Maier rode ahead. There wasn’t enough road left to be able to admire the landscape. He concentrated on the potholes and sandy ridges that had carved the old mountain road into a rutted graveyard trail.
The first thirty kilometres led through dense jungle. Maier didn’t see a soul by the roadside.
He tried to circle each pothole, some of them half-metre craters, in order to get through the mud, gravel and sand as quickly as possible. Every now and then, he could hear Rolf rev his bike behind him. Both sides of the road were hedged in by giant ferns and tall grasses. Small streams ran through the brush and underneath old, partly-collapsed bridges. The canopy threw long and deep shadows. Tigers were said to survive here. The birds, unseen, managed to create enough song to occasionally filter
