regular Mormons). Leonard was very seriously burnt in an industrial accident in ’92 and admits that he is very very lucky to be alive. He spent 2 months in a coma after the accident, and was blind for nearly a year until he has cornea transplants. He wore a burn suit for his entire body for 18 months, before returning to (the same place to) work. Janet stayed with him throughout (statistically with very serious burns cases, this is very unusual) and they have now been married for 36 years, with 4 kids and many grandchildren. Janet and Leonard have been actively involved with a burns camp for burns victims and Leonard spends much of his spare time visiting children in the Salt Lake burns unit. They are a truly inspiring couple, and it was a pleasure to meet them. And their fab grandson Isaac, the pumpkin man.

Anne is a co-founder of an organisation called Principle Voices, which has been working hard over the last few years to build bridges between the traditionally extremely wary Fundamentalist communities and the outside world. She herself was a plural wife, and along with three other wpoen, they realised that the mistrust of the outside world which the communities have was meaning that they simply weren’t asking for help where they most needed it (eg doctors, counselling) for fear of being prosecuted.

Because dealings with the Fundamentalist communities are fairly new territory for state workers (only recently, under the legislation of Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, has the state law suggested that perpetrators of bigamy would not be prosecuted for this felony), the conference waas also a way of breaking down the stereotypes and biases, and helping workers to tailor their skills to this particular culture.

During the course of the day we heard from representatives from the Attorney General’s office (including the AG himself, who we managed to talk to), from social workers, and from a panel of plural wives. The AG’s office gave a layman’s introduction to the principles of hte faith, and the current legal position of the state with regards to bigamy (which is to forgive the adult consensual union, and crack down hard on any incidences of underage marriage, child abuse and welfare fraud)

The social workers concentrated on underdoing the stereotypes, and explaining with examples who standard practice in the field simply could not be applied to this culture. So rather than defaulting to suggestion applicable to mainstream society (see a counsellor, register in college, etc) – for example, Fundamentalist commuunities prefer homebirth, as they feel that they will be discrimated against or not understood in a mainstream hospital; children are homeschooled because often the taunts that children have to suffer in mainstream schools is too intimidating.

The most powerful and fascinating part of the day was hearing from the wives themselves. They alone were enough to debunk every stereotype you may ever have held about polygamy. We heard from 4 separate women about their experiences and ways of life as plural wives. Standing up there and addressing an auditorium of people with fixed preconceptions – not least because it was risking their own freedom and that of their families- must have been fairly terrifying, and yet all 4 of them were fiercely articulate, passionate and held the audience in the palm of their hands.

2 of the ladies were a little older and told stories of the raid of 1953 when the state swept down, arresting fathers, taking children from mothers. Twice I, and the rest of the auditorium, cried at how unjust the behaviour was. One lady told the story of her mother in the raid. Her mother was very very pregnant at the time, and was separated from the rest of her family and children and depostied on her own, afraid and alone, at the door of a hospital. She had a hard birth and at the end, the doctors used a general anaesthetic. When she woke up a few hours later, she asked to see her baby. The nurses ignored her. This went on and on, she was repeated dismissed everytime she ashed about her child – what gender it was, could she see it, had it died? This went on for two days as she became increasingly frantic. Finally, after that time, her baby was returned to her. It turned out that hers was the first child to be born after the raid, and the state had tried to adopt the child. Only when they realised that legal adoption requires the consent of both parents was the baby returned. During the telling of the story, the lady wept sporadically. She was extremely well composed depsite those occasional breaks. She used the story to highlight the descrimination from the very people who should be trying to protect. She talkeed about how the raids drove the communities to be even more isolated and mistrustful of the outside world. Chldren were told to call their fathers “Uncle” in public, never ever talk about their homelives outside the family home, and not to look for help from the outside world.

At one point, a beautiful and intelligent-looking woman took the stage. She was dressed in a tailored black suit, with a green shirt and gold earrings. She told us that she was the first wife of a man with three wives. How the wives loved each other, and adored and cared for all the children in their home. She worked, another of her sister-wives did, and that the house functioned very smmothly. It was so impressive. This woman defied every expectation I had of a plural wife: I thought of braids, austere formal dress, meak character, oppressed spirit, undereducated. But no, this woman was feisty, bright, and funny. The final wife, who closed the talks, was equally well-educated and well-dressed. Exactly the kind of lady – feisty, fun, passionate – that I like to be friends with. They talked about how their households worked, their priorities, and the injustice of the Fundamentalist Mormon stereotyp and the subsequent prejudice and injustice.

Polygamy is all about the family. Everyone who we heard from, talked to on the day, met subequently, talked about how the family comes before anything and everything else. When we asked “Love is…?” as part of the interviews, pretty much every single answer was an articulate variation on the theme of loving others more than oneself. When spending time with the familes, there is an overwhelming sense of community – everyone works together, but everyone also has fun together. The children are really happy, and play delightedly with their myriad of brothers and sisters.

Anne introduced us to three polygamist families. The first, which we met on Monday evening, was a 31 year old man, his 29 year old first wife and his 22 year old second wife. One thing which Anne had informed us about is that asking how many wives or children a man has is a terrible terrible faux pas. She has never talked about how many wives her husband had, and she didn’t know how many any of the many we interviewed had. The fact that these families were prepared to talk to us – and let us film them – when their entire livelihoods are at risk for doing so (people in Utah will take their custom away from business they know to have polygamist owners) – was so extraordinary, and for that reason, I’ll refrain from using names here.

That first meeting – when the man and his two wives and his youngest baby came round to be interviewed – was captivating. They were the most enchanting family I had ever seen. The fact that they are the same age as me and Mike, and so totally recognisable and like us – made it very moving. He had met his first wife at school. They were both young, but they got on really well and knew from the get-go that they wanted to get married. Their parents resisted until she was 18, then the leader of their church consented to the union. They visibly adored each other, and had a very sweet dynamic. That said, she was feisty and fun – pretty, wearing tight jeans and a ruffled t-shirt. When, after 5 years of marriage, they met a friend of his younger sister, the first wife and she had got on really well, and the first wife suggested to her husband that they consider making this younger girl part of their family. He thought it was a good idea – she was lovely and would fit well with their already large family – so his first wife set the wheels in motion, eventually proposing to the second girl by suggesting that they go for a walk together. They are such good friends that the two of them even go away together for Girls’ Weekends, leaving him to look after their large brood. He found out about the proposal when he came down for dinner and the second wife said “we’re engaged!”. It’s very much about marrying into a family rather than marrying a man.

The second wife is one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen, and the aura of love around all three of them was quite unbelievable. When I asked the first wife why she wanted another woman to share in her life (she wasn’t raised in a plural wife family, though her husband was), she said that she had so much happiness and such a wonderful life and husband, that she wanted to let someone else have that same fortune. The second wife agreed. They were just so happy. They have a large family, the sister-wives get on like best friends, all chores are shared, the children are raised regarding both the mothers as their own. As someone who always loved being around big families, I was transfixed. There was no sense of a sleazy man at the centre of it all having his cake and eating it: he was a sensitive soul, and you had the feeling that he was thrilled with these beautiful and lively women in his life.

Mike and I were lucky enough to attend an all day conference given by a government body, designed to promote better understanding of the Fundamentalist culture to help social workers involved withthose communities.  

A few years ago, the Attorney General of Utah, a great guy called Mark Shurtleff who we managed to interview on the matter, realised that prosecuting the felony of bigamy in the state of Utah required resources way beyond his budget. What he realised was that if he did not chase after consenting adult polygamists, he could instead free up the state’s resources to find and punish – hard – incidences in polygamist communities of child abuse, domestic violence and welfare fraud. An effort which has been hugely successful, and because of his efforts, representatives from all Fundamentalist groups (including the hugely reclusive and highly publicised FLDS) have agreed to put an end to the practice of underage marriages (those under 18).

• What I had no idea about was that there are many different types of Fundamentalist Mormons, and the stereotypes which abound – of oppressed women, archaic dresses, braids, child brides – are, for the most part, not true at all.
• There are around 37,000 Fundamentalist Mormons in total. (There are over 13 million Mormons worldwide – not the same thing AT ALL) And though there are that many who believe  in the practice of polygamy, there are far far fewer who practice it.
• There are four main groups of Fundamentalists -
• The FLDS, 8-10,000 members. This is the Fundamentalist group which we hear about the most – their prophet is Warren Jeffs, recently incarcerated for rape of a minor and forcing an incestuous marriage. It was on their community that the raids in Texas happened in April 2008 (sending shock waves of terror through the other Fundamentalist communities, and undoing much of the positive work which many had been doing to build bridges into the culture) There is frustration amongst other groups that the stereotypes from this, the most extreme of the subgroups, are applied to all Fundamentalists.
• The Apostolic United Brethren (the AUB or “Allred Group”)., 7,500 members. They don’t see themselves in opposition to, or in competition with, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (mainstream Mormons) and the member are generally integrated in most ways into mainstream society.
• Centennial Park, 2.000. A large group of Fundamentalist Mormons left Colorado City in 1985 due to a disagreement over leadership succession. A year later, they established Centennial Park where around 1,500 people now live. The community is led by a council, and once again, bears almost no resemblance to the FLDS stereotype.
• The Kingstons, 2,000 (also known as the Davis County Cooperative). Formed during the Great Depression, it was set up deliberately as a non-religious organisation with the belief that people could work together regardless of their beliefs. A few of the founders included men who had been excommunicated from the LDS church for believing polygamy, though not necessarily practicing it, was a true principle.
• The biggest ‘group’ is the Independents, making up 15,000 of the 37,000 Fundamentalists. They do not subscribe to any of the individual groups’ practices or particular beliefs, choosing instead to practice in their own way – gathering in small study groups, and not being unified in any broad sense. They are usually well integrated into society.

I will write with more thoughts on polygamy from what I have seen and learnt – but they are the bare facts. (Many thanks to Anne Wilde and the Utah Attorney General’s office’s Primer booklet, handed out at the conference we attended)

• Spend morning yakking with our hosts, Angel and Johnny. She was devout LDS (Mormon) so could give us full background on the faith and practices.
• Set off to house of Anne Wilde, founder of Principle Voices, a group which has opened up communication between Fundamentalist Mormons and the outside world. She is fantastic: generous, warm and a kind hostess, and the second of a few wives of a reknowned and prolific author of Fundamentalist works, Ogden Kraut.
• She talked to us for 3 hours about how the Fundamentalists work, which I’m going to try and distil for you now in a separate post.

• We’ve made it to Salt Lake City!
• Not sure what I was expecting, but the cars on the freeway are the nicest cars we’ve seen so far on the trip – Porsches and Lexus and BMWs… blinging Mormons!
• Staying in south Salt Lake with Tee (from Seattle)’s sister, Angel and her hubby, Johnny. Love ‘em.

• Driving through Nevada as fast as we can (which isn’t lightning pace…) to cover as much distance as possible.
• Boring boring boring. And hot. Desert either side of road. Straight roads stretching into the distance. I sleep and sleep and sleep. Then we swap for a bit and Mike sleeps too.
• Arrive at Bonneville Salt Flats.
• Totally bizarre – other worldly and extraordinary. Breathtaking colours – absolute white of the salt and blue of the sky. \
• “Treat” ourselves to a night at a casino in Wendover. Hilarious. Like a poor (fat) man’s Vegas. Loved it.

• I’d like to put in a shout out for Southern Oregon. Who even knew it was there? Not very many people, judging by the number of people around. The Steen Mountains, and the Alvord Desert in particular, are amongst the most spectacular places I have ever seen.
• We drive to Fields, the nearest conurbation to the Alvord Desert and settle down for lunch at Fields Station. A gas station/shop/diner, and the only thing happening in the place.
• From Fields, it’s a half hour drive to the Alvord, a dried up lake bed – which has created a  flat. Not like the Salt Flats, which are blinding white, this is a dusty light yellow. As you pull round the corner in the road, and it appears, it is quite spectacular.
• We saw a cluster of people landsailing (like sailing, but with wheels) in the distance on the flat. Ever the pain in the neck, I say to Mike that I’d like to drive to them and film them. So over we go.
• Despite both looking like they are in their 30s, the couple there have been married for 26 years. And so we get out the camera, and off we go with a bonus interview…
• John and Diane, from Portland, up for anything, windsurfers, tae kwon do (sp?!) experts, civil war re-enactors and generally fabulous.
• They let Mike and I to have a go on the landsail. OH MY GOD, I WANT ONE. Jaaaaarmazing. Just like a topper, but much easier, much drier, and MUCH MUCH more fun.
• I suggest John has a go on the bike by way of repayment and of course, as he brings it back in from the dusty desert, something goes CLUNK. And the gears no longer engage with the engine. Not his fault – he did exactly what Mike would have – but the bike’s not going forward.
• BIKE STATIONARY. Shit.
• We’re pretty much as far from a Ural dealership as is possible. Or anywhere for that matter.
• Shit. Another screw up in the space of 2 days.
• John suggests that we use his truck to tow the bike back to Fields.
• We rig it up, Mike on the bike following behind the truck, when he waves in distress.
• THE BACK WHEEL IS FALLING OFF.
• Shit.
• So Mike and John set to work, in the middle of the deserted, dusty road in the blazing sun, taking off the back wheel to work out what the hell is wrong.
• 2 hours later (Diane and I are on the beers by this point), Mike not only realises what caused the problem in the first place (a shattered spline in the back wheel), but has fixed it. Unbelievable. Our boy’s a mechanic!
• Jubilation. We decide to stay and camp with John and Diane on the Alvord flat. One of the best decisions we have ever made:
• We head to the desert hot springs for a soak. Hot pools heated by the sulphorous emissions. (if only we could harness Mike’s natural potential similarly)
• Meet Dave who joins our merry band. We head to a mountain orchard in the midst of the dusty Steens.
• Mike adds Alpha Male points by firing John’s gun. Looks part redneck, part training-camp-kid. Only stops when Dave leans forward and says “There’s a truck over there where you’re firing…”
• Night time, desert encampment, sleeping under the stars, landsailing until I crash into Dave’s tent… Magical.

• After all the excitement of the crash, and a distinctly dodgy motel in Madras, we set off south to see the Alvord Desert
• Of course, a day of long driving doesn’t get us there and we are forced to camp in the charming hamlet of Frenchglen
• The hilarious thing about Team GTD is that, in American terms, we are absolutely tiny. Whenever we pull up to camp, the bike is titchy in comparison with the vehicles we pull up alongside, and then we get out our two man tiny tent, pitch it and hop in – alongside tents with vestibules, firesides with chairs to seat an auditorium-load of people, etc.
• And so it was in Frenchglen. But we were far away from our neighbours for it to feel like a wilderness, and the surrounding wilderness stretched for as far as we could see.
• Darkness descended, the sky got inky black, and Mike and I got out the granny rug which lives in the sidecar, lay down on the grass and settled in to watch the meteor showers which everyone had promised.
• The night sky itself was magical, with perfect clarity of the milky way, and thousands upon thousands of stars. Not long after we lay down to watch the show, the showers began – they happen every year around this time, and we had caught the night. Streaks of light glided across the Oregon sky. I think one of the most magical experiences of my life.

• Leave Portland, convinced in its credentials as a great city. Magarita hangover to prove it.
• Set off into the unknown of southern Oregon to get to Salt Lake City for the weekend.
• Stop at Timberline resort, where The Shining was filmed. Eerie. Especially Mike repeating “Heeeeeere’s Mickey” ad nauseam.
• Smith Rock park, an awesome sheer face of climbing – of every level. Climbers’ paradise. Mike and I squabble because we’re too hot. I, of course, get cornered by the inbred-looking local. Mike irritated.
• Drive for 3 hours. To White River Falls, a deserted set of falls where people can swim. We’d been told that it’s possible to climb up under the falls then leap out. Apparently it would “change our lives”. But we couldn’t find it and were too scared to take a guess at one. Plus, my Crocs kept coming off. Whatcha gonna do..?
• Antelope. THE CRASH. Winding road down into Madras (“Madd-rus” rather than everyone’s favourite curry), we thought we’d get a riding shot of the bike. I get out to man the camera, Mike sets off down the hairpin bends and, forgetting that he no longer had his lardy counterbalance in the sidecar, loses balance and careers off the road. I, of course, honk with laughter (as any concerned wife would, surely?).
• The damage is actually worse than it looked. Mike has, once again, got stuck on a pole (what is it with these unfortunately-placed lone poles in the wilderness?) and the bike was wedged. Thankfully, a truck with a winch was the only car we’d seen in 2 hours passed up within 2 minutes and pulled our boy out.
• Windscreen in bad state, and indicator down. But Mike was ok.
• Phew. Imagine the shit I would have been in if he hadn’t been…

• Team GTD, in quest for free beds, often lands in suburbs (nothing wrong with them – and thank you to all who have stumped up spare beds to the cause) – but means we don’t often see city centres without a mission. So we made like the single shot down the garbage shoot of the Death Star and went to the heart of the City.
• Central Portland interesting. Liberal, open-minded, leafy, tramps.
• Alanna pounces on footbagger (hackysack?) who happens to be US champion. He came to Portland because it is the Home of Footbagging (two guys from Portland created it) and it has the biggest Footbagging scene. Finally! Something to distinguish Portland!

• Interview Simone and Hawkins as our young love representatives. Very sweet.
• Leave them to head south to another friend (bed) on southside of city.
• Mike talks to a World War II vet about how the sidecar was really used…

• Spend the morning with Stephanie’s husband – born in Queens, NYC, and organiser of demonstrations during the Anti-Vietnam years – now a farmer.
• Much excitement about Chicken Tractors. Check ‘em out if you don’t know what one is (a moveable coop without a floor) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tractor
• Then head to Portland to stay in St John’s (north Portland), with Hawkins (son of Dove and Hawk from Sheep Mountain, brother of Shahnti from Anchorage) and his fiancée, Simone.
• Hawkins in a band, Friday is band practice.
• Mike and I do full roast chicken dinner.
• Not sure the Yanks know what to make of it all.

• Leave Key Peninsula for Olympia. Alanna sleeps entire way.
• Pitch tent at Millersylvania State Park and head to social historian, Professor Stephanie Coontz’s house nearby
• She is totally fascinating. Perfectly articulate (for TV – trained during the peace movement in the 60s to deliver soundbites, she is an interviewer’s dream) and comes at our marriage discussion from an angle which we had not previously contemplated: that marriage for love is very very recent, and perhaps not even possible.
• She’s the author of many books, most recently: “Marriage, a history: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage”
• Stayed for dinner with her, her husband and her stepfather. Raucous, mirth-filled and one of the most entertaining and memorable dinners of the trip so far.
• Drunk. End up spending the night.

• Drive to Lakebay, past Gig Harbour on the Key Peninsula across from Tacoma, to interview the parents of Kyle (of Kyle and Shahnti fame in Anchorage)
• Loving couple with fascinating memories of living up in the far north west of Alaska and running a school for only Eskimo kids.
• Then on to Olympia and Stephanie Coontz

• Head to Dr Diana Wiley’s house for our first interview.
• Dr Wiley is a clinical sexologist for 25 years: www.drdianawiley.com
• Joined by world reknowned sociologist – and Oprah regular – Dr Pepper Schwartz. http://www.drpepperschwartz.com/ 
• Between them, the two professors discuss the role of sex in marriage, and its importance.
• Both ladies very articulate, lots of meat for the documentary.
• Team GTD very chuffed.
• Spend another night with our mates, Tee and Alicia – and a plan is hatched over a few Coronas…

• Back at Ural Global HQ in Redmond, outside Seattle.
• Head mechanic at Ural is called Sergei. Old and silent. A legend.
• Much disappointment from said-Yoda at the sag on the sidecar.
• All fingers are pointing in one direction.
• Mrs GTD vows to deny the nightly beer fests.
• Other than that, bike going like a dream.
• Stay with Tee and Alicia, a fabulous lesbian couple we met at Seattle’s gay pride last time we came through.

• Back in Uncle Sam’s house.
• Almost as soon as cross border, the endless malls begin again.
• Mike is beguiled to Best Buy (electronics superstore, his favourite) Comes out, once again laden, with eyes like a child on Christmas morning.
• Humble bike now equipped with a cigarette-lighter charger, which can attach to a 4 way adaptor.
• Team GTD currently depleting half of the west coast grid every evening with amount of crap which needs charging.

• Gay Pride sparkles, totters and streaks its way round Vancouver’s sunny streets
• A mad, multi-hued menagerie of nipple tassels, stilettos and crotchless chaps. Two aged willies wiggle their way down the route to the delight/disgust of the 200,000 strong crowd

• Team GTD race with gusto to the WP&FG bodybuilding competition. Only to find it has been postponed.
• Mrs C po-faced as deprived of pecks and pouches.
• Meet and interview fantastic gay couple who have adopted the coolest little dude. Totally smitten.
• Mike heard the ovaries clanging and I was quickly ushered from the premises.
• Interview inter-racial Vancouver couple: Chinese wife, Canadian husband. Building a house. He says: “The fridge is the greatest culture clash: one side is fish heads, the other side is ice cream”

• Mike spends morning taking little people in bike helmets for rides on the bike. Much pint-sized excitement from Alanna’s cousin’s 3 year old daughter and the neighbours.
• Mrs C clucky. Danger.
• Spend the afternoon with Vancouver documentary-maker, Julia Ivanova. There really is nothing like Facebook for stalking strangers.
• All head to the opening ceremony of the World Police and Fire Games. 15,000 athletes from all variants of police and fire work gather every 2 years to compete.
• FINALLY see Mounties on horses. Love a living stereotype.
• Once again, the press pass is working wonders for Mike’s credibility. In general. (Patchy pubic beard still in our lives)

• A hop, skip and a jump over to Vancouver from Sidney, Vancouver Island.
• Use a fat lady to shield self from the wind.

• Victoria and Vancouver are the only places until Lima which hold any blood relatives of Team GTD. The barnacles finally have a hull to attach themselves to.
• Big thanks to long suffering uncle and aunt.

• Located between Vancouver Island and Vancouver on the mainland is a cluster of idyllic islands called the Gulf Islands. They range in size from splodges of land with the odd tree and rock, right up to big islands with lots of residents and hotels. The biggest and most famous of the islands (islands like Saltspring Island) and are hooked up by a network of ferries.
• Great friends of my parents have a house on a smaller island, 2 miles long, called De Courcy Island. It’s a private island with about 100 residents. One of whom was getting married, and who was generous/foolish enough to let Going The Distance film his nuptials.
• 100 or so people gathered on a pebble beach at the bottom of a private lawn to watch Patty, a beautiful artist, marry Alan, an island resident. Bluegrass violins played, the food was gluten free and Mrs GTD spent some quality time with the rosé wine.
• There really is nothing like a wedding for reminding me of my fondness for my ginger-pube-bearded husband. That, and the rosé.
• Mike tired and grumpy from all the driving. And the drunk wife.

• Covered today: 498km (on ferry)
• Much angst about ethics of taking a ferry as part of a roadtrip.
• 3am start to catch ferry down to Vancouver Island, trying to make it to wedding on Saturday.
• We made it on to the ferry. Small miracle. Though not quite as small as a motorbike (we lied and said that the sidecar was detachable. About as detachable as my burgeoning arse!)
• Drop a bombshell on Mike during the ride: have to get to Nanaimo ferry to meet mates the next day at 9am. Nothing too concerning about that, I hear you say… not until you realize that it’s a 7 hour drive from where we dock. At midnight.
• Mike did the math. I slept in the sidecar.

• Driven today: 609km; Total: 5396km
• Another day of driving to get to Prince Rupert in time for ferry on Friday (as stand-bys)
• Need to change tyre (Russian tyre on back wheel totally bald. Only lasted 3,000km. Will need to sort that if we have a hope of making it through South America where there are no Ural dealers…)
• Very badly burnt by wind and sun. Will arrive in Patagonia looking like ethno-hag on National Geographic cover.
• Heavens open 30 miles outside Prince Rupert. Should have bought raingear, now realize.

• Driven today: 750km; Total: 4787km
• 12 hours riding through wind and shine.
• Arrive campground at midnight.
• Mike honks horn by accident 3 times, just to ingratiate ourselves with the camping neighbours.
• Mozzies respond with fervor.

• Driven today: 492km; Total: 4037km
• Mike drove all day. Too much for one man to handle. See “Going The Distance Minor Incident” below:
• Arrive in Whitehorse broken.
• Not even beer can cheer us up.

• Driven today: 175km; Total: 3545km
• To Dawson City, centre of the early 20th century Gold Rush.
• Gold discovered in a creek here in 1897, and the world and his wife came to get a piece of the action.
• Still mining here today. Town preserved in traditional architectural style.
• Interview 90 year old miner and town historian, John, and his wife, Madeleine, having tracked them down in the phonebook and knocked on their door.
• Am becoming a TV researcher of the scary-stalker variety.
• Great interview, great folk.

• Driven today: 451km; Total: 3370km
• We’re now driving the 400 miles to Dawson City. Nothing really prepares you for the distances in Alaska. The top speed of the bike is around 55miles per hour so we really do have (too much?) time to savour those views.
• Roads cut through worlds of green. Really is the Last Frontier.
• We stumble across a beaunormous view at Robertson Creek:

• On the long drives, one of my favourite things is to monitor the carnage on the windscreen directly in front of me. This isn’t just a graveyard for the lowly mosquito, there are INTESTINES 2 inches from my face. They crustify as brown bogies. It looks like Damien Hirst has experimented with centrifugal force and goat shit. Which I actually wouldn’t put past him…
• Don’t make the border in time. Have to stop and camp in Chicken. Yes, Chicken.

• 3 interviews:

• An Alaskan trapper and his wife. Traps pine marten. Married 48 years. Very in love. Her advice: don’t ever try to organize his stuff!
• A world champion, Alaskan dog musher. Sadly on her own (husband fishing – very Alaskan). 51 dogs in her kennel. She races in all the major dogsled events every year. Won the Yukon Quest – the toughest of the 1,000 mile races through the wilderness. (Wo)man and dog. And miles and miles and miles of snow.
• Native Alaskan couple. Married 58 years. She’d won gold trophy for Seal Skinning.

• More WEIO: MORE EARS. Is there nothing they won’t put their ears through?
• The Ear Weight final. 16 lbs of lead weights carried by ear alone. Seal hop final.

• 7am, day starts early.
• Another brush with major celebrity, this time in the form of an appearance on the radio breakfast show of 970 AM KFBX Fairbanks news radio.
• On for half an hour. DJ opens it up to the listeners – who phone in with advice for us on how to make a marriage last. Answers range from the good American “pray together once a day” to the more practical – and very useful – “never share a two man kayak”. Done that. Got the knuckle scars.

• On to bask in yet more of our 15 minutes of fame, with an appearance on CBS 13’s morning TV news show. Wearing the bell end costumes, sitting at news desk, interviewed by nice lady with good teeth, and the kind of voice news anchormen keep in a jar by their beds.
• Mrs GTD puce of face. Mr GTD dodgy ginger of beard. Are we ready for superstardom? The question plays constantly on my mind.

• To the World Eskimo Indian Olympics. Team GTD catches the Ear Pull final. A loop of twine is wrapped around the ears of two people who sit close together, facing each other. This is like dental floss, so by round three, deep cuts appear at the back of the lucky contestants’ ears.
• The idea of the games is to preserve and celebrate the traditional games of the Eskimo and Indian cultures. Some of the games have their origin in necessity (the blanket toss, where a person is launched high into the air from a trampoline of seal gut?, has its roots in being able to see far into the distance for whales; the high kick, where contestants have to kick a suspended ball with on foot, high above them – which was the way that the news of a whale catch would be communicated over long distances) and some are games (the seal hop, where a contestant moves himself forward in the press up position on his knuckles to mimic the movement of a seal on ice).
• Much excitement: Team GTD gets press passes. Unlimited access to the ear pull. Score.

• Back to bullet points. Who needs pronouns? Or rather, needs pronouns?
• Unbelievably, am writing this from the sidecar. Has a blog ever been written from a sidecar?
• Computer back from brush with death, glassofwineonmotherboard-style
• Survived a day of data wrangling.
• Dinner at Pumphouse Restaurant, with big outdoor deck overlooking Chena river which runs through the heart of Fairbanks. People canoeing, kayaking and generally mucking about on the river on a very hot summer’s evening.
• A good town.

Hmmm. Those overalls do not provide adequate protection from the wind. After 8 hours riding, we’re both freezing. Crawl into Fairbanks cold, tired and crotchety.

After a day with Mickey, the bike is finally ready to hit the road. Many tears on departure, Mr Sherfield has shown us real kindness for our time in Anchorage.

We set off for Sheep Mountain and the home of Momma Dove and Pappa Hawk, homesteaders who welcome us into their home (and a family reunion) for the night. The US Federal Government allowed homesteading of federal land to US citizens until the early 1960s: one homestead was allowed up to 160 acres of land for each person in a family. The homesteader had to locate the land, stake it out, file it with the government. The homesteader was required to “prove up” the land to be able to purchase it: they had to build a home, clear some of the land, plant a crop. This was intended to encourage people to come up to Alaska and to help cultivate the land.

In a classically isolated dwelling – which now has electricity and running water and has been made lovely over the years by the couple’s efforts – the Wrights welcomed us in.

Set off back from the land at the back of beyond, 6 hours driving back to Anchorage. I can now sleep in the sidecar.

Back to interview Helen and Isaac, a Native Alaskan couple – he’s Inupiaq and she’s Tlingit. We interviewed them at the Heritage Center, outside a traditional Inupiaq dwelling. They’re from the far north so have to contend with extreme cold. She’s from the Tlingit in the South East who have a (relatively) milder climate to live with.

Mickey suggested that we take a test drive of the bike. This being Alaska, our test drive was 500 miles in 24 hours.

We’d found a community of Russian Old Believers, who have set up a community near the bottom of the Kenai Peninsula, remote and still living simply in line with their faith, wearing traditional Russian garb. So we headed off to find them, specifically Nina and Dennis Fefelov, son of one of the founders of the community. Nina is a life force to be reckoned with.

9th: THE BIKE ARRIVES IN ANCHORAGE

We’re getting closer to setting off. Four days of Mike and Mickey unpacking and prepping the bike for departure. Lots and lots of work.

The bike is laden like the donkey on Blackpool beach with the fat kid on it.

The team in action:

The uniform, modelled by Mrs A.Clear:

Bud and Carol (owners of the Icecream shop in Girdwood and Bud & Carol’s B&B) take us shrimping in Whittier. 7am start. Out to the submerged pots on Bud and Carol’s boat. Lift up pot. Shake out. Then behead and count shrimps.

It’s all about the technique people… you hold the live shrimp with the right thumb at the top of its chest, then twist of its head with the left hand and throw it back into the sea.

Am curiously delighted with my brush with killing live beasts. They’ll make an Alaskan of me yet.

150 of the enormous suckers. Saweet.

Determined to find a Native Alaskan couple to interview, we head to the museum www.alaskanative.net/ – what a fascinating place. Melissa gives us a full tour and we meet Helen and Isaac, a Native couple – he’s an Inupiaq from the far North and she’s a Tlingit from the South East of the country. Both have very different traditions and practices, so we wanted to get to the bottom of what that meant for a couple.

Going The Distance on Anchorage Radio

In full tourist mode.With Jamie and Mark, good folk from Toledo and our new BFFs, we head down to Seward to take a boat trip out into the Kenai fjord. Ticked off much wildlife: whales, sea otters, sea lions, puffins, fat Americans…

Touch the toe of the Exit Glacier, Seward. Had to take off shoes and walk through glacial meltwater. Full body pain.

There’s really nothing like being a Brit in the US on the weekend when they celebrate their independence from the English… that said, we’d plumped ourselves in hippy central Girdwood for the annual Forest Fair. Laidback Alaskans congregate in the forest of Girdwood to sell pottery, drink, play music, be in union with nature. Kids run around, beards flutter in the wind, Alaskan pale ale flows freely and all is well with the world.

Girdwood is magical, and we’re staying in the best place in the world: the Girdwood Alaska Backpackers lodge http://www.hostelgirdwood.com which was still in the process of being built. So the wonderful Amy and Brandon let us kip in the construction site for $5 a night. Nights by the campfire with a group of wonderful and hilarious new folk, learning how to toast marshmallows without looking like a tourist (if it sets fire, DO NOT wave it around to put the flame out – that shit burns people. And find a growing, long stick – that way it won’t set fire itself)

Team GTD at the Girdwood Alaska Backpacker Inn

A long week: Getting things sorted to travel 20,000 miles on a Russian motorbike you don’t own, starting in a country you don’t live in, find people you don’t know, convince broadcasters to be interested in the idea enough to talk about it, not to mention eating, sleeping, travelling without a car in a city which thinks nothing of a 40 mile commute, sorting a bike you know not much about, buying phones, bike and filming equipment… it’s been a really tough and very hideous week. Big thanks to the amazing people at Ural global HQ for sorting everything about the bike, packing it up to ship north, fine tuning it, and generally being amazingly patient.

Flight to Alaska. 3.5 hours. From Seattle! Jesus. This is a mahooosive country.

Anchorage. The sun doesn’t particularly set in this country – 11pm is as light as 4pm in the UK in summertime. Downtown not too inspiring (broadly, it’s the leap off point for adventures in the mighty Alaskan wilderness) so Camp GTD shifts out to the wonderful, hippy, ski resort town of Girdwood, 40 miles south of Anchorage, for the next week.

Mickey Sherfield, of Classic Motorcycles and Urals of Alaska, has the unenviable task of getting this operation on the road. The bike was set to hit Alaskan shores a week later, but he needed to order the right bits for it even before its arrival. Mickey is an Alaskan through and through: bearded, alpha male, always armed, hands so big they could fell a bear. So the two scrawny Brits spend long days loitering around his workshop, watching him work, using his internet, borrowing his enormous and ancient brown truck, getting on his nerves… He’s a kind, generous man who looked after us with a huge heart. If this trip is built on any kind of foundation, the only one to speak of is one Mickey Sherfield.

Alanna demonstrates the comfort and beauty for the relationship guidance book

Day 2 in the Big Lover House. We’re back with a spring in our steps, this time. We have new friends (a lovely and totally normal couple from San Francisco) who we giggle with during the breaks and have curry lunch with. We still feel like children running amok in the halls of a Relationship Hospital, but we’re able to be a bit more earnest about the whole thing (we didn’t stand a chance at resisting the great wave of American sincerity…) and start talking to each other like we can imagine no longer being in love (“what’s your inflexible core on this issue, Mike?” – leaps and bounds on from Mike’s response to my question “Name a big fight” – meaning in our relationship – and him writing Evander/Holyfield 92)

Seattle is awash with sunshine, and we wander away from Relationship 101 through Gay Pride carnival and meet two wonderful lesbians, Tee and Alicia, who are more genuinely in love than anyone we’ve been around for 48 whole hours.

• An extraordinary wedding: alternative meets moneyed. Earnest and exquisite. Having only communicated with Mike in To Do list points for the previous month, the sunny reality of what we were trying to capture and celebrate with Going The Distance peeped through the thick clouds for an instant.
• For one moment, I remembered that I really did love Mike. Then he got steaming drunk, and it was harder to see.
• Sat between Jack Osbourne and his producer at dinner. Lots of tips for trip from their experience of making a (proper) TV show: kidnap insurance, satellite phones, etc. All helpful for pre-trip panic attacks.