Published by Eye Books, 2000, 276 pages

Gwen Maka always knew that she would set off on a Grand Tour someday. When she was in her 40s after her children had left home and her dog had died, she made up her mind: she would cycle from Seattle to Panama!

Maka’s preparations were mostly practical—a bicycle, tent, and a gas cooker. She did little research into the region, so she went with fewer preconceptions. This was the 1990s, without the ubiquitous online advice that we rely on now. Had she looked into the route in detail, she said she would never have gone.

Maka’s meandering path from Seattle to Mexico takes her through Washington state, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and California. She cycles through the Rocky Mountains, through snow and wind as winter starts. She wakes up one morning to three inches of snow: “It was staggeringly beautiful… The snow fell… blinding me to everything except the delicate, white-laced branches and the silence of the world.”

The Central American leg of her trip takes her through Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. She brings each of these countries to life, differentiating each from its neighbors: the vibrancy of Mexico, the resilience of Salvadoreans, and the strong Honduran women. But her descriptions are detailed and vivid so, to sum up, the countries in this way do them and her writing a disservice. Eventually, she runs out of money and energy, stopping short of Panama. 

The people around her—alive and dead—are part of her journey. She rides with the ghosts of indigenous peoples, the continent’s original inhabitants, decimated by colonialism. Her companions include Janie, an ex-hippie and former lawyer on the Ute Mountain Indian reservation, and female heads of household in Honduras, who laugh with Maka about their absent husbands (more trouble than they’re worth, the women seem to think).

Despite warnings about “bad men”, she does quite well, although a few encounters with truck driver Ed (who holds forth on Sex and the American) and a powerful “muscle-bound Angus Aberdeen bull” who objects to her camping near his harem and comes bellowing after her.

In Mexico, she finally wins her badge of courage. A doom-monger who tells her she’ll never make it to Durango recants once he learns she had just cycled through Baja: “Jesus Christ; you’re crazy! Forget everything I said. You’ll be okay.” And she deserves the respect: neither an athlete nor seasoned traveler, she is a gutsy woman and an enjoyable travel companion.

This review first appeared on Women on the Road.