MEXICO, HATE–LOVE AND THE UNITED STATES
Another chapter from my Swedish book From Chile to Alska by bicycle (1986–87), translated and lightly adapted for Substack. This happened as it happened.
Before Mexico
If you’ve followed this series from the beginning on Substack, you already know the rule of the road. It never stays the same for long. Chile taught me long distances and the first real loneliness. Peru and Ecuador taught me heat and altitude and that strange feeling of being too young to be this tired. Colombia gave me people, danger, and obsession. Panama and the Darién Gap smashed the romantic idea of adventure into mud, fear, disease, and the kind of exhaustion where a bicycle stops being a bicycle and becomes weight.
Then came the road north again: Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala. Bribes, borders, strange encounters, and a body constantly failing and then recovering just enough to keep moving. And now the map says the same thing it has said from the beginning: Mexico, then the United States, then Canada, then Alaska. On paper it looks clean. On the road it never is.
This is where Mexico begins.
Cascabel
There is a sound in the night that keeps returning, a dry rasple from the cactus-ringed darkness, and it hooks into my nerves. I blow out the candle flame, try to sleep, fail, and end up lying there listening, dragged backwards in my mind to Chile’s desert, to that familiar tension between beauty and threat. The night feels alive in a way cities never do. Not safer. Just more honest.
In the morning I can’t let it go. I call it out, half joking, half proud that I’ve caught it. A fisherman sits outside my tent with his family and listens the way you listen to a child describing something important.
“Giant ants, right?” I ask, confidently.
He studies me, then his family. Then the wide toothless grin arrives.
“Cascabel, señor.”
I go back into my open tent and dig out my dictionary like it’s going to save me. I find the word, and for a second I’m still smiling until I understand what it actually means, and something cold runs through me.
Rattlesnake.
I look up at the family. They smile like people do when they’ve seen this before, the foreigner who thinks he is clever right up until nature reminds him he isn’t.
The fisherman says, almost casually, that it might be best if I close the tent. I close it fast. The smile is gone.
El Campeón
Mexico doesn’t begin with a soft landing. It begins with speed, noise, and a road that feels made for everything except a cyclist. Tapachula’s approach is double-lane chaos, heavy American cars, engines competing like animals. When the light turns red, it doesn’t slow anything down, it turns the street into a race. The lane is too narrow, so I keep getting forced up onto the sidewalk to avoid a confrontation I cannot win.
And then, when I need attention the most, the kind of attention you only ever get as a long-distance cyclist, the brief crown you wear because you’re strange and visible and suffering, it comes.
A green park appears with trees and plants floating in a sea of vehicles. People sit everywhere. The closer I get, the more faces turn toward me. At first it is curiosity. Then surprise. Then applause, spontaneous, rising, followed by chanting.
“El Campeón! El Campeón!”
For a moment the pain and sickness and the cough and the kidneys and the liver all evaporate. Pride fills the body like a drug. I swing in toward an alley that suggests my chosen hotel is close. A group of lightly dressed women whistle and hand me smiles like gifts. I don’t see the pothole in time.
The bicycle stops dead. I fly over the handlebars.
I stand up to humiliating laughter, face burning, hero-glory gone in one second. That is how the road teaches. It gives you a crown and then it pushes you into the gutter to see if you can still stand up.
Playa Congrejo and Rosa’s Mirror
Not long after, the road offers the opposite of Tapachula. A village, shade, and a rhythm that feels like recovery. In Playa Congrejo the men are out fishing. What’s left in the village is women, children, dogs, and me. For three days I live inside a calm routine, as if the whole world has narrowed to one job, eat and drink enough to become human again.
I sit under a bamboo roof in the shade and look out over the sea. When hunger comes, it comes cleanly, not the sick hunger of fever, but the honest hunger of work. I begin to watch my urine like a scientist, waiting for the moment it turns clear, like a sign from the body. You can move again.
Someone tells me I should not be proud of looking the way I look. Rosa brings a small mirror, and I refuse at first because I don’t want to see it. Then I see it anyway. Cheeks torn up, lips cracked, blood in six places, eyes red from sun and fatigue. A face shaped by illness, carved by heat.
“More food would help,” I say, holding out my empty plate like a prayer.
Rosa takes it and disappears into the kitchen, the way she has been doing since I arrived, as if she has adopted me as a task. The oldest fisherman looks at me and delivers the final insult with a straight face.
“You look like me,” he says, “and I’m fifty-five years older than you.”
I am twenty-six. I feel dead.
And still, in that village, under that roof, with water and bread and fish, something in me becomes stubborn again.
A Mexican Cowboy on a Bicycle
A few hills outside Acapulco, in the desert heat, a short round man appears beside me like a joke from the road. He wears cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, a cowboy suit, and rides a simple gearless bicycle with the same energy I’m riding with, as if he has decided we are brothers.
“Hello, life-enjoyer!” he shouts.
He talks nonstop, nudges me, almost pushes me off balance, laughs at his own lines, and then declares the day is hot like in a cow’s ass and roars with laughter. He thinks it’s hilarious. I don’t. I’m empty of humor. I increase the pace until it hurts. He hangs on anyway, for a while.
Then, as suddenly as he arrived, he fires off his goodbye, shoots forward, and disappears down the long straight road, swallowed by heat and dust and thorny bushes.
Later I see him again, broken by the roadside beside his rusty bicycle, drained by his attempt to impress the unfriendly gringo. He looks up at me with sad eyes. I throw his own line back at him, because now it feels true, and because it is the only language we share.
Yes. Today was hot like in a cow’s ass.
He takes off his hat and smiles, wide.
Acapulco: Rich and Poor
Acapulco shows me something I’m not prepared for. The richest hotels, the most expensive faces, the kind of polished luxury that almost feels unreal, and then, outside the walls, the normal Mexican life. Farmers, donkeys, fruit carts, filth. The rich suburbs collapse into poor housing as if someone turned a switch. It feels like cycling through a garbage station.
The smell reminds me of Lima in Peru. Urine, feces, exhaust, homemade liquor. The people look apathetic, emptied out, their eyes blank as they watch me grind up the hard hills around the metropolis. I’ve seen poverty before, everywhere on this route. But I have never seen a gap like this, not like this.
Sniffers, Fighting Spirit, and Solitude
By now punctures are not accidents, they are a daily language. On the ninth puncture of the day, I lose it. I scream into the heat, into the bushes, into myself. I grab the empty rear tire and throw it into a ravine with all the anger I have left.
Down there, black vultures have been following me like patients. They hope I will leave something behind, maybe the corpse of a horse, maybe my own. The ravine smells of death. I sit beside a dead horse and talk out loud to myself like a madman.
What is happening to me?
Then I answer myself, also out loud, because on this road you become two people. The one who breaks and the one who drags him forward.
Pull yourself together.
Night comes, and the map stops being stress. I look for water, for a place to sleep, and I slowly become one with darkness and stars and the light sea breeze. I remember the words of the mysterious woman in Tikal, the idea that solitude is necessary if you want to grow, and I hate that she might be right.
Baja California: Cactus, Cold, and Old Memories
In Baja the evenings turn surprisingly cold. My skin is goosebumped. The wind hits the tent hard and drowns out the frightened howling of an oasis guard dog. The night has the same sharp edge as the Atacama, and it pulls old memories up like bones.
After La Paz the rolling hills begin, Atacama-style, and the wind does its best to stop me. The difference is the landscape: here it is cactus everywhere, a thick swarm of them, and a long narrow tongue of land surrounded by sea. The danger is not only in people. It is also in the silence, in the dark, in all the things that move outside the tent without showing themselves.
Now the rattlesnake warning from earlier follows me differently. I close the tent properly at night. I listen more carefully. I am still tired enough to be stupid, but not stupid enough to invite a Culebra de Cascabel inside.
Hatred and Love
Somewhere up north in Baja, a man answers my polite request to camp and access water with pure hostility. Private land. Get out. It isn’t the first unfriendly answer I’ve gotten lately. The closer I get to the U.S. border, the stranger the atmosphere becomes. Mexicans, and thousands of Americans with summer houses, collide in a daily friction. It feels like a kind of hate-love between two nations.
Shops have two price systems: one for Americans and one for Mexicans. I quickly learn to declare my nationality, because no one has heard of Sweden anyway, and people assume I’m poor because I’m travelling by bicycle. Often young Mexicans sit with me and practice English and ask about the United States. Their disappointment is visible when they learn I’m Swedish. For them, the U.S. is the dreamland.
For me it has been a distant idea on the map, and now it is getting close enough to smell.
Tijuana: The World’s Dump
Tijuana hits like a slap. The shouting sellers compete with the roaring V8 engines. Everything is for sale. Everything can be bought. The city becomes my mental image of the United States and its cities. Skyscrapers, foul smells, hunted faces, impersonal humans, crime and violence, dirt everywhere.
I pay eight dollars for a room, and before I can even settle into the air of defeat, a prostituted, worn-out woman knocks on the door to offer her services. In that moment, with that smell, with that noise, I decide: this must be the world’s biggest garbage station.
It is hard not to feel disgust, not at her, but at the system that makes this feel normal.
The United States: Fear, Then Fascination
Crossing the border does not give me relief. It gives me panic. A kind of sickness, a reversal, an urge to flee back across the line to return to the simple and quiet Baja California. I did not expect to feel that.
But slowly fascination begins to creep in. Department stores overflowing with food. Houses and buildings that look like they come from another world. And then nature again, the Pacific, Highway 1, beauty so constant it becomes almost painful.
In the evenings, at the special campsites for cyclists, Americans appear like a parade, armed with the latest equipment. Among them are types who seem to have assigned themselves roles. Mr. Wiseguy who knows everything because his sister lives in Mongolia, and Mr. Weakling who, in honor of the day, has been allowed by his dominating wife to ride the least dangerous parts of Highway 1.
I watch them with a mix of irritation and reluctant amusement. In all this beauty, they still manage to bring noise.
San Francisco: A Shock and a Friend
San Francisco is a conglomerate of the United States I’ve experienced so far, bright, powerful, impressive, and full of cultures stacked on top of each other. There is a shimmer of greatness over the city, but also people who make me shake my head. I meet Stockholm’s Torkel Insulander again, someone I’ve spent time with in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Los Angeles, one of the dirtiest cities I’ve ever seen.
Torkel reminds me of a cactus. Hard on the outside, soft inside. He makes me laugh. He makes me understand why someone could feel drawn to a place like San Francisco even though it is a city.
Then the city delivers one more lesson in its own language. A man touches my ear, compliments my earring, and I react badly, shocked, irritated, wanting to be left alone. He answers with a grin: this is San Francisco. Relax.
I tell him I have nothing against homosexuality. I just want peace.
He laughs again. San Francisco, buddy.
And somehow that does explain a lot.
Chuck, The Seagull and Victor
Later, around a campfire on the Oregon coast, I sit with three people who carry their own roads inside them. Chuck, a Vietnam veteran who twists his prosthesis with his good hand; The Seagull, a woman in her fifties who has walked across the American continent; and Victor, a Swiss man who appears like so many travellers do, one evening, one fire, a few hours of talk that feel bigger than the time.
Chuck says he has seen society’s falseness during the years he’s been walking. He always returns to nature, because that is where he finds knowledge and strength. The longer north Highway 1 carries me, the closer I come to understanding Americans. Under the ignorance and the loudness, there can be an ordinary, decent human being. The trick is finding them in the crowd.
Victor suddenly breaks in and declares, in Swedish, that “Mike knows everything and knows most things.” I don’t know why he says it. I don’t know if it’s praise or provocation. Maybe both. Maybe that is also the road: people invent you as they go, and you have to carry their invention for a while.
Chief Red Bear and Frozen Fingers
In Oregon the cold is different from the south’s heat. Frost covers the ground like a thin veil. Fog moves toward the warmth. I freeze lightly, something I get used to after the abnormal heat further south, and I tell myself the sun will warm me at midday.
Then a voice roars in my ear.
“I’m Chief Red Bear!”
The voice belongs to a man dressed like an active-year woodsman, covered in silver coins and beads that hang down nearly to his nose. He declares the land around us as his. He insists on an Indian greeting. I reach out with the wrong hand, and he explodes, grabs my arm, shakes it violently, and storms into a shop.
He returns with three thick sandwiches and a glass of water and shouts “Here you go, knob-nose!” I can only nod thanks, too surprised to do anything else.
“Ungrateful bastard! Now I’m getting the gun!” he yells, and disappears again.
Before he returns, I pedal away.
In this country, there are so many confused people. So many sudden angels.
Tom’s Cottage and Mount Rainier
Tom’s small cottage is hidden behind rows of beautiful house façades. He has papers, seventy years old, that say he can live there. Outside the expensive houses sits Tom’s rusty Chevy from the sixties like a joke told by reality. Not a single window in the street is broken, neither on cars nor on houses.
Inside the house, there is a smell that isn’t rotten, just strange, personal. The rooms are piled with furniture and things, and to move from one room to another you have to shift objects aside. But if you have the strength to climb up to the roof, you understand why Tom stays. His cottage sits on a small hill, and you can see over the other houses.
And there, rising like a giant platform in a blue infinity, Mount Rainier stands, the volcano towering above everything, sparkling like a gemstone. From Tom’s roof it looks like a dream.
For a moment I forget the whole road behind me.
North, and what’s left
Mexico brought me back to adventure and back to nature, and also back to anger, sickness, and the thin line between pride and humiliation. The United States did not become what I expected. It frightened me first, then pulled me in with beauty, then confused me with its people, then fed me when I didn’t ask for it.
This is still the same journey we started in Chile: a bicycle, a body, and a mind that keeps changing shape as the continent changes shape.
Canada is ahead. Alaska is still the magnetic goal pulling me north. The mornings have started to taste colder, and for a long-distance cyclist that is a promise.
And I keep pedalling.