COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN
One of the first wave of MTBers (see p50), Gary Fisher has had his share of two-wheeled scrapes, but it was getting hopelessly lost in Portugal that had him really worried
“About 15 years ago I was on a ride through the historical rural interior of Portugal, which was really cool. I was with some magazine editors from Brazil and a few other people, and it was the early days of GPS systems for bikes, so they gave us Garmins to get the course right. It was really difficult to follow because there were so many unpaved sections. Portugal has a huge infrastructure, and yet so few people – a large number of the citizens move away from the country for work and then send money home.
“It was a 10-day ride and I was starting to feel really good, so I took off from the front of the group and was hammering along.
I was watching the Garmin and the sights going past me, and then I started to wonder where everybody was. Next thing I knew,
I got a flat. I realised I had a problem and tried backtracking, but still couldn’t find anybody. Eventually I reached this village where, unsurprisingly, nobody spoke English. After some attempts to communicate verbally and getting nowhere, I ended up drawing a picture of a taxi. The guy I showed it to took me to a house and said, ‘this guy has a taxi’. They asked me where I wanted to go, but couldn’t understand my response, so I started trying to figure it out on the Garmin. That’s when I realised I’d accidentally ridden into the next day’s route.
“Clearly I was getting nowhere, so the guy’s wife brought me a beer and some food, because I had absolutely nothing on me. This situation went on for a couple of hours. They didn’t know what to do with me and were going to hand me over to the police, and I was getting worried.
“Then the guy called his daughter, who spoke English. I got on the phone to her and she said, ‘Gary Fisher? You’re kidding me! I did a story about you coming here – I know all of your people.” Within an hour I was reunited with the riding group and on my way to dinner. Man, that was a really embarrassing one!”