Travels in a strange state : cycling across the U.S.A. by Josie Dew

Author:Josie Dew [Dew, Josie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Josie, Cycling, Dew
Publisher: Boston : Little, Brown and Co.
Published: 1994-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

I rode southwards down the coast through an expansive and dramatically desolate lava desert. In places, people had written their names or formed messages of love with brilliant white coral rocks on the black lava:

ALOHA MOM AND DAD LOVE JADE

MARRY ME PEGGY? PASSIONATELY DAN X

Off to my left, Mauna Kea reared its sun-streaked hulk high into the sky. Above its coronet of clouds, the atmosphere atop this monolithic mountain is the purest and most rarefied in the world and the summit is so clear of pollutants that an internationally manned astronomical observatory complex has based itself there, providing data to scientists all over the world.

Hitting the Gold Coast of Kona, I was soon into the heavy-duty tourist town of Kailua-Kona - miles of concrete condos and sumptuous hotels. I rode along the front to the church of Mokuaikaua ('The Trees Are Felled, Now Let Us Eat'), the walls of which were fashioned from massive, rough-hewn lava stone plastered together with a mortar of crushed and burned coral bound witli koa-wood oil.

I was about to set off up the hill to Captain Cook when I was set upon by Esther, an Israeli, and her husband Digby, a freelance photographer from 'Noo Yawk'. They were a flamboyantly comical couple in their late fifties, one little and the other large, and both sporting shorts that were totally the wrong dimensions for their opposite physiques. Digby's were so big and baggy that he could quite easily have accommodated a friend or two: they flapped forlornly like a ship's sails around his pallid, knobbly knee caps and were hoisted so high up his spindly trunk that they almost impeded his vision.

Esther's shorts almost defied description. They were skimpy and tight enough to threaten more than her circulation. In fact, judging from her body's two-toned coloration, she had cut that off long ago: anything below her waist had the pasty appearance of having died, while the blood in her upper region was pumping and pulsating so furiously beneath her puckered, puce skin that the prospect of internal combustion looked a distinct possibility. I felt she was living on borrowed time.

Esther and Digby let it be known that they wished to take a photograph of me for some 'sporty magazine'. Would I mind? Thinking this would entail a quick snapshot, I readily obliged, litde knowing what a farcical palaver was about to take place.

Digby was intent on photographing me on my bike on the beach with 'the traa-pical backdrop of a palm tree as company'. To reach the beach entailed the tricky operation of lowering my heavily laden mount down a ten-foot stone wall. I said it would be much easier if I removed my bags first but Digby wouldn't hear of it, mumbling something about 'good exercise for the old muscles'. Who was I to argue? Under Esther's orders, I jumped down to the beach so that

they could lower my bike down to me. Simple as that - but in reality things are never as simple as that.

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