The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold: Adventures Along the Iron Curtain Trail by Tim Moore
| The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold: Adventures Along the Iron Curtain Trail by Tim Moore | |
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| Category: Travel | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: Probably no book is as hilarious as its blurb attests, but still this travelogue is an amusingly presented account of a trip that's both demanding and intriguing. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 352 | Date: May 2017 |
| Publisher: Yellow Jersey | |
| ISBN: 9780224100212 | |
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One of the results I find from travel documentaries, often on TV but also in book form, is the verdict 'rather him than me' (and it generally is a he). Yes, I'd like to go there and see what he's seen, but I'm damned if I would risk the danger, the potential consequences and/or the effort the whole experience required. This book is the epitome of that, for as much as I love most of the twenty countries it hits on – give me a chance, I've not quite been to them all – I wouldn't countenance making this exact and exacting trip. A couple of years ago, those in the know somewhere in an office deemed the route of the entire old Iron Curtain – the fringe of the Soviet Union, plus Romania, Bulgaria etc – to be a pan-continental biking route. With the news that he can dismiss other attempts and still have a claim to being the first person to clock the whole mammoth trip, our gutsy author undertakes it all, and thus surveys a scar across the entire continent to see if it's still visible, and what flesh it once upon a time divided. Oh and he did it on a Communist-era piddly little bike, lacking in both gears and good brakes, that was designed for nothing more strenuous than conveying you around a campsite, not for 6,000 miles…
Like I say, rather him than me. And the extremes of the trip are where you feel that, for extreme they are. At one end he rides the length of Finland – in the depth of winter, of course – and at the other the road is melting in the heat. Always he rides a path taking in the edge of the old Communist Bloc, which means he circuits half of the Baltic until he hits on the line between East and West Germany, before descending through that border zone to central and southern Europe, always with the target of emerging on the Black Sea coast. It truly is a major undertaking, and the biological details we get here are testament to that. With that kind of commitment, however much this may be dressed as a comical book, there is a gulf between this and the Tony Hawks, Dave Gorman et al comedy quest/travel write-up.
But that doesn't make it, say, a Patrick Leigh Fermor, or Bruce Chatwin. In the act of cycling past people you really do get the lack of other characters in these pages – this is all about the impressions from the saddle, and bar the odd customs officer, hotelier or bar staff practically nobody else gets a word in. In trying to define the continent – and I heartily agree with Tim Moore that it's the world's best, for the sheer compactness of its history, culture and so on – this book feels a little flat. You do get a glimpse of the different peoples, through different ways – the availability or otherwise of food and drinks, the roadside rubbish, the quality of the roads, shops and housing etc – and most of these impressions I would second. But you also get the slightly tainted feel of the stereotype, heralded by too many mentions of Polish plasterers, plumbers etc in London.
You get what is clearly a lot of post-ride research, and pertinent quotes and findings, that all add to the political side of the book, but even with the addition of memories of a trip the Moore couple made immediately after the fall of the Wall as a compare and contrast, I still think this book wins out as a reportage of the event of the ride, if not the ramifications of the Iron Curtain's being swagged back. Here we get just enough – the feel of the desultory times squidging through Finnish snow with nothing to see but trees, the different seasons and weathers, the aching body and the problematic bike, all are conveyed very well. You do get to fear for the adventurer's sanity, you do feel an appreciation for his conveyance, and yes you do get a feel of the generalisations he allows himself to make. You certainly do get an admiration for the guy's determination and stamina, even if he has form in writing cycling books, which is my final evidence that this is a read more about the ride and the rider than the landscape. Still, if you can bear with a book that says more about the journeying than it can quite achieve when it comes to the setting, this is definitely worth a look.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
The Cruise of Naromis: August in the Baltic 1939 by G A Jones concerns a very different conveyance, but also covers the Baltic at a very liminal time. For a different side of the author at hand, we found him travelling less, but discovering more, in I Believe in Yesterday.
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You can read more book reviews or buy The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold: Adventures Along the Iron Curtain Trail by Tim Moore at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold: Adventures Along the Iron Curtain Trail by Tim Moore at Amazon.com.
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