Between the Santa Rita Mountains and the border.

Halfway through the ride, with the border in sight, I succeeded in turning my bicycle into a cumbersome paperweight.

Best I can tell it, it all started when the idler pulley wheel seized up. Why it did so was and remains a mystery, the damn part is sworn to the hardest omertà, but the result was a chain reaction that made my bike unrideable. The chain, pulled by yours truly through the pedals, dragged the entire derailleur forward, until it sandwiched itself between the wheel and the cassette, breaking a spoke as it did so.

As far as mechanicals went, this was as good as sawing the bike in half. I tried to bypass the shattered derailleur and run the bike single speed, with some good old tape for the stricken spoke, but that failed because I left the tool to open the chain in the hotel. If there was anyone, in this corner of Arizona, who could MacGyver the situation that wasn’t me.

So it was that, one luminous day of February, I found myself stranded some 40 km away from my hotel room in Patagonia, Arizona. I was about 10 km past the semi-abandoned town of Lochiel. Ahead of me, cutting across a wide plain of tall, golden grass, was the border fence, bisecting thickets of oak and cottonwood.

I sat on the back bumper of an abandoned motor grader and considered my options. In that moment, I must admit, my idea of cycling in America as a mean to escape the glum British winter didn’t seem very smart. I had some misgivings to start with – the new tenant in the White House, the rhetoric against cyclists, being a foreigner with a funny name this close to the border – but I hadn’t factored what had just happened. My main worry about southern Arizona was shaped like a pick-up truck with a Confederate flag, not a mechanical I couldn’t fix.

Still, I wasn’t feeling particularly anxious or worried. I sat for a little while in the shade of the grader, eating my sandwich and listening to the wind and soaking up the utter calm of this open land. Then Bill and Linda pulled up with their humongous Ford F-150 with New Mexico numberplates.

“Those Specialized aren’t very durable, aren’t they?”, quipped Bill with a wry smile. I was later to know he rides Allied bikes.

Bill and Linda wore big, wide-brimmed Stetson hats and Aviator glasses. She sported a chambray shirt, while Bill’s had a Paisley motif. Sitting in the cab of their F-150 they were at eye level with me standing up. The tailpipe of that house on wheels was big enough for a six-year-old to stick his head into.

“Well, we’re not going to leave a cyclist stranded” is Bill’s reply when I ask if I can hitch a ride in the back of their truck. And, when they dropped me off in Patagonia, right outside of the bike shop, I asked if I could pay them for the inconvenience. Bill smiled, offered a handshake that could crush an aluminium can and said “Did you mistake us for publicans?”.

That was the start of a week that shattered, as it so often happens when travelling, my preconceptions. Sure, I’m under no illusion that my nationality, skin complexion and gender smoothed things somewhat, but it can’t be denied that, for the entirety of my time in that corner of Arizona sandwiched between Tucson and the border, I experienced nothing but kindness and genuine interest from anyone I met. From ultra runners to ranch wranglers, from photographers to miners, retired microbiologists and ditch-diggers, every day brought meaningful conversations, smiles, handwaves and exceedingly polite driving standards.

I was, for the first time in all my life, cheered on by complete strangers. I’m blushing as I type this, but a lady called me a ‘stud’ – a term I never thought I’d hear associate to me – after she saw me do a 20km gravel lap for the third time. The huge foreman of a building site, the kind of 6ft 6’ guy with shovels in lieu of hands and a horseshoe ‘tache, told me “You’re a better man than I am” after seeing me riding on a somewhat chilly day. Both events left me speechless.

Look, it’s undeniable that, outside of the blissful corner that is cycling, the events unfolding in America’s politics are hard to understand from a European point of view. It’s easy, and maybe sometimes justified, to slip into a feeling of despondency towards America and its citizens, and history will judge harshly many of Trump’s policies. But Southern Arizona has remined me of something I learned in Iran and in many other places the Foreign Office wouldn’t want you to venture. The notion that a government isn’t by necessity a perfect reflection of its voters. And that, if we spend more time talking with one another, exchanging ideas – disagreeing, even – perhaps we’ll figure out that lot of the chasms that divide us aren’t so insurmountable.

A few days later, back riding in London, I found myself stopping by a set of traffic lights in a very affluent part of town, the kind of borough where mansions are sold for 7 figures, sourdough is on sale at every street corner, and where locals affix signs informing readers that they vote Lib Dem at elections. So there I was, a bit miffed because a lady in a Volvo SUV had just pulled up right in front of me, Highway Code be damned, when I noticed a small girl appearing at a window of the opulent home right next to me. She opened a ground floor window and, before her mum could drag her away in a whirl of blonde pigtails, she looked me dead in the eyes and shouted the most London – or the least southern Arizona, if you will – thing ever:

“You’re shit!”