My cousin Ann lives in New York City and kept telling everyone she knew, "This is my cousin Alf. He's from South Africa and has just travelled 10 000 miles around the United States on a motorbike!"
I'd wince and grin self-consciously as the conversation would invariably continue with "What?", "Hey!", "Wow!".
Wince? Self-conscious? Well, it seemed no big deal. True, 10 000 miles (or 16 000km as we know it) is a lot of ground to cover in six weeks, and most working people don't have the time or means to do it.
In my case it was years of accumulated leave and my good fortune to be a journalist and able to strike a deal with BMW for the loan of a bike that made it possible. But difficult?
No, because the United States is a road biker's dream.
My first choice had been South America, to retrace Che Guevarra's trip recorded in Motorcycle Diaries, but the difficulty in finding a bike to hire and the issues of crime and foreign languages made me look north instead. In the US, everyone spoke my language and there was a good road network and backup system.
Also, those legendary places, parks and rivers - the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and Yosemite, the Mississippi and Colorado - rose up like ghosts from adolescence and winter nights huddled around an open fire, the dogs' bowls freezing over outside, while pouring over National Geographics, exploring a distant continent.
I set out on a monstrous (for me) bike, a BMW R1200RT, drop dead gorgeous in red, and sporting two locking and detachable panniers - eminently practical. I invested in an expensive multipurpose motorcycle suit (with a padded protective "exoskeleton", and internal, detachable rain and cold linings) and a good pair of waterproof boots; I had my helmet, leather gloves, some T-shirts, underwear and jeans.
Hardly the last word in sartorial elegance, but at least I was covered when I was offered a free ticket outside the Met, New York City's Metropolitan Opera House, to see the last two acts of Mozart's Idomeneo.
"You weren't here for the first act?" said the lady sitting herself down next to me after the first interval. Indeed. She must have noticed that I hadn't packed my swanky dinner jacket.
I set out in early autumn, with no particular route in mind.
Unfamiliar with such a large bike and American driving habits, I set out from New Jersey and headed for rural Pennsylvania, my first destination the Allegheny National Forest along Route 6, one of the first roads to link the east and west coasts. The Pennsylvania stretch, named the Grand Army of the Republic Highway in honour of the Union Civil War veterans is a particularly scenic drive - wooded hills, historic towns and rivers.
I get my first taste of roadside diners, American drivers - law-abiding and considerate - and rain. Torrential. I haven't learnt (I'm a South African, clouds are largely decorative) to stop and fit the rain lining at the first signs of rain (don't even wait for the first drops). I am soaked, battling to see where I'm going. Pull in at a motel. From the road it appears to be pretty, and has a nice name, turns out to be low rent. The room is musty and grubby; the carpet is grey with dust where the vacuum cleaner doesn't go - and there's a handwritten note reminding you to leave a tip for the cleaner.
Rural America is beautiful and vast - maps did nothing to prepare me for the distances involved. Stop to smell the roses, a friend emailed me, who was following my journey. I couldn't, because there was so much ground to cover. Camping had been my initial thought, mainly because of cost. As it turned out, accommodation was by far my biggest expense. But carrying loose gear, I thought, would be a problem. What to do with it when inevitably I had to leave the bike on its own?
I needn't have worried. Wherever I went in rural America, bikers would leave their gear - their jackets, gloves, helmets, camping gear - unattended on their bikes while they went off eating, walking, whatever. Cautiously at first, then more frequently, and finally recklessly, I'd leave my gear with the bike - always to find everything there, waiting for me.
No, I didn't do it in the cities and, travelling far north in Montana at Polson on Flathead Lake, a Native American who took us on a boat trip questioned me closely about South Africa. Race problems? "We don't have any here," he said. "We have learnt to live together."
Crime? When I told him how safe I felt in the US and how I would leave my gear on the bike, he suddenly became uncharacteristically quiet. "I wouldn't do that... you know, young people..."
That short silence was a thousand words. Not long before, heading north to Glacier National Park on the northern US border with Canada, I had passed through the Blackfeet Indian Reservation - it was a trip to South Africa's past, a bantustan revisited. Buildings sagged under the weight of neglect, bars were worn down; tacky casinos clung to dusty towns and ethnic memorabilia lined the roads; fences were broken, there were warnings of domestic animals on the roads... Everything spoke of people dispossessed.
It wasn't the only signs of poverty, which seemed such an anomaly in such an overwhelming rich country - rich in land and water.
Wherever you go, you are confronted by America's recent history, the consequences of events triggered by explorers, hunters and early settlers, the conflict it triggered with the indigenous peoples, the rapacious exploitation of the land's abundant wealth - timber, coal and then oil - the subsequent development of the railways and, of course, the roads. From trading and staging posts grew today's towns and cities.
What strikes me from the outset is the omnipresence of water, which, setting out from the east, goes on for thousands of miles. Coming from water-starved Southern Africa, I wonder if the US could ever have achieved its greatness without its water resources. Homes and developments are strung out along streams and rivers - there's no need for towns to gather at isolated watering holes. And still in otherwise bone-dry areas, you find rivers.
But it is not enough to withstand the assault of the multiplication of people and the development they brought. The mighty Colorado River, dammed over and over again to feed agriculture and indulge cities, like Las Vegas, no longer reaches the sea. Agricultural and industrial pollution makes a lot of it unfit for human consumption.
The Rough Guide wickedly recalls the Cuyahoga River flowing through Cleveland catching fire, though it does say the city, and others on the Great Lakes, are trying to clean up their acts.
My trip took me basically on a great loop, west to the Black Hills (Mount Rushmore) in Wyoming, the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone Park, north to the Glacier National Park, south and west to the Pacific, through the Redwood forests and inland to Yosemite, Kings Canyon and the Sequoia National Forest, further south and east to the Grand Canyon, and on east across the great plains to North Carolina, north up along the Appalachian Mountains back to Pennsylvania and New Jersey, touching on 23 states.
What makes it so effortless is, of course, the US road network, which last year was celebrating the 50th anniversary of President Dwight Eisenhower signing the Federal Aid Highway Act to fund the National System of Interstate and Defence (says it all) Highways. And there really is nothing like the interstates to cover ground.
As you go, you come across road-work everywhere, roads being repaired, roads and bridges being rebuilt, on the interstates, on the backroads, even in the parks. All orderly, well marked, well controlled. In many places where there are stop-and go-signs, pilot vehicles guide the traffic through, no speeding, no chasing.
And the number of trucks (and I mean leviathans, not baby three or five tonners) is unbelievable. They are on the roads, every day, all day, thousands of them. Oh man, and oh so pretty. Every colour and combination imaginable.
I saw a truck stop (just the memory of it makes me want to go back and see that my eyes weren't lying, a mirage of sculpted metal) in the middle of nowhere in the Mojave desert, a corral of giants. It was a major intersection, traffic lights, stop lights and all, and trucks jammed in, flank to flank. And why there? No pneumatic Anna Nicole Smith bursting out of a rubber boob tube (or at least from what little I could see). Just a swell of trucks, fenced in by the desert.
You can understand why an oil squeeze would stop America dead. Its whole economy is in the backs of all those trucks.
The other ubiquitous icons of rural America are lawns and churches, everywhere, out in the country, on farms, along the roadsides.
Saturdays and Sundays are mowing and praying days. Even farmers are out mowing their patches.
And, of course, at the weekends, out come the bikes. But not all kinds of bikes - Harley-Davidson bikes. And every permutation - choppers, trikes, recliners, Lazyboys, Easyboys, whatever, even Harley versions of the Venter trailer - one, two wheels...
Out in the country, foreign bikes are a rarity. "My brother likes them," snarled a hairy scary, with a nod to my designer Beemer. It's the closest thing it got to a compliment.
But for all the tattoos, sawn-off shirts and doeks on their heads, the biking fraternity are a friendly bunch, and pointed me to some spectacular routes and places - and, of course, to the American bikers' Mecca, the Tail of the Dragon.
It is tucked away in the north-western tip of North Carolina. Skirting the foothillls of the Great Smokey Mountains it weaves back and forth, 318 turns in 17.5km. It draws thousands of bikers every year in a sort of rite of passage, where they gather at the Deals Gap motorcycle resort.
For thousands of kilometres I'd been put through switchbacks (what the Americans call hairpins) and spirals as tight as a staircase to an attic. I'd come a long way with the R1200RT and somewhere, a long time ago, we'd ceased to be separate entities. By then we must have covered 15 000km.
Still all the talk about the Dragon stirred feelings of curiosity and apprehension. And arriving at Deals Gap and seeing a boy racer, it's back broken like some hapless bright green hopper, did nothing to quell my unease. What was I up against? Was I being stoopid? There's even an infamous tree from which hangs the detritus of the bikes that didn't make it. The bits of bikers, I think, are buried.
What the hell, I thought as I looked around at the assembly, a cross-section of all the bikers I'd met on the road, retired couples in designer gear and Mad Max clones who look as if they'd eat babies, I can do this.
And, disappointingly, I could. I found myself held up by a couple on two Harleys, made way for a few "yee-haa!" crazies wanting to decorate the tree, stopped to take a few photos... and that was it.
The Dragon came out at a look-out point, where on one side the mountain dropped away steeply to treed valleys and on the other to Tellico Lake. Several bikers chatted amiably, a few "yee-haas" revving up to give it another go, another attempt at becoming baubles.
Ahead of me lay the Blueridge Skyway through the southern Appalachian Mountains, with the promise of being as beautiful as anything I had seen before.
- The BMW R1200RT was loaned to the writer by BMW Motorrad SA