The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold

by Tim Moore

  Serbia’s towns proved a dependable delight; its countryside bored and burned the pants off me. In the morning I’d stockpile toothsome, cheese-stuffed road-fuel at one of the splendid bakeries that graced every urban street corner, huff wistfully and strike out across a fresh expanse of flyblown, shade-less flatland. As long as I kept pedalling, the self-generated breeze made the heat bearable; whenever I stopped, it was shocking, an oven-baked horse blanket flung rudely over my head. The Garmin topped out at 47.1 degrees in the sun. Tiger-stripes of red began to sear through my deep base tan, and my mind boiled dry. I spent an entire afternoon counting pedal revolutions: 171 per kilometre in top gear, for the record, and 232 in low. The rare and drowsy villages were falling down and half empty, thinly scattered with aged locals stooped in sagging, ancient thresholds or gathered under trees. My appearance aroused a novel sort of attention: for once I wasn’t a weirdo on a daft bike, just a stranger, a new kid in town. Old couples would nudge each other and edge forth from their doorways as I jangled by, faces puckered in awe: ‘Look – a man.’

  In fact, the bike and I didn’t get a single funny look in Serbia. As a legacy of distant centralised manufacture and recent economic sanctions, the ancient 20-inch-wheeled shopper was and remains rural Serbia’s ride of choice. I’m sure you can imagine our excitement at this discovery, though if you can’t I’m happy to send on request a selection of related commemorative selfies. Many of these MIFA-likes supported more than one rustic bottom, the rear carrier ferrying children to school or granddad to the bus stop. And doing so with incredible sloth: the average speed of a Serbian bicycle is roughly 0.3kmh above that at which it would topple over.

  Even the scabbiest hamlet was home to a grocery shed with a colourful drinks fridge out the front, and with my CamelBak drained and the last, sweaty pastry gone I would dive in through the fly curtains, queuing up for fluids and waxy Serb chocolate behind some well-built, powerfully aromatic farmhand, trading empty beer bottles for full ones. Every settlement had its name translated into multiple languages on the welcome and farewell signs; I once counted six. Hungarian, German, Serbo-Croat in both Latin and Cyrillic flavours plus the odd mystery guest – evidence of the Balkan region’s extraordinary ethnic diaspora, and Serbia’s new-found willingness to embrace it.

  On I pressed, ever deeper into the Borat moustache belt, past mighty, glinting grain elevators and fields fringed with mounds of smouldering refuse. Whenever an agricultural vehicle chugged by I would put in a catch-up burst and settle gratefully in its slipstream, much to the driver’s black-toothed amusement. Late one afternoon I was sucked along for a good hour behind a leaking muck spreader, an instructive exercise in the opposing forces of magnetism.

  Come sunset all was forgiven, indeed largely forgotten. By then I would have slung my laundered kit over a wrought-iron balcony, and be out on some broad and well-peopled square, stopping on occasion at an appealing, parasol-fronted bar for a shish kebab or another beer, gazing with weary contentment at my route maps, the girdling of regal façades and in due course the bill. Vršac – which you should pronounce ver-shatz if you find yourself in the area and want to get laughed at less loudly than I was – proved an especial treat. Every vista offered an engaging tangle of history: pointy-topped Ottoman arches, pink and yellow Habsburg stucco, some wilfully monstrous hunk of Communist concrete hard up against the neo-Gothic cathedral’s graceful spires. Serbia had been persistently reminding me of another country, and wandering through Vršac I realised which one. The ritual evening stroll, the sons holding hands with their garrulous mothers, the unhelmeted youths careering madly through the traffic on deafening mopeds – I don’t think you need any more clues, but if you do, it isn’t Norway. From then on, Serbia delivered Italianate cameos with tireless diligence: a bus driver with a phone to his ear and his foot to the floor; a whistling, shameless fly-tipper flinging a bathroom suite into a ditch; a cluster of old men outside a village bar, watching the very small world go by in companionable silence.

  After all those stopover settlements left behind without a second thought, I was beginning to find morning departures a wrench. A damp little town in Austria seemed fair game for a loveless one-night stand, but I wanted to go out with Kikinda for at least a couple of weeks, and possibly even marry Vršac. She had the sweetest nature and a cracking set of bakeries. And though I’m slightly regretting this unwholesome analogy, anything had to be better than my next conquest: just up the road I’d be getting down and dirty with EV13’s wartiest old hag.

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  Not the first time I’ve cheated death on this trip.

  15. ROMANIA

  ‘Turizam?’

  ‘Industrial espionage,’ I said, nodding brightly.

  The Serbian border guard returned my passport, and jabbed a thumb at the Garmin.

  ‘How many you go?’

  I cupped the screen to shade out the dazzling sun, and slowly dictated the running total: ‘Seven thousand, two hundred and twelve kilometres.’ I watched his dark eyes widen. ‘About one and a half thousand left.’

  ‘But … is bicikl normalno!’

  What a stirring acclamation, rounded off with the two most beautiful words in the Serbo-Croatian language. One clause of my admittedly sketchy mission statement had been to prove that the bicycle, even in its humblest incarnation, was a go-anywhere, do-anything machine – a shopper would always get you down the shops, even if they were 6,000 miles away. As the border guard summoned his colleagues to pay homage, I mentally ticked that one off. After fourteen nations’ worth of derision, I had at last found a country that recognised the MIFA as no more than a bog-standard bike. Regrettably I was leaving it at once. A few short days before, I had left the EU behind with a sense of deep foreboding. How curious to find my heart far heavier as I now prepared to re-enter it.

  In 1990, we drove into Romania behind a convoy of Red Cross vans, the only other foreign vehicles we would encounter there beyond a couple of typically foolhardy Polski Fiats. The native border guards were flabbergasted to hear the purpose of our visit. ‘You come on holiday?’ It was ten months since Nicolae Ceaus¸escu and his wife had been lavishly ventilated by a firing squad, and after twenty-four years of despotic lunacy the country remained ravaged and traumatised. Nonetheless, by then we fancied ourselves battle-hardened, inured to East European squalor and scarcity, ready for anything. Anything but Romania, it almost instantly transpired.

  We spent our first night in Deva, just east of Timis¸oara, where the discontent that would swiftly topple Ceaus¸escu had first flared up a year before. As we approached Deva’s only hotel the whole town went black, almost pitching us into a cavernous void in the road, bereft of any warning furniture and deep enough to swallow a bus. A torch-wielding bell-boy hobbled out on crutches, his eyes nervously scanning the darkness, and beckoned us to drive across the pavement; he kept beckoning until the Saab’s front end was literally inside the hotel doors. The lights flickered back on a while later as a waitress led us into the kitchen. With a take-it-or-leave-it shrug, she threw open a fridge that contained three oval slices of bread and a blistered enamel plate with a dozen tiny cubes of cheese scattered across it. What an introduction. It was all downhill after that.

  In the countryside, people grubbed listlessly for roots in the cold autumn mud, sometimes recoiling at our approach as if they’d never seen a car before; we shared the crevassed roads with haywain-hauling horses, and hordes of filth-caked, semi-feral urchins. Both were Ceaus¸escu legacies. He had banned abortion to boost the nation’s birth rate as part of his monomaniac drive to haul Romania into the industrialised twentieth century, and when that went ruinously wrong, punted his bankrupt country back to the nineteenth. In 1986, just four years before our visit, Romania launched a nationwide horse-breeding campaign: tractors had become an unthinkable luxury.

  The towns, though, were inestimably worse. Every time we stopped, even briefly at a junction, gaunt zombies would slowly m
ass around the Saab with their hands out. Whenever we got out of the car, the crowd came suddenly to life and surged forward, blundering hectically around us, like bees around their queen. We had to clear a way through by tossing out Western unobtainables stockpiled in preparation: Biros, oranges, sticks of Wrigley’s gum. In the shops, shelves were thinly stocked with hopeless, cracker-novelty crap or stolen goods. One grocery had a counter stacked with tins of Red Cross baby-milk powder. There was a dead dog in the gutter outside.

  The hotels were bleak and unheated, forbidden by law to turn the radiators on unless the outside temperature fell below 10 degrees Celsius, which in the official forecast it apparently never did, even when there was ice on the windows. Our rooms were miserably damp and decorated with clumsily hand-painted patterns in the absence of wallpaper. Taps dispensed a chilled fluid that sometimes looked like Bovril, sometimes milky tea. Electricity came and went. The TV, if there was one, offered nothing but monochrome Hollywood obscurities, generally featuring the young Kirk Douglas doing something plausibly socialist, like saving redwoods from a logging conglomerate or punching a ruthless cattle baron on the jaw.

  We survived on fizzy green pickled tomatoes, chalky mineral water and ladles of a gristled pottage that our systems promptly rejected one way or another, generally both. One restaurant had food but no cutlery, and we ate our carbonated tomatoes and dog stew with the cocktail sticks provided. Mostly the opposite problem applied. A waiter in an otherwise deserted restaurant would politely show us to a dim table and present a menu, then shake his head regretfully, sometimes after a chin-rubbing rumination, as I ran a finger slowly down its full length. In Gura Humorului, a sizeable settlement which Wikipedia tells me was then home to 17,000 inhabitants, we enacted these silent Monty Python cheese-shop sketches at two restaurants and a café: the whole town had been entirely stripped of edible matter. ‘I just used to go on stage and say, “Food”,’ a Romanian comedian said recently, recalling his experiences on whatever passed for the native stand-up circuit in the 1980s. ‘The audience always burst into applause: I was thought so brave for using a forbidden word.’

  The only passable nutrition we ingested at any point in Romania was at the Dracula Hotel in Brasov, where to our astonishment a lorry driver on the next table flung his cutlery down after one forkful and stormed into the kitchen to complain. An hour later, I went out to get something from the car and found the chef and two waiters beating him to a pulp.

  Every large town was dominated by a vast and ghastly steelworks, the evil, belching embodiment of Ceaus¸escu’s monstrous misrule. Making lots of hard metal was a rite of state-socialist passage, and the fact that Romania – a land blessed with rich soil and an abundance of other natural resources – possessed no native reserves of iron ore wasn’t about to put off the Warsaw Pact’s most unhinged dictator.

  Eastern Bloc leaders were rarely shy of a personality cult – one edition of Neues Deutschland, the GDR’s national daily paper, contained no fewer than forty-one photographs of Erich Honecker – but only the General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party went the full North Korea. Nicolae Ceaus¸escu proclaimed himself a secular god, and built a ‘people’s palace’ that remains the world’s second largest building, after the Pentagon. He once delivered a six-hour speech that incorporated 125 standing ovations. Ceaus¸escu was the megalomaniac’s megalomaniac: paranoid, jealous and in most other ways just full-on nuts. He was 5ft 3in and refused to employ anyone taller, being thus preceded by a team of very small functionaries who dabbed down everything he was about to touch – pens, door handles, taps – with surgical alcohol. He never wore any item of clothing, even a pair of shoes, more than twice, and had everything incinerated afterwards. On overseas trips, Ceaus¸escu took along a tiny chemist whose job it was to destroy his excrement, thereby denying foreign agencies the opportunity to assess his state of health via faecal analysis.

  To unwind, he would take a boat out across the Danube delta to inspect the pelican colonies that inhabited its more remote islands. ‘Ceaus¸escu was fascinated by their structured society,’ recalled the national security adviser who accompanied him on these trips. ‘The old birds always lay up on the front of the beach, close to the water and food supply, with the children and grandchildren behind them in orderly rows. He would tell me he wished Romania had the same rigid social structure. Then he took out an Uzi and gunned them all down.’

  It was this sort of business that saw Nicolae Ceaus¸escu shunned by his less terrifyingly potty Communist brethren. Funding that obsession with steel thus obliged him to buy ore from the Other Side, generally with Western loans, in order to produce rubbish steel that nobody wanted. The spiral drove Romania into catastrophic debt. By the Eighties more than three-quarters of Romania’s food production was being sold to the West, an export trade still very visibly active in the stream of heavily laden fruit and veg lorries that wobbled past us to the border in 1990. A land of plenty with nothing to eat.

  Our nadir came one crisp, bright afternoon at Bicaz, a town atop a glorious Carpathian gorge rudely stoppered by a hydro-electric dam, built to power the local steelworks. Punctures had become an occupational hazard on roads strewn with horseshoe nails, and I had just laboriously fitted our Saab’s spare tyre when a lurch and that dread rumble from below made a bad day worse. Just how much worse is summated by my wife’s journal entry: ‘T put his head on steering wheel and wept.’

  The hours ahead were not my finest. My wife left me blubbering uselessly in the stricken Saab, and set off through the crumbly tenements with a carton of Kent cigarettes down her coat. (These were Romania’s default hard currency back then – always bartered, never smoked – and all week we’d been paying for hotel rooms and plates of rancid poison with the forty-odd duty-free packets acquired at the Hungarian border.) An hour later she returned, accompanied by an ogre in vest and braces who would in due course vulcanise a successful tyre repair, to find the Saab besieged by the youth of Bicaz.

  The happier outer circle was clicking away at their new retractable ballpoints, cheeks bulging with Wrigley’s gum; the luckiest few savoured the more exotic booty that I had fearfully fed through a small gap in the driver’s window after our stock of mob-appeasing trinkets was exhausted. Most of it came from my wife’s washbag, now hollow and ransacked on the seat beside me. The inner ring, driven to a covetous frenzy by the bottles of shampoo and Country Born hair gel being cradled by their triumphant peers, were now rocking the Saab to and fro, as if trying to shake it loose of fragrant toiletries.

  My wife bullied the passenger door open and squeezed in, to find me wedging the sleeve of her Levi’s jacket through my window gap. She snatched it clear from five dozen grubby fingertips, then firmly wound the window shut. The rocking resumed, accompanied now by a chant of irony or the very cruellest delusion: ‘Por-sche, Por-sche!’ Our eyes met and we came to a wordless understanding. Ten hours later, after a non-stop drive through the night past Bucharest and many other intended stops on our Romanian itinerary, we slipped a border guard twenty Kent and a five-dollar bill to jump the queue, then sloshed into Bulgaria through a trough of disinfectant.

  DRUM BUN.

  The sign that saw me off from the Romanian border post raised a smile: it was everywhere in 1990, a tilted, rusty farewell outside every town that literally meant ‘good road’, adopted by us as a catchphrase tribute to the percussive, month-old bread rolls that comprised the typical hotel breakfast (‘It’s a drum; it’s a bun!’).

  I knew Romania couldn’t possibly be as bad as it had been in 1990, though its fearsome rep clearly lingered. EV13 tracked the Serbo-Romanian border for several hundred kilometres, but whoever decided its precise path had conspicuously favoured the Tito side; I would merely swerve into a country that remained of evident concern to the responsible elders of cross-continental cycling. My EV13 route guide warned of dogs, terrible driving and towns that ‘greet the visitor with poor road conditions’; the chap who rented me a room in Vršac spoke succin
ctly of ‘beeeeg danger’. What no one mentioned were the huge, hot hills that reared up straight from the border, the first 3D geography I had tackled for an age. The flies couldn’t get enough of my leaking face, and the desiccated roadside brush was alive with reptilian scuttles and thrashes; I dropped my gaze and sustained myself with yet another lingering appraisal of those frankly magnificent new legs of mine, tanned and toned and winsomely aglow with perspiration.

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  Yeah, yeah.

  The villages, when at last I swept gratefully down into them, were no worse than cheerily ramshackle. Garish little houses faced in shiny pink tiles glittered through the dust thrown up by tractors. Shirtless men were splitting logs on the pavement; a tortoise inched along the gutter; I caught the first snatches of a tongue that sounds like drugged Italian. Most of the youngsters gave me a wave, and most were arrestingly rotund, the fattest kids I’d seen since leaving home. A legacy, I deduced, of all those food-free towns in 1990: it must be very hard for parents reared in famished deprivation to resist the reactive reflex to stuff their own children’s faces.

  But the towns, starting at Moldova Veche, were simply dreadful. Their streets were entirely bereft of the culture and history that had ennobled Serbia’s larger settlements, and didn’t converge on any definable centre: Ceaus¸escu couldn’t build his towns around a victory-over-fascism memorial plaza, as his neighbours generally did, because Romania spent most of the war fighting with the Nazis. Instead, there were just rows and rows of degenerate grey tenements that looked as if they’d been strafed by light artillery. Every lay-by and bus stop was an open-plan skip and the dead-cat count ticked sharply upwards. Mono-browed idlers gave me looks that had my hands tightening around the bars. The European Union is a rich tapestry; here I was at its tattered seams.