Maka - Riding with Ghosts

This Eye Classics edition first published in Great Britain in 2010, by:

Eye Books

29 Barrow Street

Much Wenlock

Shropshire

TF13 6EN

www.eye-books.com

First published in Great Britain in 2000, as Riding with Ghosts and Riding with Ghosts: South of the Border

Copyright Gwen Maka

Cover image copyright Bryan Keith

Cover design by Emily Atkins/Jim Shannon

Text layout by Helen Steer

The moral right of the Author to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-903070-77-2

Note on terminology:

While writing this book I have been conscious of the current pressure to be politically correct in the written and spoken word. In the case of North American tribal peoples I believe that Native American is currently politically correct among white Americans. However, not only did I find this at times clumsy and impersonal, I also, in my travels, never met any individuals who used this term about themselves. Rather, they used tribal names or, more generally, Indian or American Indian. I also found this the case in books.

When I read of a prominent Oglala Sioux (Lakota) proclaiming that Native American reminded him of the repressions practised against the Indian, and of his belief (and of others too) that Indian does not as commonly stated come from Columbuss belief that he had found India (which at that time was called Hindustan) but from the gentleness of those aboriginals encountered by him, so that they were una gente in Dios a people of God, then I was satisfied that these terms were not offensive in any way.

Therefore, in all cases historic I have used the tribal names or Indian. When referring to native people of the current era I have again used the tribal name where this is known and relevant, and interchanged Native American, Indian, American Indian, tribal peoples and Native people, when talking more generally.

For Ethan and Savannah.

Thanks to Dan Hiscocks of Eye Books for taking the risk of a new edition and accepting my wish to do a vastly revised script and for his inspiring ideas and advice. To Helen Steer at Can of Worms Enterprises for her hard work and patience at my many script revisions.

Thanks to John and Jane Snow, Linda Raczek, Linda of Coeur dAlene, Selina, Martha, Armin and Maria, and many others, for opening their homes to me. To all the wonderful people I met along the way who constantly humbled me with their many kindnesses and who never showed any resentment of the fact that my pains were personally inflicted and voluntary. Their ability to keep laughing in the face of immense daily difficulties filled me with admiration, brought colour to my days, and made me realise that you can have nothing yet still be generous with kindness.

My special thanks to Julian, for his endless inspiration and for still being out there somewhere still cycling. He made it seem quite normal to get on a bike and cycle for a year.

But above all, I thank all those solo women travelling alone in every corner of the world by foot, bicycle, train, bus, canoe, car, whatever with confidence and courage and flagrantly defying those doom mongers who are always warning us what a dangerous place the world is. In my travels these solo women always provided intelligent companionship, however short, whenever I met them. Christy Rodgers (who, when not travelling, publishes the radical journal What If from her home in San Fransisco) deserves special mention for her unassuming passion of quietly trying to make the world a more thinking place. Such women can truly motivate the rest of us and show us that women alone, of any age, do not have to stay at home, whilst the older among us can dream, not of what we cant do, but of what we can do or more specifically, of what we can try to do!

History creates the insidious longing to go backwards. It begets the bastard but pampered child, Nostalgia. How we yearn to return to that time before history claimed us, before things went wrong. How we long even for the gold of a July evening on which, thought things have already gone wrong, things have not gone as wrong as they were going to. How we pine for Paradise. For mothers milk. To draw back the curtain of events that have fallen between us and the Golden Age.

Graham Swift
Waterland

M AP: S EATTLE TO B AJA

I really didnt know it would be like this! As I sweated and cursed my way up the never ending hill which culminated in the Loup Loup Pass I wondered how on earth it was that in a lifetime of cycling I had managed to reach the age of forty-five without learning that cycling uphill could feasibly kill you.

And in all these years why didnt I know that wind wasnt only something that gently swayed the tree tops, but was really a malicious and vindictive spirit whose sole reason for being was to hurl me under the wheels of any passing articulated lorry or sling me into the deepest muddiest roadside ditch, and whose buffeting blasts could quickly reduce my world to a swirling maelstrom of humourless hell?

After all, since being a child I had often seen cyclists loaded down with luggage, pootling leisurely up steep hills without breaking a sweat, even having the energy to wave at me as we passed by in the car, so I already knew how easy this bike malarky was! How envious Id been of them when they erected their cosy little tents next to my parents caravan, and lit their cute little cookers as they sat on the soft green grass and watched the burning sun go down. I would watch them jealously, embarrassed by my indoor luxury. I mean, cycling tourists always had fun, didnt they?

So it was that for years Id been longing to set off on my own Grand Tour; it was something that I knew was going to happen some day. I just had no idea how or when or where. And as my parents refused to go abroad (theres plenty to see in this country) and as I was always financially challenged, I was thirty-four before I finally got beyond Britains shores on a bus to Brussels for a weekend demo.

For many years the travelling idea got stuck in the cobwebs of daily survival; I was a single mother trying to juggle what had to be done without the means to do it. I remember thinking of life as a hurdle race I would just get over one hurdle when I had to prepare for the next one, which I knew was just around the corner!

Then, one day, as I returned from the supermarket on my bike, laden down with six precariously wobbling carrier bags of food for my three teenage sons, an idea began sneaking into my mind. It was like a virus which had lain dormant for years, and suddenly it burst forth into a fully fledged outbreak.

I would go cycling!

Why did it take so long for such an obvious idea to form? Why hadnt I thought of this before? So convinced was I by this revelation that over the next few months I bought four Carradice panniers, a beautiful silver Dawes bicycle, and booked myself onto a Teaching English as a Foreign Language course I thought it might come in handy. The panniers went into the waiting room of my airing cupboard, the TEFL was done in my summer holidays, and the bike was stolen twelve months later.