The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold Read online

  Onwards I inched and slithered, squinting through shotgun volleys of windborne ice at the grim, grey Barents Sea, the stunted birch skeletons waist-deep in billowed white, and my multifunction Garmin GPS, its terrible data barely legible beneath the slushy smears of my screen-clearing efforts with a weary, thrice-gloved hand. In five wretched hours I had covered 36km; the old man reckoned Näätämö lay at least 20 further off.

  At the hotel in Kirkenes I had mixed two litres of steaming hot water with energy powder and tipped them into my CamelBak fluid-pouch; I took a weary slug from the mouthpiece tube and found it plugged fast with ice. I lowered my right arm back towards its oven-glove handlebar mitt, and in doing so confronted a strange rigidity in the elbow. Dimly I grasped that frozen sweat had plaster-casted my anorak sleeves at a right-angled crook. Colossal frosted bollocks to the social history and geo-politics of the Iron Curtain age. I had my own cold war to fight.

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  I’ve gone on holiday by mistake.

  2. FINNISH LAPLAND

  Two hours on I was laid bonelessly out on a bed, delivering slack-jawed, reindeer-mince belches at a ceiling splattered with last summer’s mosquitoes. All the furniture had been crowded up against the under-window radiator and festooned with dank wool and polyester. Crowning the bed posts: my wretched last line of under-sock defence, a pair of inside-out supermarket plastic bags releasing their repulsive moisture in sour wafts.

  Accepting that I might never be able to think straight again, I gave it one last shot. What had this day taught me? That five hours on an exercise bike – and a single lap of Kew Green on the bike now thawing out in the hall – was inadequate preparation even by my own abysmal historic standards. That I was going to see an awful lot of Finland, and in the slowest of snowbound slow motion: over 1,650km remained, and my average speed stood currently at 8.2kmh. That I would not be swept through this nation on a wave of public enthusiasm. Largely because there was no public: Näätämö stood atop the province of Inari, a region half the size of Holland that was home to 6,783 people – 4,500 of whom lived in two towns. Nor, extrapolating from my motelkeeper, would there be much enthusiasm.

  A little old lady with maroon-dyed hair, she had reacted to my rather high-profile arrival at her reception desk by holding up a single hand, her gaze fixed dourly on a soap opera and its subtitled parade of dot-topped vowels. I shuddered and dripped for a full two minutes until an advert break allowed her to welcome the Rajamotelli Näätämö’s newest guest – and, as I swiftly established, its only one. I’ve seen enough interviews with racing drivers to know that Finns operate a very limited range of facial expressions, but was nonetheless impressed by her stony indifference to my bike, pooling gritty meltwater across her lino, and especially to my face – a memorable study, as my bedroom mirror soon revealed, in partially defrosted mucus.

  The day’s final lessons had unfolded in short order. A heaving plate of lingonberry-smothered Rudolfburger and chips taught me that though I might starve to death between Finland’s far-flung hamlets, within them I would be generously refuelled. The landlady’s habit of blankly repeating an approximation of what I had just said to her (Towels? Toe-else. Food? Foat. Bicycle here? Bissa clear) suggested communication would not be straightforward in the weeks ahead. Beyond ‘reindeer’, our only shared word was ‘sauna’ – both nouns uttered by her with some vehemence to announce a non-choice option. The second my fork chinked down onto an emptied plate, I was all but frogmarched along two dim corridors and into a volcanic wardrobe. Then, alarmingly, all but frogmarched out as I slumped there pink and nude and vacant: after much pointing at her watch and a brandished list of the motel desk’s operating hours, I learned the hard way that I should have put my watch forward by an hour when crossing in from Norway.

  Every time exhaustion lured me towards coma-grade slumber, the adrenaline of bewilderment and disorientation yanked me sharply back out. What the actual frozen crap was going on? In the thirty-eight hours since creeping from the matrimonial bed at dawn I had dragged my MIFA into and out of a minicab and a long-distance coach, through three airports and the doors of two hotels. I had put on so many clothes that I could barely walk, see or hear, then saddled up this tiny bike and ridden it for seven hours through deep snow and the occasional blizzard, at the speed of a dying tramp. My digits pulsed in cook-chill distress, and my toothpaste was still frozen solid.

  And so to the day’s toughest lesson. A remedial class, really, in which a frosted dunce learns that well-established trends in climatology are more valuable than his own half-arsed predictive dabblings. While planning my itinerary, I discovered that Northern Finland had experienced a comparatively balmy winter the year before, and was now enjoying an even milder one. I was thus incited to pooh-pooh the worriers who urged me not to set off until at least May, or to do the ride the other way up if I really couldn’t wait that long – starting at the Iron Curtain Trail’s Black Sea end with a view to reaching the Arctic Circle in high summer. (This latter option was never on the cards: as a slave to the ‘idiot’s gravity’ of the map, I just couldn’t begin to imagine heading from south to north.)

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  My washbag was in this front carrier. Just tried to brush bits of reindeer burger from my gob with frozen toothpaste.

  Every time I consulted the colour-coded online forecast for Lapland, all I saw was a sea of the very palest blue, with occasional islands of yellow. On my wife’s birthday in mid-December it had been 1.9 degrees Celsius in the Näätämö area, and by the second week of February, winter seemed all but over. Yes, there would still be snow. Of course there would, and I wanted some – it was as deeply ingrained in my mental image of the Iron Curtain as coiled razor wire, border guards with peaked hats the size of cartwheels, and a young Michael Caine being bundled into the boot of a Wartburg. But on 16 March, three days before my departure, the Näätämö mercury topped 8 degrees. So much for all those self-styled voices of reason, many of them thickly Finnish, who had warned me that the Lapland winter generally peaked in March, when the snow would be at its deepest.

  My phone screen faded to black on the bedside table, thoughtfully concealing an online local weather map awash with negative teenage numbers. Winter had come back in from the cold. Why was this happening? It all seemed so unfair, and yet so very richly deserved.

  *

  BREAKFAST IS SELF. YOU EAT AS YOU WAKE.

  If the printed welcome on the deserted dining hall’s door failed to sharpen my appetite, then the view from its window would make that fourth bowl of cornflake muesli a challenge. Beyond the streaky double glazing, shimmering under a hard blue sky, lay a silent, white wilderness of the most terrible beauty, a very still, very lifeless still life. A garden bench just outside was buried up to the top inch of its backrest, encircled by conifers weighed down with chubby dollops of icing. Further, past Näätämö’s desolate scatter of snow-wigged concrete barns, a monochrome nuclear winter tolled out in every direction: barren white slopes speared with dead black trees, the introduction to a huge and hostile nothingness.

  The stretch south of Näätämö offered a choice I had wrestled with for weeks. Either a safe but scant 33km to the next settlement, Sevettijärvi, or the full-fat statement of intent set out by an 88km ride to a rentable lakeside hut much further south. This late-onset winter made the decision for me: no way on God’s frozen earth could I manage 88km in these conditions. So an hour later, a fleece-faced, hi-vis klutz slalomed blithely past Näätämö’s petrol-station grocery, knees-out on a kid’s bike, off into the 20-mile void.

  ‘Sevetin Baari?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are open?’

  A searching look – what’s that other word again, the not-yes one?

  It was midday. Three hours of lonely but increasingly competent trans-Arctic pedalling had delivered me across a pin-sharp winter wonderland to the tiny, forest-nestled village of Sevettijärvi, and t
he bar-hotel-restaurant that welcomed the cold and weary from a catchment area the size of Yorkshire. The morning’s achievements had hotwired my flatlining Arctic mojo, but this latest faltering discourse with an elderly Finnish landlady was heading ominously off-piste.

  ‘No food?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes, you have food, or … yes, you have no food.’

  A small nod – that one, option B.

  A tantalising coil of heat swirled through the door she was sticking her head through. This wooden-walled, steep-roofed oasis was self-evidently Sevettijärvi’s one-stop shop, the only show in town: a parade of snow-covered receptacles around the front proved that locals congregated here to collect mail, buy bulk food and consume alcohol with crate-piling abandon. The surge of relief and achievement that had propelled me recklessly down the pine-lined Cresta Run that linked the bar to the road was swamped by a rising tide of panic. It was ten below and falling.

  ‘Is there any other place to eat and sleep in Sevettijärvi?’

  ‘Ah … ’

  ‘It’s just that if there isn’t, I might kind of die.’

  The slightly constipated look that had annexed her compact features intensified, then abruptly burst. ‘Camping – three-five metre!’ Alarmed by her own ejaculation, she jabbed a finger north-east through the white woods and slammed the door.

  Humming reedily, I heaved the bike off through a winding, path-shaped gap in the trees. At times the snow was thigh-deep, but at least there weren’t any wrong turnings to take. For days there never would be. Finally, after the thick end of one-five kilometre, I found myself before a shabby farmhouse encircled by off-season camping chalets, each topped with a plump cushion of snow. Never has a cyclist been so glad to hear a dog bark.

  The porch was home to a teetering pile of empty beer cans; after some cautious knocking, the door behind it opened. A tousled old chap in a tracksuit and hiking socks welcomed me forth into a bachelor’s kitchen, its sink piled high with soiled crockery, the smell of blandly functional solo catering heavy in the air.

  My host spoke English, enough for me to negotiate the purchase of a plate of lumpy mashed potato, smothered in stewed hunks of an antlered animal with festive associations. For twenty euros this hardly seemed an unmissable bargain, but I wasn’t about to haggle with the nearest calorific competition three hours back down the frozen road. ‘Only reindeer and salt,’ he declared solemnly as he placed his steaming handiwork on the liver-spotted Formica before me. ‘Very natural. You take one beer, yes?’

  ‘I really couldn’t.’

  My refusal left him crestfallen. I suppose he just wanted to deny sole responsibility for that stack of shame in the porch, to roll his eyes and jab a thumb at it when he welcomed summer’s first camper: ‘Honestly, those English cyclists.’

  A radio in some adjoining room pipped out the hour. I checked my watch: 2 p.m.

  ‘Come my friend, one beer.’

  My apologetic head-shake was followed by a semi-explanatory slurp from the CamelBak, laid on the table beside me. He surveyed this apparatus with rheumy disappointment. ‘So, maybe I take one beer.’ In a single practised movement he withdrew a can from a tracksuit pocket, popped the top and tilted it into his stubble. My firm intention to ask this fellow for an overnight bed seemed suddenly flawed, and a moment later I was fairly scooting back down the path I had cleared through the snow on the way up. I am here to report, just, that the liberated glee smeared across my features at this point was not there six hours later.

  How do you adapt an old Communist shopping bicycle for a 10,000km expedition? The answer is simpler than you might think: you cast a spell that turns it into a proper bike. While practising this, though, it won’t hurt to seek advice from qualified experts.

  My heart was already set on a MIFA 900 when I tracked down a German internet forum devoted to GDR two-wheelers, and posted up an outline of my intended mission plus a request for helpful input. The responses were universally discouraging.

  ‘Why such an old MIFA? This little bike is very heavy, much more than it looks like.’

  ‘The MIFA bike was really to ride only in a camping site, from the caravan to the small store for beer and bread. No further!’

  ‘The core problem might be the weakness of the frame. Please avoid, it will become a horror-trip!’

  Most damningly pertinent was the experience of a 900 enthusiast with a passion for long-distance touring. ‘I had this idea too, for a Greek holiday, but I give up after biking 50km in five hours with the little MIFA.’ (On the first day of my ride, it would take me two hours longer to cover 56km.)

  I persevered. German eBay had offered up a tantalising trove of MIFAs, amongst them several 904s with double carriers and the less suicidal front brake. I had also discovered the frankly astonishing existence of nail-studded 20-inch snow tyres – a product surely of no interest to any small-wheel cyclist in their right mind. Before the manufacturer came to its senses and burned them all, I bought a pair.

  Foolhardy as they clearly thought it, my determination seemed to impress the GDR bike fans. Helpful suggestions, however reluctantly couched, began to pepper their prophecies of doom.

  ‘You must change origin gear ratio, very slow for the plain and unusable for the mountains.’

  ‘The MIFA maybe OK with a strengthened, stiff hinge.’

  ‘In DDR era, to make good the MIFA our dad or uncle weld the hinge and sometimes also add a strut.’

  ‘If you want really to do it, you have my unrestricted respect for this performance! But I think you will still find disappointment in the brake.’

  I considered all this, asked more questions and eventually decided on a compromise that preserved core authenticity while offering at least a fighting chance of making it to the Black Sea, and before my children forgot what I looked like. West German shopping bikes of MIFA vintage, I learned, had generally come with a two-speed rear hub – the marvel of Sixties engineering that was the Fichtel & Sachs Torpedo Duomatic, a self-contained, cable-free device allowing urban potterers to change from low gear to high and back with a backwards flick of the pedals. The lower ratio was intended to tackle nothing more than a gentle rise in the high street, but 100 per cent more gears was not to be sniffed at, and I found it predictably easy to convince myself that it wouldn’t be cheating. If anything, this East/West, cross-Curtain vintage hybrid would surely make the bike even more appropriate for the task in hand. Unrestricted respect!

  The plan seemed simple: I would take the back wheel off an old 20-inch West German shopper and whack it on a MIFA 904. However, I made rather a meal of the associated logistics, in a manner that ended with my old BMW spinning gaily around on a hail-bound autobahn, before coming to a sudden and uncomfortable halt against the concrete central reservation. A fortnight later the irreparable wreckage was repatriated to a salvage yard in Dover, where a big man with a crowbar helped me prise open the buckled boot. Inside lay the gold, Fichtel & Sachs-equipped, 1970s West German shopper I had bought from a Russian man in Bonn, an hour before the dark sky tipped icy marbles all over the A1 near Wuppertal. I brought it back to London in the hold of a National Express coach. A few evenings later, a Polish van driver arrived at my door with the white MIFA 904 I had been en route to pick up in Leipzig.

  ‘Is not big,’ he said, holding out the documents for my signature. ‘But is heavy.’

  Both attributes were apparent as I wheeled it into the garden for inspection. Before confronting the gold bike in Bonn, I had stubbornly failed to grasp the defining tininess of a bike with 20-inch wheels. For this I blame the Raleigh Twenty upon which I came of cycling age, a family runabout commandeered in order to master gravel skid-stops. As a nine-year-old with the saddle right down and the bars chin high, it had always seemed a beast of a bike. Dwarfed beneath our carousel washing-line, the MIFA looked a dismal, shrunken runt.

  It was, if nothing else, original: the fat plastic saddle, the gaffer-taped dynamo and even the chubby, cracked t
yres all bore their factory GDR stampings. Some previous owner had applied a decal that graced the frame’s down tube with the possibly ironic legend ‘Nice Ride’, in cursive script. More importantly, this same tube was unencumbered by a folding hinge. Quite how such a screaming absence escaped me in the eBay photos remains a mystery, but I wasn’t about to complain. The hinge had been flagged up by the MIFA collectors as an accident waiting to happen, and which now wouldn’t.

  In due course, once supplied with photos, these collectors would express some excitement about my two-wheeled curiosity. I just know you will too. With its caliper front brake and dual luggage carriers it was a MIFA 904 in all but name, a previously unrecorded non-folding model. A stamp under the bottom bracket dated it to the second quarter of 1990 – a forgotten child of the GDR endgame, knocked out in that strange hiatus between the Wall coming down in November 1989 and reunification eleven months later. ‘Fold-bikes were a trendy thing in the 1970s, but completely out in 1990,’ postulated one of my online German friends. ‘Maybe MIFA figured that a 900 without a hinge could be more attractive for the new West market.’ If they did, then just like the Trabant production managers who launched a VW-powered model in the same ambitious spirit of this time, they were badly wrong.