No One Said It Would Be Easy. Des Molloy
of yin and yang came into play immediately we had found a suitably remote and discreet place to establish a camp … although camping seems to allude to some sort of temporary shelter, like a tent. For some reason we either didn’t have one, or my optimism and confidence in the wonderful weather of the time persuaded the others that under the stars would be great. So it rained and it rained. The trees seemed pretty dense and initially we thought they might give us shelter but once the foliage got saturated, so did we. Not wise enough to cut and run, we toughed it out lying under the trees, all but floating away in the deluge. Steph still asserts that she nearly drowned. The night seemed endless. As a testament to resilience, this was right up there with anything I had been through. We became half-submerged islands in a lake of ground-water. The saving grace was that it wasn’t cold. It stopped raining in the morning but being under the sodden tree canopy it continued to fall on us for quite some time before we wised up.
Quite clearly we survived to ineptly live many other days, but Steph often proclaims that it was a close-run thing. She only just gave me the benefit of the doubt that this was a one-off, and life with me wouldn’t be a series of near-disasters and escapades of dubious viability. The wonders of youthful love and lust saved the day, and preparations continued.
As well as the obvious physical bike preparation to be done, there were paperwork hoops to be jumped through. The dream of riding a motorbike across the world is often scuttled at the first hurdle … the right to do it. Because each country has their own regime of import duties, taxes, levies etc., it means that the value of the said
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vehicle will vary from country to country. Unchecked, sharp entrepreneurs would soon work out where a given model was cheap and take it to one where it was expensive and sell. To control this, most of the world’s nations require you to have a document that ensures you keep on going. This is a Carnet de Passages en Douane, a document that is signed when you enter a country and signed when you leave. The muscle behind making you comply with this is quite simple … you are required to lodge a significant bond which you don’t get back until you return to where you set off from. Some countries require this bond to be as high as twice the new value of the vehicle, so when planning a trip, you need to find out the highest bond required and get an appropriate Carnet. With none of our bikes still being in production, our bacon was saved … there was no ‘new value’. This meant we were able to value the bikes ourselves and as you can imagine we valued ‘the worthless old shitters’ pretty low and as an added bonus found an insurance company to lodge the money, with us just paying a premium. Travellers we met on the road had either lodged huge cash bonds or in one case the parents had a significant mortgage taken over their house.
The next hurdle … visas. Of course being ‘Working-Joes’ meant that getting our paperwork in place was a laborious chore necessitating taking time off and intermittently dashing into the madness of Central London. Getting the US Visa proved to be a real hurdle. If travelling from NZ, it is quite normal for you to pass through the US and as you might be going to do the same on the way home, the Embassy in Wellington typically issues you a multiple-entry visa for five years. The US Embassy in Grosvenor Square has no such largesse. The first visit was a complete fizzer as the queue stretched for several blocks and we didn’t reach the front in the allotted time. It was an interesting process and once inside the actual building you could observe the ‘culling process’. A row of front people reviewed your application and it seemed rejected it as a default position. It looked like only about one in ten were being ushered off to other small interview rooms. Our second visit at least got us to the rejection stage. For the third visit, we prepared quite thoroughly … we thought. We pooled as much money as we could find from friends and got bank statements showing fat balances. We also worked our way through several of the Central American countries’ embassies, getting visas.
So back into battle. We arrived, not quite in the middle of the night, but certainly at an hour when we should have still been somnolently dreaming of the wonderful
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Gestation
ride to come. Getting to the front and trying not to look guilty of anything, we presented our applications along with evidence of funds to support ourselves.
“Why do you want to go to the US?”
“Well, we don’t want to go to the US as such, we just need a transit visa to pass through!”
“Why should I believe that?”
“Because we have all these visas showing we are going to travel through these subsequent countries.”
“But since 1949 tens of millions of people have entered on transit visas, then stayed illegally. I see no reason to issue you one”
Struggling to keep my cool and not tell the woman I didn’t care about her dumb country, I tried again to explain about our motorbike adventure and how we were aiming to ride all the way to Rio. Fortunately, the official in the next booth overheard and pricked up his ears.
“Are you guys really going to try and ride all the way to Brazil from New York?”
Thankfully we had struck a fellow motorcyclist and in no time we were sharing stories and adventures, as is always the way with the two-wheeled brotherhood. The hefty thud of the US Visa being stamped into our passports was a welcoming end to a process that had been fraught and which had almost got us to our ‘last resort’. Word on the street was that the US Embassy in Edinburgh was an easier hurdle. Already we had been working on a back-story to cover the lack of local address … phew, not needed.
Bessie was ridden to Liverpool and on 6th Oct dispatched to New Orleans as deck cargo. Things were now moving along at a frantic pace. Roly and I, along with Penelope and Samantha were booked to sail from Tilbury Docks to New York on 17th Oct. Along with these exciting developments it was a wonderful time to be young and in love. Even with Steph working at her three jobs and Roly and I putting in the hours to get the two old Panthers ready, there was still time for the joys of the besotted. There was no need to fret about an exit strategy, I knew I was in for the long-haul. The clarity was wonderful. We ventured out when we could and even managed to take in Leonard Cohen’s last concert of a European tour. This was the one where after many encores, he came back out onto the stage and said “What the fuck … I’ve got nowhere to go! Let’s party!” And so he did, telling us stories and performing with his backing singers until 1.00am. Luckily we had our own transport
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because in those days the last tube went before midnight and the night buses were pretty limited. For those few hours, we were his mates.
We also got across to Chelsea one Saturday so I could look in a pet shop window at snakes. Like many Kiwis (NZ and Ireland are reportedly the only snake-free countries in the world) I reckoned I suffered from herpetophobia. Aussie Ann had cracked up at my over-reaction to a grass snake encounter in Yugoslavia a couple of years back. Even looking through the glass brought on a shudder. By now I had The South American Handbook, a brick-like tome which detailed everywhere relating to where we were going and what we should know. It was a serious guide aimed at travelers, not tourists … not like the Fodor publications of the time. I'd read the bit about snakes and how it is vital you catch the snake that has bitten you, or can identify it accurately. My new knowledge allowed me to pontificate to all at-large how snake venom kills you either by over-exciting your nervous system or by slowing it down till life is precarious … or not at all. If the wrong antidote is taken it will certainly be the end of you … you’ll either over-excite to death or just fade away.
I’d also seen the display in a posh Rover dealership of the British Army’s 1972 expedition led by Sir John Blashford-Snell, detailing how they had gone the whole length of the Pan American Highway, including getting across the Darien Gap between Panama and Columbia. They had rafts, ladders, ramps, winches and all sorts of paraphernalia. Their Darian Gap team consisted of more 60 army engineers and civilian scientists. It took them over 100 days to get the two Range Rovers through the 66-mile swamp. Until viewing this I must admit I didn’t know much about the Darian Gap