Author: Loretta Henderson

My passport is full, obese with stamps; it has eaten well over the last 20 months of travel.  And like a chubby person in an airplane seat, there are so many stamps that there are stamps spreading out on top of stamps without an empty page or seat in sight.   Each of the 24 pages of my passport, stuffed with a stained collage of ink marks as juicy looking as cellulite in a mini skirt.

 Therefore, this week I ate enough bureaucracy to leave me with indigestion. The 3 course meal consisted of the Australian Embassy in Laos for an appetizer, their cousins the Canadian Embassy in Thailand for the main course and their friend the Canadian Government in Canada for dessert.  I say thank you to the passport chefs on 2 continents and 3 countries, thank you for super sizing me and cooking me up a 48 page double sized passport.  The Big Mac of passports layered with endless travel ingredients and empty pages. Ironically, my appetite for pedaling through foreign lands is far healthier than anything on the McDonald’s menu.

However, as I pedal through northern Laos and wait on my Big Mac to arrive from Canada, I sing the two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese song and change the words to my 2 all new passports, empty pages, visas, cheese etc. and dream to become fat with travel.  In three weeks time, my Big Mac passport will arrive at the capital of Laos and I will backtrack from the Chinese border to retrieve my hungry travel mate. Pandemic The Magic Bicycle will patiently wait my return at the Chinese border so we can continue north through the Himalaya foothills.  In the meantime, I pedal along through the hilly mountains singing and happy to someday soon be super sized with a double sized passport and grateful that I haven’t seen a real McDonald’s in over 3 months.

Are you alone….you are a girl, are you crazy? Why yes, last I checked down there, yes I am a girl, and crazy? Well only on a good day.  I have been asked this many times in many countries by many people from many countries.  I have had this conversation in English, French, Indonesian, Thai etc., also in broken English, sign language and hand gestures with no words at all.  I do believe I know the words are you alone in at least a dozen languages and various finger positions for the words “solo”.  So what is it with this unending curiosity about women travelling alone as unsafe, especially while undertaking an independent adventure?

After a little research, I have discovered that this sort of thing has been going on since, well 1895 when Annie Londonderry, a suffragist and mother of three accepted a dare, cycled off and became the first women to round the world by bicycle.

Ann Strong in 1893 declared that the bicycle has done more for the emancipation of women than any other thing in history.  Back in the day and age when women were struggling for the right to vote the bicycle became the symbol of freedom, independence and equality.  In 1895, Ann Strong would later add that ‎”The bicycle is just as good company as most husbands and, when it gets old and shabby, a woman can dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the entire community.” And I will add to Ann Strong’s words, a brilliant comment from the Twitter page that the best part about a bicycle is that you always know you are in for a good ride.  After seeing the historical wisdom and wit in Ann Strong’s words and also posting her quote on the Facebook page the other day, I realized that there are a whole lot of people who like and laugh at the thought with a certain degree

Are you really alone…you are a girl, are you crazy? The most common questioned asked of me, as I round the world on two wheels.  My solo female presence seems to peak a curious mystery.  However, it is my curiosity that peaks highest because my ovaries prove to be handier then a leatherman multi-tool at rendering nothing but good hearted concern and assistance from the world.  Why is it that that some men and women see solo female travel as unsafe and travelling with ovaries as extra weight instead of the useful magic they keep proving to be?  Comments about your experiences are welcome, use the NEW comment boxes below or subscribe to RSS comment feeds.

Here in Central Laos, after a daily consumption of pedaling and eating rice and lacking the endurance to continue the latter, I begin to pedal along and eye the street food vendors with a hungry curiosity. Noodle soup is the daily breakfast staple; it is served with a plate of lettuce, green beans and chilies. Sticky or steamed rice is the local Laotian roadside meal and my daily snack.

Other on the go foods for the hungry bicycle tourist in South East Asia? There are hollowed out bamboo tubes that are stuffed with rice and peanuts and razor thin beef steamed inside of whole portable pineapples. And every food imaginable is served on an environmentally friendly take away stick. No need for tuberware or styrofoam here. There are boiled eggs on sticks, bananas on sticks, papayas on sticks, corn cobs on sticks and yummy mystery “sausages” on sticks. I pedal along the oddly nutritious heavily forested palatable roadside attraction. Pandemic The Magic Hungry Bicycle comes to a quick halt as we stumble across the most peculiar sight of a full cooked chicken plus feet.  It appears as if our chicken friend has been stopped, wings a flapp’in mid flight.  He is roasting on a steel grate and is being served…you guessed it, lacerated onto a bamboo stick.

After pondering how and why to eat a chicken’s feet and then immediately scratching my head as to how they can get an entire chicken onto such a skinny stick, I begin to chomp away. The texture is furry for I don’t think the feathers have been removed, I decide not to look and keep eating. Attempting to devour this whole chicken on a stick is a hunger be gone, no more rice for me for a while, adventure. In addition to a curious texture and the sight of the ‘I think he is next’ chicken running around the cooking area, there is a brown gooey substance mid stick that could be an organ to nibble around. The stick itself has been soaked in lime juice so the stick itself is quite tasty. Fear Factor try outs here I come! After failing at eating the entire chicken, for I gave up somewhere near the organs, I take a large swig of sour sop juice and cycle off deeper into the mysterious nutritional adventures of central Laos while realizing how much I really do miss rice.

Some women birth babies others women birth bicycle tours, utilizing their thighs towards creating a slightly different endeavor, an equally challenging affair but a tad less gooey.  I dare venture a guess that any woman who has pedaled in the remote central Mekong region would choose the latter.  Please don’t misunderstand, after having spent the better part of a decade working with school districts, I do believe that it is fair to say that I enjoy the company of children.

 However, in rural Cambodia, it is not the children but a simple matter of being outnumbered by about 567:1 (on last count).  Cambodian children do not have a lot of toys by western standards but they do have the occasional tourist to play with.  Today’s lot of 567+ youngsters screamed their hearts out with a walloping hello that could be heard in the entire Mekong region, a remarkably fertile area heavily populated by the under 5 crowd.  Some of the young welcoming committee ran along beside me and hit Pandemic  The Magic Bicycle with pieces of bamboo.  While others simply wanted to ride the bicycle, play with the bicycle components or grab my hand as I pedaled by.

My favorite of the young ankle biters are the babies.  Babies normally discover their hands at around 6 months old.  Here in Cambodia, the moms wave the new born babies hands shortly after the exit plan therefore the babies at around 1-2 months begin waving at tourists.  It is truly quite comical to see a new born infant with their little backward fist in the air waving at me as I pedal by.  By the time a child is 2, it is firmly engraved in their psyche that when you see a tourist, it is customary to wave, scream, jump, grab and/or chase.  Initially, this is very entertaining and I actively obliged the first 200 or so, however as the day progressed I have become convinced of the benefits of all women birthing a bicycle tour and not birthing another baby into the population.

As I sit on the upper porch of a guest house overlooking the banks of the Mekong river typing this after a 92km day of following the Mekong river through villages not often visited by tourists, the tranquil sound of the peaceful current is suddenly interrupted for I have been discovered.  Hello, Hello, Hello, I glance down from the balcony and have to smile for there are 4 tiny children bellowing hello and jumping up and down with the energy of a jackhammer.  Now that I have parked the magic bicycle for the evening, am hands free and my new vocal crowd is free of sharp bamboo toys,   I stand up on the porch and   jump up and down with them as we all scream hello, wave and laugh.  There is no curbing their enthusiasm for having spotted me up on the balcony of this guest house that is rarely visited by foreigners; therefore, if you can’t beat them you might as well join them. In fact, I am definitely going to start jumping up and down and screaming hello to all tourists when I get home as well, it is indeed quite fun.  I am also looking forward to tomorrows jumping, screaming and waving juvenile hello chorus as I head further north up the remote dirt roads of the Mekong river of central Cambodia.    I will definitely be venturing north pondering the thought of whether birthing a baby or a bicycle tour is the better idea.