France: All that way to see a naked woman

September 13, 2015

WELL, TERRY, I did it. You never knew I wanted to and you'll have made so many more exciting journeys since. Or have you? We never met - I was too scared to knock on your door - so I don't know whether I ever waved to you on the road or if you never rode again and became a fat lump with a car.

So, more than half a lifetime after my dream, I have lived it. Will it change the rest of my years? Had its absence blighted my life until now? No, of course not. But there's a satisfaction in something finally achieved, like trying a trampoline, flying a glider or kissing the girl you fancied in your teens.

The ride taught me, or underlined, two things. The first was what I'd known all along: that the joy of travel, its very point, is not sights seen but people met. Spare the time and their world will open. I ate bread and sausage with an old seaman in Poland; I stayed with a world authority on the brain; I drank coffee with a brokenhearted clown; I met a man who made Spitfires; I had breakfast with Korea's head of nuclear safety; I met a couple who had walked the length of Britain; I met an offender doing good works in graveyards; and I discussed the world with countless people whose name I never really knew.

Isn't that the point of travel? To spare the time rather than build the distance?

The other thing I rehearsed was that some countries are beautiful but that people are the same all over. They smile at the same things; they have the same worries. They find matching socks in the morning and wonder if they've put the cat out at night.

I realised again just how beautiful is France. I learned again - because I hadn't been there for so long - how breathtaking, literally and visually, are the hills in England and Wales. And for the first time I went further north in Scotland than Glasgow and Edinburgh - and wondered why I'd left it so long.

Holland was familiar. I know Holland well, at least how it works, what to expect. Northern Germany was the only disappointment, for the dreary countryside, the awful but obligatory bike paths, and the empty villages.

Denmark was gentle and inoffensive and full of pleasant surprises, the sort that make your day on a bike but you'd never mention on a postcard.

I can't tell you much about Sweden because I went there, as with Everest, because it was there. I took a ferry there and three days later I took a ferry away again, to Poland.

That was a mystery, Poland. I'm thrilled to have been there. It's so clearly different from western Europe. And Poles were universally friendly, caring and - to the limits of the language - inquisitive. I am deeply moved by the sadness of their history and the courage they repeatedly showed to overcome it. But the beauty of Poland, I think, is in the wedding-cake towns more than the countryside.

And the same, to a lesser extent, applied in the Czech Republic. (How hard it is to write that, even after so many years, rather than "Czechoslovakia".) I had one of the happiest days of my cycling life in the Czech Republic (there we go again), the day I found that wonderful leafy path that I rode and walked by turns. But that merely pointed out the contrast with elsewhere.

Perhaps it would have been different had I got into the mountains. The problem of a linear journey is that it is just that: a line. I rode a big zigzag to see Gdansk, Warsaw and Krakow, and on a couple of days in the Czech Republic I had the rolling, pastoral countryside that Poland couldn't offer. Not where I went anyway.

But the joys were, as in Poland, in the beauty of little places I'd never heard of and struggled to pronounce.

There were wet-sock days, naturally. If not literally then spiritually. We've all had those, so I won't bore you. But when I had one on my last but one ride of the journey, it was more than compensated by the surprise discovery of the old town at Pardubice.

I could so easily have missed it. If I'd concentrated only on getting to my destination, not satisfied my curiosity to see what was on the other side of that archway, I'd be home right now without knowing it even existed.

But then, isn't that where I came in? That the point of travel is not to get there but to revel in the getting. To give people time to tell their story, because a story they always have. To wonder what's round the corner, through an archway.

There are corners in everybody's life but so few take them.

[]

I leave you, with my thanks for riding along this far, with some photos that never made it to the story.

Not so far from Dover, a rich eccentric created a 22km steam railway line with scale models of the locomotives that ran on the nation's main lines

Stow-on-the-Wold: probably not authentique but charming nevertheless

Llangollen: a volunteer paints a sign for the steam railway

Nelson: it was a pub but long ago, as the sign shows, it was headquarters of the town's cycling club

Yorkshire Dales: chance meeting with a hill walker

Warsaw: the goddesses of justice were so shocking - their nipples were visible - that the city moved the entrance to the high court to the other side of the building

Czech Republic: the glum buildings of yesterday are bright, even too bright, today

Prague: for old time's sake, a tram still runs from the communist period

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