SEA OF CORTEZ

13 SEPTEMBER
SEA OF CORTEZ
Midday and the sun is a killer. The road dives down from the plateau to the Sea of Cortez. We pose for silly pics above water the blue of dark turqoise. The sky is a pure blue marginally paler than the sea. Islands of stripped rock and quartz glint pale in the fierce light. The road climbs above the coast. A fish rises, rings spreading across still water. An enclave of foreigners' houses and a hotel stand at the head of a bay. The golf course is obligatory, grass green as our lawn back home. From where comes the fresh water and at what cost?

SOUTH ACROSS THE DESERT

13 SEPTEMBER
SOUTH FROM SAN IGNACIO
Dawn and we ride the Baja California plateau in desert chill. The road is a straight line across a flat desert of scrub and candelabra cacti. Mountains in the distance come in two colours. The sun brings a soft rose glow to those to the west while the shadowed faces to the east remain a hazy blue.

OASIS

12 SEPTEMBER
OASIS
San Ignacio is a miraculous lagoon in the middle of the desert. Date palms shade the streets. Imagine yourself a traveler in ancient time, exchausted and kneeling at the water's edge. Tears of relief and of gratitude for life mingle with the green water where now a man paddles a kayak. J an I eat quesadillos at a taco shack across the square from the church. The church is 18th century. The interior beauty is created by perfect proportions rather than decoration. I imagine a time of monastic discipline, of date palms pruned of their dead fronds. Today the oasis is unkempt. Tourism is the earner.

SUFFERING

12 SEPTEMBER
TO SAN IGNACIO
Though beautiful, the desert is a place of suffering. We are imune to the fear that acompanied past travelers. The heat, for us, is a momentary discomfort. One more hour and we will swim in the pool at the Desert Inn, San Ignacio.

BIKER HEAVEN

12 SEPTEMBER
DAY THREE SOUTH FROM CATAVINA.
The desert here is a vast up-and-down jumble of immense grey boulders, candelabra cactus, Judus trees and skinny scrub. To the south and west lie mountains scrubbed to their stone core by a few million years of wind and ocasional rain. To the east a long roll of cloud or fog lies low over the ocean. The dawn light washes the mountains a pale chalky blue. The cloud bank is touched with pink.
I have ridden on ahead. I haven't met another car or truck in twenty minutes. Cut the engine and the silence is total. Two buzzard glide overhead. Nothing else moves. I am absorbed into the stillness and the quiet and the beauty and find myself shivering, not with cold, but with that exultation that comes sometimes when, tired yet wonderfully content, you get into a bed spread with Egyption cotton sheets stiff from the laundery and wriggle in minor ecstacy as you clutch yourself in your own arms. Never done that? Never slept between Egyptian cotton sheets? How sad...
And if you have never visited Baja California, start planning. Right now this is about as close as you can get to heaven without a one-way ticket.

A MOVING MICRODOT

12 SEPTEMBER
Joe and Arlene ride production bikes. John and I ride pre-production bikes. These are small bikes, pretty babies to treasure. The average owner will ride down to the store of a Sunday or drop by a neighbour's – say twenty minutes max. Steve wants the bikes tested to destruction. John is massive and I'm no light-weight. Steve wants destruction, we're his men.
Day one south from Tijuana is horrific coastal-strip development on the cheap side of cheap. Pass Ensenada and I begin to understand Baja's magic: clarity of light, range upon range of mountains, immense spaces across which merely to travel is an adventure. Even Big John becomes little more than a moving microdot.

MEET THE POSSE

12 SEPTEMBER
We are five on this adventure – the length of the Baja California peninsular and back – 2000 miles.
Four riders and J in support. J is Nevada based, aids businesses in the Adventure Tourism field market their products and drives a double-cab (leather seats) three million horse-power Dodge PowerWagon laden with everything bar rockets and a cappuccino machine.
Joe and I are given. John is a 50s-something jet engine engineer, six-six and weighing in at a few tons. Arlene is slim, classy, Gay and designs, manufactures and markets biker clothes for style-concious biker ladies (and for Real Men). Check out her sight:

PRETTY BIKE

12 SEPTEMBER
CATAVINA, BAJA CALIFORNIA
Joe Berk is mostly metal. He was in a coma for a few days last November. He was riding a Triumph Speed Triple when a lady on four wheels back ended him. He limps now. Maybe he will always limp. The limp and the metal slow him down somewhat but haven't damped any of his enthusiasms – particularly bikes. He sold a second Triumph the day he picked me up from LA Lax – changing Brits. A KLR 650 shares the garage with a Corvette and his wife's 5 series BMW. Joe's souped-up Subarau has to sleep outdoors. His California Scooter Company 149 stays at the plant. The Company is Steve Seidner's baby. Steve both owns the company and designed the bikes. The bikes are small and pretty, surely an unusual description of a bike. Best of all they make people smile, not with scorn but with pleasure - as does watching your children play out in the yard.

GODBYE MATURITY

12 SEPTEMBER
CATAVINA, BAJA CALIFORNIA
Back in the 1990s Katrina Larkin gave a party for like minded friends in a deconsecrated London chapel. The party is now an annual event and is grown into The Big Chill Festival. Until this year the Festival was as it began: a party for like-minded people. Katrina remains a shareholder and the artistic director. This year she invited the North American installation artist, Spencer Tunick, to create one of his mass nude photographs. My number three son called Bernadette with words to sap the firmest of good intentions: “Mum, tell Dad, absolutely not...”
So of course I joined the parade, one of four hundred nude people on the grass at Eastnor Castle Deer Park and painted all over in lipstick pink.
A few days later came an Email from Joe Berk of The California Scooter Company: How about a ride down Baja California as a proving run for the Company's new bikes.
Which explains why the lawnmower is back in the shed and I am in the Desert Inn, Catavina and goodbye maturity.

GODBYE TO WISDOM

SEPTEMBER 12
BAJA CALIFORNIA
I've been lying in bed the past hour wondering what time it is. My watch died yesterday after taking a fall off a table to a stone floor and I haven't changed the time on my mobile nor on this notebook. Where am I? The Desert Inn, Catavina, Baja California.
I am aware that I haven't blogged since March. Bernadette has been pushing at me over the intervening months. “Write, Simon, that's what you do. Readers expect it.”
So here is an apology to those readers – and an explanation. The Sela Pass in Arunachal Pradesh did for me. The road was suitable for a young, sure-footed mule. It was unsuitable for a septaugenarian with a fear of heights. I reached the top of the pass and I was old. Really old. Five days of rain in Tawang without electricity was time in which to face facts, time to call a halt to exploring continents by bike. Get home, invest in a ride-on lawn mower; should I crave adventure, drive eight miles over the Malvern Hills of an evening; paddle in the warm waters of the outdoor pool at the Malvern Spa; for a change of climate sample the spa sauna or the steam room. In short, act my age.
So what happened to such sensible intentions?
First came The Big Chill music festival.