“I cycled through Ukraine, delivering pizzas on a Penny Farthing”
Adventure cyclists Neil Laughton and Paula Reid took on a money-raising 700km ride through war-ravaged Ukraine
Neil: “Siobhan’s Trust provide support, solidarity and pizzas to displaced people in war-torn Ukraine. Paula and I had wanted to help raise awareness and funds for their humanitarian aid efforts.
Paula likes to cycle and I run the UK-based Penny Farthing Club, teaching novices how to ride the Victorian-designed velocipede. We agreed to cycle from Odesa in the south by the Black Sea to Chernobyl on the Belarus border to the north.
During the ride, our routine was: up at dawn, cup of tea, start riding, pit-stops every 15 miles or so and then find a suitable campsite before dusk, avoiding areas where the Russians had laid land mines.
Paula rode a basic racing bike with drop handles and I rode a modern UDC Penny Farthing with a 54in diameter wheel, solid rubber tyres, one gear and no suspension.
Ordinarily, I’d ride the full distance for a challenge like this, but I chose to ride just the first and last legs of each day, about 20 miles out of the daily 65. Primarily, it was Paula’s challenge and I didn’t want to steal her limelight, plus I was a lot slower.
One day we rode into the largely destroyed town of Borodianka (40 miles NW of Kyiv) to see a Banksy artwork on a dilapidated wall. It was called David and Goliath and depicted a young boy judo-throwing an adult Putin.
We managed to link up with the charity’s pizza-making teams to help deliver a meal to hungry local villagers and to an orphanage. At a town called Makariv, we gatecrashed a 23-year-old woman’s birthday party in a restaurant. We were immediately welcomed and joined them for a delightful evening of local delicacies and home-made vodka. Throughout the ride, engaging with ordinary Ukrainian families and hearing of their oftenhorrific experiences of war was very poignant.
On arrival in Chernobyl, the Ukrainian military police had relocated the official border 10 miles further south than pre-war, I guess to have more of a buffer zone between themselves and Belarus, so we didn’t get to ride into the village itself. Nevertheless, it was an eerie place with memorials of the local heroes who worked at the nuclear plant after the explosion in 1986 dotted around the other villages. Rob Kemp