WE ALL HAVE dreams of leaving behind our everyday life – even if temporarily – and doing something a bit off the wall.
For travel writer Tim Moore, embarking on strange trips for months at a time has become a way of life.
He has recreated the route of the notoriously difficult Giro d’Italia (in reproduction period costume, including a totally impractical woollen jumper), travelled to all the locations on the British Monopoly board, and walked 500 miles in Spain accompanied by a donkey.
For his latest adventure, the London-based writer went one better – he cycled the entirety of the former Iron Curtain. All 9,000km of it.
The ‘curtain’ was the work of the Soviet Union in the wake of World War II, and separated the east and west sides of Europe. The countries to the east of the Iron Curtain were within the Soviet Union’s remit, while those on the other side were able to develop their own alliances. But things began to fall apart in 1989, followed by the Berlin Wall being demolished in 1990 and the Soviet Union dissolving in 1991.
Moore’s adventures along the remnants of the curtain have been gathered in his latest book The Cyclist Who Came In From The Cold, where he details his three-month trip through 20 countries, starting in the middle of a Finnish winter and ending on a beach in Bulgaria.
When TheJournal.ie meets with Moore, he’s still in a bit of shock that he actually did the whole thing.
“I’m reliving it all again and it’s always a bit odd, and I do really wonder was that really me?” he smiles, as sardonic in real life as he is in print. He recalls seeing a photograph of himself on the monitor during a TV appearance: “Who is that stupid idiot on that little child’s bike in the middle of frozen nowhere? Oh, it’s me.”
Moore describes himself as leading “this very strange, binary life which involves me doing absolutely nothing, staring gormlessly at a computer monitor and then every two years going away and having this completely ridiculous over the top bout of physical activity and going to lots of different places”.
(Asked what his family think, he replies: “It goes beyond long-suffering – I think they’re actively pleased: ‘Oh you’re going away for three months dad, oh well, bye!’”)
To make things even more difficult on his Iron Curtain trip, he cycled it on a “tiny-wheeled, two-geared East German shopping bike”. At one point, his son joined him for part of the cycle through Finland – whereupon Moore realised that for every two pedals he took, his son only had to pedal once.
That, for him, was perhaps proof of how difficult he was making things for himself.
“It cast a shadow over part of my life”
The book tracks his journey from snow-sodden Finland (where the houses he came upon were sometimes 80km from each other), stopping along the way in countries like Russia, Estonia, Latvia, and Turkey.
The decision to cover the Iron Curtain route came in large part due to the role it played in Moore’s own childhood.
“The whole thing was absolutely horrendous,” says Moore of living with the threat of nuclear war. “I think they did various polls at the time in the 80s and something like two-thirds of people in the UK said ’yes, I expect to die early because of a nuclear war’.”
“I was endlessly fascinated in a post-traumatic way in my revisiting these places,” he says – but what particularly interested him was that people were very reluctant to talk to him about it.
“Clearly for them it wasn’t just the threat of nuclear war, their lives were scarred and damaged in a much more pervasive way than the war on our side.”
While the Cold War meant something to his generation, it wasn’t the case with his children.
“They couldn’t understand, it means nothing to them but it cast a really massive shadow over the first half of my life,” says Moore.
It was interesting to think ‘I am being indoctrinated into thinking of those people over there as the enemy’, and you know, this is more than a physical barrier, it is a mental barrier, we are right and they are wrong, and they are evil…
His own son became fascinated with the topic after visiting him – and became a bit traumatised after watching the 1984 BBC drama Threads, about a nuclear bomb hitting Sheffield.
When in Germany, Moore visited the factory where his bike was built – and expected he’d get to talk to staff who worked there about what life was like at the time.
“The sales manager Dieter, he literally wouldn’t talk about it, and every time I said ‘Dieter what was it like’, he says ‘yes, let me tell you about our electric bicycles now that we manufacture’.”
Moore came to understand people’s reluctance to visit such a difficult part of their past. “Some people who did talk about it again, quite reluctantly, [they said that] ‘one in six east Germans we found out after the wall went down were Stasi informers’. You literally couldn’t trust anyone.”
“Idiot’s gravity”
Moore was advised to start off at the southern end of the Iron Curtain, and work his way north to arrive in Finland/Norway during the summer.
Instead, he did the route the other way around. “It’s like the idiot’s gravity of the map,” he jokes. “If you start in the north it’s downhill – I couldn’t begin to imagine doing it the other way.”
Did he ever have moments of thinking “what on earth am I doing?”.
“There were moments; and some of those moments were three weeks long,” he says.
It was -18 degrees when he started out. He’d been tracking the weather online by watching local CCTV, and by researching historical weather data, but then a fresh snow landed just before he arrived.
It was such a shock to the system… there wasn’t enough space in my brain to feel sorry for myself or even to think what I’m doing, it was ‘ohhh what is going on’ sort of sensory overload of all this just frozen expanse of nothingness, and how I was trying to tackle it on this tiny ridiculous little shopping bike. Somehow, I won’t say that was a morale boost but somehow that stopped me panicking more than I should have done.
“The whole thing seemed so ridiculous and surreal that it was almost as if this can’t really be happening to me.”
Things got so weird that after one phone call his wife said: “I’m coming out to see you, I’m a bit worried about you”.
“Normally at any excuse to throw the towel in, I throw the towel in but I didn’t, I just kept plugging away and just doing it and I think in that tedious sporting cliché ‘take every day as it comes’, I took every day as it came,” says Moore of his mindset during that time.
Finland, in particular, was difficult due to its remoteness. “You just have your own company and you suddenly realise you’ve spent four hours bellowing offensive re-adaptations of popular musical hits to yourself.”
What was the highlight of the journey?
“I’m always struggling to say ‘the bit where I get to the end’,” he laughs.
“Because it wasn’t really that actually… every single day for three months I was cycling, waking up really early by my standards and cycling all day, hours and hours, like nine or 10 hours a day. And it was so immersive out there, the last couple of days I was thinking it’s great, I’m actually going to make it, I’m actually going to get to the Black Sea and finish… and I thought ‘well this is the only life I know, how can I possible re-adapt to the outside world’?
“I did – it only took about three days actually.”
While finishing was unforgettable, the highlights included Serbia: “They were amazing, really friendly people, some real characters there.”
Finland also gets a look-in: “When you think ‘I am going to die a very snowy death’, and then some man in a furry Cossack hat strides out of his log cabin… I’ll never forget those people.”
Just like the body forgets pain after it is gone, Moore is slowly starting to forget all the very tough times he had on the road – the cold, the pain, the hunger, the stress.
Listening back to the voice recordings he made while cycling, he sometimes wonders if it was really all that bad.
“I would say ‘note to self – don’t ever do anything like this ever again’. But even as I listen to them now I think ‘God that wasn’t that bad’, which is stupid because clearly the reason it upset you was because it was that bad.”
So, it’s understandable then that he’s still thinking about whether there might be more challenges ahead for him.
“Probably going on a penny farthing backwards over the Andes or something,” he grins.
The Cyclist Who Came In From The Cold by Tim Moore is out now.
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