The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold Read online

  And so Estonia meandered flatly onwards, up and down peninsulas, in and out of the lonesome pines, past truck-sized ‘erratic boulders’ strewn across the landscape by glacial retreat like abstract installations. I filled my gust-emptied husk with stew and beer at a hostel full of multinational wind-farm erectors, who conversed in English replete with casual profanity: ‘In fucking Sweden, I can go out of any town and just drive super fucking fast, I’m fucking serious, dude.’ I watched moonlight dapple the Baltic from my balcony in a converted Commie fish warehouse. I stood humbled before the Memorial to the Victims of Soviet Cruelty, and in sad disbelief at a visitor information board that hailed the regenerative input of Finnish ‘alcohol tourists’ (‘Purpose of visit: alcohol tourism’). I poked uneasily about in derelict Red Army bases, their tiled floors littered with rolls of film and audio tape, hoping that the next dusty drawer I opened would reward me with the blueprints of a plan to invade the Isle of Wight, or an expertly doctored photographic depiction of Richard Nixon kissing a naked sailor. When the snow came back one horrid afternoon I bagged-up in a bus stop and bought two pairs of gardening gloves at a hardware store. I dug deep that day, and fell face-first into the frozen hole.

  And at last, one windless, blue-skied morning, I rode EV13 as I’d ridden it in my pre-departure daydreams, freewheeling through sun-speckled pines on smooth and car-less tarmac, the view refreshed by glimpses of twinkly sea and fairy-tale woodland cabins. The moreish tang of fresh coffee and logs on a smouldering hearth, the chorus of chaffinch and woodpecker, the festive pop of my Browning automatic as another yapping farm dog was silenced for ever. All this and the brain-bending thought that for more than half of my life, and nearly all of my father’s, the simple act of riding a bike through this densely forested coastal exclusion zone would have had me imprisoned and very possibly killed on sight.

  How could a tiny country like Estonia host such a gigantic wooded wilderness? Though I had by now spent around 417 years cycling through what is properly known as the Eurasian boreal forest, the unending immensity of this dark world of spruce, pine and birch remained a lingering amazement. Stretching from Norway to the eastern edge of Siberia, the EBF isn’t just the largest forest on earth, but the largest terrestrial eco-region of any sort, our planet’s default state on dry land: over two million generally chilly square kilometres of big, bad woods. Such is its global influence that in the brief summer growing season, the EBF singlehandedly elicits sharp opposing spikes in our planet’s levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen.

  Russia is home to the vast bulk of the forest, and in consequence to more trees than Canada and Brazil combined. Although being Russia, it’s having a good go at wronging that right: of late, its swathe of the EBF has been shrinking by an area the size of Switzerland every year. On the plus side, there’s no such thing as an ancient boreal forest: regular lightning-strike fires burn them down every few decades. Rare is the Russian tree that reaches 100 – so rare that Vladimir Putin sends each one a congratulatory telegram, printed on 101-year-old wood pulp and with a PS explaining that at current rates of deforestation there won’t be any trees left in Russia by the time he celebrates his own 250th birthday with another facelift.

  Tallinn, capital city and home to a third of all Estonians, felt like some overcrowded Brothers Grimm theme park. The old town’s tilting cobbled alleys were thick with the first tourists I’d seen, gawping up at Rapunzel towers and Pied Piper gables, badgered by peasant-smocked gingerbread sellers and medieval innkeepers offering two meads for the price of one. I looked at the foreign guests waving their iPads about like camera-enabled tea-trays and thought: I am not as you are. But of course to them and the locals I tragically was, and then some – not just any old sightseer but a cyclo-tourist, and not just any old cyclo-tourist but a grade-A twat on a kid’s bike. Such was the martyred fate of the trans-continental shopping cyclist. What rare joy I brought to all the rickshaw taxi-riders: look, a dafter bike than ours!

  My hotel room was designed for some agoraphobic toddler-goblin, an illegally compact cell with a bench-wide bunk and a one-sock sink, its floor space dominated by a wastepaper bin I would trip over twice in the night. I winked through my window bars at the MIFA, chained to a copper drainpipe in the courtyard below, then went out to hit streets I’d last hit on my only previous visit to Estonia, twelve years before. Tallinn was then enduring a scourge that I had come to report on: in the early years of this century, no other city exerted a more powerful lure for the British stag party. My billet was a ‘rock and beer’ hotel by the ferry terminal: every morning I would be greeted by the massively enlarged faces of Metallica gurning down at me from the bedroom wall, along with the sickly whiff of complimentary breakfast lager seeping in under my door. ‘We are not a place that will tell someone they have had enough to drink,’ said the rather dead-eyed young manageress, before confessing that mattress protectors were on urgent order. I did most of the fieldwork before noon, when there was at least a chance of procuring a coherent sound bite from those young men in matching T-shirts, if not an especially considered one; as I dutifully filled my notebook with phrases such as ‘pound-a-pint tottie fest’, I found it hard to imagine cobbling them into an article fit for intelligent publication, and history would prove me right. All that said, it remains a matter of profound personal regret that I missed out on what must be the ultimate stag-tivity: in tones of blurry reverence, half a dozen Mancunians told me of the out-of-town field where for a modest fee they had drink-driven Ladas into each other, then shot up the wreckage with AK-47s.

  Happily for Tallinn the stags seemed to have galloped messily away to pastures new, though I did see two men in pink wigs striking a predictable pose before the sign that identified a city-wall bastion as Kiek-in-de-Kok. A stint as a stag city seems to have been a tawdry rite of passage for most ex-Soviet capitals, some sort of lowest common denominator on the journey to an open market and free expression. On that 1990 trip my wife and I were aghast to see sweet old dears selling hard-core porn from trestle tables in the Budapest metro.

  Today’s less sordid but more durable blight on Tallinn is a cobble-clogging glut of historic-city-break weekenders and the likes of me. Avoiding the likes of me meant I ended up eating vegan tortilla wraps in a shisha bar full of bearded local hipsters. On the way back I passed a 10-foot slab of concrete mounted on a plinth, embedded with a plaque that was perhaps a Banksy-pattern spoof, or an indication that Estonia still had some way to go on that road to true freedom, or simply an indirect order to destroy a planet that has gone entirely to shit: This piece of the Berlin Wall, originally located at the Potsdamer Platz, was donated by Sony Corporation.

  ‘Do you speak English?’

  Every previous Estonian had reacted to this question with an offended snort: like, der. But the rotund, bespectacled pharmacist’s wordless response was unblemished by patronised irritation, or even the pained head-jiggle that says ‘only a little’. Instead, I met an open-faced study in blithe ignorance: ‘I have absolutely no idea what any of that meant.’

  The pharmacist’s own language was of course no less a mystery to me, though its comedic impenetrability had provided an entertaining roadside alternative to watching the Baltic Sea being steadily reclaimed by low cloud and cold mist. Whenever my spirits flagged there was always a Koogi Keskus or a Postipanki Puutookoda to raise them; I once wobbled right off the road in total hysterics beside a poster that yelled MUUA KRUNT! Entering the pharmacy my features had still betrayed their recent exposure to the bold magnificence of LOOMA POOD writ large over the shop next door, though that smile was now long gone. In defiance of my linguistic preconceptions and that four-square, short-cropped appearance through the window, the pharmacist was not a man and spoke no English. Neither revelation seemed likely to smooth an already awkward mission.

  The previous afternoon I had been welcomed into her town by a billboard declaring that Smokie (‘Legendaarne hittsingel Living Next Door to Alice!’) were due to play the Piiskopi
linnuse Hoov in August. Haapsalu was a seaside town in a strangely fetching state of drawn-out decline, lined with once-grand holiday homes and bandstands that had been decorously shedding flakes of paint and slivers of elaborately carved wood since a brief tsarist heyday. My less decorous accommodation was an otherwise empty dormitory above a sports hall, and it was there, to an accompaniment of misty-mouthed grunts and roars from discus throwers in the outdoor training ground beneath, that I experienced the sudden flaring of an irritable rash in the inner saddle-sore department. Procuring temporary relief of its insufferable chief symptom was, as I soon established in a pizza restaurant up the road, an unacceptable public activity. Twelve hours later the need for remedial medication had progressed from urgent to imperative; I smiled helplessly, looked the pharmacist straight in the horn-rims and let my fingers do the talking.

  While flaying myself alive in the night, it had occurred to me that my malaise must be no more than an intimate relative of athlete’s foot, for which a remedy might be requested with minimal embarrassment. So it was that I now raised a shod foot to knee height, and before the pharmacist’s curious gaze began to scratch it with an expression of orgasmic release.

  ‘Ah – postipanki hittsingel,’ she may have said when I was done, stooping down to the shelf behind her. As she did so, I suddenly recalled the aftermath of a wasp sting in my school years: holding a swollen finger up to the headmaster’s secretary I had told her a bee was to blame, obscurely thinking it sounded more impressive. ‘Acid for wasps, alkaline for bees,’ she intoned sagely, as I wanly prepared to have injury added to injury. Thirty-six years was a long time to learn a lesson, but needs must. My loins were on the line here.

  ‘Hang on!’

  With the selected tube of ointment already in hand, she slowly turned her large head and gave me a prompting look.

  ‘In fact, it’s not so much the … well, you know, it’s just kind of a bit further up.’

  I flapped a vague hand across my torso and pelvis. Behind her glasses the pharmacist’s eyes narrowed quizzically.

  ‘Yes, so … still really super-itchy’ – and here I reprised my scratching, subdued and repositioned to suggest a shy and incompetent guitar solo – ‘but sort of here … ish.’

  The round face before me was once more stripped of any trace of comprehension. I might have been teaching a cat how to make gravy.

  In the end, of course, I simply did what my groin had been silently screaming at me to do all morning. No slack-jawed euphoria in this performance: I attended to myself in homage to a bitter zoo chimp upsetting his young visitors. The pharmacist’s features sped through many evolutions, settling into a look of inward disappointment, as if she should have known all along it would come to this. Then with a tiny, brisk sigh she laid the tube already in her hand onto the counter and nodded at it. We looked down at it together, and while completing our transaction shared a silent moment over the futility of that regrettable finale.

  ‘Kiek in de kok,’ I mumbled, and went outside to cool my face.

  The weathervane turned and I was hurried through Estonia with almost indecent haste, swept in and out of faded seaside resorts, past blurred signs for Krapi and Catwees, shooting by all those erratic boulders with nary the time to conjure my habitual translations of the incomprehensible plaques that often decorated them (‘On 13 September 1725, Pastor Koogi Puutookoda discovered a blacksmith’s boy in an obscene embrace with this “Shame Boulder”, and forcibly betrothed the pair on the spot.’ ‘When this rock split apart in December 1898, farmworkers found the disgraced poet Keskus Hoovpood hiding inside. He threw his shoes at them and burst into flames.’)

  If a persistent headwind feels like some ancient curse, then a tailwind is a gift from God, a miracle, a blessing, cupping you in its hand and bearing you magically along almost above the road. Miles were delivered to me on a nice flat plate, and I found myself thinking what a wonderful base Estonia might make for a cycling holiday, especially if you didn’t like cars or hills and were startled by scenic variety. It had taken me a month and a day, but I’d finally cracked this long-distance shopping bike lark: all you needed, it transpired, was a snowless flat road and a force-7 wind at your back.

  Latvia, the first country on my route that I had never previously visited, was very much not Estonia. The language seemed inevitably more sensible, the landscape regrettably less prostrate, the civic mood less Scandinavian and more Soviet. The first town past the mothballed border huts was dominated by a towering Mother Russia war memorial, and the now-familiar trappings of totalitarian infrastructure lay absolutely everywhere, rusted starburst-pattern gates guarding some tumbledown assemblage of dirty cream bricks, perhaps a barracks, perhaps a weighbridge.

  Most compelling was the sudden coarseness and poverty. The road went to pieces and the shiftless, littering shamblers were back in force. Public expectoration became abruptly de rigueur, with throats and nostrils exuberantly voided at every bus stop and school gate. After sharing the road with Estonia’s smattering of sleekly kitted weekend club cyclists, I was now in the regular company of shonky old men on shonky old bikes, most with the dishevelled, reluctant bearing of recidivist drink-drivers consigned to a life on two wheels. Only now did I realise that though plenty of Latvians and Lithuanians decamped to Britain to pick vegetables and dig holes, I’d never heard of an expat Estonian community. They clearly had enough well-paid work at home.

  My encounter with the very first EV13 sign I had laid eyes on came freighted with portent and farce: moments after the historic commemorative selfie, its successor pointed me inland down a trail of ochre gravel that seemed an unlikely right way, but was only confirmed as the wrong one by the time it was too late to double back. Channelling my Finland-honed mastery of loose surfaces, I skittered up and down scabby hillsides and through neglected villages that didn’t seem to have changed since the Russians left – the first time, in 1920. As befits the sort of man I now am – a boring old one – I have become a connoisseur of the firewood stack, an outdoor art which in southern Estonia reached such a grand peak of Tetris-master geometric perfection that I took several admiring photographs. I took another on this lonely Latvian trail: a ramshackle cottage dwarfed by a heap of whole trees, sawn off at the base of the trunk.

  Limbaži sounded as if I had strayed off-track by as much as two continents. It looked at least as many decades out too. Of late I’d been reminding myself how wonderful all these abysmal 1960s tenements must have seemed to their first residents, just as those now-reviled post-war estates and tower blocks in Britain were initially inhabited by often tearfully grateful ex-slum dwellers. Known as Khrushchyovka in honour of the Russian leader under whose aegis they were erected, these five-floor prefab blocks became the Soviet empire’s default home: 64,000 went up in Moscow alone. They weren’t perfect. Three generations routinely shared two small rooms, the baths were four foot long and early examples featured a shower/toilet combo. The GDR architect required to adapt the blocks for native construction described the design (several decades later, when it was safe to do so) as ‘barracks for the Grim Reaper’.

  But then the Khrushchyovka were only intended as a stopgap housing solution. In 1961, General Secretary Khrushchev proclaimed that the global triumph of pure Communism would be achieved within twenty years, ensuring, amongst much else, wonderful new dream homes for all. Because history badly let him down, millions of crumbling, leaky Khrushchyovka survive in former Soviet nations to this day. Rising expectations did as much damage as shoddy materials and poor design: a centrally heated tenement flat with electricity and running water might have been very heaven for a rustic raised on earthen floors, but his children grew up in these places and instead of Khrushchev’s promised upgrade, watched their temporary homes slowly fall apart. Limbaži was full of them, and many more cracked and grubby reminders of endgame Soviet stagnation. In accidental homage I spent the night in one.

  ‘Construction of the Berlin Wall allowed the GDR to proceed with it
s development without further interference from the west. It served its purpose well, and the transition from capitalism to socialism was soon complete.’