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Tim Moore has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

The extract from The Winter War by William R. Trotter (Aurum press, 2003) here is reproduced with permission of Aurum Press

Thanks to the wondrous Raija Ruusunen, Ed Lancaster and the ECF, Stephen Hilton, the saintly and several Samaritans of Hossa, Peter Meyer and everyone else at MIFA, Matt, Fran and Nick at Yellow Jersey, Peter Milligan, my entire family, Comrade Timoteya and Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov.

The elderly Norwegian in a Charlie Brown earflap hat was the first pedestrian I had encountered since leaving Kirkenes, a little port hunkered pluckily up in Europe’s furthest top-right corner. On his third and loudest attempt, he had at last penetrated a howling blizzard and the many thermal layers that swaddled my head.

It was a disappointing response to my own snood-muffled enquiry: the distance to Näätämö, across the border in Finland, the European Union’s northernmost settlement and the only place for hours around that offered an overnight alternative to a hunched and lonely death in the sub-Polar darkness. My understanding of how it was there, the weather, had, I felt, been pretty solid for a graduate from the No Shit Sherlock School of Climate Studies: our conversation was taking place 400km above the Arctic Circle, in winter. Nonetheless, this knowledge base had broadened memorably over the previous eighteen hours, and in ways that left the tiny exposed parts of my face encrusted with frozen tears of pain and terror. I nodded feebly, expending around 8 per cent of my physical reserves.

The road to forsaken hypothermia had begun in cruelly different circumstances. The August before, I was outside a café in Florence, winding down after another day at the coalface of Offbeat Travel Writing – in this instance, failing to catch giant catfish beneath a city-centre bridge, under the watchful gaze of a hundred loudly critical onlookers. My phone rang: it was the Guardian’s Germany correspondent, who had my contact details from a commission related to a distant misadventure that had left said coalface deeply imprinted with my own screaming death-mask. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Please tell me this has absolutely nothing to do with the Eurovision Song Contest.’

Having reassured me, he requested my opinion on something I had never heard of, rather than simply wished I hadn’t. Our conversation was correspondingly brief, just long enough for my interviewer to imagine a story headlined, ‘Part-time cyclist knows nothing of new Iron Curtain bike trail.’

I set off home the next day, having for this trip exchanged my usual budget airliner for the four-wheeled fruit of a cheapskate’s midlife crisis: a two-door, eighteen-year-old BMW, recently acquired as it bumped noisily along the bottom of its depreciation curve. It was a ruminative drive, partly because of my dilatory chosen route, and partly because the radiator hose blew off whenever I put my foot down. Across northern Italy I found myself on big, winding chunks of the roads I had cycled two years earlier when I had retraced the 1914 Giro d’Italia on a ninety-nine-year-old bike with wooden wheels. Crossing into France I sought out Alpine climbs remembered, more fuzzily, from my ride around the 2000 Tour de France route. And all the while my thoughts were snagged by the idea of tackling this Iron Curtain Trail.

What a deliciously cool and breezy antidote such a ride would be to my current, wilting south-European summer, periodically enhanced as it was by an antifreeze steam facial whenever I raised the bonnet in a lay-by. Then there were nostalgic memories of a three-month journey my wife and I had made in 1990, driving across Scandinavia and a great swathe of the Eastern Bloc, just weeks after the Berlin Wall came down. This over-ambitious, under-budget epic had, I now realised, set the template for my subsequent travels. We survived on stolen bacon and took turns at the wheel of – hmmm – a two-door, eighteen-year-old Saab.

Reflecting on that trip, my mind’s eye offered up repeated images of yawning flatlands viewed through a grubby windscreen. The prospect of freewheeling along such gloriously prone landscapes held immense appeal to a man gazing through another grubby windscreen at some of our continent’s most merciless inclines, ones he had ridden up when he was either slightly too old to be doing so or much too old. Then again, he was now two years older than much too old, and 6,700km – the Iron Curtain Trail’s total distance as gleaned by the Guardian man from the press release in front of him – was twice as far as he had ever previously managed in one go.

I came home with a new obsession, along with the facility to ask for five litres of demineralised water in a selection of continental languages. As a child of the Cold War – in fact, for many years a proper grown-up – I still couldn’t get my head round the fact that one could now traipse gaily hither and thither across the death-strip. How unthinkable that would have seemed to my younger self. At the age of twelve I’d acquired a wooden-clad, Russian-built short-wave radio, and spent long hours twiddling through eerie interval signals broadcast by Soviet-satellite propaganda stations, loop tapes of ten-note trumpet fanfares interspersed with some fruity-voiced defector announcing: ‘This is Radio Prague, Czechoslovakia.’ I was enthralled and petrified in equal measure. Back then you’d be packed off to the gulag for smuggling Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit in through the Iron Curtain, or shot dead trying to climb out over it. Now I could ride a bike across it at will.

And beyond all that, this Iron Curtain Trail tracked the full length of what I think we can all agree is our planet’s most splendid continent, an unrivalled diversity of culture, history, climate and geography – all in one fun-sized package! Infected to the point of delirious commitment, I contacted the European Cycling Federation, bureaucratic overlords of this new trail and a dozen other long-distance ‘Euro Velo’ routes that traverse our fair continent. The ICT, I soon learned, was more properly known as Euro Velo 13, which travelled through no fewer than twenty countries between Kirkenes and its terminus at Tsarevo, on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast.

Online investigation revealed some exciting truths about the route I was by now emotionally obligated to tackle. Long stretches of EV13’s 6,700km were as yet unsignposted, beginning with its entire 1,700km passage through Finland. Other sections were no more than vaguely mapped with dotted lines – most notably through Russia, where it wandered distantly inland to avoid a long section of Baltic coast that was closed to foreigners, on account of an embarrassment of military and nuclear facilities. No less exhilarating was the revelation that nobody had yet conquered the virgin EV13 in its entirety – assuming you were happy to exclude a lavishly supported corporate team of electric cyclists, which I was, and to heartlessly dismiss a middle-aged German for not starting in quite the right place, which I did.

I convinced my editor and cleared my diary. Then I emailed the ECF to impress them with my trailblazing intention, and to enquire if any of EV13’s missing links had been recently filled in. In the weeks ahead, the ECF’s Ed Lancaster would humble me with his kind and invaluable assistance. It is fair to say, though, that Ed’s initial response filled my heart with uglier emotions. ‘I thought it was important to highlight at this stage that we are now putting the total distance of the route at 10,000kms,’ I read, my jaw settling at full gape, ‘so maybe a bit more than you were calculating.’ A bit more. Like almost precisely 50 per cent more. Not twice as far as I’d ever ridden in one go, then, but three times. I’d barely turned a pedal in a year, and my, um, forty-eleventh birthday lay just a few months ahead.

My wife had for some time been cheerily introducing my adventure to friends and relations as ‘a ride too far’. The gently corrosive drip of this billing now abruptly swelled into an acrid torrent of concentrate that burned a ragged, smoking hole straight through my morale. Ten thousand kilometres was a ride and a half too far, the ride to end all rides with an extra ride on the side. Yet there was nothing to be done: my obligation had recently progressed beyond the emotional to the rigidly contractual. More than that, I’d already bought the bike. And what a bike it was.

The MIFA 900 series made its debut at the Leipzig Trade Fair in 1967, accompanied by whatever passed for a publicity fanfare in the German Democratic Republic – I’m seeing an encirclement of grey-suited men in horn-rimmed spectacles clapping expressionlessly, while a Stasi officer poorly disguised as a podium dolly-bird takes careful note of the cadence and intensity of every individual’s applause. Superficially, this little 20-inch wheeler with its folding, step-through frame was a match for the new wave of compact urban bicycles then being launched in the West – it was only two years since the Dawes Kingpin had spawned the shopping-bike genre, and MIFA’s 900 actually beat the famous Raleigh Twenty to production by eighteen months.

But take that first 900 – more specifically a 901 – off its jerkily revolving Leipzig rostrum, and you would note the odd shortcoming. For one, the bike had no gears whatsoever. It lacked the supportive strut that bolstered the vulnerable open frames of its Western counterparts, and was fitted with a visibly inadequate folding hinge-lock. Most conspicuously, the single brake lever operated a metal rod that depressed a stout rubber pad onto the top of the front tyre, via a big hole in the mudguard. This startlingly shit ‘spoon brake’ was a throwback to the age of the penny-farthing – an age when deceleration issues were the principal cause of 3,000 annual cycling deaths, and when about 3,012 people owned bikes.

The Central German Bicycle Works, whose native acronym gave MIFA its name, manufactured the 900 series until the Wall came down. The model’s development over those twenty-two years is a handy metaphor for the progress of Soviet-model state socialism: there were no developments. Actually, that isn’t quite true. From 1973 the decorative stripes on the mudguards, hitherto colour-coded to the frame, were all more economically painted in Comrade Red. From 1986, they switched to the less comradely but even more economic black. A ‘flagship’ 904 model was also introduced in 1977, with shopping racks fore and aft, a 29mm armour-piercing cannon and a normal, non-Victorian front-wheel caliper brake. But the vast majority of 900s still came with spoon brakes, and none offered gears or a frame that didn’t buckle in two if you liked your bratwurst.

On the face of it, such archaic shonkiness should have guaranteed commercial failure – especially as the cannon never existed. But in the GDR, commercialism wasn’t a factor. To paraphrase Henry Ford, East Germans could have any bike they wanted, as long as it was a MIFA 900. And not just East Germans – the 900 was offered to/foisted upon comrades right across the Soviet world, becoming the default pedal-powered runabout from Vietnam to Cuba.

The consequence of this international monopoly can be considered astonishing. In 1977, 150,000 Raleigh Twentys were built – the annus mirabilis of the British bike industry’s final mass-market, global success, which sold just over a million in its production run. In 1978 alone, the MIFA plant in Sangerhausen churned out 1.5 million 900s. By the time the last one rolled off the line in 1990, over three million had been built. Take China out of the equation, and you will struggle to find any machine in the history of bicycle manufacture that betters this total. I did, and failed.

And having failed, I wanted one. It had been the same during that 1990 trip, when I developed a deep maternal affection for the Trabants abandoned on every East European street, headlights shattered and Bakelite doors ajar, sneered at by their VW and Audi replacements speeding sleekly past. Three million Trabants were built, too: another ubiquitous but unloved ugly duckling, another semi-functional, jerry-built anachronism. And each one a little piece of big-ticket history, a symbol of the one-size-fits-all Communist experiment, which at its peak encompassed a third of the world’s population. I’d been brought up to regard East Europeans with fear or pity, depending on whether they were saluting at an endless parade of missile launchers or being pistol-whipped for wearing Levi’s. But as we drove past all those oatmeal Trabants, how histrionic my adolescent emotions seemed. That gormless radiator-grille smile was the true face of an evil empire. Who could not warm to such a goofy, hopeless, squat little underdog, other than perhaps anyone who had ever owned one? Anyway, let’s just agree that the MIFA 900 was a Trabant on two wheels, and that this was why I came to be hauling a black-trimmed mudguard through the snowbound reception door of Europe’s northernmost hotel.

I’d booked the hotel long in advance with a view to spending the night there, but Kirkenes was on its well-clad, steamy-breathed way to work as I dragged my bike, mummified in plastic sheeting, past fridge-faced council offices and warehouses. The overnight blizzard had cleared but its fallout lay deep and crisp and even, the thick topcoat to an archetypally Scandinavian study in bleak but bland prosperity. My heavy Arctic boots struggled ominously for purchase: if I could barely stay upright walking 100 yards in great big wellies, what hope of riding 100 kilometres on two thumb-sized patches of rubber?

How my body had whimpered for rest, having been repeatedly hauled from slumber during an all-night coach ride by the violent fishtailing of our driver’s latest attempt to regain control as we careered through the white-out. But the minute I lay down on the hotel bed for a money’s-worth doze, my brain buzzed into life: mission-mode activated! Robotically I rose to my feet and submitted to some clipboard-wielding internal master of destiny, and his stridently delivered checklist. Shower! Very good, sir. Don body layers! Very good, sir. Swish noisily to breakfast, lay waste to buffet, unwrap and reassemble bicycle, mount panniers, don head layers, unnerve Australian Northern Lights watchers, conquer Arctic! Typically, the minute I heaved the bike outside and down the hotel steps, this sir character smartly buggered off, leaving me bereft of vigour and discipline.

The manager poked his head through the door, blew his cheeks out in response to the conditions, then encapsulated my riding companion with commendable efficiency.

I knew my first waypoint was the road past the airport, and asked him to direct me. He did so with palpable reluctance, then slipped into a more urgent, pleading tone.

I watched his shaking head disappear, then turned my pasty, hopeless face towards the beanie-hatted young JCB drivers busily pushing snow into giant spoil heaps around the car park opposite. Somewhere inside my balaclava, my mouth tried to smile.

The first road sign I had passed, just outside Kirkenes, was a fingerpost pointing south. It took a while to decode it. The letters were Cyrillic, and the tightened drawstrings of my outer headwear had narrowed the world to a tiny, fleece-framed slot. Murmansk. I didn’t know much about the place, but it had the right kind of deep-frozen, John le Carré ring to it. What an ideal prompt for quest-launching contemplations: the curdled dream of a socialist utopia and the umpteen millions who suffered in consequence; the threat of nuclear annihilation that had blighted the first half of my life; the general vibe up here in the twitchy ears of the Russian bear’s looming shadow, at a time of East/West tension unparalleled in the post-Curtain era. It wasn’t even snowing at that point, but even so, and with no more than a single hill and 2km under my daft wheels, I’d been too shattered and shell shocked for any such insightful context. Now, with twilight stealing in across a desolate winterscape and the temperature into double digits below, my brain was running on empty, bypassed by a crude, numb instinct for survival.

Onwards I inched and slithered, squinting through shotgun volleys of windborne ice at the grim, grey Barents Sea, the stunted birch skeletons waist-deep in billowed white, and my multifunction Garmin GPS, its terrible data barely legible beneath the slushy smears of my screen-clearing efforts with a weary, thrice-gloved hand. In five wretched hours I had covered 36km; the old man reckoned Näätämö lay at least 20 further off.

At the hotel in Kirkenes I had mixed two litres of steaming hot water with energy powder and tipped them into my CamelBak fluid-pouch; I took a weary slug from the mouthpiece tube and found it plugged fast with ice. I lowered my right arm back towards its oven-glove handlebar mitt, and in doing so confronted a strange rigidity in the elbow. Dimly I grasped that frozen sweat had plaster-casted my anorak sleeves at a right-angled crook. Colossal frosted bollocks to the social history and geo-politics of the Iron Curtain age. I had my own cold war to fight.

Tim Moore

@mrtimmoore

I’ve gone on holiday by mistake.

Two hours on I was laid bonelessly out on a bed, delivering slack-jawed, reindeer-mince belches at a ceiling splattered with last summer’s mosquitoes. All the furniture had been crowded up against the under-window radiator and festooned with dank wool and polyester. Crowning the bed posts: my wretched last line of under-sock defence, a pair of inside-out supermarket plastic bags releasing their repulsive moisture in sour wafts.

Accepting that I might never be able to think straight again, I gave it one last shot. What had this day taught me? That five hours on an exercise bike – and a single lap of Kew Green on the bike now thawing out in the hall – was inadequate preparation even by my own abysmal historic standards. That I was going to see an awful lot of Finland, and in the slowest of snowbound slow motion: over 1,650km remained, and my average speed stood currently at 8.2kmh. That I would not be swept through this nation on a wave of public enthusiasm. Largely because there was no public: Näätämö stood atop the province of Inari, a region half the size of Holland that was home to 6,783 people – 4,500 of whom lived in two towns. Nor, extrapolating from my motelkeeper, would there be much enthusiasm.

A little old lady with maroon-dyed hair, she had reacted to my rather high-profile arrival at her reception desk by holding up a single hand, her gaze fixed dourly on a soap opera and its subtitled parade of dot-topped vowels. I shuddered and dripped for a full two minutes until an advert break allowed her to welcome the Rajamotelli Näätämö’s newest guest – and, as I swiftly established, its only one. I’ve seen enough interviews with racing drivers to know that Finns operate a very limited range of facial expressions, but was nonetheless impressed by her stony indifference to my bike, pooling gritty meltwater across her lino, and especially to my face – a memorable study, as my bedroom mirror soon revealed, in partially defrosted mucus.

The day’s final lessons had unfolded in short order. A heaving plate of lingonberry-smothered Rudolfburger and chips taught me that though I might starve to death between Finland’s far-flung hamlets, within them I would be generously refuelled. The landlady’s habit of blankly repeating an approximation of what I had just said to her (Towels? Toe-else. Food? Foat. Bicycle here? Bissa clear) suggested communication would not be straightforward in the weeks ahead. Beyond ‘reindeer’, our only shared word was ‘sauna’ – both nouns uttered by her with some vehemence to announce a non-choice option. The second my fork chinked down onto an emptied plate, I was all but frogmarched along two dim corridors and into a volcanic wardrobe. Then, alarmingly, all but frogmarched out as I slumped there pink and nude and vacant: after much pointing at her watch and a brandished list of the motel desk’s operating hours, I learned the hard way that I should have put my watch forward by an hour when crossing in from Norway.

Every time exhaustion lured me towards coma-grade slumber, the adrenaline of bewilderment and disorientation yanked me sharply back out. What the actual frozen crap was going on? In the thirty-eight hours since creeping from the matrimonial bed at dawn I had dragged my MIFA into and out of a minicab and a long-distance coach, through three airports and the doors of two hotels. I had put on so many clothes that I could barely walk, see or hear, then saddled up this tiny bike and ridden it for seven hours through deep snow and the occasional blizzard, at the speed of a dying tramp. My digits pulsed in cook-chill distress, and my toothpaste was still frozen solid.

And so to the day’s toughest lesson. A remedial class, really, in which a frosted dunce learns that well-established trends in climatology are more valuable than his own half-arsed predictive dabblings. While planning my itinerary, I discovered that Northern Finland had experienced a comparatively balmy winter the year before, and was now enjoying an even milder one. I was thus incited to pooh-pooh the worriers who urged me not to set off until at least May, or to do the ride the other way up if I really couldn’t wait that long – starting at the Iron Curtain Trail’s Black Sea end with a view to reaching the Arctic Circle in high summer. (This latter option was never on the cards: as a slave to the ‘idiot’s gravity’ of the map, I just couldn’t begin to imagine heading from south to north.)

Tim Moore

@mrtimmoore

My washbag was in this front carrier. Just tried to brush bits of reindeer burger from my gob with frozen toothpaste.

Every time I consulted the colour-coded online forecast for Lapland, all I saw was a sea of the very palest blue, with occasional islands of yellow. On my wife’s birthday in mid-December it had been 1.9 degrees Celsius in the Näätämö area, and by the second week of February, winter seemed all but over. Yes, there would still be snow. Of course there would, and I wanted some – it was as deeply ingrained in my mental image of the Iron Curtain as coiled razor wire, border guards with peaked hats the size of cartwheels, and a young Michael Caine being bundled into the boot of a Wartburg. But on 16 March, three days before my departure, the Näätämö mercury topped 8 degrees. So much for all those self-styled voices of reason, many of them thickly Finnish, who had warned me that the Lapland winter generally peaked in March, when the snow would be at its deepest.

My phone screen faded to black on the bedside table, thoughtfully concealing an online local weather map awash with negative teenage numbers. Winter had come back in from the cold. Why was this happening? It all seemed so unfair, and yet so very richly deserved.

If the printed welcome on the deserted dining hall’s door failed to sharpen my appetite, then the view from its window would make that fourth bowl of cornflake muesli a challenge. Beyond the streaky double glazing, shimmering under a hard blue sky, lay a silent, white wilderness of the most terrible beauty, a very still, very lifeless still life. A garden bench just outside was buried up to the top inch of its backrest, encircled by conifers weighed down with chubby dollops of icing. Further, past Näätämö’s desolate scatter of snow-wigged concrete barns, a monochrome nuclear winter tolled out in every direction: barren white slopes speared with dead black trees, the introduction to a huge and hostile nothingness.

The stretch south of Näätämö offered a choice I had wrestled with for weeks. Either a safe but scant 33km to the next settlement, Sevettijärvi, or the full-fat statement of intent set out by an 88km ride to a rentable lakeside hut much further south. This late-onset winter made the decision for me: no way on God’s frozen earth could I manage 88km in these conditions. So an hour later, a fleece-faced, hi-vis klutz slalomed blithely past Näätämö’s petrol-station grocery, knees-out on a kid’s bike, off into the 20-mile void.

It was midday. Three hours of lonely but increasingly competent trans-Arctic pedalling had delivered me across a pin-sharp winter wonderland to the tiny, forest-nestled village of Sevettijärvi, and the bar-hotel-restaurant that welcomed the cold and weary from a catchment area the size of Yorkshire. The morning’s achievements had hotwired my flatlining Arctic mojo, but this latest faltering discourse with an elderly Finnish landlady was heading ominously off-piste.

A tantalising coil of heat swirled through the door she was sticking her head through. This wooden-walled, steep-roofed oasis was self-evidently Sevettijärvi’s one-stop shop, the only show in town: a parade of snow-covered receptacles around the front proved that locals congregated here to collect mail, buy bulk food and consume alcohol with crate-piling abandon. The surge of relief and achievement that had propelled me recklessly down the pine-lined Cresta Run that linked the bar to the road was swamped by a rising tide of panic. It was ten below and falling.

The slightly constipated look that had annexed her compact features intensified, then abruptly burst. ‘Camping – three-five metre!’ Alarmed by her own ejaculation, she jabbed a finger north-east through the white woods and slammed the door.

Humming reedily, I heaved the bike off through a winding, path-shaped gap in the trees. At times the snow was thigh-deep, but at least there weren’t any wrong turnings to take. For days there never would be. Finally, after the thick end of one-five kilometre, I found myself before a shabby farmhouse encircled by off-season camping chalets, each topped with a plump cushion of snow. Never has a cyclist been so glad to hear a dog bark.

The porch was home to a teetering pile of empty beer cans; after some cautious knocking, the door behind it opened. A tousled old chap in a tracksuit and hiking socks welcomed me forth into a bachelor’s kitchen, its sink piled high with soiled crockery, the smell of blandly functional solo catering heavy in the air.

My host spoke English, enough for me to negotiate the purchase of a plate of lumpy mashed potato, smothered in stewed hunks of an antlered animal with festive associations. For twenty euros this hardly seemed an unmissable bargain, but I wasn’t about to haggle with the nearest calorific competition three hours back down the frozen road. ‘Only reindeer and salt,’ he declared solemnly as he placed his steaming handiwork on the liver-spotted Formica before me. ‘Very natural. You take one beer, yes?’

My refusal left him crestfallen. I suppose he just wanted to deny sole responsibility for that stack of shame in the porch, to roll his eyes and jab a thumb at it when he welcomed summer’s first camper: ‘Honestly, those English cyclists.’

My apologetic head-shake was followed by a semi-explanatory slurp from the CamelBak, laid on the table beside me. He surveyed this apparatus with rheumy disappointment. ‘So, maybe I take one beer.’ In a single practised movement he withdrew a can from a tracksuit pocket, popped the top and tilted it into his stubble. My firm intention to ask this fellow for an overnight bed seemed suddenly flawed, and a moment later I was fairly scooting back down the path I had cleared through the snow on the way up. I am here to report, just, that the liberated glee smeared across my features at this point was not there six hours later.

How do you adapt an old Communist shopping bicycle for a 10,000km expedition? The answer is simpler than you might think: you cast a spell that turns it into a proper bike. While practising this, though, it won’t hurt to seek advice from qualified experts.

My heart was already set on a MIFA 900 when I tracked down a German internet forum devoted to GDR two-wheelers, and posted up an outline of my intended mission plus a request for helpful input. The responses were universally discouraging.

‘Why such an old MIFA? This little bike is very heavy, much more than it looks like.’

‘The MIFA bike was really to ride only in a camping site, from the caravan to the small store for beer and bread. No further!’

‘The core problem might be the weakness of the frame. Please avoid, it will become a horror-trip!’

Most damningly pertinent was the experience of a 900 enthusiast with a passion for long-distance touring. ‘I had this idea too, for a Greek holiday, but I give up after biking 50km in five hours with the little MIFA.’ (On the first day of my ride, it would take me two hours longer to cover 56km.)

I persevered. German eBay had offered up a tantalising trove of MIFAs, amongst them several 904s with double carriers and the less suicidal front brake. I had also discovered the frankly astonishing existence of nail-studded 20-inch snow tyres – a product surely of no interest to any small-wheel cyclist in their right mind. Before the manufacturer came to its senses and burned them all, I bought a pair.

Foolhardy as they clearly thought it, my determination seemed to impress the GDR bike fans. Helpful suggestions, however reluctantly couched, began to pepper their prophecies of doom.

‘You must change origin gear ratio, very slow for the plain and unusable for the mountains.’

‘In DDR era, to make good the MIFA our dad or uncle weld the hinge and sometimes also add a strut.’

‘If you want really to do it, you have my unrestricted respect for this performance! But I think you will still find disappointment in the brake.’

I considered all this, asked more questions and eventually decided on a compromise that preserved core authenticity while offering at least a fighting chance of making it to the Black Sea, and before my children forgot what I looked like. West German shopping bikes of MIFA vintage, I learned, had generally come with a two-speed rear hub – the marvel of Sixties engineering that was the Fichtel & Sachs Torpedo Duomatic, a self-contained, cable-free device allowing urban potterers to change from low gear to high and back with a backwards flick of the pedals. The lower ratio was intended to tackle nothing more than a gentle rise in the high street, but 100 per cent more gears was not to be sniffed at, and I found it predictably easy to convince myself that it wouldn’t be cheating. If anything, this East/West, cross-Curtain vintage hybrid would surely make the bike even more appropriate for the task in hand. Unrestricted respect!

The plan seemed simple: I would take the back wheel off an old 20-inch West German shopper and whack it on a MIFA 904. However, I made rather a meal of the associated logistics, in a manner that ended with my old BMW spinning gaily around on a hail-bound autobahn, before coming to a sudden and uncomfortable halt against the concrete central reservation. A fortnight later the irreparable wreckage was repatriated to a salvage yard in Dover, where a big man with a crowbar helped me prise open the buckled boot. Inside lay the gold, Fichtel & Sachs-equipped, 1970s West German shopper I had bought from a Russian man in Bonn, an hour before the dark sky tipped icy marbles all over the A1 near Wuppertal. I brought it back to London in the hold of a National Express coach. A few evenings later, a Polish van driver arrived at my door with the white MIFA 904 I had been en route to pick up in Leipzig.

‘Is not big,’ he said, holding out the documents for my signature. ‘But is heavy.’

Both attributes were apparent as I wheeled it into the garden for inspection. Before confronting the gold bike in Bonn, I had stubbornly failed to grasp the defining tininess of a bike with 20-inch wheels. For this I blame the Raleigh Twenty upon which I came of cycling age, a family runabout commandeered in order to master gravel skid-stops. As a nine-year-old with the saddle right down and the bars chin high, it had always seemed a beast of a bike. Dwarfed beneath our carousel washing-line, the MIFA looked a dismal, shrunken runt.

It was, if nothing else, original: the fat plastic saddle, the gaffer-taped dynamo and even the chubby, cracked tyres all bore their factory GDR stampings. Some previous owner had applied a decal that graced the frame’s down tube with the possibly ironic legend ‘Nice Ride’, in cursive script. More importantly, this same tube was unencumbered by a folding hinge. Quite how such a screaming absence escaped me in the eBay photos remains a mystery, but I wasn’t about to complain. The hinge had been flagged up by the MIFA collectors as an accident waiting to happen, and which now wouldn’t.

In due course, once supplied with photos, these collectors would express some excitement about my two-wheeled curiosity. I just know you will too. With its caliper front brake and dual luggage carriers it was a MIFA 904 in all but name, a previously unrecorded non-folding model. A stamp under the bottom bracket dated it to the second quarter of 1990 – a forgotten child of the GDR endgame, knocked out in that strange hiatus between the Wall coming down in November 1989 and reunification eleven months later. ‘Fold-bikes were a trendy thing in the 1970s, but completely out in 1990,’ postulated one of my online German friends. ‘Maybe MIFA figured that a 900 without a hinge could be more attractive for the new West market.’ If they did, then just like the Trabant production managers who launched a VW-powered model in the same ambitious spirit of this time, they were badly wrong.

With barely a month left until we flew off to the Arctic together, I set about readying this blameless old campsite runabout for the brutal ride of its life. I removed the dynamo and hit up the gold shopper for its Duomatic rear wheel, bell and kickstand. (This other bike, as a point of interest, was what you might call an extreme folder – when I unscrewed the central bolt the thing fell into two entirely separate halves.) The ferociously pointy-toothed snow tyres had almost eaten their way out of the cardboard box they’d been delivered in, and fitting them required the motorcycle gauntlets I had last worn twenty-five years before, while encouraging a vast and furious cat into his travel basket. Shod in these rotary maces, my MIFA exuded an improbable whiff of aggression, the sort of thing Mad Max’s auntie might have ridden to the bingo.

My devotion to authenticity had never been entirely slavish, and as departure loomed the backsliding gathered pace. Could I reasonably be expected to straddle a vinyl breezeblock for 10,000km? To curl my fingers around bar grips of harshly ridged Bakelite over the same eternity, while pushing round tiny, twin-spindled rubber pedals with enormous Arctic boots? Addressing these issues and a few others was bad news for the bikes I’d be leaving behind in the shed. I took the saddle off my 1914 Giro bike, and mounted it on the chassis plundered from my eldest daughter’s basket-fronted ladies’ model. My daily ride – a thief-repellent eBay clunker – donated handlebar grips and flat pedals, and my mothballed Tour de France bike bequeathed its panniers. With a sigh and a dip of the shoulders, I then trudged shamefully forth to the darkened outer limits of acceptable compromise.

Even without a folding hinge, my MIFA’s single-spar open frame had shrieked its pliable vulnerability to all who saw it. Rather than the double-braced diamond established as the time-honoured bicycle standard, here was a two-sided triangle. With its twin carriers laden with luggage and a grown ninny in the saddle, there seemed little reasonable prospect of such a design covering the full and bumpy length of Europe without profound structural mishap. There wasn’t enough tubing, and what there was had been forged and assembled by Communists. Because try as I might, there was no forgetting my unhappy introduction to East German bicycles: the ten-speed GDR-built racer that was my sixteenth birthday present, a brand-new machine that died of old age before I could vote.

At any rate, the frame clearly needed some sort of brace. After a fiesta of scattergun Googling I found that scaffolding handrails came in tubes of appropriate diameter, sold with clamps that together might make a bolt-on crossbar. Just in case this scheme wasn’t as excellent as it seemed, I did a search for ‘amateur frame-builder’ and emailed the first name that came up for a second opinion. ‘My instinct on the scaffold poles is that they aren’t a good idea, but I could be wrong,’ replied Stephen Hilton, before politely explaining in elaborate detail why he definitely wasn’t. Stephen’s easy way with the language of fillet brazing and mitres marked him out as an unusually capable amateur. His subsequent actions marked him out as an unusually wonderful man. Within a week, he had taken my frame away to his domestic workshop in Chorley, fitted a bespoke bolt-on top-tube and delivered it back to my door. ‘Just in time,’ he said as my eyes filled with tears of grateful wonder. ‘The front and back tubes were already way out of parallel.’ Despite my repeated efforts, this noble paragon of self-taught frame-builders would not accept a penny for all that brazing, mitring and crawling up and down the M6. It’s the least I can do to order you – yes, you – to buy one of his frames.

Alas, it is almost time to bring this enthralling tale of salvage, plunder and mechanical give-and-take to a close. But one chapter remains before the Dr Frankenstein of expeditionary shopping bicycles brings his ungodly creation to life, and it begins with our spirited protagonist flicking the Vs at a Thompson bottom bracket.

Soon after my MIFA arrived I noted that its between-the-pedals engine-room was home to that eponymous cottered horror, the same stupid, clonking mess that did its un-level best to destroy my 1914 Giro ride. Having bent down to insult this engineering travesty, I battered the hateful thing clean out of the frame with a club hammer. A cotterless replacement arrived in due course from Germany, and Peter from our pub-quiz team came round to help me coax it into place. Pooling our resources – his dextrous inventiveness, my crate full of century-old bike bits – we also fashioned a bracket to connect the arm of the rear-wheel coaster brake to the bike frame, and another to brace the wobbly rear luggage carrier.

The great unknown was the Duomatic hub, which to judge from the state of the 1970s bike it came off hadn’t seen much action in decades. An online search unearthed an exploded diagram – more precisely a shattering detonation of microscopic ironmongery – which persuaded us to leave it be. To atone we slathered most of the bike in engine oil, then tightened everything up really, really hard, wishing we’d done these things the other way round.

‘Night and day,’ I said, hauling my leg over Stephen Hilton’s crossbar. This sounded preferable to full disclosure: with my departure three days off, that was the first time I’d ridden the thing.

Two days in, and already pleading for my life. This lakeside hut renter was proving a reluctant Samaritan on the phone; I had just interrupted her assertion that the eighty-five-euro overnight tariff did not entitle guests to bedding, towels or sustenance of any sort. The hut was still more than 20km away, the daylight frail and frigid, and the next place to buy food was the town she was speaking from, a further 60km up the road. All I could be grateful for was that even here – way out in the frozen, lonely sticks – Finland’s deep association with mobile telephony had endowed me a three-bar signal.

A pained sigh crackled from the speaker, at length followed by words. ‘Some people stay also with you. I talk and maybe they give you food.’

Tim Moore

@mrtimmoore

Lovely day except for the minus 14ness. And the 11 hours to do 88km.

To the cyclist, snow is like sand. If you’ve ever ridden a bike on the beach, you will have an idea of the consequent 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 that 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 with antlers downcast, 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 duly 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 minus 13, and my eyelashes started freezing together.

Before setting off, I had researched the risks and rewards of riding a bicycle in extremely cold weather, as described by a plucky brotherhood of online ‘ice bike’ enthusiasts. The upsides seemed both vague and few, no more than a handful of rhetorical questions that begged for unkind answers: ‘Need a place to reflect and unwind?’ ‘Want to push yourself right to the limit?’ ‘How does your own private road through an Arctic wilderness sound?’ Not really; no; absolutely bloody terrifying.

The downsides, though, presented an endless litany of danger and distress. In the brutal days ahead I dwelt regularly on the scariest. Most centred on the human brain and body’s suicidally whimsical reactions to extreme cold. When Captain Oates succumbed to frostbite on that sorry runners-up trudge back from the South Pole, he slept with his feet outside the tent: the agony as they thawed inside was literally unbearable. Take a bow, circulation and nervous systems – some lovely interplay there. (What a tragedy to reflect that if Oates had only been able to pull a pair of plastic carrier bags on under his socks, he could have starved to death with everyone else thirteen days later.)

Then there’s the moronic package of death-welcomers we call hypothermia. In response to intense but sub-lethal cold, our brain essentially gets drunk – both quickly and extremely – and starts making giggly prank calls to every gullible body part. The hands that were frozen a moment ago suddenly feel pleasantly warm. Your eyes decide the map makes more sense upside-down, and a report comes in from your ears that a rescue helicopter is touching down just behind that hill. Before you know it your legs are striding enthusiastically off the path and up through a dense and snowbound forest, and making good speed with those clumsy boots discarded. Soon your fingers are so burningly hot that you offer your gloves to the centaur at your side, who gobbles them whole and vomits up the paisley Travelodge that will somehow evade the hikers who chance upon your clenched remains four years later.

To fight off this insidious malaise, I had learned that one must first conquer the enemy within: sweat. If perspiration accumulates inside multiple layers and does not (bleargh) ‘wick away’, in very cold conditions it is likely to freeze. This is much to the detriment of your all-important core temperature, and when it happens, you already have one bare foot in the grave. Since the frozen-sleeves anorak incident I had been on paranoid alert against sweat and its causes, a vigil that began even before I set out in the morning. Fully clad in all my many layers, at room temperature I would begin to froth up like a salted slug within two minutes. The answer was to breakfast in thermal vest and long johns – sorry, landladies – before pulling on the rest in a sort of controlled frenzy, then waddling swishily out into the Arctic like a big fat love doll.

That was the easy bit. Once the body hit normal operating temperature out on the road, any vaguely concerted effort would slam down every lever in my sweat factory. I’d survived a frosted-elbow scare while labouring up a gentle hillside before lunch, but the challenge now ahead was an open invite to heavy perspiration – concerted effort, and lots of it, was unavoidable if I fancied reaching that hut by nightfall. And that was before I factored in the circular conundrum presented by another capricious failing of psycho-physiology: if there’s one thing guaranteed to make you sweat like a pig, it’s the knowledge that doing so might kill you.

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 glassy gaze to the Garmin screen, and watched the temperature flash down to minus14.2°C. A pitiful sniff froze my nostril hairs with a space-dust crinkle. Somewhere inside their six-layer cocoon of rubber, merino wool and polythene my toes died, a farewell klaxon-scream of agony fading into wooden numbness. Far more terrible, though, was the message that soon 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 four-walled thermal prison. Frozen shitlords! Here they came, the opiate delusions of hypothermia, luring me off to a peaceful, stupid death. The very thought squeezed my sweat glands like ripe citrus; both armpits prickled and a rivulet wriggled its way down the back of my neck. No! I arched my back to blot this bastard harbinger against an inner layer, and in doing so made a discovery that sent a steamy shriek of terror across the Arctic wastes. My anorak – the whole thing, sleeves, torso, collar and all – had frozen solid from the inside, an exoskeleton of iced sweat that I could have taken off and stood up in the snow beside me. Then befriended and gone off with hand in stiffened cuff, over the snowy hills to find that helicopter.

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 dread footnote: ‘by this stage you may already be too far gone to recognise the problem’. It didn’t help that sleepy, irrational confusion had been my default state for forty-eight hours. Then came the suspicion that the very act of hosting this inner monologue proved I was already too far gone to recognise the problem. How much further? With a dying groan I looked down at the Garmin and met a blank screen – the battery had gone. Hysteria welled in my guts. Did I have 5k left? Ten? The sweeeshsweeeeeeeshsweeeeeeeeeeshthwosh-

ALSO BY TIM MOORE

1. TO THE NORTH

2. FINNISH LAPLAND

3. THE WINTER WAR