Crossing the Pyrenees

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This summer [1989] I cycled from Bordeaux to Barcelona, a journey of nearly five hundred miles. I went because the trip included crossing the Pyrenees, a mountain range with which for some reason I am obsessed. (Why? Because as the French philosophes had it, what was true on one side of the Pyrenees was not necessarily true on the other; because there are still bears living there; because Walter Benjamin committed suicide there; because I have seen them from the air and they are dazzling; because of the wild flowers; because of the way they sealed off a benighted Fascist regime from the rest of Europe for so many years, awkwardly, uncomfortably; because, finally, they divide the extraordinarily different and more exotic world of Spain and Portugal from the rest of rapidly homogenising Europe -- but for how long?

At the highest point we cycled to 6,500 feet, and camped near a Spanish village which at night produced the clearest sky and brightest stars I shall ever hope to see. Cold, indifferent, achingly splendid. But it wasn't a feat of endurance. Everybody who started, finished. Some cyclists were in their sixties, others in their teens; several were overweight and in not very good health. But long distance cycling is not necessarily a matter of stamina but of resilience. It's boring, at times, deeply tiring, hot, frustrating, only occasionally taxing on the lungs, legs and bum. But it requires no superhuman strength, abnormal muscle development, use of steroids, Union Jacks, travelling supporters, training from birth, right-wing political views, knowledge of quiz games, trips to South Africa, dual passports, or any of the other paraphernalia of 'serious' sports. You can smoke, drink, eat carp with a grape sauce, stay up late at night, go dancing, finish on calvados and cigars, and still do it -- as long as you just love the symmetry of Reynolds 531 tubing, the grace and bounce of alloy wheels, and the sheer pleasure of turning two pedals which translate every ounce of human endeavour into four times its value through a simple system of gears and wheels. In short, you either like bicycles and cycling (I do) or hate them. My own obsession, a matter of the last decade, has no rational explanation. I was never interested particularly as a teenager, yet somehow now I can't imagine life without two wheels.

Apart from a large Finsbury Park contingent, the only other strong geographical grouping was the crew who all came from Bath, where the tour company is based. Perhaps it is the proximity to Glastonbury and the meeting point of all those ley lines, but people from the Bath area seem to inhabit a world of their own. The West Country seems detached in time and space from the rest of southern Britain. The same seven-person crew provided the drivers for the four vehicles, the catering, the medical care, the folk-rock band; they were all multi-talented in that old hippie way in that they could mend bikes and cars, read Tarot cards, play Irish fiddle, talk at length on chaos theory or Jack Russell terriers, bluff their way into any 4-star restaurant and order 120 evening meals, drink half a bottle of brandy each and still be first up in the morning, opinionate at length on homeopathic medicine, and always be in between jobs. Everybody I've met from Bath has had elements of the rootless independence in them. What do they teach them in schools? I'm sure that when the national curriculum arrives, Bath schools will still insist on compulsory juggling and diesel engine maintenance lessons.

If the regular late night parties or four course restaurant meals in the evenings were the heady pleasures of the trip, the daytime pleasures were more of a miniaturist nature. Getting up, packing up tents, shaving and chewing muesli were mostly done in a state of lethargy and mild apprehension of the day's cycling to come. There were only two kinds of day: a short distance up a very steep mountain or a long ride up a gentle set of foothills. We were blessed with perfect weather. As any cyclist will tell you, the first ten miles of the day are the worst; here any aches and pains, discomfitures, old muscle problems, creaking joints, rapidly assert their own identity and you wonder if you will ever finish the day's ride. After ten miles a rhythm is established, all the aches and pains disappear, and in the right circumstances, you begin to achieve a state of otherness, nirvana, or mindless boredom, whichever particular metaphysics one subscribes to.

The great thing about large amounts of exhausting physical exercise is that it nullifies all other physical and mental concerns. There are no agonies of indecision in the morning as to what has to be done and in what order -- there is only one choice: you lift your leg over the saddle, put your feet in the toe-clips, and start cycling. At the end of the day your brain is so numbed by tiredness that you enter a pleasant state of mental and intellectual vacuity. Like an automaton, you dismount, find your bags and tent, put up the tent, have a shower and then lay out on the grass for an hour staring into the sun.

So what was cycling through the Pyrenees actually like? Well the two days on the flat in southwest France were idyllic. Gentle hills, winding country roads, small villages and a great variety of farming, forestry, landscapes and people. It still felt very religious, as the many roadside shrines to the Virgin Mary were well kept with fresh flowers and pristine paintwork. Only subsequently did I realise how much I prefer inhabited landscapes to uninhabited ones, for the further into the Pyrenees we went the less people, houses or any sign of human cultivation we saw, and the bleaker it became. The second night we camped in the medieval town of Armagnac, found the best bar of the whole trip, friendly, ridiculously cheap, with an outside garden overhung with vines, with a dark interior of old woodwork and ancient prints and photographs of football and cycling teams. The field we camped in was just one thick carpet of wild mint, which, crushed by the tents and people's constant footsteps, gave off such a sickly smell that one slept as if drugged.

Further into the French Pyrenees we came into the smarter winter ski resorts such as Luchon, but since it is a principle of these bike tours that main roads are never used -- even where the main roads are the only roads -- we found ourselves cycling along goat tracks and roads of scree over the tops of mountains rather than through the valleys from town to town. Some of these wild mountain roads were fabulous as you cycled clear of the gulches, rivers and forsts, above the tree-line and into the hot, clear air of cropped pastures and dizzying heights. It was not unusual to be cycling along a mountain road looking down into the valley on the tiny Cessna aircraft used for local air traffic flying below, looking down on the hang-gliders, and onto the world beneath settled comfortably on the valley floor like a model railway on the front room carpet. For a number of days we climbed some 2,000 feet in the morning only to drop down 1,500 feet again in the afternoon to the next village and campsite. But oh the exhilaration of some of those views and spectacles -- valleys folding into each other like bolts of cloth unravelled, layers of mountains standing in serried rows further and further into the distance like a pop-up book picture, sunlight and shadows moving across the valleys like a stain spreading in water. It all felt so expansive, so utopian. And what was best was the silence. And the wind ruffling the gorse bushes, the occasional long grasses, the sheep's fleece caught in the scrub.

But the increasing remoteness of the landscape meant that on some days there simply were no bars, hamlets or villages to be cycled through from the start of the ride until the end. A single road across a mountain or through a long gorge could be cycled along for hours without seeing a single car or lorry. This made one feel better about being able to cycle in the middle or, when negotiating the frequent hairpin bends, on the wrong side of the road, as often one found oneself riding within three or four feet of a sheer drop of some hundreds of feet into rock-strewn river or forested gorge. It sounds worse than it felt at the time; just a case of keeping awake, that's all. The compensations for this isolation -- which others enthused about more than I did -- were that the occasional stop for a piss, a drink of water, a bar of chocolate or a handful of prunes, involved finding a secluded resting place by a stream or in a glade, in which you quickly realised just how profuse and fecund the natural flora and fauna really were. In less than five minutes one might see at least six different kinds of grasshopper, dozens of different moths and butterflies, several kinds of lizards, dragonflies and lots of other bugs and divers creepy-crawlies. The grass was alive with insect, pulsating with movement. Quite extraordinary. The only disappointing thing was the lack of variety of birds -- hardly any at all except for large birds of prey, a buzzard or a kite, a few magpies and sparrows. We saw several fields full of crocuses -- in the autumn!

The ride into Barcelona was the low point of the holiday: suberbs, motorways, industrial estates, dust and noise everywhere, and later very fast traffic and impatient drivers. But the city centre lived up to every expectation I had of it and had been told about; it teems with life night and day; it is a city which the people (as 'the people') still live in and territorially control the centre, which is full of tiny streets and alleys crowded with tenements, bars, small shops and street life. We only had one day in the city before the 28 hour train/boat/train journey back to Victoria.

I was pleased to realise on this trip that I am now regarded by others as a competent long-distance cyclist. Whereas in earlier trips I had often been at the back, distinctly ruffled and frazzled by the end of a day's ride, on this trip within an hour of finishing and endless cups of tea and a shower, I felt fully revived and ready for anything. It is difficult really to explain the hold that cycling eventually has over people. In the winter months, just to look at my touring bike hanging there upside down in the shed brings a profound sense of well-being, and anticipation of pleasures and freedoms still to come. It is like a lifeline and a passport to another world.