Blazing Bicycle Saddles

Blazing Bicycle Saddles

Five rollicking expeditions exploring

Darkest Europe on bicycles

by James Clarke

This book is dedicated to those we leave behind each year – Arlene, Elizabeth, Jo-anne, Lenka, Pat and Peter’s daughters, Helen and Julia.

They’d never be able to keep up with us anyway.

Smashwords Edition 2013

Copyright © James Clarke 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without written permission from the copyright holder.

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

First published by Jonathan Ball Publishers (Pty) Ltd.

Johannesburg and Cape Town. 2007.

Edited by Aïda Thorne

Cover design: Pieter Dreyer & Deon De Bruyn. Holistic Circus

Illustrations: Julie Clarke-Havemann

Cover photograph: Alan Calenborne

Photographs by Alan Calenborne and Peter Sullivan

ISBN 978-0-620-51384-5

Books by James Clarke

NATURAL HISTORY:

Man is the Prey (London, New York 1968)

Focus on Fauna (Johannesburg 1970)

The Bushman (Johannesburg 1971)

Our Fragile Land (Johannesburg 1974)

The Environmental Crisis (Johannesburg 1974)

Bottero's Wildlife Art Collection (Johannesburg 1978)

Survival Guide to the Outdoors (Johannesburg 1987)

Mountain Odyssey (with David Coulson) (Cape Town1983)

Roof of Africa (with David Coulson) (New York 1984)

Sabi Sabi (Johannesburg 1990)

Back to Earth(Cape Town 1991)

Coming back to Earth (Cape Town 2001)

HISTORY:

Like it Was (Johannesburg 1987)

An Extraordinary 20th Century (Johannesburg 1999)

ANTHOLOGIES:

The Bedside Star – edited (Johannesburg 1988)

Back to Bed – edited (Johannesburg 1989)

Bedtime Again – edited (Johannesburg 1990)

Laugh, the Beloved Country (with Harvey Tyson) (Cape Town 2003)

HUMOUR:

The Yellow Six (Birmingham and Johannesburg 1994 & 2006 – ebook 2013)

The Search for the Great South African Limerick (Johannesburg 1996)

S*x for the Extremely Shy (Johannesburg 1995)

S*x for the Terribly Shy (ebook 2013)

Enclosed, Please Find (Johannesburg 1999)

Great South African Limericks (Johannesburg 1997)

Clarke on Your Stoep (Johannesburg 2005)

The Funny Side of Golf (Johannesburg 2005 – ebook 2013)

TRAVEL:

Blazing Saddles – the Truth Behind the Tours de Farce. (Cape Town 2007)

Blazing Bicycle Saddles (ebook 2011)

More about James Clarke:

Website

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Blog

What this book is about

This is a true story; a true adventure involving six colleagues – mostly retired – who, on a sudden whim, decide to embark on a 1 000 kilometre cycle ride down the River Danube believing it would be downhill all the way. None had cycled since childhood nor even owned a bike.

Their hilarious journey was so enjoyable that it led to a series of annual rides in Europe involving ten countries including England. Their story – reminiscent of Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat – is told by their not terribly good leader.

Four of the six were daily newspaper editors; the author is a syndicated humour columnist and the sixth man claims he only goes along with them out of curiosity. All live in Africa and their mission is to explore Darkest Europe and bring back to Africa stories about the strange natives there and their funny customs.

"I can’t ride on the flat, I can’t ride in the mountains and I can’t do sprints. I’m the complete all-rounder."

Jimmy Casper, winner of the 2004 Tour de France Lanterne Rouge – the Red Lantern. The trophy, symbolic of the lantern carried behind the last carriage of a train, is presented to the man who comes stone last in the Tour de France.

Chapter One

Complete All-rounder

We were old enough to have known better. Well, all right, two of the six were still in their fifties at the time, but only just. The rest of us were certainly old enough. Here we were, old friends, mostly retired daily newspapermen with an average age of sixty-eight and we were about to set off on a 1 000 km cycle ride down the River Danube. Perhaps, in the end, it was nearer to 900 km but I am speaking of genuine kilometres, the sort they have in France. We planned to follow the Danube from Passau in Germany, across Austria, across the tip of Slovakia and into Hungary as far as Budapest.

I had worked out that the ride would be downhill all the way. Anyway it’s logical, I had explained to my prospective though hesitant companions. "River courses are famous for running downhill; ipso facto the cycle track along the Danube must do something similar." It certainly made sense at the time but it was the first of many assumptions that proved to be not terribly accurate.

The upshot of it all was that a few months later the six of us, early one spring morning, found ourselves inside a bicycle hire depot on the periphery of the medieval town of Passau in Bavaria inspecting the Austrian-made trek bikes we were about to sit astride for the next couple of weeks.

Harvey, the most senior of us, contended that from a physical comfort point of view picking the right bike was as important as picking the right mate. It must, he said, be a bicycle of docile but steadfast character with gentle saddle and – vitally important – of precise and peculiar height to suit the rider. In other words, it was no good anybody trying to adjust a bike that was suitable for Richard or Alan, the two youngest and who happened to be the tallest (both were around 2 metres above sea level), to suit Rex and me who were considerably shorter.

We minutely inspected the bikes; we rang their bells listening to them intently and professionally as if tuning a harp. We squeezed the tyres and clicked the gears. There were twenty-one of them.

I’ve never seen so many gears, muttered Rex who is inclined to growl into his clipped beard which, like his close-cropped hair, is silver.

What’s that? So many years what? asked Harvey who, like me, is somewhat deaf. Harvey at seventy-three hardly had a grey strand in his thick mop of hair and has the stamina of a Sherpa.

Gears, gears, repeated Rex whose low resonance voice means he has to repeat practically everything he says no matter to whom he is speaking.

The rest of my companions were as inexperienced as I. None of us even owned a bike until three months before we set out and not one of us had seriously cycled since our first childhood.

The fellow in charge of the cycle depot came over and asked us with more anxiety in his voice than I thought was warranted: Are you sure you are going to be all right?

We were, I suppose, an odd-looking group. We were attired in form-fitting sky blue, bum-hugging Lycra cycling shorts and canary yellow shirts stretched, in my case, to splitting point over a thickened waistline. The shirts were emblazoned with the words Cycle Lab, the name of the cycle firm that had fitted us out.

Yet despite our professional appearance the cycle hire man looked genuinely concerned, even alarmed. I realised afterwards that he had probably been misled by the word Lab on our shirts. He might have thought we were part of some heartless geriatric experiment.

One by one we mounted our bikes and wobbled out of the shed and on to the small cobbled square outside Passau’s bahnhof . It was quiet in the station’s cobbled forecourt as we tested our bikes but we realised that traversing Passau town centre would be something else entirely. We were going to have to cycle through it in peak morning traffic.

We had spent the previous day walking around the medieval section of Passau which is set on a great river junction on a wedge of land between the Rivers Danube and Inn. The River Ilz enters at the north end of the town and the whole is surrounded by steep forested hills. The town’s denizens have traditionally made fine swords that over the centuries have done a lot to trim the population of Central Europe.

It would have been sensible for us to have spent the previous evening carbo-loading and having an early night but without our wives around to say Don’t you think you’ve had enough? we had recklessly spent it wining and dining and offering each other toasts – a toast to our cycling success; a toast to our boundless courage; a toast to our good health; a toast to our wives back home (God bless them, I think somebody said) and to many other worthy things all now a little hazy.

The expedition had, more by accident than design, been labelled the "Tour de Farce" and the name has stuck to this day. But as we circled the cobbled square testing our bikes outside the bahnhof the whole enterprise had suddenly become very serious and I felt the first pang of anxiety. I had good reason to feel apprehensive, for being the Obergruppenführer I felt responsible for the welfare of these men and for ensuring that they were returned more or less intact to their loved ones. Harvey, Rex and Richard had been successive editors of a big daily newspaper and I had worked under their lash for most of my career. For the purpose of this expedition they had unanimously recognised my leadership abilities though I found it strange that they had never mentioned it over the preceding years. They were now happy to sit back and allow me the privilege – as they put it – of doing the planning for the expedition and the organising and negotiating with cycle hire companies and cycling outfitters, as well as organising the air tickets and connections.

In fact, among the toasts on the eve of our departure from Passau they had stood and toasted me as a Terribly Good Leader. I was a little embarrassed and might have shuffled the feet a little. I told them that I didn’t need praise because I was a terribly modest person. Rex growled something.

What’s was that? asked Harvey, cupping his ear again.

I was quoting Churchill, Rex said, this time a little louder, I was saying that Jim has quite a lot to be modest about.

I was quite touched by Rex’s little homily and felt myself colouring a little.

I had led everybody to believe that all we had to do at the next day’s start was to get on our bikes and persuade some friendly German to give each of us a little push and we’d then be able to freewheel all the way to Vienna.

What if our brakes fail? Harvey asked. Then, said Alan, who has a way of bringing complicated matters down to basics, if Jim is right and it is downhill all the way we’ll go screaming through five countries and end up being pitched headlong into the Black Sea.

I did a final check of my bike, ran a professional eye over my rear wheel panniers, clicked my gears one final time, retested the bell and announced with just a hint of drama that I felt the occasion demanded, Right gentlemen, let’s go!

They had in fact already gone.

I caught up with them as they were baulking at the formidable stream of traffic that was slowly crowding into the modern part of town. The city’s main thoroughfare was undergoing extensive repairs and there were many confusing deviations and many temporary signs in very poor English, such as Ausfahrt, Shritt fahren, Radweg kreuzt and Umgehungsstrasse. Frankly I find that everything in German sounds a little intimidating. To my ear even Ich liebe dich sounds like an order for a Panzer division to move forward.

I was ushered to the front to lead the peloton through the city. And so we merged with the jockeying traffic in much the same way that the Allies merged with the Germans in Normandy in 1944. The traffic immediately engulfed us and we became helplessly scattered – a yellow figure here and a yellow figure there. I had anticipated this and had suggested at the outset that we would probably have to make our individual ways through town and that the survivors should muster on the north bank of the Danube where the riverside cycle track began.

Obviously some of my colleagues must have been hopelessly disoriented because at one point I came across Harvey pedalling towards me and later, as I crossed a flyover, I spotted a yellow-shirted figure, head down, pedalling furiously at right angles beneath me. Yet, much later I came across all five of them lounging under a tree at the appointed spot. They said they had been waiting twenty minutes.

It was not to be the last time they were to wait for me and, not for the first time was I greatly touched by their reliance on my leadership and their nervousness about going on without me. After a great deal of handshaking we set off. Naturally they insisted I go in front.

Chapter Two

Coarse Cycling

We cycled leisurely in the crisp spring air along a smooth tarred cycle track with a crash barrier between us and the busy Linz highway on our left. On our right flowed the Danube wide and swift. It was a beautiful May morning. Cotton wool clouds floated against a blue sky and our progress was under the shade of an almost unbroken canopy of giant horse chestnut trees lavishly festooned with white and pink blossoms. In the grass beside the track were shining yellow buttercups, white daisies, orange dandelions and the occasional patch of blood red poppies. Sometimes we’d catch the aroma of the headiest of all spring perfumes – lilac blossom.

Soon the track peeled away from the traffic and dived into a deeply wooded valley, the Bavarian Forest. We now had the river and the cheerful songs of the blackbirds and thrushes to ourselves. At one time Rex himself burst into song. It was unusual for Rex who is normally a quiet fellow. It wasn’t a very tuneful song and when we gave him a look he settled down.

Richard commented on the ecstasy of cycling through foreign lands and how both hiker and cyclist were able to enjoy the aromas and sounds of the countryside far, far more than those touring by car or bus who, literally, suffer sensory deprivation. Cycling has an advantage even over hiking: the scenery changes at a more stimulating pace, yet not so fast that one does not have time to savour it. And at cruising speed one creates one’s own cooling breeze. Cycling, said Harvey, is the one form of wheeled transport that cannot in any way be regarded as offensive – no pollution, no noise, little demand on road space. The bicycle itself is a marvellous machine when one considers how it runs on fuel such as bananas, bread and jam, beer, even duckling bigarade. The nice thing about this is that the cyclist has to consume it all first because the cyclist is the bike’s engine and his stomach the fuel tank.

Richard described our form of cycling as coarse cycling. I thought this was quite clever and stared at him for quite a long time. He said coarse cycling differs from riding hi-tech racing bikes just as coarse fishing differs from fly fishing or ballet differs from international rugby. The casual pace allows one to experience nature, even to feel part of it to the extent that one empathises with flattened hedgehogs on the road – nature’s little speed bumps –somebody called them. One’s objective as a coarse cyclist is totally different from the bum-in-the air frantic pace of those on hi-tech carbon-fibre cycles that are used in road races and sometimes cost as much as a Harley.

Ernest Hemingway said cycling was the best way to learn a country’s contours because you physically experience them – you sweat up the hills and there’s the sheer joy of coasting down the other side.

Among my first memories as a child living just outside of London is that of yearning to ride a two-wheeler; of dreaming of owning one and the wonderful freedom it would offer once I had mastered the art of staying upright. I recall vividly the sheer ecstasy when, for the first time, I rode around the garden on two wheels. A bicycle is probably the first serious material thing a child earnestly pleads for in its prayers. Canadian comedian, Emo Phillips, said he used to pray every night for a bike until he realised that the Lord doesn’t always work that way, so he stole one and then prayed for forgiveness.

I believe the bicycle is on the edge of a golden age. Today there are about a billion bikes in the world – most of them in China – yet the advent of the mass-produced chain-driven cycle occurred little more than a century ago. It was an event that affected human evolution. Being cheaper to buy and cheaper to keep than a horse, the bicycle enabled more and more young men living in villages to court girls in distant villages thus giving a wider choice of mate and resulting in a more widespread and therefore richer human gene pool.

Mechanically the bike hasn’t changed much in the last 100 years. Until almost the end of the nineteenth century its pedals were fixed to the front wheel hub which made it practically impossible to pedal up inclines. The penny-farthing with its huge front wheel and small back wheel was not only without a chain – initially it also had no brake. In emergencies, such as when running out of control downhill riders were advised to lift their legs over the handlebars, hold them straight out in front and aim for the softest obstacle – a bush maybe, or even a fat person – and land feet first.

Yet these front wheel-drive bikes were used throughout Victorian times and were, in a way, the first step towards the emancipation of young women. They spelt the end of neurotic Victorian modesty; the end of ankle-length dresses, corsets and petticoats. These were replaced by skirts and bloomers and all over Europe women were suddenly revealing their legs causing men to walk into lampposts and into each other. In 1866 in Bordeaux the first recorded cycle race for women was held. The girls, as they came pedalling along, bare legs working the pedals, caused such a sensation that