Eat the Wind

Travels with Dictators, Mercenaries and Queens

“The narrow, choppy Strait of Malacca between Malaysia and the island of Sumatra has swallowed countless trading ships over the centuries. That was in the back of my mind as I flew over the Strait in one of those small seaplanes where they ask how much you weigh before you board. Just being asked that question makes you hope the other passengers are all skinny.

I certainly was. After quitting my job as a lawyer in a big firm and spending seven months traveling overland in Southeast Asia, I was at least ten pounds underweight, and I was thin to begin with. Occasionally I’d get sick for a few days and lose a few more pounds, making me cinch my belt even more. So when it came to making sure the propeller plane skimming the rough waters of the Strait of Malacca did not plunge into the sea, I carried my weight, so to speak, by not carrying much weight.”

So begins “A Night of Bahasa,” an excerpt from Eat the Wind: Travels with Dictators, Mercenaries and Queens that won Second Prize at the Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference 2024. You can find the story here.

Eat the Wind will be a time capsule of memorable journeys spanning a decade across the ‘70s and ‘80s, when I often dropped into events that made world headlines at the time, like a real-life Forrest Gump. The dictators who play parts in these tales? They include Idi Amin, Francisco Franco, and especially Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, where Wake spent two months during the People Power Revolution that toppled that dictator. The queens who appear in these stories? Start with Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II and a twenty-year-old hitchhiking into London during the height of her Silver Jubilee celebration. The mercenaries? Well, they first appear in Chapter 5 …