The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold Read online

  In a generally successful bid to keep my bereft blubbering at bay, I counted the upsides of being alone on the road once more, a man on a very solitary mission. Earlier starts, shorn of familial faffing. An end to the contamination of my painstakingly ritualised, male-pattern capsule unpacking system, honed over six dozen nights to minimise the unthinkable horror of leaving something vital behind. The departure of a recidivist corner cutter, who was forever waggling a finger over one of EV13’s border-hugging cartographical meanders with the temptingly subversive catchphrase, ‘Why bother with that bit?’ (I may as well confess now that to satisfy my support team’s capricious desire to spend each night at a nice place in a different country, of late the route had suffered some drastic tweaking: for three days I had saddled up at the wrong A, and dismounted some way from the right B. And of course all those record-shattering distances I had racked up in their presence came suffixed with a disclaiming asterisk: *without panniers.)

  Just as it had after Berlin, the interlude induced a back-to-square-one reboot. I would find myself bumping through a field of lilac opium poppies or slip-streaming a gypsy horse-cart and ask myself, aloud, what the freaking knackers I was up to. By now I had ridden further than my Tour and Giro rides combined, and succumbed to irrational fears as I probed ever deeper into uncharted territory, a bit like those early train passengers convinced that the unheard-of speed would melt their faces. At one point I forgot how to propel a bicycle, and watched in bemusement as my feet repeatedly slipped off the pedals. More often, pedalling seemed so effortless, and the flood-plain horizon so impossibly distant, that I felt I was back up in my attic on the exercise bike, going nowhere fast. And then, without warning, a surge of cocksure self-belief would course through me: all this last stretch demanded was rhythm and routine, the simple discipline of getting up every morning and knocking out the big clicks, of channelling that Forrest Gump vibe: Ride, Timmy, ride. It took me a while to realise that these surges always occurred just after my mid-afternoon refreshment stop. It was the Magic Man talking.

  Croatia marked EV13’s exit from the EU’s passport-schmassport Schengen zone, as I had discovered one morning while attempting to enter it with all my documents distantly locked away in the support vehicle. (‘I give you choice,’ the border guard cheerfully told me when I ill-advisedly lost my rag. ‘One, you stop talking, then wait here for wife and she come with passport. Two, you pay five hundred euro for travel without document, then wait here for wife and she come with passport.’) There was a palpable sense that I had broached our continent’s outer limits, and gone back the thick end of a century for good measure. Hunched crones in shawls and headscarves dragged hoes across dusty backyards decorated with laundry and roses; tractors trundled past wicker corn cribs, each cab full of uncles and a dozen cousins dangling their feet off the trailer behind. The division of weekend labour in this part of the world was arresting: while women of all ages toiled away in the field, husbands went fishing in their pants and sons hung about by bus stops vacating their nostrils into the gutter.

  Accommodation was in ever shorter supply, and from now on I took any bed that turned up after 5 p.m. At Virovitica, a welcome blurt of noise and life, that meant a room above a petrol station; at sleepy Suza, a village guest house on Marshal Tito Street. This tribute to the very Serbian father of socialist Yugoslavia seemed a surprising find in twenty-first-century Croatia, but I didn’t fancy asking the sombre, baritone proprietor for an explanation. Hard up against the border with Serbia, Suza lay at the edge of the Croatian municipality of Draž, which took a predictable hit in the Balkan conflict. As Wikipedia blandly has it: ‘There are 2,767 inhabitants in the municipality … During the Croatian War of Independence (1991–1995), 1,300 were expelled.’ Twenty years on, the wounds continue to suppurate: the border between the two countries has yet to be fully defined up in this Danube-divided corner, a dispute in which shots are still occasionally fired.

  Mittel Europe, with its stodge and beer, its Bon Jovi and bike paths and drizzle, began to seem very far away. My days now began at a table strewn with little dishes of paprika paste and pork scratchings, beside a big jug of thin white yoghurt that more than once I blearily poured into my coffee. Then it was out under a belting sun through cricket-chorused fields of ripening cherries there for the taking, down scabby roads splattered with careless reptiles. After all those villages shuttered up to keep the heat in, the ones I now rolled through were built to keep it out. And seeping through every other car window and fly curtain from here to journey’s end, the hectic, brain-softening ululations of Balkan folk pop.

  A long black snake slithered out at alarming speed from the roadside brush and – per-lomp, ker-domp – went straight under my wheels. The heat built. I learned how to ask for more chips in Serbo-Croat, from a barman who went outside to inspect the MIFA, then gave me a pat on the back and a beer on the house. A return to Hungary cluttered the verge with crucifixes and the towns with pepper-pot church spires; I overtook eight barefoot men in reflective jackets with ‘I Trust in Jesus’ on the back, pushing a giant trolley full of bibles down the road. One afternoon I went down with the ominous introductory cramps of a kidney stone, and manfully saw off this potential ride-ender with four litres of water, two hours of hunched distress, and – what the hell – the raw head of a giant cannabis plant I found growing wild by the road. For two days the quieter borderlands were thick with jagged little leaves and potent odours, presumably the legacy of drug shipments abandoned in panic. You couldn’t imagine north Europeans tolerating such plantations, even if they had the weather to foster them. I’d passed from the chilly, rule-bound roundhead realm to the broiled and slapdash land of the cavaliers.

  I spent my last Hungarian night in Mórahalom, whose proximity to two borders made it a very popular stopover for long-distance truck drivers who didn’t fancy a night in Romania or Serbia. Besieged as it was by thunderous heavy traffic, the town still bravely clung to its past as a genteel spa resort – and with evident success, as I bagged the last available room in its largest hotel. Result: the palatially proportioned disabled suite, with a sit-down shower, help-me-up lavatory arms and other blessings for the kidney-bruised, mildly drugged shopping cyclist with 6,738km under his ever looser belt.

  Most of the other guests were retired couples – Serbs, Germans, the odd native – and all had the build and bearing of that particular breed of spa visitor whose health cure is a strict regime of frothy wallows, interspersed with the regular stuffing of a fat red face. I left my laundered kit drying out on a twenty-wheelchair balcony, and went down to join them for dinner. This was a first-come, first-served buffet job, and came included in the price: a recipe, with bulky pensioners and me in the mix, for sharp-elbowed conflict. There were ugly scenes around the cutlet trough, and when I snatched the last dumpling from under his bulbous nose, some indignant wobble-chops in a towelling tracksuit called the police. So it seemed at least; in fact, the epaulette-shirted duo who now muscled up to the silver food bins were simply queue-jumping guests. What sort of policeman goes on holiday in his uniform? The cap I spotted on their table provided the answer: a German one.

  In the morning I spunked my last forints on fly spray (why?) and a quarter bottle of Partizan vodka, then swapped a fifty-euro note for several thousand Serbian dinars at a bureau de change. I didn’t need a reminder that I was about to leave the EU’s comfort zone, but the woman behind the glass gave me one anyway.

  ‘Where you go after Serbia?’ she asked, unhappily counting note after tuppenny note into a grubby stack.

  ‘Romania.’ She pulled a frying-pan/fire face. ‘After that on to the Black Sea in Bulgaria.’

  ‘Oh, is nice,’ she said, brightening.

  ‘On a bicycle.’

  ‘Is not nice.’

  Then I scooped up the mountain of cash, walked out into the already wilting heat and set course for Horgoš, where I would enter a pariah state and pedal blithely past an unfolding humanitarian tragedy.

/>   14. SERBIA

  I saw them as I turned down the motorway ramp that would eventually deliver me to the Republic of Serbia, a couple of hundred blurry silhouettes slouched in the shade of a long blue building just inside the Hungarian border at Röszke. Amongst the police vans dotted about the surrounding compound was one with POLIZEI on the side – evidently those buffet-browsers were not on holiday at all, but had come to assist their EU counterparts with border security. Serbia wasn’t in the EU, Hungary was; I deduced that the stooped and seated figures were apprehended migrants. But with a thousand roaring, many-wheeled vehicles poised to occupy my thoughts, that was all I deduced.

  Horgoš and Röszke were all over the news within weeks, focus of a refugee crisis that shocked the world. The people I saw were Syrians, the first trickle of what would soon be a flood: a month later more than 1,000 were massing here every day. This border pinch-point was the beginning of the end of their long and desperate journey from a war-torn homeland to sanctuary in the EU, or at least the German and Scandinavian bits of it that were willing to take them. (A pleasing postscript: four months after I came home, Syrians began crossing from Russia into Norway up at the Kirkenes border – exploiting a loophole that permitted cyclists free passage. You may imagine my delight when TV news reports showed refugees wobbling up to my departure point through the first snows of winter on their ride of choice: a cheapo kid’s bike. Some 5,500 made it over before the Norwegians changed the rules.)

  The Hungarians, it has to be said, didn’t acquit themselves terribly well. The refugees’ sole intent was to proceed straight through the country en route to more sympathetic lands, yet at Röszke they nonetheless found themselves stoned, spat at and hosed down by water cannons. A camerawoman for one of Hungary’s many nationalist TV channels, filming refugees in flight from a police baton charge, was photographed kicking two children and tripping up a man carrying his young son.

  A few months later, when Hungary erected a 175km razor-wired fence along this border, I remembered all those snide and blotchy roadside nationalists in Austria, and their strident pledges to refortify the frontier. I remembered the Croatian barber who despised the EU, and recalled that every single nation I’d passed through – even placid Finland – was now host to a burgeoning Eurosceptic movement. In Hungary, a poll suggested that two-thirds of the population wanted out. Was the one-Europe dream over so soon? The Iron Curtain Trail had been laid out to celebrate the end of a beastly era of division and hatred, but walls that had come down in 1989 were already going back up. Would EV13 still be around if I returned in twenty-five years? Hard to say: I’d be seventy-six by then and wouldn’t recognise a bike path if it hit me in the face, which it repeatedly would.

  The motorway border post was despatched without incident, and I shortly found myself in the knocked-about, lethargic countryside that would define much of my passage through Serbia. I had, I confess, been dreading my entry into a maligned and marginalised nation that receives fewer annual visitors than Luxembourg, and generally bags a top ten spot in internet polls of the world’s most hated states. By popular international agreement, Serbians are the baddies, the bullies, the ethnic-cleansing war criminals, the Tito-tutored tyrants who just can’t cut the cord, who still feel all of Yugoslavia is theirs by right.

  The dread reappearance of Cyrillic, rare as it was this far north, didn’t help, and nor did the return of totalitarian keepsakes: crumbly white obelisks topped with sun-bleached red stars, derelict military compounds where sentry posts and basketball hoops poked above well-established vegetation, a bust of a people’s war hero in every funereal village square. The very first Serbian I encountered who wasn’t in a border uniform almost flattened me, pulling straight out of a sandy side road obscured in a cloud of his own making.

  This was a rare excitement, for the Vojvodina plain now served up a huge, hot slice of nothing. For hours I bumped along a deserted concrete-slab road marooned amid a treeless, houseless sea of scraggy maize and wheat. The crops thinned and the soil blackened; the camomile pot-pourri that had perfumed the hedgerows for days soured to a putrid miasma of mouldy old towels. My only company across this poisoned prairie were the toads who croaked unseen in the roadside drainage trenches, deep down in the sickly bulrushes.

  By mid-morning it was 35 degrees; a fifty-seven-point swing up the Celsius scale from my ride’s opposite Lapland extremity. There was a curious affinity with those Arctic wastes, that same sense of having ridden right off the map. Indeed, Finland was lodged in my mind all afternoon once I’d run out of water. All those months ago, as I crawled across iced lakes with a frigid gale ripping in through my balaclava eyeholes, I had scraped together some solace by telling myself there would be times ahead when I would pay good money for a frozen headwind. Here was the first of those times.

  ‘One thing, please,’ drawled the Hostel Paparazzo’s tattoo-ankled receptionist, laying the dusty MIFA to rest between an ironing board and a Marshall speaker stack. ‘You will not drink the water here in Kikinda, never. It is technical water only.’

  Hardly a surprise, given the stagnant, sulphurous wafts I had toiled through for hours, but an intriguing phrase nonetheless. A worrisome one too, as just outside Kikinda I had lowered my blistered lips to a village standpipe and gratefully ingested bobbing throatfuls of the stuff.

  ‘You can use for toilet, not in kitchen. Even you take it to 100 Celsius, you will be like this.’ With sudden gusto she showered the MIFA’s bedroom with imaginary human voidance. ‘The boss he will not be happy.’

  This gentleman – owner of the Marshall stack and, I suspected, the receptionist’s heart – was a local rock-god whose lion-maned, Fender-fondling image had been plastered gigantically all over the lobby, and halfway up the stairs to my airless dormitory. ‘If you are lucky he will be here in morning,’ the receptionist told me as I headed out an hour later, reeking of technical water.

  Kikinda guts, as I brilliantly dubbed it, was a dusty wonder: the Paparazzo lay at the heart of a bustling mess of pastel cathedrals, monumental sculpture and crumbling socialist apartment blocks, which together brought Latin America to mind. Everything from the brown eyes to those filthy wodges of semi-worthless banknotes would have transferred seamlessly to some banana republic. I hadn’t felt so foreign since Kaliningrad.

  The blistered stucco walls were slowly releasing the day’s mighty heat and I cooled myself with a fist-sized ice cream, tonguing it languidly along a leafy boulevard clustered with ambling couples and families. There wasn’t a single Western shop sign, and the windows were piled with clumpy shoes and cheap-looking furniture: EU and US sanctions were only recently lifted, and almost everything on sale in Serbia is made locally. I went round a grocery and found its entire stock – fig rolls, drinking yoghurt, shampoo – labelled as produce of the Republika Srbija. Any motorist who recalls the Yugo, subject of a recent monograph entitled The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History, will tell you that the Republika Srbija isn’t very good at making things. Even exported Yugos sometimes came with mismatched front seats – one brown, the other black – and dashboard warning-lights labelled by hand. The shop’s rear end was stacked from floor to ceiling with colossal plastic barrels of non-technical water, several of which I had seen being lugged through the streets over an often ancient shoulder. It wasn’t a terribly European look. I have just established that the water supply in Vojvodina province is contaminated with our continent’s highest levels of bacterial and chemical pollutants, a cocktail that routinely contains threadworms, raw human waste and arsenic. Anyway, drinking half a hogshead of it didn’t kill me. In fact, like some fledgling Marvel superhero exposed to toxic radiation, it may have made me stronger.

  I had two Lav beers (no – it’s too easy) and a pizza in a restaurant full of Balkan pop, sauce-faced kids and smoking parents, then strolled over to the showpiece civic spaces. At 9 p.m. Kikinda was busier, and balmier, than any place I’d walked round after hours since Berlin, and it was here, among the poi
soned fountains and dimly lit relics of a complex past, that I first began to fall for Serbia. Toddlers clipped their parents’ ankles at the wheels of rented electric go-karts, buzzing between a moribund socialist hotel and a big ochre church. Louder elder siblings were playing unisex football by a boldly abstract 1960s war memorial; the more restrained had gathered at a giant chess set, rubbing chins amongst the waist-high pawns. A couple embraced in the grandly turreted shadow of the Habsburg-vintage city hall, and outside the pockmarked high school that propped up the Paparazzo, a young accordionist was drawing a small crowd. It was infectious and heart-lifting and – cough – unbelievably cheap. The ten-dinar notes I’d been piling up on counters all night, I now calculated, were each worth 6p; the entire evening had set me back under four quid. I was so pleased I phoned my wife to tell her, blissfully unaware that Serbia lies in the same tin-pot, pariah-state telecommunication charge band as North Korea. After I got home I discovered that every minute of this conversation had cost more than my night out.

  A little man with sunken eyes and a straggly grey poodle-perm was installed behind the Paparazzo’s desk when I stumbled wearily downstairs after a sticky, restless night. At length I connected him with the thrusting axe-merchant staring imperiously down from the walls. As I pushed the MIFA out of his storeroom he lugubriously hoisted the sign of the horns with both hands; I returned the gesture with one and headed out into the blazing sun.