January 27, 2014
Its not about how hard you hit, its about how hard you can <I>get</I> hit: And keep moving forward!
The rain continued for most of the night, but I was delighted with how well my tent coped with it thanks to the newly installed drainage hole. I should really work for a tent-designing company. In the last few hours before dawn the rain stopped and the temperatures plummeted to below freezing. This combination of heavy rain followed by such immense cold proved to be, how can I put this politely, a complete ducking fisaster. I climbed out of the tent into light snow and tried to disassemble it, a necessary step prior to cycling off. Unfortunately, the water which had run into everything had rather annoyingly frozen solid. The poles were frozen together, the poles were frozen to the tent fabric, the pegs were frozen to the ground, the tent was frozen to the pegs, the pegs were frozen to my hand, and my hand was just frozen. It took me the best part of an hour rubbing and breathing on everything to get the tent down and put away, with just the one pole snapped in the process.
If you think this was a bad way to start the day, let me assure you that you have heard nothing yet. With the tent packed away I turned my attention to the bike itself. My first concern was the brakes. The brake levers were frozen solid, the brakes themselves were frozen solid, and the cable was frozen in the housing. The latter proved the worst as it is very difficult to rub or breathe on a cable that is encased in housing. I gave up and tried the gears. Obviously they were frozen. The derailleurs were frozen, even the chain was frozen. I managed to get the chain warmed up and moving, and one of the jockey wheels on the rear derailleur. The other jockey wheel was a lost cause, completely frozen. This was really, really, really not fun.
I turned my attention back to the gear cable running to the rear derailleur. I was pulling on it trying to get it to run through the housing and then it snapped. "Oh bother!" I said politely, or something along those lines that may or may not have been slightly less polite. At least that meant I could take the housing off and put it down my pants to warm it up. I had a spare cable but I did not have cable cutters and so I could not install it. On my last day in Bulgaria I had some spare money left and had been very close to buying some cable cutters, but finally decided that 200 cable ties were a wiser investment. Given their lack of cable cutting properties, I presently felt my decision to be the wrong one.
I gave up and just started cycling. I needed to get to a town, find some cable cutters, find somewhere warm. I remembered to remove the housing from my pants just in time. If housing could talk I believe it would have gasped for breath and said "Don't ever do that again!" but housing can't talk, can it?
I was in the woods but I remembered that I had passed a village a couple of kilometres before I camped, and I considered going back to it. But it was down a very steep hill and I didn't have any brakes, so I carried on along the road ahead instead, hoping to find another town before I came to another steep downhill. So now picture the scene if you will; I was cycling on a bike with no brakes and no gears, the jockey wheel on the rear deraileur wasn't spinning so the chain was making an awful grinding noise as it went around, all of which is ignoring (as I tend to do) the wobbly headset, broken bottom bracket and snapped off braize-on, not to mention the freezing wind, the snow, the ice on the road and the fact that I was in the middle of friggin' nowhere!!!
The road went gently uphill for a while and I ground along noisily in my one gear but then I came to a slight downhill and I had to get off and walk because my brakes weren't working at all. The situation was ridiculous. When the downhill got more steep I just had to stop and try and get the brakes working and this I did, putting new brake pads on and pushing and pulling on the cable until it finally started moving a bit. I now had working front brakes at least, although I had to pull them apart again by hand after every time that I used them. Things were really looking up now!
If you think this is a terrible way to start a morning, let me assure you, you have heard nothing yet. The jockey wheel still wasn't moving and the grinding noise of the chain running over it was making me go a little bit deaf. I was still feeling somewhat buoyed by my success with the brakes and decided to stop and sort out this next problem and pulled into a lay-by to do so. What I didn't see until too late was the big puddle stretching across the width of this lay-by. A moment before I hit it I saw it and thought I could go around the edge of it, then saw that was impossible, and in a split-second decision I decided to just cycle through the puddle. I do this kind of thing all the time; as long as you go with enough conviction, you just go straight through and come out the other side. But not on days like this. I attacked the puddle, which was much, much deeper than it looked, and my bike got stuck in the mud in the middle of it. I didn't want to put my feet in the puddle so I jumped off with, I might add, tremendous agility and grace, landing on a small mud island in the middle of the puddle. My feet were dry but any elation I may have felt at this small victory was cut short by the sight of my bicycle collapsing into the puddle. My front right pannier, the one with my passport, wallet, camera, diaries, books, and important papers broke off and became submerged in the water, whilst the rear right pannier, that containing my laptop, took the weight of the fall and landed in the puddle also. I instinctively grabbed the front right pannier and hurled it onto the mud island, then leaned forward and pushed the bike upright so that only the wheels were really under the water now. With everything now in relative safety I paused for a minute in this absurd position, bent over holding the bike up in the muddy puddle, not entirely sure how to extricate it, and wondering just what in the world I had done to deserve all this.
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With the kind of untapped superhuman strength that people are sometimes able to use to lift cars off trapped victims in extreme situations I managed to haul my bike out of the muddy waters. I began going through my bags and surveying the damage. As regular readers of this blog will no doubt be disappointed to hear my laptop was unharmed, my decision to triple bag that proving to be one of my finer moments. As for the front pannier quite a lot of filthy water had seeped in although my passport was only a little damp and everything else was okay after being dried off. Nevertheless, going through all of my possessions and drying them with toilet paper like this wasted an enormous amount of time, on top of all that time that I had already lost. Not that I had any idea what the time was because I couldn't select the time function on my bicycle computer on account of the button being frozen. I decided to remedy this by putting my bicycle computer down my pants. It didn't work.
All of these delays were most frustrating because I actually had a place arranged to stay in the evening, with a man named Özgür just outside of Istanbul, which I knew to be 79 kilometres away from where I had started the day (and about 76 kilometres away from where I was now, four hours into my day!) I so very much wanted needed to get there, to have a nice warm place to dry my clothes, my tent, my bike, myself. It was tantalisingly close, and yet felt impossibly far as I struggled once more into the cold, snowy wind, my jockey wheel still grinding.
I hadn't eaten anything and after twenty kilometres struggling on up the hills without being able to change gears I decided I really needed to stop and refuel before I collapsed (even though collapsing felt like a GREAT idea), so I pulled into another lay-by. No puddles this time and I could see a nice place to sit, if only, if only I could make it through another twenty metres without any more disasters. Just when it seemed like I might actually make it a gang of wild dogs appeared from the trees, barking at me menacingly and encouraging me to get the hell out of their territory. I had noticed that the dogs in Turkey tended to hang around in gangs, and I'm not talking about the Boathound Gang here! These are mean, nasty dogs and they are very territorial. They clearly didn't welcome my presence, and so without further ado I turned the bike around and headed swiftly back to the cold and lonely road.
Wondering what was coming next to try and strike me down I arrived in the town of Subasi and found a mechanic. He was a young man in his thirties and appeared to have absolutely no work to do. I must have arrived looking like some kind of a wild man from the woods but he was all smiles as I approached him and shook his hand like he was the Messiah. I got out my gear cable (not from my pants) and indicated that I needed to cut it. He whipped out a pair of cable cutters which, now I come to think of it, might have come from his pants, and cut my cable. I thanked him and set to work replacing it on the bike as the man disappeared off somewhere. A few moments later he came back grinning, carrying my daily glass of tea with him. He invited me into the garage to drink it with him and introduced himself as Tajuk. He was a very friendly chap, dirty faced and wearing a bobble hat and overalls, although he spoke no English and I had no time. I drank my tea quickly and set to work again.
I had to chip more ice off the bike to thread the cable through and in my frantic jabbing I managed to cut my hand quite badly, but carried on through the bleeding. Tajuk soon came running with a box of plasters and gave me one to cover the cut. Worried that this wasn't being hospitable enough he gave me another to wrap over the top of the first and then, probably thinking that I was very unlikely to make it through the day without suffering further injuries, he insisted I take the whole box with me. The kindness of the Turks really was the only thing keeping my spirits up by this stage.
After this simple act of kindness I now had an almost fully functional bike, that is to say I had one set of brakes and most of my gears (this is ignoring the bottom broken racks and the wobbly screwed up bracket and the braize-on headset.) Also beyond Subasi the road became very wide, a six-lane highway with wide paved shoulders but with little traffic. As I cycled away from the town I heard the call to prayer wailing out from the mosque and I could see the Turkish flag flying in the breeze and for just a moment everything seemed like it was going to be okay.
Naturally it wasn't though. Next to join in my day of horrors was another gang of wild dogs. As I said before, these dogs are mean and nasty and very territorial. They were quite a long way away from me in a field when I cycled into their territory but unfortunately I was going up a big hill at the time. They started barking at me and running over towards the highway menacingly. I was worried, there were at least six of them and they looked like they meant business, so I stepped on the pedals and started going as fast as I could up the hill. I looked back and saw them entering the road from the field, which was on the other side of the highway from me. At least there were six lanes of traffic between me and them. Except of course, at this moment there was absolutely no traffic whatsoever. Why is it that there are never any big trucks when you need them? I mean, absolutely nothing. Some of the dogs crossed onto my side of the highway. They were running after me in a row, they basically each had a lane to themselves. It was an absolutely absurd situation. They won't even include this scene in the movie because no one would believe it. I was essentially on a motorway with absolutely no traffic and six ferocious snarling dogs pursuing me spread out across the whole road. I don't think I have ever cycled up a hill so fast in my life, glancing back occasionally to see the dogs gaining on me, pushing me on to cycle faster. I arrived at the top of the hill finally, heart racing, blood pumping, gasping for breath, but with enough energy to summit and turn back with middle finger raised and a cool "So long, suckers" before zooming away from danger down the hill.
But do you believe this was the end of my trials? If only that were the case! If only I could tell you at this point that the sun came out and the road was all downhill from here and my bike somehow fixed itself! But no, none of that happened. What actually happened was that I passed some sort of quarry and the road suddenly became insanely busy with yellow dumper trucks. I later found out that these were carrying materials for the construction of a new airport and a new bridge over the Bosphorus and new roads of all kinds for the ever expanding Istanbul. What they were doing wasn't nearly so relevant to me at the time as what they were spraying. What they were spraying was a fine mist of water and mud and filth from their back tires which went all over me, even cycling as I was in the shoulder. One after the other after the other they kept lumbering past. Every single time my mirror became coated in filth and I would try and clean it, only to see the next truck coming up, ready to dump a load more filth on me.
All of this was tolerable because I at least had the shoulder. But then the shoulder disappeared and the road shrank to just one lane in each direction and I had to share a lane with these yellow monsters. Of course most of the drivers had no patience and tried risky passes justified by the prior use of the 'watch out I'm going to kill you now' horn beep. On the worst occasion a truck beeped to signal he was coming past, then saw the bendy foldable plastic barrier in the middle of the road as he was passing me and, deciding that his massive heavy truck was no match for a bendy foldable piece of plastic, cut back in sharply towards me. I anticipated this move as something I have learnt to expect as the 'idiot truck driver doesn't know how to drive' move and dived out of the way. I hit the kerb at the side of the road, causing my front pannier to come off and break the magnet for my cycle computer. I must admit this near-death experience really was the icing on the cake for my wonderful day and I let out a joyous scream in the direction of the departing truck, letting out all of my pent up happiness, which I cannot repeat here but can reveal rhymed with "DUCK FLEW!!!" This felt so good I could hardly contain myself when the next truck blared his horn at me as he came storming past and I let out a second delighted chorus which this time rhymed with "CHUCK GLUE!!!"
I reattached my pannier and got moving again. The shoulder returned. I composed myself. I wondered what was next. I still had a way to go to Özgür’s, although I could no longer tell exactly how far because my bicycle computer was now broken. Then I ripped my ski pants on my front chainring, which honestly seemed like one of the better experiences of my day. What was next? What was next for me, oh cruel world? Just then a flock of birds flew over my head, and one of them took this as a good time to poop. A splatter of white bird poop landed directly in front of me, in the road literally a centimetre from my front wheel. If it had been half a millisecond later it would have landed on my head. 'Wow,' I thought, 'it must be my lucky day!'
The final challenge was a steep climb to Özgür’s town on a narrow and twisting road which was very busy with people driving home in the dark (yeah it was dark by now, obviously.) I got chased by another vicious dog at this point, although I could hardly raise the energy to care. A man driving his car actually saw this and slowed down, beeped his horn and swerved at the dog to get him to leave me alone. It was a small act of kindness on his part which showed me that not everyone in a car is completely uncaring and in such a rush not to give a duck about a poor down-on-his-luck cyclist. I forced myself to raise a thankful hand in salute.
Finally I arrived at Özgür’s apartment. I should think that when he offered to host me he did not quite have in mind the battered and bedraggled looking figure that would finally crawl up to his doorstep. I was literally covered in mud and filth from head to toe. My bike was in a similar state, but heaven only knows how it was still in one piece. I was exhausted, I had barely eaten all day, I was dripping wet, I may well have been bleeding again, I can't remember. I was on the verge of collapsing, I was practically on my knees. Özgür opened the door. "Help... me..." I croaked.
Today's ride: 79 km (49 miles)
Total: 13,196 km (8,195 miles)
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