The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold: Adventures Along the Iron Curtain Trail

It had been a few months since I'd read any non-fiction, and so as the long winter nights started to draw closer and the weather finally started to take a turn for the worse, I decided to take a look at a book that would put those issues in perspective.

The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold: Adventures Along the Iron Curtain Trail is journalist Tim Moore's account of his utterly insane - but ultimately successful - attempt to cycle the length of EuroVelo's EV13 cycling route, better known as the Iron Curtain Trail. Starting at the top of Norway in the depths of winter and emerging in Turkey months later, having ridden 9000km through 19 countries, Moore documents his trip in agonising detail.

There's a lot crammed in to around 350 pages here - from the woeful inadequacy of Moore's bike (built in East Germany in the 1980s for short-distance use), to the tremendous physical and mental strain that such an undertaking entails, to the vast shadow of recent history that still looms over the entire region. Moore chooses to focus principally on the latter, and while his tales of dealing with murderous lorry drivers, aggressive dogs and the perils of saying the wrong thing in the wrong place never wear thin, it is his assessment of the successes and eventual failings of communism and the way this has affected the people, culture and even physical appearance of Eastern Europe into the present day that elevate this above your standard travel journal.

The obvious comparison is Bill Bryson, and while Tim Moore does come close to emulating that style of humour, there's more to be said for this book. Moore does a wonderful job of relaying the maddening tedium and frustration of slogging through Finnish snow for hours on end, and the strangely comparable feeling of slogging up and down Balkan mountains in brain-melting heat. He also has a knack for capturing the essence of a people - from the resolutely serious Finns to the surprisingly laid-back Serbs by way of Germans who live up to every stereotype - and the way in which nearly all of them are friendly and welcoming to a stranger in a way that is much rarer in the West. And he makes sure to put the national moods of the present in their proper historical context. It was these passages that I found most interesting of all - for instance, how the Finnish army held off the Russians for over a year at the start of World War II despite being outnumbered effectively ten to one, or how Romania is still yet to recover from Nicolae Ceausescu's utterly hopeless economic policies. While he does not hesitate to criticise the effects of communism on the area based on a solid foundation of growing up in '70s and '80s Britain, there are moments where he admits there were positives, and in fact seems to have reconsidered his position by the end of the book having met so many people who aren't necessarily any better off today.

All in all, while The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold works on its own as an entertaining yarn about Europe's toughest road trip, it goes much deeper as an analysis of just how varied and perhaps divided the continent still is.

4/5

A bicycle can be many things, even a musical instrument...