The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold Read online

  ‘Here in Macedonia, nobody can bring home 250 euros in one month, even in police.’ We shook our heads at the trundling border-bound traffic. ‘Life is not easy here. In next month will be 45 degrees in temperature, in January can be 15 minus. And always big problems with, you know, with other peoples.’

  I nodded, and against my better judgement made reference to the proximity of national enemy number one: Greece was looking down on us from the right-hand mountain-tops.

  ‘What you try to say?’ His expression made me dearly wish I hadn’t. ‘Greece, no problem, here we are many with Greece blood; Bulgaria, no problem, I have also Bulgarian passport; gypsy people, no problem, they like to have many horses but that is OK.’

  Anyway, it was the Albanians. Apparently they expect always something for nothing. As this personable young man ranted on at baleful length I wondered if there was any hope for this part of the world. The Balkan jigsaw had a thousand pieces, but every time someone joined together a hopeful corner section, someone else would dash the whole thing angrily to the floor.

  ‘Meistari, meistari!’

  The Macedonian border guards saw me off with transparently ironic cries of acclaim, but when you’re on 250 euros a month you deserve a perk, and I smiled indulgently. It was certainly more fun than the glazed indifference that welcomed me back into Bulgaria. For many long miles thereafter the road gently descended the wide Strumica valley, a land of maize and shepherds backed with leering, mighty slopes. By Petrich I was freewheeling all the way, down now below 100m, but with the giant hills closing in on all sides I prudently called it a day. Along with not having any more children and buying a cordless long-reach hedge trimmer, this proved to be one of the few truly wise decisions I have made in middle age.

  The route guide, still witlessly preoccupied with how the long-distance cyclist might entertain and refresh himself at point B, was displaying an ever looser interest in describing the journey there from point A. I had to find out myself that I was currently approaching the route’s lowest point since the Baltic coast, and, more crucially, that within a few dozen kilometres EV13 would be levelling out at 1,408m, its loftiest peak to date. Ahead of me lay what would be, and by a gigantic margin, the most gruelling vertical challenge along the entire Iron Curtain Trail.

  This was a prospect that needed blotting out, and an hour or two later a Petrich waitress handed me a multilingual restaurant menu, which along with ‘sham peanuts’ and ‘hotch-potch up masters’ thoughtfully offered ‘bulk wine’. This and the balmy night air allowed my postprandial ruminations to blunder far and wide as I sat out on my fourth-floor hotel balcony, hands locked behind head, gazing blearily across at the misted, moonlit hills and below at downtown Petrich’s grubby roofs and busy nightfolk.

  How different would this scene have been under Communism? Fewer cars and fewer lights, maybe fewer people on the pavements at … well, at ten past nine (to ride a bike all day is to exist in a separate time zone: if you’re still awake at 10 p.m., it feels like four in the morning). But the dead hand of centralised planning remained on dominant display in the gloomy ranks of apartment blocks, and thirty years back the night breeze would have been just as warm, the wafts of pee rising up from the alley beneath just as pungent, my belly just as full of bulk wine.

  On my way out to the restaurant I’d popped into the Petrich Lidl to stock up on dependable Latin-alphabet sandwich fillings. (More than one village grocer had bagged up my mystery cheese and meat selections with a disconcerting nod of impressed approval: ‘Horse-lung sausage and pickled sow’s whey? Fair play, son.’) The aisles had been packed, and after a while I noticed that very few people were carrying baskets: this was a barebones discount supermarket, yet the locals had come to browse its shelves and raw wooden pallets in unworthy wonder. I saw a young couple cradle a packet of Lindt chocolate, faces aglow with longing, before placing it tenderly back in place. At the time it seemed pitiful, a shaming level of consumer deprivation here in the EU. But now, more expansively, I wondered if this pimped-up semi-socialism – bread and milk from your local grocery, push-the-boat-out 70 per cent cocoa from the uptown Lidl – could be the future: a compromise between Soviet-empire food queues and the overwhelming purchasing decisions that are such a draining feature of modern west-European existence. I thought about this and suddenly felt a wave of righteous outrage wash boozily over me: what foul forces had conspired to build our twenty-first-century consumerist society, a soulless, hateful world where a good man such as I was compelled to spend his every waking hour trying to find a slightly cheaper online source of AA batteries?

  I stooped recklessly over the balcony and at length focused on the MIFA, a muddy glint far below in the hotel’s side return. I wasn’t at all sure what I was trying to ask myself, but the bike seemed part of the answer: it was a bit rubbish, but it did the job. What more could you ask? And, in fact, what more did I need? What else did anyone need? I had my trusty little runabout, two packets of mechanically recovered Lidl meat slices and the clothes I stood up in. And then I looked down at the clothes I stood up in, the trousers that shone with the accumulated after-hours dribbles and stains of eighteen countries, and with one of those abrupt cogitative twists of a drunken mind, thought: This is not the evening look I was hoping for at the age of fifty-one. What has become of me? I eat stolen breakfast rolls in bus shelters and wear fingerless gloves. I pee in lay-bys and crap behind trees. My nose is a bruised plum and I’m wearing filthy old tramp’s trousers, like the filthy old tramp that I am.

  18. BULGARIA II

  EV13 would throw everything at the MIFA and me in the 123km that separated Petrich from Dospat, a trial of topographical and meteorological mercilessness that felt like some final, crowning test of our mettle. The first climb into the Rhodope Mountains was what is known in sporting circles as a reducer, a brutal, humid haul through aged villages that blew my hangover to bits, but was cruelly undone at once by a plunging, back-to-square-one descent. Then it was up to the foot of a vast green wall, past a lorry driver filling his radiator in preparation, and a poor old nag hauling a trailer with an elderly couple in the box seat. As I toiled by, the wife cried out in a tone of scolding exasperation. ‘That’s it, Dimitar,’ she almost certainly said, ‘we’re getting a car.’

  The hairpins came thick and slow, and sweat was soon pooling in the usual crevices. Man and MIFA creaked and groaned; somewhere beneath us an unseen cowherd berated his charges, bawling in rage above the weary lowing and clonking of bells. The trees thinned, offering views of the conquered slopes below and – oh, take them away – the balding, rocky Rhodope brows so very far above. How grateful I was for the trickling springs that some patron saint of under-prepared travellers had erected in tiled roadside shrines at thoughtful interludes: first I sipped from their mossy faucets, then suckled and glugged; after three hours and 800 metres I plunged my smouldering skull into the falling water with an almost audible hiss.

  The road began to dissolve at the edges, its threadbare asphalt scattered with fallen rocks; at one point half the hillside had come down, and I pushed the bike over a metric shitload of crudely bulldozed red earth. And all the while the air grew thicker and my shadow more frail, as the puffy clouds clumped and darkened and came down to meet me.

  Every morning since day one had begun with an obsessive weather check, which in the increasing absence of wifi meant flicking through fuzzy TV channels for long minutes until I blundered across someone standing in front of a map. I’m not entirely sure why I ever bothered. It wasn’t as if I could take a detour or a day off, or ask the man in the shiny blue suit to stick some different symbols over southern Bulgaria: ‘Come on, Georgi, you can do better than that.’

  Anyway, that morning’s Georgi had made it clear that I would be getting very wet, and he wasn’t wrong. Without even the slightest drip-drop build-up, at 1,000m the leaden heavens abruptly shed their mighty load. I was soaked in a second, like the victim of a slapstick routine; in thirty more the tarmac was
submerged and the world around screened out by heavy wet curtains. The roadside culverts boiled and frothed and spat out a year’s worth of accumulated pine cones and beer cans. Brown water surged spoke-high through the MIFA’s little wheels. I was barely moving by now, but I didn’t stop. Nor did the rain. I have never, at first hand, experienced such intensive and relentless precipitation. Clumps of mountain, some as big as house bricks, were sluiced across my path. Somewhere amid the layers of exhaustion and sodden hardship, I felt a small, fearful thrill at finding myself engulfed by such elemental ferocity.

  A bronze socialist partisan stood guard at the head of the pass; I dropped the MIFA at his feet and staggered towards the tiny orthodox chapel on the other side of the road. The door was locked so I crouched under the domed porch and began pushing damp wodges of bread and sausage into my mouth, rain clattering the tin tiles like popping corn. Then, beneath God’s roof and at EV13’s highest and heaven-most peak, I clicked open a Strong Hell and the world fell silent. As suddenly as it had begun, the storm departed. I looked up through the dripping pine trees and saw blue sky; by the time I picked the MIFA back up, steam was rising off the road in wispy coils.

  The rain was done for the day, but the Rhodopes absolutely were not. For hours and hours I was always doing something agonising or lethal on an extremely steep road. The climbs broke my body and the descents blew my mind. It became ever more difficult to maintain the requisite concentration and dexterity, and by stages a terrible, fuck-it fatalism set in: when you feel half dead, finishing the job doesn’t seem such a biggie.

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  Road down had ‘55kmh on a fully laden shopping bike’ written all over it (in my blood).

  My right calf cramped up while stamping down on the coaster brake at 60kmh. I shot through an asteroid belt of armoured green insects with an abysmal mastery of flight, copping one in the teeth and welcoming another through a vent in my helmet, the first act of a flappy, flailing farce. The asphalt was savagely potholed, and I routinely careered round a bend along some scree-flanked eternity to find my side of the road annexed by a crater-avoiding motorist. I couldn’t understand how I had yet to witness even a single road accident on this trip, but I didn’t have long to wait: at the apex of a demanding hairpin, an ancient Transit van that had passed me very noisily an hour before was wedged upside-down in the bushes, with a police car beside it. As I swept by I saw three men in the back seat, all cradling heads in hands. It struck me that if I died in such an incident, it would at least be a tragic hero’s death – a haunting fear at this stage, with the finish line almost in sight, was that I might fatally choke on Eurocrem Blok in a bus shelter, or slip down a ravine while having a poo behind a mountain pine, or suffer some other form of ignominious, legacy-soiling demise. ‘It is not yet clear why Moore, who was apparently on some sort of bike ride, had wandered into the forest, though for his family’s sake let’s pretend the boars attacked him with his shorts up.’

  The settlements were few and desolate, introduced by a monumental, granite-sculpted son or daughter of Communist toil fixing the mountaintops with a thousand-yard stare. However daftly overblown, these always stirred the soul: imagine the tingle of driving home past some massive concrete postman astride a 10-foot EALING. There was usually just one shop, selling everything from milk to tractor tyres, with a plump and grumpy proprietress who never met my eye. Nobody seemed to notice the hollow-faced man on the strange little bike: not the gangster types in black Mercs, filling jerrycans at the village spring; not the masons who squatted in their hundreds among roadside heaps of sandstone tiles; not the Del Boys and Rodneys flogging brooms and buckets out of Lada boots in the muddy squares. Rural Bulgaria was lost in its own dour little world.

  Dospat had cows wandering its steep, cracked streets. Dospat had minarets and old ladies in hijabs. Dospat seemed strange and different, but my brain was dead and my body empty, hollowed out like a Halloween pumpkin, and I couldn’t be entirely sure of anything. One minute I was riding very, very slowly past a domed mosque; the next I was punch-drunk in front of a hotel reception desk, grasping it with both hands for support. In the morning, the curly-haired young man behind the desk would have to help me find my bike – I had no idea where I’d left it.

  ‘Is your first time in Dospat?’

  At some point in the addled late afternoon, I had graced the receptionist’s home town with a nickname that had thereafter burst from my throat every time it appeared on a signpost. Reflexively it now emerged in a broken whisper.

  ‘Tosspot.’

  He tilted his head, put a room key on the desk and looked at me with the sort of kind-hearted condescension I shall have to get used to when I’m struggling to dress myself.

  ‘Tosspot,’ I mumbled again, and weaved off down the wrong corridor.

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  Final summit of the day.

  It was mid June, halfway through a year that I had largely spent riding a shopping bike across a continent. In the early stages there had been moments of profound misgiving, some of them up to eleven days long. But I was now locked into an automatic Stakhanovite routine, the unquestioning repetition of hard toil. My parents and my two daughters had hatched a plan to meet me at my journey’s end, and my wife forwarded a related email she had sent to our youngest’s head teacher with a view to securing permission for absence. ‘Her father has been working abroad since the middle of March,’ I read, and as daft as that sounded, I had. Riding a little bicycle all day and every day was no longer an absurd and monstrous self-inflicted punishment. It was just what I did; it was my job.

  In the days ahead I developed an ever more intimate working knowledge of the Rhodope Mountains, now creaking up through a moribund ski resort, now plummeting into a hollow clustered with terracotta roofs and the blue-tipped rocket of a minaret. Sometimes I grovelled across plump hillsides that offered a cruelly benign backdrop for suffering; sometimes I shot impressively through stupendous gorges, the road squeezed in beside a river that tumbled along between cliffs of cork-like rock. I hit EV13’s ceiling at 1,679m, but the ensuing terrain still undulated fiercely. The endless climbs had now engorged my legs to worrisome dimensions, the calves swollen and rippled, big double chins of muscle overhanging each kneecap. It somehow felt as if the MIFA should have bulked up too, but instead I just looked ever more wrong on it, a physically over-engineered bully. This seems as good a place as any to reveal that the MIFA 900 was briefly marketed in West Germany as the Everest.

  Women in woven shawls and plastic macs herded sheep down hillsides or split logs on their garden walls. I passed a cemetery stone embedded with two photographs, one of a husband who had died in 2008, the other of his extant wife above her date of birth and a blank space. Terrific nocturnal thunderstorms wrought fearsome havoc amongst dogs and livestock, and one night blew up my phone charger. They took the edge off the daytime heat but brimmed the extravagant potholes I battered and splashed through, each one testament to the ‘extreme mañana’ approach to road maintenance that had set in over recent weeks. How had I not suffered a single puncture since Finland? It made no sense.

  The fields in this forgotten world had a tentative, pioneering look, dwarfed on all sides by great stands of pine trees, a landscape newly claimed by man. Old horseshoes glinted in the gutter; one morning I saw three mules dragging ploughs across the valley before I passed my first motorised vehicle. Like half the cars round here it was a Moskvich, most hopeless of all the Soviet crock-mobiles: older than me and still somehow moving under its own steam. All through Germany and Austria I had lived in fear of a serious mechanical mishap, knowing how hard it would be to persuade any Teutonic technician that the MIFA was worthy of their professional consideration. But now I was reassuringly deep into the land of make-do-and-mend: if my crappy old bike fell apart, these people would put it back together.

  By mid-afternoon, as more and more of my body and soul was siphoned away into those
distended legs, I would dependably run out of food on some giant empty hillside and burrow light-headedly through my panniers for sustenance. By some shameful miracle these searches always turned up a few biscuit shards or an extremely forgotten slice of cheese. Then, by stages, I all but nodded off in the saddle. Riding all day up big hills with little wheels is tiring in the most literal sense. By 6 p.m. I could easily and quite happily have curled up in a pothole waterbed and slept. Instead, I motored vacantly onwards, through a shaded cleft and up to the foot of another stack of hairpins, the dread sound of a labouring lorry echoing down from the heavens.

  My day would end at a dog-eared socialistic-era hotel, as the low sun was blotted to a smudge by those dark clouds that crept in from the horizon towards twilight. For long and empty-headed minutes I slumped against broken tiles under a tiny bathroom’s curtainless shower, water and road-filth splashing all over the toilet and crusty towels; then it was down to another deserted restaurant, and another Cyrillic bill of fare that swam before my eyes.

  ‘Frytki, salat shopska, chleb, shashlyk.’

  These days I just put the menu down and ordered chips, Greek salad, bread and kebabs in a garbled mash-up of Polish, Russian and Serbo-Croat. It was lazy and very possibly offensive, but if I repeated myself enough it always did the job. An hour later, sunk in the mid-mattress imprint left by distant generations of tubby party officials and tractor-factory managers, I would listen to the first clatters of rain against glass and dwell on my foreign predecessors, those who had stared up at this stained polystyrene ceiling in decades past, their pulses quick and their mouths dry.