The Black Bag of Shame

I've mentioned in one of my recent blogs what a wizened old prune I've always been. Even as a seventeen year-old I could pass for fifty-five. Nearly. Well, I could easily buy bottles of Martini for my then-girlfriend and her mates, who were all fifteen at the time. It felt furtive but drinking the sickly sweet shite felt oh so good. Well, not drinking it, obviously, but its effect. I didn't know any better. It was the summer of 1987. My family had gone to Malta and left me alone for two weeks. What the hell else was I supposed to do with a houseful of fifteen year old girls?

Now that I'm 637 (and a half), I thought that this furtive feeling was just a distant memory. But in Turkey, "the system" reduced me to clandestine pickups of bags of booze just like the olden days. I took to downloading some vintage Terence Trent D'Arby tracks from YouTube just to make it all feel genuinely teenage again.

As far as I can see, Turkey has an odd relationship with alcohol. Although the country itself is officially secular, the vast majority of Turks are Muslims and, according to the Koran at least, Muslims don't drink. Now, Turkey is known in the west for offering a fairly relaxed sort of Islam, certainly not the kind of place that's going to stone the missus if she looks suggestively at a donkey, but does this relaxation extend to alcohol?

There are lots of establishments in Turkey that advertise the fact that they sell their expensive booze. Outside of Istanbul, restaurants rarely seem to sell it. Even those outdoor cafés that do sell it, like those in Bandirma, never had anyone visibly drinking it. Supermarkets almost never sell it either (I've seen only two that do in the whole of Turkey and one of those was in Istanbul) and neither do most corner shops. But if the bright blue logo of Turkish brand Efes or the easier-to-miss gold of Tuborg is shown around a corner shop's logo, then it's an off licence. And yet I seem to be the only person who goes into these places. Here's the procedure:

1. I walk in. The shopowner looks guilty. He never smiles (which is unusual for a Turk).

2. I walk to the beer fridge. The shopowner has already located and opened a black - always black - carrier bag.

3. If there does happen to be anyone else in the shop, especially someone under eighteen, he is now sniggering, as though I am buying a stack of Gusset Munchers porn mags or something worse, like Model Train Enthusiast.

4. The beer quickly goes into the black plastic bag and the financial transaction is carried out with the utmost haste. I leave feeling guilty for reasons I can't fathom.

The black bag

As a side note, during Ramadam (or Ramazan in Turkey) even this is not always possible because some of the off licences stop selling alcohol entirely, which sort of makes you wonder why they don't just take a month's holiday.

And so I'm puzzled. If I'm the only person buying from these shops, then how do these shops make any money? They can't just have set up with the knowledge that I'll be passing through town, lovely though that thought is. If they have, they've certainly overestimated how much I can drink, although if they reduced their price I'd be prepared to give it a go. Like I say, I'm puzzled.

UniCycle50's Facebook page now has at least five Turkish Likers. If any of you can give me more information on this topic (without incriminating yourselves if that's a possibility) then I'd love to know.

The black-bag-as-cloaking-device in itself is odd. While cycling I've popped into such an off licence and bought only a can of Coke and then you get an innocent white carrier bag (that is, if you don't tell them in time that you don't need a carrier bag for a single can of Coke), a white carrier bag that is probably hand-stitched from the hymens of a thousand virgins. So the black bag doesn't hide that you've bought some naughties; it merely highlights the fact. But maybe that's the idea. Maybe it's the black bag of shame, the mark of Cain, the Judas sack.

None of this affects me now. I've moved on to Bulgaria where the opposite is the case. This afternoon I was sat on a lovely, sunny terrace drinking a decent pint for 66p. Whereas Turkey usually sold a bottle of rubbish blended whisky for €50 (I kid you not), here a large bottle of schnapps is a tenth of the price. Alcohol here is so cheap and so plentiful that I might just end up dead in a gutter. If that happens, please would someone pop around and cover my face with the black bag of shame.

Bishops and God and a Load of Istanbul

There's nothing like consistency within the Church. When a youthful and virtuous loved one is struck down by terminal cancer and you ask a vicar or priest how God could let this happen, he'll respond with some meaningless tat that we can't know the mind of God or something equally vacuous. All very convenient. But in Nicaea back in the year 325 it was possible to know exactly the mind of God, even to define the mind of God, because hundreds of bishops descended upon the place to discuss that very thing.

The walls of Nicaea

It's all now a bit laughable what these people were seriously discussing. Was the Father and the Son one in divine purpose or also one in being? Easy, neither. It's all made up. Next! What date should Easter be? Easy, it doesn't matter. Probably later is better because we might then get some decent weather for the Bank Holiday weekend. Next! What is the role of the Holy Ghost? What, seriously? It wasn't a ghost; it was Mr Jenkins from the amusement park in a mask, you pesky, meddling kids. And on it went.

They also came up with a list of new church laws, or canons. The first of these was to forbid self-castration, which seems like a sensible if largely unnecessary rule to me. Or maybe it was the fashion at the time, I don't know. Perhaps you couldn't walk down the street without someone chopping off their bollocks and lobbing them at passing traffic. Another rule was that the presence of a younger woman in the house of a cleric was banned. Given that these were Catholics it might have been wiser to prohibit the presence of eight year-old boys. I mean, when do you ever hear of priests and young women?

Anyway, why am I talking about all this? Because I'm here, in Nicaea, the very place where all this, erm, important stuff was decided. It's not called Nicaea any more; it's now known as Iznik. You can see why the bishops and their vast entourages descended upon this place. It's lovely. It sits by a large, turquoise lake, surrounded by rugged mountains on all sides. They also do nice kebabs here. I bet that was a big pull. If you've been discussing ecumenical matters all day, in the evening you'll probably want to go out, get lagered up and finish off with a tasty doner or two.

The lake of Nicaea

This is one of my last stops here in Asia Minor. My vast Turkish adventure is coming to an end. I cycled the 1,200 kilometres from the Greek-Turkish border in the north to the scolding hot south coast via the cities of Bursa, Eskişehir and Konya, the home of whirling dervishes. From there I ferried myself to Cyprus and back and after a quick visit to Turkey's modern capital of Ankara and another 1,000 kilometres I'm now a day's ride from the ferry in Yalova that will take me to Istanbul. All the roads entering Constantinople from the east are motorways and arriving by boat seemed the most romantic way to take myself back to Europe. Besides, I saw Michael Palin arrive in Istanbul by boat and I wanted to copy him.

After a week's break with The Lovely Nina in Byzantium, it's only two or three days before I'm out of here and I cross over into Bulgaria. And then after doing only nine capitals between the end of March and early August, I'll be visiting another nine in a single month. This is their highest concentration on the entire tour - Sofia, Pristina, Skopje, Tirana, Podgorica, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana - in about 1,900 kilometres on the road. And after last year's grand total of four currencies (sterling, euros, Swiss francs and Czech korunas), I'll have to deal with nine different ones in 30 days. Expect me to be offering handfuls of change to Slavic shopkeepers with the bewildered look of a British pensioner.

And then two days from Ljubljana, over the border in Austria, it'll all be done for another year. 2012 has disappeared even more quickly than the last one, whatever it was called. By the time I reach Graz for my second visit on this tour in mid-September I will have cycled something close to 22,000 kilometres. Happily I'll still only be two-thirds of the way to the end with 16 more capitals left to do, including the largest capital by population (Moscow), the capital within the dodgiest country (Minsk in Belarus) and the capital with the most disgustingly pungent canned fish dish (Surströmming in Stockholm). They have to open it outside under running water, for Christ's sake.

Britain and Britons can often be quite down on Europe. But it is the most amazing place on the planet. The concentration of capitals and national differences are what makes it the most interesting continent on which to cycle. Within an hour you can find yourself in an entirely different culture. That wouldn't happen in the States or in Australia. Where would be the fun in cycling there? God knows. Or at least a bunch of bishops could visit my hotel room in Nicaea and decide for Him.

The Day The Shit Hit The Rim

I suspect that at one point during this blog the hackneyed expression "Too much information!" will flash through your mind like a perv in a park. Don't do it; it's not worth thinking in clichés. But if that's my fault then I think it's important that as well as bragging about all the good stuff that happens to me I'm honest when things don't quite work out. And yesterday was one the shittiest days possible.

For a while I hadn't been looking forward to Wednesday. It was a longer ride than normal, out of Bursa - a strange and massive, traffic-stuffed city - with several mountains to climb and, if the previous days had been any indication, a hurricane in my face. As it turned out, with a cool-aired, half-six start, nothing but a gentle breeze, an overcast sky keeping the sun off for the uphill bits, and mountains that seemed to melt away, I was an hour and a half ahead of schedule with only eight kilometres to Bozüyük, my destination. Life was perfect. All was well.

Yes, all was well with the world...

But then it wasn't well. I got a puncture. OK, that's a pain in the arse but no worse than that. I flipped the bike over, got out one of my spare inner tubes - one I'd previously fixed - and test-inflated it. And that's when I realised that I'd previously put it back in the bag with the intention of fixing it and then I'd never actually got around to it, lazy sod. Not to worry, I had a second, brand new inner tube. I took off the tyre and reinstalled it with the new inner tube. I inflated the tube and, once again, all was rosy.

Except it wasn't. What is the one thing you must absolutely do whenever you change a tube? That's right, you check that whatever caused the initial puncture isn't still inside the tyre. Because, of course, it might puncture the second tube.

It punctured the second tube.  Had I checked it? No, I hadn't. Was the thing still inside the tyre? Of course it was. One kilometre down the road I had another flat tyre, but now I had no spare inner tubes. Brilliant! What a dick. But that was the least of my worries because that's when I noticed it: The crack. In my back wheel rim, the wheel that takes all the weight. A spoke was spontaneously removing itself and destroying my wheel in the process. I'm riding on 700Cs, a non-standard size outside of western Europe. Replacing or repairing the wheel in Turkey could take forever, or at least long enough to seriously disrupt my entire ride. To finish this year in time for the exams I might even have to miss out Cyprus, and UniCycle49 sounds crap.

I still had to get us to town. Now, of course, the overcast sky had gone. I pushed the hobbled chopper the seven kilometres to Bozüyük in the now mid-afternoon, blazing July sunshine.  And I burnt my stupid face off.

On the edge of town, with a similarly-coloured complexion to that of Mr Strong, I found an old bike repair man. He couldn't do much about the non-standard, cracked rim but he trued up the wheel so that the knackered spoke wasn't deforming it and we repaired the puncture. At least the bike was rideable now, for the final 500 metres to the only hotel in town.

The edge-of-town old cycle repair man

So with a broken rim, a crispy face, an evening of puncture repair ahead, a solution to find to the mystery of how to replace 700C wheels in a country that doesn't generally sell them, and the prospect of a three-year trip in tatters, my mood wasn't great. I thought I would cheer myself up by doing something crazy, like going to the toilet. Maybe I'd do a little wee or something. Y'know, fellas, sometimes, as you're in the bathroom and heading bowlwards, it's a discrete time to let out a little gas, relieve some pressure. And there's nothing wrong with that. As long as it is gas.

Mmm. Mine wasn't. Despite avoiding Turkish tap water and not having had a kebab for a couple of days, my insides were, unknown to me, molten and, yes, inside my cycling shorts, I cacked myself. There you go. Feel what you like: disgust, sympathy, sexual arousal, whatever, it's out there now. In retrospect, perhaps it had been very wise not to look forward to Wednesday.

You might be wondering why I'm telling you this. Part of it stems from a similar incident in Majorca, aged 18, when, with another dodgy stomach, something equally tragic happened on a mountainside while walking with my brother and he has loved to bring it up at parties whenever possible while I frantically deny it. So instead, to exorcise the demons before they emerge, I'll tell everyone now and get it out of the way. Don't go thinking I'm a serial cacker - twice in a lifetime isn't bad. I think. Now that I've confessed, I realise that there was no one present during this second incident and it need never have got out at all. Unlike the...ah, you know.

Anyway, it's alright now. The cycling shorts are thoroughly washed. Today, I managed to crawl the forty kilometres to Eskisehir and find the one bike shop with 700C rims. While waiting for Ibrahim to rebuild my wheel, I was also entertained by Ümit, the next door barber, despite an initial misunderstanding on my part (Me: "Ah, so you're from Africa then." Him: "No, here." Me: "Oh, I thought you said Berber.") He taught me a few words of Turkish and we had an instant football connection because the unfortunately named Turkish star, Tugay, had played for my team, Blackburn Rovers a few years back. My trip was saved.

Ibrahim, gladiator of the wheel

Ümit, a barber, definitely not a Berber

And I've managed to go the whole day without soiling myself. So far. Things are looking up.

It's Oh So Quiet

Sorry about the silence but since the last blog entry, somewhere around Lisbon at the end of August, things got a little bit hectic. For a start I had to race down to Gibraltar as I desperately needed to pay nearly twice as much for a pint in a duty-free country as in its non-duty-free neighbour, but mostly because I wanted a photograph of my bike with some monkeys climbing on it. Oh, and it's a capital.

Then there was the murderous traffic and non-existent shoulders of Spain's almost entirely flat N-340, lovingly known as the Road of Death. This links Gibraltar to Nerja, my final destination for 2011. As I had no desire to get squished, I had to take a massive detour inland, going from sea level up and over the 1100 metre pass near Ronda, adding more miles to my journey than I care to calculate. Nice scenery though.

But I did it. I arrived in Nerja. And on the last day, my old mountain walking pal, Boz, joined me for the final leg before kicking off the first of many celebratory drinking sessions.

This was followed by seven days in Majorca, playing with telescopes and spectrographs and a daily quota of three hours' sleep. Just like the Nottingham residential back in July, it was another fantastic week. It was harder work, with longer working sessions and no laid on entertainment, but it was full of equally great fellow OU students and climaxed with an utterly brilliant student-organised beach party. Toilet facilities were limited but there was always the Med.

But this is the end of the ride, for 2011 at least. Although I've still to calculate a more accurate figure, I've completed somewhere in the region of 9,000 arse-busting kilometres, visited seventeen countries and sixteen capitals (I'll do Madrid next year) and eaten lungs, spleens, intestines, stomach linings, eels, horse and marmots. I've paid one euro for a pint, met a woman who's climbed Everest twice, been called a tramp by a Christian, spoken bits of ten languages and met some of the nicest people in the world. This has been the best year of my life.

I've spoken to a lot of people about this ride. Many of them have said that they'd love to do something like this, not necessarily cycling but a big adventure. If you're one of those people, please go and do it. If you can't afford to do it yet, work out a plan so that you can. Eventually you will get ill, or old, or worse, and then you won't be able to do it. Do it now. Or plan it now and do it very soon.

For now, I'm taking a break. Not an actual relaxing break - I still need to write up a report for the astronomy residential, revise for my maths exam in mid-October, finish a 20,000 word philosophy dissertation before the New Year, learn as much Italian, Greek and Turkish as possible for next year, revise the Greek alphabet and learn the Cyrillic one, and train for a half-marathon or possibly a marathon in March as a way to keep the weight off over winter. But I'll take a break from this blog.

Action will resume some time in early 2012 while I prepare for the kick off of Year Two, a trip even more exciting than 2011's, with visits to central Turkey, a short excursion avoiding bears and landmines in Kosovo and experimenting with even more foreign languages in forgotten corners of forgotten lands like Albania. So please come back. I'll still be blogging occasionally for the OU on their Platform site (with links from the UniCycle50 Facebook page) but perhaps not as often as I have been doing.

So a massive thanks to each and every one of you for reading this blog, and for commenting, and for Facebook Liking and Twitter following. You probably don't realise the emotional spur your feedback provides. When I find an internet connection in a dreary backwater after a hard day in the saddle, the stuff you write lights up my day. I feel like I've personally carried all three hundred and odd of UniCycle50's Facebook Likers along with me. This has been great, but do you think you could all perhaps lose a bit of weight before I set off again next year?

And now the silence returns until 2012...

Hills 'n' pills 'n' Turkish thrills

In May 2009, just as I was about to set off on a bike ride from the Isle of Man to Spain, my head popped. I don't mean it went bang and whizzed around the room like a balloon or anything, but something leaked that shouldn't have leaked. I'd been very lucky. My condition can often be fatal. The source of the problem was my blood pressure, and it was high, so high in fact that worryingly it shot off the top of those little graphs that hang from hospital beds. I was the first person in history to have his blood pressure expressed in exponential notation. (That's a maths joke, by a way. Enjoy it, there aren't many.)

I had to go to a brain unit in Liverpool, a setup line so obvious that you can fill in your own punchline. In order to see what was up with my noodle, they carried out a cerebral angiogram. This involved sticking a strange tube thing into my groin. Who'd have thought there was a connection between my gentleman's area and my brain? In the end they discovered I'd had a brain bleed. This is just like a haemorrhage except that it's easier to spell. In fact, I'd had three. To prevent this from happening again I had to lie flat and stay completely still, like a Victorian on her wedding night. After pumping me full of drugs, the doctors managed to reduce the blood pressure, which was nice, but the resulting dizziness meant I passed out every time I tried to stand up. But thanks to the medication, that chart on my hospital bed now looked remarkably similar to an recent LibDem popularity graphic.

The problem with taking blood pressure medication is that once you start you tend not to stop. In addition to the laptop and the tent and the saddle-sore-relieving Vaseline and all the other bits and pieces I'll be carting up and over the mountains of Europe, I also need to take six months' pills. And I'm supposed to take six different tablets each day. You don't need a maths degree to work out this is over a thousand pills. I'm hoping that if decanted into little bottles this won't take up too much space. The problem then comes when I'm crossing an international border and the customs official wants to know why I have enough pills to host a party at Pete Doherty's. I could be hearing the thwack of a rubber glove quicker than you can say Midnight Express. Luckily, in Schengen-flavoured Europe, the only time I should need to show my passport in 2011 is when leaving the UK and when entering Andorra. But if you're still following this journal in 2012 when I travel to Turkey, and 2013 when I reach Russia, that's when the fun will begin. If I go quiet all of a sudden, please give Amnesty International a buzz.

So the moral of this week's blog is that you should get your blood pressure checked. It might save your life. Or I suppose it might mean that, a few years from now, when you go off on a bike ride of your own, you get your bottom felt up by Turkish border guards. Then you'll really be glad of that Vaseline.