The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold Read online

  Then the cars and buildings vanished, I rounded a gravelly corner and there was the Danube, smooth and green and impossibly broad, stretching out like the sea with Serbia a misty suggestion on its opposite coast. What an Amazonian beast, the EU’s longest watercourse – with a drainage basin of almost a million square kilometres, swelled by the rain of eighteen nations, it’s the closest we have in Europe to an Old Man River. An old man’s river, too: the broad, gravelly foreshore was here and henceforth speckled with topless anglers of pensionable age. I would follow the Danube all the way down the Romanian border, with one titillating fantasy always lurking in my thoughts: if I strapped the MIFA to a lilo and clambered on, after an effortless day or two we’d be bobbing out together into the Black Sea.

  I stayed at an upscale but unfinished hillside guest house, sharing my first swimming pool and a majestic overview of the Danubian sunset with a fat family and two JCBs, very loudly excavating a terrace ten feet from our heads. The vista was timeless, but my company and surroundings captured the essence of a bipolar new Romania. Medieval hayricks and stooped peasants dotted the sloping, gold-green pastures; my poolside companions were an unappealing vision of plump and gaudy entitlement, flumped on sunloungers with brown-domed bellies, wrists weighed down with precious metal, periodically clicking fingers for more beers. From time to time the prostrate paterfamilias would lazily swivel his massive bald head and fix me with one open eye, a look that spoke of a fortune made through nefarious means. It was Russia all over again. I felt so sorry for the nervous young waiter that after dinner I left him a sixteen-quid tip. Admittedly I might not have done had I got to grips with the exchange rate, and refused some of the umpteen complimentary shots of slivovitz that punctuated my meal.

  In the late Sixties, during a rare moment of Yugo-Romanian harmony, Tito and Ceaus¸escu agreed to build a hydro-electric dam across the Danube, near a pinch-point known as the Iron Gates, which lay at the end of a long gorge. Doing so submerged hundreds of villages, amongst them the extraordinary Ada Kaleh – a Turkish enclave that had held out on a river island for almost a hundred years after the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. (In this part of the world you often get the impression that everyone is still doing their best to forget the centuries of Ottoman rule: Vršac was part of the Turkish empire for 200 years before the mid-Victorian era, but the only surviving record of this period is a single account left by a passing diplomat in 1662, who described it as ‘a little town of Oriental type, with three mosques, a public bath and a courthouse’.)

  The Danube’s damming also required Romania and Yugoslavia to build new roads above the waterline, a challenging assignment given the steepling walls of rock that hemmed in this stretch of river. The light of a hot new day allowed me a clear assessment of each nation’s approach. Over on the opposite bank, Serbia as is, the road speared impressively and very expensively through the cliffs or between them: tunnel, bridge, gallery, bridge, tunnel. Here on my side, the engineers had been compelled to take the economy option, and national route 57 meandered apologetically around the foot of the towering canyon wall, close to the Danube’s ever more urgent waters. Even at this range – despite the narrowing gorge, the river was never less than a kilometre wide – Yugoslavia flaunted its relative prosperity, a land of civil-engineering extravagance that was a self-evidently better place to live. No surprise to learn that hundreds of tantalised Romanians drowned here; the few who made it across endured a four-hour battle with a current so strong that larger ships had to be pulled through with the help of locomotives.

  I’ve often wondered why anyone bothers with those tumbling-rock warning signs. How are you expected to moderate your driving style to account for the imminent possibility of a granite cascade? I guess closing the sunroof might be an idea. These signs infested the N57, a major transnational route whose mysterious emptiness was explained when I swept around a bend and found the carriageway interrupted by a boulder the size of a shipping container. The effect was comical rather than sobering: I half-expected a condensed Dick Dastardly to totter out from under it, just a pair of shoes under a flat hat. That night I was told that the N57 had been thus blocked for six weeks, condemning road-users unable to carry their conveyances around large obstacles to a 190km detour. Other than a little red reflector stuck to the boulder itself I hadn’t spotted any advance notification, and there was no evidence of an attempt to clear the road.

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  This took a dozen Romanian sculptors 10 years. Verdict: Mount Rushless.

  I approached the Iron Gates through a circuitous and punishing route that wandered distantly away from the river and wound upwards, through the sometimes inhumanly grim hilltop towns built by Ceaus¸escu to replace the submerged villages. Then the road twisted down, the granite flanks pressed in and the green waters began to surge and billow. The Iron Gates of Kladovo sound like the setting for a Spinal Tap live album, and look it too, with those walls of rock and the mighty water. For good measure, one rearing granite promontory was embellished with the monumental head of an ancient Dacian king, commissioned by an eccentric Romanian billionaire in the 1990s. It’s apparently the tallest rock sculpture in Europe, but I fear my reaction was out of line with expectations: the overall suggestion is Brian Blessed in a wizard’s hat.

  In Berlin I had acquired two aerosols of police-grade pepper spray, principally to ensure that my friends cried when I left, but also for later use in taking the fight to the famously excitable dogs of rural Eastern Europe. No-nonsense weaponry seemed a lot more appealing than the favoured ‘three S’ defensive tactics revealed by my online research: stand your ground, shout, throw stones (in the Moore-ish translation: scream, sob, surrender). Since leaving Austria, unchained rustic yapping had steadily progressed from occasional irritant to regular menace; even in kindly Slovenia, a mad old collie had chased me for the best part of a kilometre along a mercifully downhill road. The farm hounds of Croatia had upped the ante, and ever since I’d been packing double-barrelled heat, one little can of ‘Pfeffer KO Jet’ tucked under the front luggage strap and the other stuffed in my rear jersey pocket.

  Romania, as I feared and had been severally warned, was in a barking class of its own, top dog, Peak Cur. Nowhere else would man’s worst friends play faster or looser. By far the stupidest, chasiest aggressors were the shop-dogs that lay in wait outside every grocery in every godforsaken concrete settlement. Once my CamelBak was dry and my breakfast burned off, I would approach those tantalising awnings and alfresco fridges with a thwarted sigh and a clench of foreboding, knowing that if I even thought about stopping, and frankly even if I didn’t, a howling mass of fur and fury would fly out at me from some unseen shady recess between crates. I would then be closely escorted with the most intense enthusiasm to the edge of town, in a dusty ball of frenzied barks, fast legs and the very reediest profanity.

  Only once, when a squat half-breed got his jaws into my right-hand pannier, did my juddering, fearful fingers flip the safety lid off the Pfeffer KO Jet; the vicious little shit instantly disengaged at the simple sight of that nozzle of maximum distress, and dived under a parked lorry before I could offload liquid fire into his filthy yellow face at the recommended point-blank range. But however dearly I wished to damage these ghastly animals, it was probably as well that I never did. The long, lonely hours in the saddle offered ample opportunity to play out relevant scenarios in my mind, and these imaginary confrontations never ended in the right sort of tears. A shopkeeper who chose to repel all passing trade with bestial assault had, I reasoned, already proven himself an irrational man of violence; if such a man discovered his furry charge in whimpering, stricken distress with half the Danube frothing out of his face holes, one might expect him to launch a prompt and vengeful investigation. As a conspicuous witness with two cans of Pfeffer KO Jet visibly about his person I might plausibly be invited to assist with this inquiry, and there would only be one way of excusing myself. Don’t Mace the dog if you can’t
Mace the man.

  Banished from groceries I was forced into a Proper Sit-Down Lunch: the regional omeletty institution that is ham and eggs, pronounced ha-man-dex, consumed on a lofty, vine-shaded terrace. On the spangled Danube below, a pair of enormous, low-slung bulk-commodity barges struggled manfully against the current, and I wondered how the Romans had managed to span this vast bastard just upstream (Trajan’s Bridge was well over a kilometre in length; no one would build a longer arched rival anywhere on earth for more than a thousand years). The Romans were only here for a century and a half, yet exerted a disproportionate and durable influence on Romania, as you may cunningly deduce from its name. The native language is in no small part derived from the military Latin slang spoken by the legionaries who came, saw, conquered and quite swiftly buggered off, which means Romanian still boasts a one-word command to thin trees in order to facilitate their collapse on an invading army. I’m not telling you what it is, though, in case you spoil my plan.

  Romania’s endgame was a trial of Russian proportions, played out on an undersized road that overflowed with heavy vehicles, all rejoining my route at the end of their monstrous diversion around that boulder. Lorries strained and ground up the bottle-green hills, then barrelled thunderously down the other side, buffeting the MIFA up against the threadbare ridge of shin-high Ceaus¸escu cement that separated me from the Danube seething distantly beneath. It was sultry in the extreme, and more than one truck swept by with its me-side cab door held wide open, providing a passenger with welcome ventilation and an unhindered, close-up view of the top of my helmet. On occasion the edge of the road was interrupted by deep, jagged arcs, as if some giant beast had taken bites out of it. About this time I stopped wondering why I hadn’t seen a single bicycle in Romania.

  Looking back, I fear that I may have exhausted my reserves of national compassion. As a veteran of Romania’s properly dreadful past I was better placed than most to forgive the country its manifold present failings. But in the event, all attempts to muster some farewell empathy were shouted down by a simple, profound desire to get the hell out of there. As a bonus, doing so involved crossing EV13’s most extraordinary border: I rode back into Serbia over the Danube-spanning Iron Gate dam, a mighty, rushing turbine roar thrumming up through my wheels from far, far below.

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  Romania excitingly skanky, odd to enter the EU and see everything fall to bits. Commie relics a-go-go too.

  16. SERBIA II

  It would be wrong to suggest that my days now spooled by in a blur – very wrong, an injustice both to the captivating, sunbathed hillscapes that increasingly defined EV13, and to my heroic endurance in repeatedly conquering them. But with seventeen nations under my wheels and just three ahead, I was infected for the first time with something that felt like confident expectation, and which sometimes spilled into impatience. I began to tug EV13’s multi-stranded, squiggly string a little more tightly: when the route guide and my maps offered a choice between pushing for an hour down a wandering sandy track or a direct main road, I didn’t agonise. With well over 1,000km left this was one hell of a finishing straight, but I’d wound up some momentum and couldn’t bear to let it slip.

  From here on I rarely knocked out fewer than 120km a day, and the marker-pen line I traced on my laminated EV13 map, which for long, dispiriting weeks had seemed barely to progress, now squiggled eagerly towards its conclusion. As it did, so the Iron Curtain narrative seemed ever more muted and distant: Yugoslavia and Romania were just two rogue Commie states in a desultory sideshow face-off, and my remaining nations – Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey – hardly reeked of the Cold War. Whole days went by without a single old watchtower troubling the horizon.

  I was at that stage of a long trip where everyone starts falling out with each other, but the MIFA didn’t argue back and, despite my very best efforts, nor did the route guide. Whoever had compiled this last section was an absolute maestro of the maddeningly superfluous.

  ‘Be careful to avoid potholes!’ Woah, let’s get this straight: you’re telling me to steer around craters in the road?

  ‘TIP: beware of lorries on this highly travelled section!’ Are you sure? Are you absolutely certain that as a cyclist I should be paying attention to heavy goods traffic?

  ‘And after a long day, why not enjoy an ice-cold local beer?’ Of course! And to think of all those hot evenings spent rubbing gravel into my gums.

  My spirit was eager, but both bike and body had long since settled into a state of grumbly resignation, obeying orders without enthusiasm and reminding me at regular intervals what an unreasonable bully I was being. The Duomatic hub rattled like a tin of tacks in low gear, and occasional flare-ups of third-degree Brinelling kept me on the straight and narrow when I least wanted to be. But this seemed like small beer in the big picture. I was, after all, asking the MIFA to do something it had never been expected to do: work properly without immediately falling to bits.

  Every morning my ankles carried me gingerly down to breakfast, raw and tender and all but creaking like old doors; riding a bike all day seemed an improbable remedy, but after a couple of hundred wincing revolutions they piped down. In the evenings my thigh muscles were prone to a cramp so severe that when I crossed my legs, as I invariably seemed to when sitting back in my restaurant chair after dinner, both hands and many loud gasps of agony were required to uncross them. The endless quantity of roads did for my legs; my arms were ravaged by their jarring, potholed quality. A palsied numbness crept across my hands, eventually disabling the outer three fingers of each. My enfeebled wrists began to fall distressingly foul of Lycra’s tensile strength while yanking the front of my shorts down behind trees. One morning, saddling up the MIFA before a coach party of pensioners outside a hotel reception, the front carrier’s elastic strap whiplashed from my frail grasp, and its hefty clasp thwacked me square in the nuts.

  My buttocks came closest to mutiny. They’d been spoiled soft by all those weeks riding on grey German velvet, and the pebble-dashed Balkan roads came as a bruising wake-up call. I spent the morning shifting about in search of a bearable perch, but by mid-afternoon just sat down and took it, the saddle a cluster of hard and complex protrusions. It was like squatting on a typewriter for nine hours. I felt strangely betrayed by a mass of flesh that had always served me well, a faithful, uncomplaining servant in those long rides around France and Italy; to conjure an image we can all fruitfully savour, my bum stood on the burning deck, while all about it burned. Only now do I grasp a causal connection with drastic weight loss: by this stage I was literally down to the bones of my arse.

  Serbia brought shopping bikes back to the roads, and bright little homes in place of Romania’s soiled and crumbling hutch-stacks. Tortured yowling and electro-accordions serenaded me through every town; ripe red cherries embellished the roadsides. I dined splendidly – kebabs, Greek-style shopska salad, refreshing gum-fuls of gravel – and as the bills were laid down, came to a belated understanding of why so many people in this part of the world whinged on about the EU: Romania, a starkly inferior nation, had been significantly more expensive.

  As a more ambivalent courtesy, during our second spell together Serbia accommodated me in some truly arresting socialistic-era crap-holes – a useful last perspective on the centralised-economy guest lifestyle, with one overarching lesson: any Briton over forty-five who has ever shared a house with fellow students could probably have coped with Communism. Rooms were frailly illuminated by a single bare bulb that dangled from a battered false ceiling alive with scuttling badness; my feet parted with sickly reluctance from carpets blotted with complex stains and ingrained wodges of vegetable matter. The horridest hotel didn’t even have bedclothes. A less exhausted man would have baulked at taking his ease on a grimy towelling under-sheet covered with a car blanket. A more sensible one might have troubled himself to investigate. In the morning, my flesh sticky to the touch, I opened the wardrobe and found a full set of ironed beddi
ng stacked neatly inside. It was a curious DIY system, doubtless some collectivist hangover, and one that lingered sporadically, deep into Bulgaria.

  The people, though, were unfailingly kind and courteous – clearly determined on an individual level not to embody their nation’s unfortunate reputation, in a way that almost every Russian so proudly had. Yes, Serbs were lethally terrible drivers – on the busier roads, every blind bend and hill crest was crowned with a thicket of death-shrines, often commemorating multiple simultaneous victims (typically two or three young men, sometimes alongside a dedication to a much older motorist who one presumed was the hapless third party). And yes, they were not a painstakingly ethical bunch, or so I deduced from the incredibly detailed passive-aggressive ‘price lists’ of fixtures and fittings that graced every superior hotel room: moving boldly beyond the usual haul of coat hangers and bath robes, previous guests had by implication scuttled out through reception with their suitcases full of wall lights, telephones and bedspreads.

  But above and beyond all that, these were people who knew how to grill meat and brew beer and show the weary shopping cyclist a restrained good time. Hotel receptionists would lead me halfway across town to the door of their favourite restaurant. When I waved, everyone waved back. Tito fed his people on Communism Lite, and Serbia retained an almost moreish hint of its flavour. There was a refreshing absence of global chains on the high streets, and on the shelves: after months of sustaining my afternoons with a couple of Mars bars or Snickers – they even had them in Russia – I was now refuelling with Eurocrem Blok. By name and nature this brown and white slab should by rights have been laid under laminate flooring, but I found its appearance pleasingly functional, and whatever the hell it was made of had a usefully higher melting point than cocoa solids.