At the age of 25, New Zealand nurse Louise Sutherland bought a used urban bicycle without gears in London and decided to take it to Cornwall, 450 km away, but the headwind only allowed her to continue as far as Reading, 70 km from the English capital, when she then reversed her route towards Dover, to cross the English Channel.
She started there, first in Calais, France, and then through Belgium, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, the then Yugoslavia and Greece, a journey that would take her to the countries of the East, starting with Israel, then Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, India.
The year was 1951.
Louise slept in accommodation, in the homes of occasional acquaintances and in charities where she volunteered. Throughout her journey, she heard words of perplexity from many interlocutors about traveling alone.
“I was tired of trying to convince people that traveling around could be fun. That being alone was my best protection”, she writes in the book “Eu Sigo o Vento”, now released in Brazil by the publisher Ediventura.
Louise published “Eu Sigo” in the United Kingdom in 1960, but Brazilians only got to know her better in 1978, when she decided to travel the Trans-Amazonian spring, also by bicycle, facing kilometers of almost insurmountable mud and staying wherever possible, usually very simple homes of residents who welcomed her.
Her bicycle was now gaining gears, which seemed to bother her a little, and in the book she would also write about this experience, “Transamazônica – A Viagem Impossível”, she continued to record discrepancies between the reality she lived and that imagined by those around her.
When describing an episode in a corner of Acre, in which a large group of unknown people appear in the middle of the night in a single house on the side of the road where she was also staying, and which is marked by the generous welcome of the hosts, she asks: “I tried to imagine what a mess it would be if this had happened in someone’s house in the civilized world. This made me think about what the true definition of the word ‘civilized’ is.”
Louise would return to Brazil a few years later to bequeath to the city of Humaitá (AM) a mobile clinic to serve the most vulnerable population. The structure was made possible with difficulty with the income from her books and donations from companies and philanthropists mobilized by her.
In my last column, I told the story of two male travelers, Guilherme Cavallari, who crossed alone, by bike, part of the Andes, Patagonia and Mongolia; and Carlos Dias, who walked the entire length of the Transamazônica in recent months.
Two readers saw something forbidden to women there. Daniela Franco said that “if they were women, they would have already been killed (as was Julieta Hernández)”.
In fact, the horrendous murder exactly two years ago in the north of Amazonas of Julieta, a Venezuelan artist who had been cycling for four years and was just a few kilometers from the border of her country, tends to eliminate any hope in the repetition of stories like Louise’s.
If Daniela is really right and her pessimism expresses reality, may Louise’s remarkable journeys remain at least as beautiful Christmas stories, worthy of being remembered once a year.
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