by Tim Moore
I didn’t see any of the black-glazed king-of-the-roadmobiles or razor-wired executive compounds that betrayed a miserably divided society. Tickets at the national theatre in Kikinda were a quid a pop. Whole days went by without a policeman in sight, and the mood was always wonderfully laidback. If the GDR came closest to mastering the cold logistics of centralised state control – the science of old-school Communism – then Serbia offered a glimpse of an artier, more relaxed side we might have seen if the socialists had survived and learned from their mistakes.
On my final hours beside the Danube, wobbling along a remote water’s-edge trail, a woman ran yelling out through her front door and flagged me down with the desperate intensity of Jenny Agutter halting that locomotive in The Railway Children, making it wordlessly plain that I should turn around at once. I did so and was later told by a hotelier that she had spared me a 20km round trip to the foot of a vast landslide and back. In most countries I’d been through, nobody would have bothered. In one, I’d have been pushed into the river.
Tim Moore
@mrtimmoore
Last memories of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
In Zaječar, where I watched the Champions League final in the courtyard of a Tolkien-themed Irish pub and could have purchased the air-conditioner remote control in my hotel room for 5,000 dinars, I finally met some other touring cyclists. They were New Zealanders of about my own age, a cheery and indefatigable couple who were riding from Spain to China – a journey that knocked mine into a cocked hat, then sat on it and farted. (‘But we’ve got proper bikes,’ the husband modestly insisted.) It was the first time I had been required to explain myself and my MIFA to native speakers of English since leaving home. How very glad I was to be having this conversation now, with the end nigh, to an audience who in consequence appeared gratifyingly impressed, indeed almost astounded. If I’d met them near the start they’d have nodded indulgently, thinking: You’re riding that all the way to the Black Sea? That’s right, sonny, of course you are.
17. BULGARIA AND MACEDONIA
The last time I entered Bulgaria, tears of relief welled in my hollow eye sockets. A few hours later they rolled copiously down grimy, lined cheeks, as my wife and I stood before a restaurant buffet, bony hands locked together, and understood that food did exist after all, in crisp and colourful, freshly harvested abundance. Our holiday in Romanian hell was at an end, and Bulgaria unfolded before us like some post-Soviet Arcadia, a land of milk and honey, not to mention wine, salad, chicken and passers-by who would help push-start a crappy old Saab in return for nothing more than a wave and a nod of gratitude. In a heady mood of convivial recklessness, we made friends with every Bulgarian we met, such firm friends that after a few months they began to turn up at our door in London. One couple stayed with us for the whole summer. On their first day we took Nikolai and Angyela to Sainsbury’s and they burst into tears in the exotic produce aisle. Watching them sob on the pineapples I wondered if Bulgaria might have been slightly less idyllic than it had seemed at the time, if our own buffet breakdown was more a reaction to leaving the very worst place in Europe, rather than the merits of the land we had left it for.
A part of me has been wondering ever since, and that part – let’s call him Doug – rode pillion as I rolled away from Dimitrovgrad, Serbia’s last outpost and even late on a Sunday a riot of fun and colour, the pavements dense with noisy promenaders and alfresco café patrons. ‘A lot of Bulgarian number plates,’ noted Doug. ‘Bad sign.’
Tim Moore
@mrtimmoore
Old border police control points. Whole area was once an exclusion zone. They really didn’t trust the Yugoslavs.
Doug chuntered dismally through the border post, and along a truck-heavy highway that wound between the rocky and desolate green hills. ‘No houses for miles,’ he muttered. ‘Classic Soviet-style border exclusion zone.’ The sun had gone down by the time I freewheeled creakily up to a motel in Dragoman, a transit town as grim as it sounded, defined by heavy goods vehicles and even heavier goods trains, Richter-scale trundlers that would shake my bed through the night. The motel was new and comfortable, but lay at the dusk-fringed edge of a forlorn straggle of Khrushchyovka tenements and gravelly wasteland. Doug didn’t need to say anything. He smiled significantly at me half an hour later, when the waitress in the motel restaurant slapped a menu in front of me like a poker player throwing down her twelfth crap hand in a row. I opened it and saw Cyrillic dishes with their weight in brackets.
‘Tomorrow-breakfast-ten-o’clock,’ she intoned robotically as I left, under-fed on 90g of chips and a 120g kebab. Ten?! I told her I needed to leave before nine, procuring a shrug. ‘For you no breakfast.’
‘Back in the USSR,’ sang Doug, fatuously, and with that he was gone.
Fuelled on an emergency stash of Eurocrem Blok and Strong Hell (my taurine carrier of choice with Magic Man absent from the shelves), the western Bulgarian borderlands I now struck deep into presented a lonesome, ageless panorama, locked in by thousand-metre, pine-topped hills. This was the Balkan landscape of my imagination: steep and dark green, cleaved by gorges, a dramatic horizon that reared and plunged under a cloudless sky. The dustiness of rural Serbia seemed long gone. There just wasn’t sufficient human activity here to stir up the earth, nothing but the odd swaddled smallholder bent double with a hoe. For hours I was alone on a sinuous, frail road scarred by frost and heat, weeds stealthily creeping in from both sides and sometimes meeting in the middle. The steepest and most profoundly forsaken stretches were occasionally overlaid by a toppled tree, its fall arrested just above head height by some sturdier rival on the opposite side. Rolling terrain and decrepit roads made an unhappy combo: I would slalom wildly down a bumping descent and suddenly find my front wheel spoke-deep in gritty sand. The ensuing battles for control desecrated a dozen empty valleys with girlish shrieks and awful words, but I never learned to take it easy, and quite miraculously never paid the price.
Sometimes I would pass a memento of times past trapped in three decades of overgrowth, a colossal acclamation of socialism in lichen-streaked concrete, or a yellow-tin border-patrol checkpoint. Every so often, which wasn’t often at all, I would wheeze through some decaying hamlet, all rusty hand-pumps and roofless barns. The only signs of habitation were glass bottles of moonshine lined up to cure on sunny window sills. Those and the dogs. The New Zealanders had met an American cyclist whose companion had been repatriated after a Bulgar farm hound made off with most of her right calf in its jaws; as soon as I spotted a cluster of tiled roofs ahead, the Pfeffer KO Jet came out in preparation. (I only had one can left: after the Kiwis told me that story, I gave them the other.) Yet again the mere sight of chemical retribution in my quivering grasp seemed deterrent enough, accompanied by some of the daftest threats ever to pass human lips. ‘Go ahead, Shep,’ I once heard myself rasp, ‘make my day.’
The first town I went through was Tran, marooned way up in the hills and full of very dark-skinned gypsies who stared as if I had ridden by on an emu. Some had made their homes in dented old shipping containers, and the wearing of shoes seemed optional. I wasn’t astonished to discover that Tran ranks amongst Europe’s poorest municipalities. An oncoming Moskvich pick-up bounced through a pothole at intemperate speed, ejecting a number of rusty tools from its load bay, amongst them a cold chisel that flew past my face and hit the wall of an apartment block with a heavy chink. As with so many Romanian settlements, there was no architectural evidence of life before 1950. For the first time in months I was beyond the reach of the great old empires – the Russian, the Prussian, the Habsburg – that had washed across central and Eastern Europe and then receded, leaving castles on hilltops and stately edifices around every town square.
I bought a plaster-casted forearm of bread in a bakery with a bare concrete floor, and ate what I could of it on a bench behind some bronze hero of moustachioed collectivist toil. Doing so required the final drops of my Tabasco, the dear, dear frie
nd who had been making bad food better since the middle of Finland. In the days ahead I would regularly dredge some fossilised comestible from my panniers and consider, with ratcheting seriousness, bringing it back to life with just the teensiest squirt of Pfeffer KO Jet.
Civilisation returned grudgingly, the villages more frequent and less desperate, the roads busier, the wild landscape tamed by active agriculture. I stayed in Kyustendil, a town surrounded by the first snow-veined peaks since Finland, at a humble guest house whose proprietor showed me to my room in total and very stony silence. This meant I didn’t dare ask why he was wearing a miner’s-lamp helmet, a mystery that troubled me for eleven long minutes until the power went down. It returned soon afterwards, but he still had the helmet on when I returned at ten full of bacon and beer, the only two items I had been able to identify with any confidence from the Cyrillic menu.
‘Good man,’ I said, giving him a thumbs-up, because it isn’t every night you come back and find your host painting his garage door by the light of a miner’s lamp, and the least I could do was acknowledge the dedication. He turned to me in silence and for a while I stood dazzled; then the beam moved slowly from side to side before sweeping back to the shiny, wet metal. Only when I was in bed with the door double locked did I understand: I had just been reacquainted with the no-means-yes Bulgarian head-shake, a gesture that had wreaked havoc in our dealings with that parade of house guests who pitched up on our doorstep back in 1991 (‘You’re not seriously intending to stay for the whole summer are you, Nikolai?’).
I later wondered if that headshake – more accurately a sort of comme ci, comme ça shimmy, the international sign of meh – was an expression of evasive restraint, a Russian-reared reluctance to commit yourself to something you may later regret. My dealings with Bulgaria’s border guards, receptionists, shopkeepers and waiting staff were all coolly infused with sidelong glances and a standoffish anti-banter. And motorists, once they returned in numbers, exerted a recognisably Russian indifference to their own continued survival and mine. The steadily uphill road south out of Kyustendil was a colon-clenching stampede of hot and heavy metal, massed with thundering lorries that duked it out all over the tarmac like Ben Hur chariots. After the third near miss I wobbled cravenly onto the railway-ballast verge, crawling for miles through super-sized gravel and the giant thistles that sprouted from it, slashing exposed flesh from ear to ankle. Down in the valley floor, workmen were putting the final touches to a smooth and sinuous motorway, which by now will doubtless have lured away all those multi-wheeled maniacs, making life much easier, and indeed longer, for future generations of endurance shopping cyclists.
Tim Moore
@mrtimmoore
Kyustendil really Commied out as I left it this morning.
Focused on self-preservation, I had barely noticed the craggy eminences that stared down at the road from both sides, until EV13 hung a sharp right and threw me straight up them. The traffic vanished, the sun blazed, the lonely tarmac weaved and tilted ever steeper. How I toiled to regain the rhythm that had seen me up the mist-wreathed brows of Bavaria, a synchronised grand alliance of rasped respirations, pedal revs and Garmin-reported altitude: nine forty-five, puff, crank, huff, creak, nine forty-six … The shrubs gave way to scree and bleached rock, my limbs burned and shone, a hornet the size of a humming bird droned waywardly past. At a thousand metres it was still over 30 degrees; I clamped my seared fingertips, hand by hand, around the MIFA’s shaded, blissfully cool seat post. One thousand one hundred and twelve … fuff, thunk, ptthh, screeek … one thousand one hundred and … twelve and a half … This was the highest I had yet climbed, but of all the agonies endured in getting there, that sheer, dredging sloth was the most torturous. Speed and its association with accumulated distance hadn’t bothered me in the slightest when I’d been slithering pitifully down frozen Finland, not just taking each day as it came but each minute, every tenth of a click. But now with the end so tantalisingly near and yet so steeply far it really was an appalling frustration, chewing painfully on gristled uphill kilometres when I wanted to wolf down great tender chunks of them.
The road flattened, I rounded a final broiled bend and there at the head of the pass, flapping above a clutch of booths and barriers in my smeary, sweat-stung field of vision, flew my eighteenth flag. A geometric red and orange starburst, like something a kamikaze pilot might have wrapped around his brow before take-off: what a splendidly mad departure from all the dreary, homogenous stripes of red, white and blue I had ridden under of late. What on earth had persuaded Slovaks, Slovenes and Croats to celebrate their release from the state-socialist yoke by rallying under a national pole-topper almost indistinguishable from Russia’s?
I knew almost nothing about Macedonia beyond the fact that it was previously part of Yugoslavia, and had since independence been locked in a furious row with Greece over its name – a fantastically Balkan badge-kissing, no-surrender stand-off that hinged on the triangular ambiguity between the new nation, the ancient kingdom of Macedon and the adjacent Greek region of Macedonia. (I never enquired about the current state of play, wary of having my chest prodded deep into the night by moustachioed mountain men wearing ammo bandoliers.) This aside, my ignorance was shamefully complete. Did it have its own language? Was it in the EU? Were its people as miserable as Bulgarians? Would I sleep in a monastery full of plastics executives? Down I swept into a valley filled with soupy heat and donkeys, where the answers lay in wait.
Macedonia won a bloodless independence from Serbia, and maintains friendly – almost fraternal – relations with the Yugoslavian rump state. Their native languages are almost indistinguishable and so too, I found, were the respective country-folk and their contented, approachable demeanours. The country I rode into seemed like a more venerably bucolic version of the land north of the border, its people far removed from the dour and silent types who lived east of it. Beetle-browed ancients cheerily cajoled livestock and shouldered bundles of sticks across the rich, red earth of a plateau ringed by plump hills. A man with a grey moustache in a double-breasted Al Capone suit bounded out of a cherry orchard with a bunch of wild flowers in his hand and leapt into a waiting Yugo. There were mule-drawn haywains and a billion butterflies. I waved at everyone I passed, largely to acknowledge that most of them were having a visibly harder afternoon than I was. From horseback and hillside and the top rung of a cherry-picker’s ladder, they all waved back.
The villages were a bit of a mess – every other wall had bare patches of wattle and daub – but at Berovo I lucked-in miraculously, accommodated in the cloistered, comfortably modernised splendour hinted at in a nearby paragraph. Here, via a kindly manager, I learned of Macedonia’s thwarted efforts to join the European Union (the Greeks have a veto). Then I went out on to the colonnaded terrace and watched the Balkan sun go down over a table groaning with defiantly unweighed comestibles, soothed by dense, dark local wine and the stultifying discourse of paunchy executives conversing in their thickly accented lingua franca.
‘Any advance in laminate, we must all be aware. But I am not having a good success with my new thermal moulding.’
I couldn’t begin to imagine what had brought such people all the way out here, but I was very glad of their presence. Though I may never understand what on earth possessed me to take a university degree course in Business Studies, it is moments like this that remind me how sensible I was not to take in a single minute of it.
Macedonia’s schools were breaking up for summer and I inched out of Berovo through alarming scenes of juvenile excess: at 9 a.m., the main street was full of empty beer bottles and staggering young brass-band trumpeters, some no more than twelve or thirteen. One kid tried to high-five me as I weaved through, with such enthusiastic imprecision that he almost fell over in the process. These were the people who in a few years – perhaps a few hours – would be going up the silent mountain pass I now effortfully conquered, daubing angry-looking slogans on the ironstone rock and letting every road sign
have it with both barrels.
The broad, flat valley ahead and a thousand metres below seemed to shimmer with flood water, but after a terrific, tooth-loosening descent I found myself rolling between several thousand shoddy plastic greenhouses. The peppers and tomatoes skulking towards ripeness under sickly yellow roofs brought my stomach to noisy life, as everything even passably edible did by now. An hour or two later, when I stopped at the last restaurant in Macedonia to offload my dinars, the unfortunate proprietor could hardly make himself heard above my gastric orchestra of fizzing squelches. I gathered he was trying to tell me that the dish I had ordered, helpfully pictured in the menu as an earthenware pot of cheese-topped stew, was of such overwhelming stand-alone substance that I should think again about my supplementary request, which I had effected by pointing at a neighbouring photograph of a plate of chips. I thought again, and amid a reprise of under-jersey percolations, additionally ordered six slices of bread.
I was alone on the street-side front terrace, and the final stages of my feat were witnessed through the window by the boss and a woman I took to be his wife. I think money might have been riding on it, because the minute I wiped the last wodge of bread around the emptied stew-pot’s interior and folded it into my sauce-rimed mouth, the wife shook her head and shuffled briskly away. Then a young man with lavishly tattooed arms emerged through the fly curtains, introduced himself in English as the owner’s son, and told me I was dirty fat Greek pig who bring great shame to family and Republic of Macedonia. Actually, he didn’t. Instead, he asked many questions about my so-small bicycle and where we had been together, widening his eyes gratifyingly at my every response, before revealing that he was back home on holiday from his job as a van driver in Switzerland.