Around the Arctic Circle on an East German shopping bike
Aged 51, the writer Tim Moore decided to tackle a 10,000km bike trail following the old Iron Curtain – and to make it more authentic, he did it on a gear-free East German shopping bike that he’d bought for £50 on ebay. Here, he is in Finland
To the cyclist, snow is like sand. If you’ve ever ridden a bike on the beach, you will have an idea of the impact on speed and ease of progress. Every kilometre was an attrition of gasps and slithers, one more battle in this hopeless campaign to conquer a hostile infinity. I gazed through a fleece-framed slit across iced lakes and forests, my snood-muffled huffing the only sound in a cryogenic realm of white silence. I saw my first reindeer, a mournful taupe column shuffling through the snow, on their lonely trek to a farmer’s casserole. Once every hour or so a car barrelled waywardly past, piloted by a blank-faced man in a docker’s hat with a fag between his lips. To preserve my bond with humanity I saluted each and every one, though with my many-gloved hands wedged fast in my pogies (as I’m afraid those oven-mitt handlebar covers are known), all I could manage by way of greeting was a wink. Until we hit -13°C, and my eyelashes started freezing together.
It was way past six now, and the sun’s long goodbye was gilding the alabaster wilderness in a manner that would have doubtless looked wonderful through a heated windscreen. I lowered my gaze to the Garmin GPS screen, and watched the temperature flash down to -14.2°C. Somewhere inside their six-layer cocoon of rubber, merino wool and polythene, my toes died, a klaxon-scream of agony fading into numbness. Far more terrible, though, was the message that emerged from within my pogies: the thrice-gloved fingers that had been clawed rigid round the bars all afternoon now felt fluidly, lazily aglow, drawling for release from their thermal prison.
Here they came, the opiate delusions of hypothermia, luring me off to a peaceful, stupid death. Withdrawal, confusion, sleepiness, irrationality… My mind riffled desperately through the stages of hypothermic consciousness that preceded “apparent death” in an online chart I’d found, hoping to recall which one bore the dreaded footnote: “By this stage you may already be too far gone to recognise the problem.” It didn’t help that sleepy confusion had been my default state for 48 hours. How much further? I looked at the Garmin and met a blank screen – the battery had gone.
Hysteria welled in my guts. Did I have 5k left? Ten? Dusk was fading to dark, and I hadn’t seen a car for two hours. When the road curved uphill I succumbed to full-blown panic, pedalling so hard that my studded rear wheel began to fishtail wildly through the snow and its underlay of polished ice. Sweat sluiced down me,
defrosting my eyelashes and stinging the mad red orbs behind them. Calm the f*** down! With a supreme effort I steadied my breathing and slithered to a halt, and there, winking through the trees and the frosted gloaming, was a cluster of lights.
So unfolded the longest, hardest days of my life. The mornings began with a bleary, fearful peek through many layers of glass, scanning the sullen sky, the thermometer nailed to the frame outside, and beneath it the last-gasp slalom my wheels had traced through the snow the night before. Twelve hours later I would stumble into a hotel, log cabin or reindeer farm, and stand, shuddering and melting, while my refrigerated brain struggled to process thoughts into speech.
The morning after my brush with exposure, the temperature hit -22°C, so extravagantly bracing that a haze of ice hung in the air, and every inhalation punched the back of my throat like a Death Eater’s fist. Overbearing desolation is what northern Finland does best, and I would have entire afternoons to myself, watching the illimitable, primordial scenery fail to evolve. And the snow kept coming, smothering the whole world. Two or three times a day a demonic cacophony announced the approach of an Arctic Machine – an implacable snowplough with a fearsome blade. I learnt the hard way that this was the cue to hurl the bike into the roadside and crouch behind its panniers, face to the forest and arms round head. As the grating roar climaxed, a bow wave of snow and ice nuggets would crash over me, followed by the gritted tornado that every large vehicle trailed behind it up here.
The few natives I encountered in these difficult days embraced every national stereotype, which is to say both of them. This is a country whose self-referential comedic lexicon is focused on lugubrious alcoholism, with an entire joke genre devoted to the knockabout adventures of two men marooned in a lonely cottage with a case of vodka. In my favourite, Kimi ransacks the toolshed after the last bottle is drained, and comes back with a jerrycan of antifreeze. “We could drink this,” he tells his friend, “but we’ll probably go blind.” Mika looks slowly around the cottage and out of the window, then says, “I think we’ve seen enough.”
Like the winter that defines their homeland, Finns can come across as bleak and chilly. I never heard a raised voice, or a cheer, or a roar of laughter; it would be a mistake, though, to interpret this dour dispassion as heartlessness. I made this mistake again
“Two or three times a day a demonic cacophony announced the approach of an implacable snowplough with a fearsome blade”
and again. The last time was just after a puncture. As I battled the tyre off, bare fingers raw and shrieking, an ancient Audi rumbled up from the bleached horizon. The window squeaked down and a wail of blues guitar burst out, followed by a red-bearded face. “I think you are not from Finland,” declared its owner in the toneless blare. He flicked the stereo off and impassively surveyed my predicament. “A bicycle is a bad idea. That bicycle is a very bad idea.” Then he nodded, turned up the volume, and shouted his farewell: “If you need help, you will ask.”
There was no malice or misanthropy in his words, just naked truth, baldly delivered. Finns were people of few words, understated to the point of bluntness. I would never meet a Finnish bullshitter. Dauntless, hard-core journeys were part of everyday winter life up here. And it wasn’t as if I needed to do this at all, certainly not at this time of year and on this sort of bike. If I’d chosen to make it harder for myself, then that was my own silly fault. Redbeard had simply called it like it was. His was a land of harsh sincerity, where spades were spades, and daft little bikes were daft little bikes. Where you got help if you asked for it, but otherwise didn’t.
I had little idea of my whereabouts, except that I was now in Northern Ostrobothnia, which sounded like somewhere you would be banished to with no hope of return. At some point I grasped that I had to find a place to stay overnight in this frigid outback. Jabbing at my phone, I made the first of what would be many emergency calls to Raija Ruusunen. “I’m going to put you in touch with our contact in Finland,” the European Cyclists’ Federation’s Ed Lancaster had written months before, in an email littered with polite suggestions that I consider setting off at a less-ridiculous time of year. Thus was I introduced to Ruusunen, whose stoic reply accepted my schedule, and its implicit consequences: I had made my stupid mind up, and she would therefore be getting me out of a succession of fine messes. Somehow, this cyclo-evangelical university lecturer was able at the shortest notice to persuade far-flung strangers to set off into the Arctic emptiness and drag an unknown English shopping cyclist from death’s frozen door.
My Cossack-hatted saviour on this occasion beckoned me to follow him to a cottage set back from the road through a rank of conifers. As a rustic Finn he proved a man of few words, none of them English. The only time his features broke into life was when he threw open a door in the basement and a wall of heat fell out. The sauna is an invention cobbled together from Finland’s most abundant natural resources: wood, water and vowels. To call it a popular tradition would be like calling respiration a hobby. There are more saunas than cars in Finland, three million for a populace of less than twice that. On the sweaty, red face of it, Finland’s enduring sauna obsession seems indictment of a failure to follow its fellow north Europeans up the Goldilocks learning curve: out in the snow – too cold; in a pine-lined crematorium – too hot; stretched out on a sofa in a centrally heated home – just right. But, rather admirably, they don’t even bother trying to justify their addiction to broiled claustrophobia. To a Finn there is simply no problem that cannot be solved by another sauna.
March was over, and though the conditions didn’t scream April, Finland had begun to shed its winter coat. I took off one of my four hats and the middle pair of gloves. For the first time I began to examine the map over breakfast with something close to anticipation rather than dread; I’d crossed the Arctic Circle and the miles were getting easier. But progress came at a price. I was caning it along some evergreen corridor, head down in pursuit of the magic 1,000km mark, when the left pedal began to miss a beat at the top of each revolution. This soon swelled into a quarter-turn missing link, and very shortly after the whole crank fell off and hit the road with a slushy chink.
In these conditions, every spanner session was a fumbled, sometimes tearful frustration, like trying to make an Airfix kit in boxing gloves. I fixed the crank as best I could, which meant it fell off again half a mile up the road. An hour later I pushed my bike up to a farmhouse with a smoking chimney. I had wondered how a Finnish farmer occupies himself in winter, those long months with nothing to do but sit by the stove adding vowels to stuff. The door opened and I found out: he sits by the stove with a toolkit in his lap, awaiting the knock of a distressed cyclist. If you need help, you will ask. How capable these backwoods Finns were, I thought, pedalling away ten minutes later. Perhaps it was just natural selection: all the idiots had long since frozen to death or been eaten.
It was 50km to the next town: I made it to Kuhmo in five hours, and walked into the hotel. My room was a microcosm of Finnish towns in general, and this one in particular: clean, bland and cheerless. I don’t make a habit of weeping on the phone to anyone who isn’t a vet, but of late my calls home had been blighted by blubbering self-pity and other expressions of the loneliness of the long-distance shopping cyclist. My wife might forgivably have barked at me to snap out of it. Instead, she and my son were coming out to keep me company for a few days, bringing along some life-insurance documents that apparently needed an urgent signature.
“I saw your bicycle. It is not what I expected.” The receptionist’s morning greeting was a variation on the English phrase I heard most in Finland. I hated not being able to reciprocate, to coax out even a single intelligible word in the native tongue. But what a twisted tongue it was. Even words that generally had some common cross-border ground in most European dictionaries – like days of the week and months of the year – were over the hills and far away in Finnish. April: huhtikuu. Friday: perjantai.
My support crew arrived late, but I was so delighted to see them I didn’t mind, not even when they greeted me in the car park with a stream of woe about tackling Finland in an underpowered rental vehicle. That morning I had spent some time in front of the mirror, trying to see myself through the eyes of long-absent loved ones. This was time well spent, as it prepared me for the concern and mild revulsion that annexed their expressions when we went inside and they beheld me in the light. The blistered, ruddy face with its flash-fried, snow-burnt balaclava slot. Clothes hanging loose on a shrunken torso. Fingers so feebly arthritic I couldn’t close them around the handle of my wife’s suitcase.
The next day, with the sun out, I rode on through a different Finland, a world of carefree speed and achievement. The slush was in retreat, and after two weeks of creak and crunch, my ears attuned to the novel thrum of tyre on tarmac. Lorries delivered my first facefuls of dust. Dabs of colour enlivened winter’s dead palette: a tentative leaf bud; a bluebottle; and the occasional big red barn, Scandinavia’s architectural gift to the Midwest.
“‘I think you are not from Finland. A bicycle is a bad idea. That bicycle is a very bad idea’”