The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Moore

  Dedication

  Title Page

  1. To the North

  2. Finnish Lapland

  3. The Winter War

  4. Northern Ostrobothnia

  5. Central and Southern Finland

  6. Russia

  7. Estonia and Latvia

  8. Lithuania and Kaliningrad

  9. Poland

  10. The German Baltic

  11. The Inner German Border

  12. The Czech Republic, Germany and Austria

  13. Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia

  14. Serbia

  15. Romania

  16. Serbia II

  17. Bulgaria and Macedonia

  18. Bulgaria II

  19. Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Scaling a new peak of rash over-ambition, Tim Moore tackles the 9,000km route of the old Iron Curtain on a tiny-wheeled, two-geared East German shopping bike.

  Asking for trouble and getting it, he sets off from the northernmost Norwegian-Russian border at the Arctic winter’s brutal height, bullying his plucky MIFA 900 through the endless and massively sub-zero desolation of snowbound Finland.

  Sleeping in bank vaults, imperial palaces and unreconstructed Soviet youth hostels, battling vodka-breathed Russian hostility, Romanian landslides and a diet of dumplings, Moore and his ‘so-small bicycle’ are sustained by the kindness of reindeer farmers and Serbian rock gods, plus a shameful addiction to Magic Man energy drink.

  Haunted throughout by the border detritus of watchtowers and rusted razor wire, Moore reflects on the curdling of the Communist dream, and the memories of a Cold War generation reared on the fear of apocalypse – at a time of ratcheting East-West tension.

  After three months, 20 countries and a 58-degree jaunt up the centigrade scale, man and bike finally wobble up to a Black Sea beach in Bulgaria, older and wiser, but mainly older.

  About the Author

  Tim Moore – Britain’s indefatigable travelling everyman – has walked 500 miles across Spain with only a donkey for company (Spanish Steps); roamed the continent from Liverpool to Lisbon to track down the Eurovision contestants who suffered the entertainment world's prime humiliation (Nul Points); sort-of conquered the Tour de France on a diet of ProPlus and rosé wine (French Revolutions); and ridden the 3,200km route of the notorious 1914 Giro d’Italia, handicapped by a century-old, wooden-wheeled bicycle and an unbelievably daft period outfit (Gironimo!). Now, in defiance of the ageing process and every pleading dictate of basic reason, he undertakes an odyssey more ambitious – and more silly – than all of those combined. Somehow, he still lives in London.

  ALSO BY TIM MOORE

  French Revolutions

  Do Not Pass Go

  Spanish Steps

  Nul Points

  I Believe in Yesterday

  You Are Awful (But I Like You)

  Gironimo!

  Thanks to the wondrous Raija Ruusunen, Ed Lancaster and the ECF, Stephen Hilton, the saintly and several Samaritans of Hossa, Peter Meyer and everyone else at MIFA, Matt, Fran and Nick at Yellow Jersey, Peter Milligan, my entire family, Comrade Timoteya and Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov.

  1. TO THE NORTH

  ‘You understand how it is here, the weather?’

  The elderly Norwegian in a Charlie Brown earflap hat was the first pedestrian I had encountered since leaving Kirkenes, a little port hunkered pluckily up in Europe’s furthest top-right corner. On his third and loudest attempt, he had at last penetrated a howling blizzard and the many thermal layers that swaddled my head.

  It was a disappointing response to my own snood-muffled enquiry: the distance to Näätämö, across the border in Finland, the European Union’s northernmost settlement and the only place for hours around that offered an overnight alternative to a hunched and lonely death in the sub-Polar darkness. My understanding of how it was there, the weather, had, I felt, been pretty solid for a graduate from the No Shit Sherlock School of Climate Studies: our conversation was taking place 400km above the Arctic Circle, in winter. Nonetheless, this knowledge base had broadened memorably over the previous eighteen hours, and in ways that left the tiny exposed parts of my face encrusted with frozen tears of pain and terror. I nodded feebly, expending around 8 per cent of my physical reserves.

  ‘So why you are WITH BICYCLE?’

  The road to forsaken hypothermia had begun in cruelly different circumstances. The August before, I was outside a café in Florence, winding down after another day at the coalface of Offbeat Travel Writing – in this instance, failing to catch giant catfish beneath a city-centre bridge, under the watchful gaze of a hundred loudly critical onlookers. My phone rang: it was the Guardian’s Germany correspondent, who had my contact details from a commission related to a distant misadventure that had left said coalface deeply imprinted with my own screaming death-mask. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Please tell me this has absolutely nothing to do with the Eurovision Song Contest.’

  Having reassured me, he requested my opinion on something I had never heard of, rather than simply wished I hadn’t. Our conversation was correspondingly brief, just long enough for my interviewer to imagine a story headlined, ‘Part-time cyclist knows nothing of new Iron Curtain bike trail.’

  I set off home the next day, having for this trip exchanged my usual budget airliner for the four-wheeled fruit of a cheapskate’s midlife crisis: a two-door, eighteen-year-old BMW, recently acquired as it bumped noisily along the bottom of its depreciation curve. It was a ruminative drive, partly because of my dilatory chosen route, and partly because the radiator hose blew off whenever I put my foot down. Across northern Italy I found myself on big, winding chunks of the roads I had cycled two years earlier when I had retraced the 1914 Giro d’Italia on a ninety-nine-year-old bike with wooden wheels. Crossing into France I sought out Alpine climbs remembered, more fuzzily, from my ride around the 2000 Tour de France route. And all the while my thoughts were snagged by the idea of tackling this Iron Curtain Trail.

  What a deliciously cool and breezy antidote such a ride would be to my current, wilting south-European summer, periodically enhanced as it was by an antifreeze steam facial whenever I raised the bonnet in a lay-by. Then there were nostalgic memories of a three-month journey my wife and I had made in 1990, driving across Scandinavia and a great swathe of the Eastern Bloc, just weeks after the Berlin Wall came down. This over-ambitious, under-budget epic had, I now realised, set the template for my subsequent travels. We survived on stolen bacon and took turns at the wheel of – hmmm – a two-door, eighteen-year-old Saab.

  Reflecting on that trip, my mind’s eye offered up repeated images of yawning flatlands viewed through a grubby windscreen. The prospect of freewheeling along such gloriously prone landscapes held immense appeal to a man gazing through another grubby windscreen at some of our continent’s most merciless inclines, ones he had ridden up when he was either slightly too old to be doing so or much too old. Then again, he was now two years older than much too old, and 6,700km – the Iron Curtain Trail’s total distance as gleaned by the Guardian man from the press release in front of him – was twice as far as he had ever previously managed in one go.

  I came home with a new obsession, along with the facility to ask for five litres of demineralised water in a selection of continental languages. As a child of the Cold War – in fact, for many years a proper grown-up – I still couldn’t get my head round the fact that one could now traipse gaily hither and thither across the death-strip. How unthinkabl
e that would have seemed to my younger self. At the age of twelve I’d acquired a wooden-clad, Russian-built short-wave radio, and spent long hours twiddling through eerie interval signals broadcast by Soviet-satellite propaganda stations, loop tapes of ten-note trumpet fanfares interspersed with some fruity-voiced defector announcing: ‘This is Radio Prague, Czechoslovakia.’ I was enthralled and petrified in equal measure. Back then you’d be packed off to the gulag for smuggling Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit in through the Iron Curtain, or shot dead trying to climb out over it. Now I could ride a bike across it at will.

  And beyond all that, this Iron Curtain Trail tracked the full length of what I think we can all agree is our planet’s most splendid continent, an unrivalled diversity of culture, history, climate and geography – all in one fun-sized package! Infected to the point of delirious commitment, I contacted the European Cycling Federation, bureaucratic overlords of this new trail and a dozen other long-distance ‘Euro Velo’ routes that traverse our fair continent. The ICT, I soon learned, was more properly known as Euro Velo 13, which travelled through no fewer than twenty countries between Kirkenes and its terminus at Tsarevo, on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast.

  Online investigation revealed some exciting truths about the route I was by now emotionally obligated to tackle. Long stretches of EV13’s 6,700km were as yet unsignposted, beginning with its entire 1,700km passage through Finland. Other sections were no more than vaguely mapped with dotted lines – most notably through Russia, where it wandered distantly inland to avoid a long section of Baltic coast that was closed to foreigners, on account of an embarrassment of military and nuclear facilities. No less exhilarating was the revelation that nobody had yet conquered the virgin EV13 in its entirety – assuming you were happy to exclude a lavishly supported corporate team of electric cyclists, which I was, and to heartlessly dismiss a middle-aged German for not starting in quite the right place, which I did.

  I convinced my editor and cleared my diary. Then I emailed the ECF to impress them with my trailblazing intention, and to enquire if any of EV13’s missing links had been recently filled in. In the weeks ahead, the ECF’s Ed Lancaster would humble me with his kind and invaluable assistance. It is fair to say, though, that Ed’s initial response filled my heart with uglier emotions. ‘I thought it was important to highlight at this stage that we are now putting the total distance of the route at 10,000kms,’ I read, my jaw settling at full gape, ‘so maybe a bit more than you were calculating.’ A bit more. Like almost precisely 50 per cent more. Not twice as far as I’d ever ridden in one go, then, but three times. I’d barely turned a pedal in a year, and my, um, forty-eleventh birthday lay just a few months ahead.

  My wife had for some time been cheerily introducing my adventure to friends and relations as ‘a ride too far’. The gently corrosive drip of this billing now abruptly swelled into an acrid torrent of concentrate that burned a ragged, smoking hole straight through my morale. Ten thousand kilometres was a ride and a half too far, the ride to end all rides with an extra ride on the side. Yet there was nothing to be done: my obligation had recently progressed beyond the emotional to the rigidly contractual. More than that, I’d already bought the bike. And what a bike it was.

  The MIFA 900 series made its debut at the Leipzig Trade Fair in 1967, accompanied by whatever passed for a publicity fanfare in the German Democratic Republic – I’m seeing an encirclement of grey-suited men in horn-rimmed spectacles clapping expressionlessly, while a Stasi officer poorly disguised as a podium dolly-bird takes careful note of the cadence and intensity of every individual’s applause. Superficially, this little 20-inch wheeler with its folding, step-through frame was a match for the new wave of compact urban bicycles then being launched in the West – it was only two years since the Dawes Kingpin had spawned the shopping-bike genre, and MIFA’s 900 actually beat the famous Raleigh Twenty to production by eighteen months.

  But take that first 900 – more specifically a 901 – off its jerkily revolving Leipzig rostrum, and you would note the odd shortcoming. For one, the bike had no gears whatsoever. It lacked the supportive strut that bolstered the vulnerable open frames of its Western counterparts, and was fitted with a visibly inadequate folding hinge-lock. Most conspicuously, the single brake lever operated a metal rod that depressed a stout rubber pad onto the top of the front tyre, via a big hole in the mudguard. This startlingly shit ‘spoon brake’ was a throwback to the age of the penny-farthing – an age when deceleration issues were the principal cause of 3,000 annual cycling deaths, and when about 3,012 people owned bikes.

  The Central German Bicycle Works, whose native acronym gave MIFA its name, manufactured the 900 series until the Wall came down. The model’s development over those twenty-two years is a handy metaphor for the progress of Soviet-model state socialism: there were no developments. Actually, that isn’t quite true. From 1973 the decorative stripes on the mudguards, hitherto colour-coded to the frame, were all more economically painted in Comrade Red. From 1986, they switched to the less comradely but even more economic black. A ‘flagship’ 904 model was also introduced in 1977, with shopping racks fore and aft, a 29mm armour-piercing cannon and a normal, non-Victorian front-wheel caliper brake. But the vast majority of 900s still came with spoon brakes, and none offered gears or a frame that didn’t buckle in two if you liked your bratwurst.

  On the face of it, such archaic shonkiness should have guaranteed commercial failure – especially as the cannon never existed. But in the GDR, commercialism wasn’t a factor. To paraphrase Henry Ford, East Germans could have any bike they wanted, as long as it was a MIFA 900. And not just East Germans – the 900 was offered to/foisted upon comrades right across the Soviet world, becoming the default pedal-powered runabout from Vietnam to Cuba.

  The consequence of this international monopoly can be considered astonishing. In 1977, 150,000 Raleigh Twentys were built – the annus mirabilis of the British bike industry’s final mass-market, global success, which sold just over a million in its production run. In 1978 alone, the MIFA plant in Sangerhausen churned out 1.5 million 900s. By the time the last one rolled off the line in 1990, over three million had been built. Take China out of the equation, and you will struggle to find any machine in the history of bicycle manufacture that betters this total. I did, and failed.

  And having failed, I wanted one. It had been the same during that 1990 trip, when I developed a deep maternal affection for the Trabants abandoned on every East European street, headlights shattered and Bakelite doors ajar, sneered at by their VW and Audi replacements speeding sleekly past. Three million Trabants were built, too: another ubiquitous but unloved ugly duckling, another semi-functional, jerry-built anachronism. And each one a little piece of big-ticket history, a symbol of the one-size-fits-all Communist experiment, which at its peak encompassed a third of the world’s population. I’d been brought up to regard East Europeans with fear or pity, depending on whether they were saluting at an endless parade of missile launchers or being pistol-whipped for wearing Levi’s. But as we drove past all those oatmeal Trabants, how histrionic my adolescent emotions seemed. That gormless radiator-grille smile was the true face of an evil empire. Who could not warm to such a goofy, hopeless, squat little underdog, other than perhaps anyone who had ever owned one? Anyway, let’s just agree that the MIFA 900 was a Trabant on two wheels, and that this was why I came to be hauling a black-trimmed mudguard through the snowbound reception door of Europe’s northernmost hotel.

  I’d booked the hotel long in advance with a view to spending the night there, but Kirkenes was on its well-clad, steamy-breathed way to work as I dragged my bike, mummified in plastic sheeting, past fridge-faced council offices and warehouses. The overnight blizzard had cleared but its fallout lay deep and crisp and even, the thick topcoat to an archetypally Scandinavian study in bleak but bland prosperity. My heavy Arctic boots struggled ominously for purchase: if I could barely stay upright walking 100 yards in great big wellies, what hope of riding 100 kilometres o
n two thumb-sized patches of rubber?

  How my body had whimpered for rest, having been repeatedly hauled from slumber during an all-night coach ride by the violent fishtailing of our driver’s latest attempt to regain control as we careered through the white-out. But the minute I lay down on the hotel bed for a money’s-worth doze, my brain buzzed into life: mission-mode activated! Robotically I rose to my feet and submitted to some clipboard-wielding internal master of destiny, and his stridently delivered checklist. Shower! Very good, sir. Don body layers! Very good, sir. Swish noisily to breakfast, lay waste to buffet, unwrap and reassemble bicycle, mount panniers, don head layers, unnerve Australian Northern Lights watchers, conquer Arctic! Typically, the minute I heaved the bike outside and down the hotel steps, this sir character smartly buggered off, leaving me bereft of vigour and discipline.

  The manager poked his head through the door, blew his cheeks out in response to the conditions, then encapsulated my riding companion with commendable efficiency.

  ‘Small bicycle.’

  The principal failing of my itinerary was afforded similar shrift.

  ‘Summer is good for bicycle. Now is not good.’

  I knew my first waypoint was the road past the airport, and asked him to direct me. He did so with palpable reluctance, then slipped into a more urgent, pleading tone.

  ‘Too cold. Take taxi, please, to airport is just few kilometre!’

  I watched his shaking head disappear, then turned my pasty, hopeless face towards the beanie-hatted young JCB drivers busily pushing snow into giant spoil heaps around the car park opposite. Somewhere inside my balaclava, my mouth tried to smile.

  The first road sign I had passed, just outside Kirkenes, was a fingerpost pointing south. It took a while to decode it. The letters were Cyrillic, and the tightened drawstrings of my outer headwear had narrowed the world to a tiny, fleece-framed slot. Murmansk. I didn’t know much about the place, but it had the right kind of deep-frozen, John le Carré ring to it. What an ideal prompt for quest-launching contemplations: the curdled dream of a socialist utopia and the umpteen millions who suffered in consequence; the threat of nuclear annihilation that had blighted the first half of my life; the general vibe up here in the twitchy ears of the Russian bear’s looming shadow, at a time of East/West tension unparalleled in the post-Curtain era. It wasn’t even snowing at that point, but even so, and with no more than a single hill and 2km under my daft wheels, I’d been too shattered and shell shocked for any such insightful context. Now, with twilight stealing in across a desolate winterscape and the temperature into double digits below, my brain was running on empty, bypassed by a crude, numb instinct for survival.