Skurup, Sweden: The good and unrainworthy road

August 20, 2015

I stopped for a picture and the local headbanger turned up

HE LOOKED wobbly when I passed him on a bike path. There have been a lot of paths today and generally they have been good, as wide and smooth as Danish paths but not as well signposted.

This particular one was taking me further down the Swedish coast to the bottom left-hand corner, where tomorrow I'll turn east and ride to the ferry for Poland. You are my friend, so I won't mislead you: I am in Sweden only because I noticed I could get there. Taking the ferry to Sweden and then to Poland instead of straight from Denmark to Poland is a bit of train-spotting: another country in my book.

Anyway, I could see from the back that the man was no gambolling lamb and the generous way he occupied the path held me back as I chose my moment to squeeze by.

He was tall, bendy and dressed in a dull grey jacket and nondescript trousers. I glimpsed a green, sit-up-and-beg bike with a white tool bag hanging from a broad leather saddle. And I thought no more of him. How many riders like him had I passed in the last couple of months?

It was then that my faith in Swedish bike paths dissolved. Until now, I had been pleasantly immune from the torrent of traffic coming south from Malmø on my right. And Malmø, by the way, is another of those places not pronounced the way you've always thought.

There was no warning. The path reached a side road. It existed on one side and it existed no more on the other. No offered solution.

I rode down the side road in the hope it was a scattered junction. I looked at the traffic on the single lane each way and considered I'd ridden worse. I'd have a dozen kilometres to do, probably less. I could do it. But against my will.

And I was about to launch into the fray when Mr Wobbly came up behind me. He was about 80 and the reason his progress had been so piratical was that his eyes couldn't agree which way to look. It is hard to talk to a man who is both looking at you and over your shoulder at the same time. You have this feeling that someone is creeping up behind you.

And at the same time, it's hard not to move your own eyes between his, working out which one to look at, making it obvious you've noticed.

"You must follow me," he said in good but gruff English. "I will take you. There is a track. It is unrainworthy [a good word, I thought, for someone speaking a second language and making it up as he went] but today it will be good. Come. You follow."

He went off across the traffic with a confidence I could never have. He simply challenged drivers to stop. I followed like a one-man crowd trailing Moses through the parted Red Sea. We went down a suburban street and round a bend and we turned between two houses on to an unsignposted path.

The useful but unrainworthy path is an old rail line

It reminded me of a day in Serbia when a man just like him took me down a path, through a hole in a fence and up a bank to an international motorway so we could go through the border controls for Hungary. He'd shown that same insouciance, riding past cars and trucks that had been there half an hour and insisting on his right as a cyclist not to have to wait for anything or anybody.

My Swedish friend had the same view. He scattered pedestrians and mountain-bike riders coming the other way as he insisted on progress. I've no idea whether he actually saw them. Or maybe his eyes gave him panoramic vision that explained the world around him.

And, with squealing of brakes on my part, he turned suddenly on to a hidden, long, straight path of pale fine gravel. This was the unrainworthy trail. It would be a morass in a good downpour.

On the corner stood a white building with tables and chairs.

"It was a station," my friend said with a wave over his shoulder. "This used to be a railway line to Skurup. But that closed a long time ago. There were many plants. It was all natural again. Nobody knew what they must do with it. And then they made it for bicycles. It is not good there's no money to have a proper surface. But otherwise the traffic is not good, is it?"

And that was the end of my day riding in suburban streets, beside highways and sometimes along bike paths which, instead of neighbouring them, went off on pleasant but kilometric excursions of their own. Malmø is a substantial city, the headquarters of Volvo among others, and today has been an exercise in getting there and out again with minimal bloodshed and shredding of nerves.

You say it Maahl-meuh, by the way. Or you do if you pronounce Swedish as badly as I do.

Swedes are proud of their national colours. Warning chevrons on bends everywhere else are black and white; in Sweden, they're blue and yellow

I was riding through an outlying town when I stopped for a picture of stone roadmenders laying cobbles. And up stepped one of those people you know instantly will be a gem or indescribably odd.

"Nice bike," he said in English. He was around 40, with a long thin face that would have looked uncomfortable whoever owned it, and casual, flowing clothes that weren't the shape that he was.

"I've done a lot of travelling, too," he said, once we'd established where I'd been and where I was going. He listed as many countries as a small boy would have in his stamp album.

"All by bike?" I asked, impressed.

"No, none of them."

I could see the odds of his being a gem were now dulling.

"Oh?"

"I worked for an electronics company" - note the past tense - "and they sent me everywhere."

I sensed I needed a way out.

"I've got a motorbike," he announced more than said. "It's in Kenya."

"Oh."

He insisted this was interesting.

"It's 100cc and it was made in Japan."

Panic started to rise.

"Oh look," I gasped. "A gap in the traffic! I really must be going."

I turned and rode off, getting my balance, clipping my feet.

"I've been to China, too," he shouted after me.

Distant beach huts lined my dusty ride to the campground

The countryside today has been dull, large and full of unhedged fields, flat, windy and arranged in hills little more than hat height. Skurup turned out larger than I thought, a proper little seaside place settling down after a day on the beach. I saw a sign for my campground and followed it down a long unmade road through scruffy grass and into nowhere in particular.

"Oh, a cyclist," said the man in reception when he finally arrived. "I don't know what to charge you. We've never had a cyclist before."

Today's ride: 91 km (57 miles)
Total: 4,306 km (2,674 miles)

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