April 5, 2014
Is your fish as long as my tunnel: Saved by an angel
The next morning I had another pass to cycle up, but it was okay because it was a glorious sunny day and the snowy mountains looked beautiful all the way up. What wasn't okay was when I got near to the top of the pass and I saw ahead of me a very long tunnel. This concerned me because I had come across a few very short tunnels on the way up the first pass and they were terrifying. Imagine if you will, being in a completely unlit tunnel in Armenia, that is to say pitch darkness, and cycling carefully on an extremely bumpy crater-like road surface (too dark to do repairs presumably) and at the same time trying to go through as fast as possible before the next truck comes which would have either a) killed me on account of not having any functioning lights, or b) killed me on account of smoke inhalation from its exhaust. Luckily those tunnels were, as I just said there, very short and I therefore did not perish. But for obvious reasons the very long version that I now faced did not appeal.
Fortunately there was another road which went right over the top of the mountain and, as it had no traffic on it, would have made for a perfectly peaceful little detour. Unfortunately the snow, which was at this altitude more than a foot deep at the sides of the road, had not been entirely cleared. Even so I persevered through the icy, slushy, snowy stuff for a kilometre or so on this road until I reached a point where the snow was too thick to continue. There was still a long way to go and so pushing the bike through the snow was not an option. I stopped for a moment before backtracking to the tunnel and, as I didn't have a country-sign picture for Armenia I came up with the bright idea of writing '29.Armenia' in the snow and posing with it. It didn't work, but look at my new cap, its orange, isn't it lovely?:
There was nothing else for it, I was going to have to go through the tunnel. I went back down the closed road and wrote a message in the snow for Kieran and Natasha, telling them that the snow was too thick higher up and that I had decided to take the tunnel. Given this decision it probably would have been prudent to include a brief will so that they would have known what to do in the all-too-likely event of my untimely demise, but I didn't really have much to give away except my orange cap (I would have given it to you Natasha) and in any case my finger was getting cold. Plus I didn't think a will written in the snow would be legally binding.
But as I approached the tunnel I saw with some relief that there was a half-decent footpath. It was raised up very high above the road surface, a couple of feet or so, but I managed to lift my bike up onto it. I had my own safe place to ride and initially it seemed like everything might be okay, as long as I could get through before passing out from the fumes. From looking at my map I guessed the tunnel was about three kilometres long, and I was slightly concerned about being poisoned by a build-up of carbon monoxide in the middle of it, which could cause me to pass out and fall two feet into the path of a passing truck. Still, I reassured myself with the optimistic assumption that if anyone would know how to ventilate a tunnel properly it would be the Armenians.
I cycled as fast as I could to escape being poisoned. I was being sarcastic back there by the way; the Armenians don't know how to ventilate a tunnel, they don't even know how to build a footpath through a tunnel. Sure it started off great, if you ignore the big boxes that appeared on the wall every few hundred metres that I had to slow down and duck around. Then there was the occasional patch of ice, that was a real challenge. Water had dripped in from some hole somewhere (the ventilation holes?) and frozen in a big patch of extremely slippery ice all across the path. Of course I couldn't get down from the path because it was too high, so I had to tiptoe very carefully across the ice, aware of the fact that one wrong move could cause me to slip and fall two feet into the path of a passing truck.
All of this, lest we forget, was taking place in a very dark tunnel and by the time the biggest obstacle arrived I could no longer see the light from either end. The biggest obstacle was a narrowing of the path to a disappointingly tiny width. It might have been okay if there hadn't also been a pipe running all along the length of the path (the ventilation pipe?). This pipe had minded its own business at the side of the path earlier, but now took centre stage, selfishly taking up almost the whole path and leaving no space for a bicycle. Still, with my available oxygen rapidly decreasing I did my best to squeeze through, making painfully slow progress shuffling the bike along on tiptoes in the tiny gap available to me.
Finally it became impossible to fit through. The path had shrunk to the width of a bike tire and the pipe was the width of a pipe, so there was no room for a bike tire. All hope was lost - I was zoning out, I was definitely being poisoned, it was really dark and really scary and there was nothing I could do so I gave up and waited to die. Then an angel came. I don't know if you've ever seen an angel, so I'll describe it to you. It looked like a Lada 4x4. Can you picture that? No? I bet you didn't even know such a thing existed! Well, it looked like a poor man’s jeep. A very poor man’s. It was white and it passed me like a ghost in the darkness at the exact point that I was hurling my bike off of the path and into the abyss road. The Lada was going the other way but as it saw me it came to a skidding halt and began to do a three-point turn. Whoever was driving that thing was either really brave or really, really stupid, because that was probably the worst place anyone could ever attempt such a maneouver.
My goal upon leaving the path and entering the roadway was to cycle out of the tunnel as fast as I bloody well could, and this I proceeded to do. To my surprise the Lada, having avoided being T-boned by a passing truck, followed just behind me, acting as a kind of protective shield and escorting me through the remainder of the tunnel. It was very reassuring to have this kindly vehicle looking out for me as I quickly cycled the rest of the way. Finally we emerged out and the light of the sun reflecting on the snow burned my eyes as I gasped wildly for breath. The Lada 4x4 pulled up and I could see four men squeezed into it with whom I had a short conversation during which no one understood anything and then the car turned off onto a track and disappeared into the snowy mountains. This last act further convinced me that it must have been an angel, because why else would it go off that way in such a mysterious way? Unless perhaps the three-point turn was not for my benefit and merely because they had missed their turn, and given the nature of their vehicle, they hadn't quite been able to get up the speed to pass me. Was it really an angel? We'll never know, but at least I was still alive. Sorry Natasha, the cap remains mine.
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Soon after the tunnel I arrived at Lake Sevan, a vast body of water 1900 metres above sea level that provided me with my only flat piece of cycling in all of Armenia as I followed its shoreline south. I was soon called over by a man selling fish at the side of the road. He was holding his arms spread wide towards passing motorists, as if to suggest his fish were as big as his outstretched arms. He stopped to welcome me and beckoned me into a portacabin which was filled with fish, none of which were anywhere near as big as his outstretched arms. I was led into a small room at the back and invited to drink coffee, a welcome change from tea. The man was about my age but spoke no English and made very little attempt at conversation so we sat and drank our coffee in relative silence, with him frequently rushing outside to exaggerate the size of his fish whenever a car came by. Nobody ever stopped. I examined the room. It was almost completely unfurnished except for a table and two chairs, an old television set, and a plastic clock on the wall. The design of the clock was of the Iranian flag and the 'France '98' football world cup motif, with 'Made in Iran' written underneath, a reminder of how close I was getting to that country now. But I was something of a football fanatic in my youth and I remember France '98 very well, and I don't remember Iran's involvement in it. I'm sure they can't have done very well. Not well enough to warrant a commemorative clock anyway. Maybe that's how it came to end up in Armenia. But the most unsurprising thing about this 16-year-old cheap plastic novelty clock was that it was of course not working.
Today's ride: 66 km (41 miles)
Total: 15,914 km (9,883 miles)
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