July 19, 2012
An encounter with a shattered American: Sucaraj - Vira
ALL ROADS look different the other way, this one included. Early sunshine, a slight tailwind again and perfect temperature... everything that makes a cyclist's dream. We had it all. We even had a dying American to entertain us.
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Heading back the other way, we rode the same route as the way out, the stony path past the airport included. We even stopped at the same roadside bakery for sticky buns. Yesterday's baker wasn't there, replaced by what we took for his wife, a woman of 40 with a mole in the cleft beneath her nose. We peeped into the baking area. It lay as silent as yesterday, the big stainless steel corkscrews of the dough mixing machine shiny and stopped. Baking is a job for sunrise.
We bought cold drinks and sat on a narrow wooden bench with our backs to the wall. On the other side of the single door, three men in shorts and workmen's vests were doing the same. Across the road, slowly as though she expected no traffic or defied it, came a woman dressed all in black. She looked 80, her face lined from years of hardship or perhaps decades of widowhood. She smiled yellowing teeth at the three men but stared at us without expression when we wished her good morning.
We wriggled through the tourist masses on the beachfront and the square of Stari Grad. They sauntered, they bought hamburgers and bottles of beer and they lined up for cruises on Spanish galleons knocked up from disused trawlers. Just out of sight, a man was playing someone else's trumpet or a trumpet he had recently acquired. He played it wonderfully badly. And loudly, which is always the problem for novice trumpeters. He missed or crashed through every fifth note, creating a spectacle to amuse. When we got to him, he was sitting on a wall with two other men in their 50s, blowing duff notes as much as he chose. His friends took no notice.
There are two ways from the port at Stari Grad to the principle tourist town of Hvar itself. The most obvious is to follow the signs, which point to a road that runs through a tunnel along with the rest of the traffic. The other way is to ride back a little in the wrong direction and then turn right on a minor road which nobody uses. That was the way we went.
The road climbs gently through trees and then gets steeper, offering wonderful views over the sea.
It is a road not to be missed but it does get hard. And it it was at its hardest when we found a dead body in the grass beneath a bush.
The corpse waved limply as we passed.
Short of having a Stars and Stripes taped to his head, he couldn't have looked more American. I asked him in English where he came from.
"Washington, DC," he panted.
I waved and rode on.
Later, when I stopped for a photo, he came up to me again. Steph had ridden on. Had he asked how I knew he was American, I would have admitted a clue from a group we had seen in Vrboska, riding with that lost look of organised groups everywhere but also with yellow triangles strapped to their backsides. See someone like that and you never need inquire where they're from. They are always Americans.
"My girlfriend will be mad at me," Alan confessed. "She is less of a strong rider and she's gone back in the bus with the rest of the group. I'm the only one to have ridden in both directions." Meaning that he had ridden the hill that morning from Hvar as well.
"The problem is that I had too large a lunch and now I'm paying for it."
His leader, a lean, tanned Canadian called Paolo... his family is Italian and he lives in Italy himself... rode back down the hill to find him. Together they distanced us up the rest of the hill. We found them at the top, their bikes propped against a wall.
There is nothing more enticing on a hot afternoon at the top of a hard hill than to hear your name from the shaded terrace of a bar. Alan had discovered, like many a cyclist before him, that life gets better over a cold beer with nothing but a long descent to complete a hard ride.
We were happy to help him drown the sorrows of the afternoon to that point.
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