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I knew there were two bridges on the way, I knew they were going to be bad, I had planned a strategy to get help, or a truck, but I was onto the first one almost before I realised it and besides, there was no-one around and a line of cars not far behind me, spur-of-the-moment time….skinny rail tracks on shaky sleepers, shee-it…..I rode on. <br /><br />On each side of the tracks were planks, two wide (about 350 mm total) rough-cut, unfixed, splits, cracks, uneven heights, nasty gaps, all balancing on randomly placed and spaced sleepers….….on my right was the rail track with a six inch drop to the random sleepers, to my left the random sleepers and the remains of a “safety” rail, wouldn’t have stopped me from plunging over, it is simply, a railway bridge, the facility for pedestrians and vehicles, a temporary afterthought by desperate people.

BOCAS BRIDGES AND BRAVE BIKIES

Bill Shum
2006-08-21 17:10:19

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no choice….they hold the bike while I get on and continue, shaky, swerving, luckily finding something when the feet go down, then it’s the last couple of metres, I gun it and make it…I have to pull over right there and get the gear off, still shaking,
I can’t believe I just did that…..there’s a line of vehicles waiting to go back and the drivers give me various signs of acknowledgement, some pissed off that I’ve held everyone up but others who I think recognised the death defying stupidity of what I’d done…..Jesus wept!

10 kms on and there’s the actual frontera. To cross, you take the side road, leads up onto the old rail line and heads for another, similar bridge…omg…I stop at the cops and customs, get cleared to leave and wait, I walk a little way out onto the bridge, looks almost as bad but at least the safety fence might slow the fall…..I ask around to get some help to walk it across, there is no way I’m going to be able to ride it, I don’t care, call me chicken but this is serious shit…..can’t find anyone!…nor a truck or ute, I’m waving serious money around….nada…I keep looking across the bridge, the longer I look the worse it gets, and it’s about 38 degrees and 110% humidity, I am soaked, still a little shaky….OK, enough is enough, on with the armour, helmet, gloves…and off I go, swerving, shaking, shitting bricks, people jumping out of the way, I can hardly write about it, maybe my sub-conscious has thankfully applied the blank over-ride that keeps us from remembering really awful things.

On the other side, surreal, everyone just going on with their lives, they have no idea what has just taken place…I’m drained…..following the interminable backwards and forwards of centro americano frontera procedures, like in a trance, sweating, still shaking, trying to fill in forms, down to the insurance office, back to the farmacia for photocopias, back to migracion, all a bit of a ...