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To Mexico, Tuesday 9 May

I leave tonight by bus for the Gulf of Mexico port of Veracruz. I have done in Dallas what a visitor should: watched a baseball match (my first), admired the play of light on the glass facades of Pei’s magnificent tower, and glutted on Tex-Mex and barbecue ribs. Today I am invited to an executive breakfast club on the twenty-seventh floor of a downtown office building. The hundred or so members are white and male. Latino waiters serve a vast buffet. When introduced, I mumble a few words of gratitude for Dallas hospitality.

The day’s guest speaker has published the history of the United States flag in verse. Each verse faces a full-page illustration of an American family: Mom, Pop and two kids – white, of course. General Tommy Franks has penned an introduction.

Only the army and the Church stand between America and chaos. The flag is their symbol and the speaker is campaigning to have his history distributed to every primary school. He warns us of the 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, every one of whom is taught from birth to hate and kill Americans. Hindus, Buddhists, Asiatics, Africans and Arabs are equally dangerous. A passing joke at the cowardly French raises a titter.

A member whispers to me in Spanish that not everyone present would agree with the speaker.

My bags are in the Hummer. Don drives from construction site to construction site. His workers are Mexican. I listen to the radio and watch the construction of a freeway overpass. Thirty or more huge trailer trucks queue to unload enormous concrete girders. Three cranes swing the girders into place. Trucks feed a concrete mixer the size of a European factory. We pass by the gun shop and eat steak.

Late afternoon we visit a friend of Don’s who leases mobile road barriers, traffic cones and road signs. He and his father share a 7000-acre hobby ranch in Oklahoma. The ranch is ringed with deer fencing and they’ve sunk a million dollars into damming a creek. If they were British, they would have bought a holiday apartment on the Costa Brava.

Don and his friend drive me to the bus terminal. They make jokes at my bravery in travelling by Mexican bus. Mexican buses fall over cliffs. This is Texas. What cliffs? The road is straight. The land is flat. Nightlife is sticky doughnuts at an arc-lit service station. Lights glimmer dimly in trailer homes and in homes indistinguishable from trailers. I have a double seat to myself directly behind the driver. He drives with one hand while eating a half-pint tub of caramel ice-cream.

Entering the US is tough. Leaving is easy. The bus cruises through customs and immigration. I have a moment in which to note a queue several hundred metres long of aspiring Mexican immigrants. Then we are at the Mexican border. I still have my US entry card. I have no exit stamp in my passport. I have left the US illegally.

The Mexican immigration officer asks how long I will be in Mexico. I explain my trip and make a guess at four weeks. He examines me with interest and issues a visa valid for three months.

Dallas is twelve hours and forty-six dollars away from Monterey. The border region is as dry as Texas. The only hills are of dead cars heaped in junkyards. Finally, real hills appear. The highway dips into a narrow valley and Monterey surfaces from within a pale haze of exhaust fumes. The driver pulls into the depot and rushes me across to the bus company that makes the run to Tampico. A morning bus leaves at ten. This bus is new: seats tip all the way back; seatbelts are easy on the shoulders; Kung Fu movies play on the video screen.

I doze on the road to Tampico and wake to my first palm tree of the journey, sisal fields, jacarandas in flower, a flame tree. We pull into the Tampico bus depot at four p.m. Buses leave for Veracruz every hour. I find a trucker’s restaurant and eat steak ranchero with fresh corn tortillas and red and green chilli sauce.

I call the Ampara Hotel in Veracruz and book a room. This bus is the most comfortable yet. Again I sit directly behind the driver and watch the speedo. Night falls and we crawl through hill country on a double-lane highway behind a convoy of tanker trucks. Mexico is the US’s largest source of oil. Gas torches flame beside collector tanks.

The bus pulls into Veracruz terminal at five the following morning. I have travelled 1214 kilometres at a cost of 115 dollars. Veracruz is hot. The Amparo Hotel is a block from the central square. I have a room with a shower and a ceiling fan. The hotel is clean. My room is quiet. Two windows open on to the central well.

Moto Diaz is the main Honda agent in Veracruz. I had emailed Honda Mexico from the UK. My bike is waiting – a white Honda 125 Cargo. Honda advertises the model as a workhorse. In truth, it is a pizza delivery bike. It has a one-person seat and a large rack for the pizza box. A serious grey-haired mechanic is preparing the bike for my journey. The mechanic assures me that the bike will carry me to Tierra del Fuego sin problemas. No problems. I buy a removable rack box and the Honda agent presents me with a smart helmet. Tomorrow I queue for registration plates. I am warned that this may take all day. This evening I celebrate my purchase with a dish of devilled prawns and a bottle of Mexican lager.

I discover a small square around the corner from the hotel, where the middle-aged and elderly play chess at a pavement café. I sip a beer and watch the games and am drawn slowly into conversation.

Veracruz, Friday 12 May

Just before seven I am the first to queue outside the vehicle registration office – a privilege I relinquish to a woman who arrives a minute later, thus I have someone to follow. Doors open at eight. First disaster: all vehicles must be registered at a domicile. A hotel is not a domicile. Although motherly, the counter assistant is insistent. I am instructed to consult the department’s director. The director is both patient and sympathetic. He will accept an electricity bill as proof of domicile. He instructs me to find an address, any address. Surely I have a friend in Veracruz? In Veracruz everyone has a friend.

He produces his own electricity bill as an example of the proof he requires, lays the bill on his desk and transfers his attention to an assistant. An hour later the bike is registered and the plates are on the Honda. Mechanics and sales assistants watch as I mount and wobble tentatively round the parking lot. I will take the bike out properly tomorrow, Saturday, when (I hope) there will be less traffic.

Veracruz is tidy for a Mexican city. Trees shade street after street of small shops (how do the proprietors earn a living?). Small restaurants are common, as are ice-cream parlours and mini-cafés that serve a table or two on the pavement. Street vendors don’t nag, are happy to give directions and welcome conversation.

In search of riding goggles, I navigate, on foot, the narrow lanes of the market district. Dallas was foreign territory. Here I feel at home. The pace is Mediterranean. So are the chatter and leisurely human interplay. I ask directions and walk pavements striped with sun and shade. My goal is a row of kiosks where bike tyres and inner tubes hang on wooden shutters. I peer into gloom at shelves packed with spares. Most storekeepers are women – or instinct steers me to stores run by women. One advises me that goggles with glass lenses are too expensive – more sensible to buy plastic safety glasses at a hardware store.

I read in a guidebook that Veracruz has a strong black influence. I haven’t seen a single black person. The standard skin colour is a rich pale golden mocha – imagine a good sun tan without the red. People are good-looking, particularly the younger generation. For men, long trousers are obligatory. Young women show their tummies. Given the heat, this seems an unfair advantage (not that I wish to display my own gross wobble).

I have taken three cabs. The first driver opined that Veracruz is a disaster. Politicians have stolen everything. Working people can’t afford to eat.

The second driver was a sybarite. He boasted of Veracruz cuisine and instructed me to eat at any one of the small restaurants upstairs in the fish market.

The third was elderly and teaches English to his granddaughters. His own English is pedantic and he is contemptuous of North American English. He said that in Veracruz I can walk at night in safety, but in Mexico City I would be murdered.

I am less panicked now that the bike is registered. A cool evening breeze blows inshore. I stroll the streets and actually see the city for the first time (you can walk for miles without actually seeing anything).

So what have I seen now that my eyes are open? A castle built in 1660 and so small it could be a giant’s toy – every boy’s desire. A ramp leads to a drawbridge and a gate in fierce walls mellowed by age; a lookout post that resembles a pepper pot surmounts a square keep, and a further pepper pot crowns the far corner; cannon defend the battlements. The whole is the perfect size for a TV makeover programme. Imagine the dialogue between the two presenter-designers.

The central square, Plaza de Armas, is pleasant rather than great. The cathedral occupies one side. It has a simple interior lit by chandeliers and is small enough to feel intimate rather than overbearing. The cloister of the city hall runs at right angles to the cathedral; there is a plush hotel opposite. Palm trees shade pavement cafés. Almond trees surround a central stage and bandstand.

I sit in the Plaza de Armas and order a cold beer. Up on the stage, folk dancers stamp their heels. The women wear full floor-length dresses of white cotton gauze; the men white shirts, white cotton pants, high-heeled boots and those hats worn by scouts and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The dance is a Mexican version of flamenco, equally haughty and yet less fierce than the gypsy original. (I recall Cuban flamenco dancers being too soft and pliable.)

In the final dance the women carry trays of lit oil lamps on their heads. They glide and spin across the small stage with the charm and grace of women from a bygone era. A near-full moon, its light softened by humidity, floats above a palm tree at the corner of the city hall. Lamps on tall, elegant lamp posts illuminate the cathedral’s facade. The temperature is perfect. The beer is cold. This is bliss.

The folk dancing ends and I stroll to the small square by the hotel for a final coffee – prices are lower here than in the Plaza de Armas. A chess player beckons me to a vacant seat.

Veracruz, Saturday 13 May

I wake in the night and lie in bed unable to sleep. I must ride the bike today. My fears surface. I am crazy to attempt this journey. I should be safe at home weeding a flowerbed and preparing for the hereafter. Or cooking a lasagne for my wife Bernadette and our two sons Josh and Jed. I miss them. I miss my one-month-old grandchild, the divine Boo.

I am not superstitious.

That today is the thirteenth seems unfair.

Unable to sleep, I sort my possessions. How much space do I have in the bike box? Barely enough for my laptop and reference books. I can buy clothes. Books are irreplaceable.

Moto Diez is five kilometres from the city centre on a six-lane highway. I am nervous. I mount the Honda and practise turns in the car park. Mechanics watch. They wonder why I don’t ride out onto the road. Fear stops me from riding out onto the road: fear of falling off, fear of panic, fear of being hit by a truck. And there is a further and greater and growing fear: the fear that the mechanics will suspect me of cowardice.

This is the fear that forces me to the car park slipway. Trucks and buses thunder through a fog of blue exhaust fumes. I edge out gingerly onto the highway and stall the motor. I remain astride the bike, kick the starter and almost overbalance. The mechanics have come out of the yard to watch. My palms are slippery and sweat stings my eyes. I dismount at the curb, find neutral and kick the starter again. The engine fires. I mount, open the throttle and engage bottom gear. The bike bucks. I close the throttle. The engine stalls. I long to hide my face in my arms and weep. A small crowd has collected. My ears burn with shame. I dismount again, kick the starter and ease forward along the curb. I keep in bottom gear for the first hundred metres and then move into second. I am still in second when the bike stops. I have ridden 300 metres.

The temperature is in the mid-thirties Celsius. Pushing the bike back to Moto Diez would kill me. I park the bike outside a store that sells plastic pipe. My reappearance at Moto Diez is met with consternation. Have I crashed?

No. I’ve run out of gas.

The mechanic apologises and rides me back on a scooter with a gas can. He tips the gas into the tank and we repeat our goodbyes. Off he goes. I kick the starter. The engine won’t fire. Kick, kick, kick …

This entire project is insane. I can’t cope. I contemplate suicide. The storekeeper (a woman, naturally) suggests I try turning the ignition key. Dumb, dumb, dumb …

I am facing out of town on a very busy six-lane highway. I don’t have the courage to pull into the outside lane to make a U-turn. I ride (crawl) a while behind buses that halt on every block. I take a right down a minor road, then left and left again to an intersection on the highway controlled by traffic lights. I take a left at the lights and am heading back into town. Is this comprehensible?

A six-lane highway is not the best learning terrain.

I stall a couple of times. Manic cab drivers and bus drivers thump their klaxons. I miss a red light. Bikers hurtle past in search of death (memories of the Dallas BMW boys). I crawl. I make third gear. I make fourth. For a short stretch – five metres – I make fifth. I’ve been riding bikes for years. I’ve ridden bikes in seriously weird places. So I was younger. What has changed? Modern bikes are easier to ride; brakes function; cubic capacity is harnessed more effectively.

I ride into the city centre. I ride around the city and all over the city. I even have to warn myself against overconfidence. I am in search of a solution to my baggage. I ride from bike shop to bike shop. I examine plastic panniers and leather panniers and leather bags coated with studs. All are both too big for the Honda and too expensive.

I park the bike in the hotel garage and walk two blocks to the fish market for a very late lunch. The market is on the harbour front. Stalls on the ground floor sell fruit, vegetables, fish and crustaceans. The restaurants are upstairs, with concrete worktops, gas rings, and plain plastic tables and chairs. Choose a dish from the menu and the cook screeches at a boy to run below and find the freshest relevant fish.

I order devilled prawns (I always order devilled prawns) and orange juice. The prawns are perfect. So is the fresh juice. I am overweight and this is my one meal of the day. I have cut down to fruit for breakfast and in the evening. But what fruit!

I walk a while, checking out luggage stores. I am looking for two small waterproof school satchels. Cheap is important. Later in the evening I visit the chess players. A four-piece band plays in the square: a singer taps a gourd with an ebony stick, and there are two guitarists and a drummer. United by years of practice, portly couples in late middle-age glide joyfully and with rhythm. A show-off forties accustomed to wealthier territory calls to the musicians and holds centre piste with a late-twenties blonde from the US. He wears a wedding band. She doesn’t. They argue between dances, she giving him a hard time. Summoned by his mobile, he takes the call around the corner away from the sound of music. His wife?

Plastic tables and chairs belong to the two cafés each side of the plaza. A row of wrought-iron benches on the pavement are city property. A young courting couple, dressed neatly, share a bottle of water on one of the benches. They dance on the pavement, shy with each other but gaining confidence. The girl’s high heels are new or nearly new. Seated again, she surreptitiously scratches her ankle. That is the staple of the tropics: there is always one mosquito.

Four young male Brits dressed in grubby shorts, T-shirts and designer stubble stumble down the pavement to a vacant table. Already a little drunk, they slouch in their chairs, legs spread, and order litre bottles of beer. They talk loudly among themselves and drink directly from the bottle. They aren’t pretty.

Veracruz, Sunday 14 May

Every bike has its foibles. There is a knack to starting a bike first thing in the morning. Think waking a teenager on a school day. I fail with the Honda and am helped by a young man down from the capital who has the same model of bike back home. I head out of the city on the freeway. This is easy. Confidence grows. I am on the inside lane. Weekend divers hurtle by. A deep hole gapes dead ahead. Swerve or emergency brake? I go for the swerve. A klaxon nearly blasts me off the road. I pull into the curb and calm myself.

The freeway leads through a rolling countryside of paddocks and clumps of big trees. I turn off the freeway towards Antigua – the site of the original Veracruz founded by Cortés. This is a toll road and bikes and cars pay the same charge: three and a half dollars seems exorbitant for twenty kilometres. Sunday drivers hurtle past. Nervous, I grip the throttle tightly. My hand cramps and I prise my thumb back. Both hands are cramping by the time I reach Antigua. I have ridden thirty kilometres. My backside hurts and my thighs ache. An entire continent separates me from Tierra del Fuego. I am too old. Failure seems certain.

Antigua lies a few kilometres inland on the banks of a muddy river. It is a village of cobbled streets, tall trees, a few ruins and a few houses destined for ruin. The roofless ruin of Cortés’ first house occupies one corner of the church square. Banyan roots throttle the walls; an unlikely cannon guards what was the entrance. Children gambol in the square on swings and a slide. The church is charming from the outside. The inside is wrecked by pallid statues of saints in coarse horsehair wigs. One saint lies on his back in a glass case. The sculptor has given him a huge beak of a nose and fake eyebrows. Moths or mice have chewed bits of his hair and his face is chipped and discoloured. A normal child would think vampire rather than spirituality. The final awfulness is the vases of dusty plastic flowers within spitting distance of flamboyant trees and frangipani.

Launches take Sunday trippers downriver to the beach. A fisherman lands his catch and I follow him to a restaurant on the riverbank. Twenty or so tables are arranged on a concrete floor beneath a thatched roof. The kitchen is indoors on the other side of a dirt road. I celebrate my mobility with a shrimp cocktail and one of the fisherman’s catch fried in crisp, wafer-thin cornflour batter and bathed in a green chilli sauce (à la Antigua). Add two large glasses of fresh orange juice and, at ten dollars, this is my most expensive meal since leaving Dallas. A three-piece marimba band sets up: two men play guitar, and a schoolboy plays drums and a gourd. One musician is probably a minor official in real life – blue shirt, pressed jeans, spectacles. The other has a girth problem undisguised by a flowered shirt. People in the US get fat all over. Mexicans appear to restrict fat to the belly. Why?

I am in Antigua because I intend following the route Cortés took in conquering Mexico. My bible is Hugh Thomas’ history of the conquest. Cortés led his army across the Cordillera. The head of the pass is 3200 metres above sea level. From the crest, the Spaniards looked down in amazement at a city far larger than any in Europe. I open the book on the table and try once again to marry the indigenous names on the map of the conquest to a present-day road map. The names have changed.

I glance up at the musicians. The boy on drums has a Tintin quiff and seems embarrassed to be here – replacement for an uncle who got drunk last night? The belly musician is a latent anarchist. Every few tunes he make a run for freedom, breaking out of the routine dadedaddada with a fast riff and intricate flourishes, before surrendering to the reality of a hot midday Sunday on a riverbank with an audience of six, only one of whom is listening – me.

I feel on familiar territory. I recognise the trees and the humidity and the scents and the people taking their time at doing whatever they are doing. I’ve never enjoyed cities much. In London, we lived out in Kew, which has a village atmosphere. In Cuba, we lived fifteen kilometres out from central Havana in Santa Fe. And our home in England now is the perfect village setting, with the garden backing on to two cricket fields and not a house visible beyond.

Veracruz is famous for the friendliness of it people. The musicians join my table between sets. I discover that the gourd the kid scratches and taps is called a guiro. The musicians study the place names on the old map and confess their ignorance.

I return reluctantly to the city. Keeping my grip loose stops my hands cramping. Sixty to seventy kilometres an hour is a comfortable cruising speed. I will need to stop every three-quarters of an hour to avoid cramps in my thighs. I can’t envisage riding much more than 200 kilometres in a day, maybe 250. How far is Tierra del Fuego?

Central Veracruz is thronged with happy people in shorts and short skirts back from the beach. I fall into conversation with a Mexican businessman in his late forties. He has visited Europe a few times and is amused at the envy for other people’s lives that tempts so many northern Europeans to move to Mediterranean countries. He loathes the term ‘Latin America’, preferring ‘Iberian America’. He is contemptuous of Hugh Thomas’ history of the Conquest – he read a couple of chapters and chucked it in the bin. I suspect that he was incensed by a Welshman daring to interpret a Spaniard. His jaundiced view of the US is typical of most Mexicans with whom I talk.

I quote my friend Don to him: ‘Everyone is trying to get here …’

‘No one with any choice,’ the Mexican retorts. As to his own people, ‘The only pure bloods are horses. Everyone of us is a mixture: Indian, black, Spanish. We are all mestizos.’

I have been told that Sunday evening at the Café de la Parroquia is a tradition among the bourgeoisie of Veracruz. I hope for an ancient building on the harbour front. I discover a modern caféteria. Fortunately the ambience is excellent for people-watching. A few tables are occupied by elderly Spanish émigrés. The women are anaemically pale and have thin lips, thin hair and narrow chests. They sit somehow folded in on themselves as if nervous of being contaminated by the touch of a sexual deviant. For ‘deviant’, read ‘voluptuous native’. Watching them, I am reminded of the leftover French colonials at a café in Tangier where I interviewed Paul Bowles years and years ago. In Tangier we ordered chocolate cake. The Café de la Parroquia is so clean that I risk a lettuce and tomato salad.

Later, I watch a charming programme of 1930s dancing in the Plaza de Armas and then attend a sung mass at the cathedral. Lit by chandeliers, the cathedral enjoys a tranquil beauty. The congregation is a mixture of holidaymakers and the resident sedate. Men and women are in equal numbers. Many are young. Communicants worldwide wear the same gentleness of expression.

Veracruz, Monday 15 May

Baggage Day: I’ve bought a small backpack and two satchels at a luggage store. Admittedly, one satchel is dark green, and the other dark blue: they were on special offer. I require a metal sheet to be cut and bent to keep the satchels off the chain and rear wheel. I have directions to an alley of metalworkers. A ragged awning shelters the narrow entrance and I miss it a couple of times. I wheel the bike over the pavement and have the choice of twenty or so small, open-fronted workshops. Artisans in whatever country always know best. They don’t listen. I am a foreigner; foreigners, by definition, are short on sense. Work ceases in the alley while the metalworkers argue between themselves as to what I need. I know what I need and what I want. I have drawings. I am surplus to the discussions. Finally one of the artisans confronts me with a drawing. It differs from my drawing by half a centimetre here or there.

A few workers return to their own shops. Most remain as onlookers, all voicing opinions of the work and of my proposed journey and why I should or shouldn’t take a particular road.

Cost of the metalwork plus satchels and backpack is fifty-seven dollars. Any solution from a bike shop would have been double. I am well pleased. I shall miss the unfailing friendliness of the Veracruz people – and the food. Veracruz University is my sole disappointment. A history department existed in ancient times. History has been replaced by computer sciences.

Veracruz shuts down for luncheon and siesta. Only the cops stay open. The federal police are equivalent to Spain’s Guardia Civil and the most feared of Mexican police forces. Few people voluntarily visit the Federales. The Veracruz HQ is a modern building at an intersection on the fringes of the city. My arrival is a surprise.

Mexican police in Hollywood movies are invariably criminal types, small, swarthy and scruffy. The duty officer is six foot two and blond. His uniform shirt is starched. He wears riding breeches and his boots gleam.

I have with me Hugh Thomas’ history and a road map. Surely a federal policeman would recognise the ancient place names? The Fed stands and spreads the map on the desk. Only then do I fully realise his height – big and a cop, the very essence of authority I feel reduced to the status of a small schoolboy – a curious feeling for a man in his seventies.

The Fed studies the place names on Cortés’ route and points to their equivalent on the modern map. He examines me with interest. ‘You wish to take this route? On a motorcycle? Tell me, when did you last ride a bike?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes, you do.’

‘A while ago.’

‘How much of a while ago?’

‘Well, I rode a scooter in Havana. That was in the nineties.’

‘Not a scooter. A bike.’

‘Something like thirty or forty years.’

‘Which?’

‘I’m not certain.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘Well, forty … more or less.’

The Fed is satisfied: ‘Forty. And why do you wish to ride this particular route?’

‘When Cortés reached the top of the pass, he looked down on what is now Mexico City. He went on to conquer Mexico. I thought that if I could reach the top, I could go on to reach Tierra del Fuego.’

‘The south of Argentina?’

‘Yes.’

‘All the way on your small motorcycle?’ The Fed studies my passport. ‘Cortés commenced by marching north. Aged seventy-three, is it sensible to commence such a journey by riding in the opposite direction to your destination?’

The Fed traces the route up the pass on the modern map: ‘Much of this is a dirt track. It is probable that I could find fanatic bikers among the transit police to accompany you at a weekend. In all probability you would fall off – many times. Were you to reach the summit, you would see nothing of the capital. The capital is hidden by pollution.’

The Fed traces an alternative route south along the coast. ‘This is a good straight road with little traffic.’

The following day I should turn inland. I will encounter little traffic in the morning. Only later will I be on a trunk road. On the third day I will climb a pass. I will cross the mountains at the same height as the pass that Cortés crossed. I will do so on a good surface and meet with few trucks or cars. Rather than north, I will be travelling south towards my eventual destination.

‘In the evening you will reach Oaxaca, a beautiful city – a city that is not dangerous.’ The Fed folds the road map, hands it to me and shakes my hand: ‘Please, in Oaxaca telephone that you have arrived.’

I thank the Fed for his counsel and speed back into town. This is my final day in Veracruz: one more dish of devilled prawns at the fish market. In the evening I enjoy the company of two Mexican businessmen and a recent Cuban émigré. One of the Mexicans, small, intense and with a habit of leaning into you when he talks, is determined to discuss the Falklands/Malvinas war. How could I defend Britain’s colonial seizure of Argentine territory on the far side of the world?

I ask how he can defend permitting a bunch of particularly unpleasant fascist generals a military success that would have kept them in power for a further ten years. Would that have been preferable for Argentinians?

The Cuban is vague as to the location of the Malvinas. He dreams of being reborn English or German (a citizen of the United States is third by a distance). The Cuban gives as his reason for wishing to live in England or Germany his desire to live where everyone is white-skinned and has blue eyes and blond hair. Imagine his surprise were he to visit London or Hamburg.

The second Mexican prefers discussing food. So do I. I have no desire to be the spokesman for British foreign policy. The Iraq war is universally unpopular here. Oil is believed to be the reason for the war. Britain is denounced as subservient and obedient to the wishes of the United States (in return, the US helps Britain in big brother/little brother fashion – just think of the Falklands).

Enough of politics. I bid my farewells and sip a final coffee at the chess players’ café.