With a bike, you can conquer countries and continents

The enduring appeal of any enormo-ride is that you never really know what you’ve let yourself in for. It begins at the airport, where the check-in staff will gawp at your bike in theatrical disbelief, as if you’ve turned up with a horse and a sheet of bubble wrap. At that moment, and when you land at the other end and reassemble your mount by the lonely “outsize weird crap” carousel, a bicycle seems like a daft encumbrance, an albatross, a mess of awkward metallic angles. But then you hoick a leg over the crossbar, thread your way through all the jostle and fraughtness and very soon it makes the most perfect sense. The wind in your wheels and the world in your panniers. A self-contained, self-propelled expedition is under way.

It started by mistake. In 1998, retracing the Arctic travels of an eccentric Victorian aristocrat for the journey that begat my first book, I selected a mountain bike as a more biddable alternative to the horse Lord Dufferin rode across Iceland. I had by then developed a fixation with the Tour de France — the daily highlights came on after an afternoon TV quiz popular with students and under-employed freelance writers — and during some of that ride’s more compelling ordeals would sustain myself with improvised sporting commentaries. “Well, Phil, this ford across the glacier-fed River Hvítá has no respect for reputation, but Moore’s got the bike over his head and it looks as if he’s going for it.” It was the first time I’d ever ridden more than four miles, but I came home alive and inspired.

Because we can all ride a bicycle. We have all known what it is to grind agonisingly up a steep hill and freewheel madly down the other side. In its unique dual role as mode of transport and childhood accessory, the bike has played a formative role in all our lives.

If the core skill is universal, then so (whisper it) are the physical demands. My two-wheel odysseys have included retracing previous routes of the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a España, as well as the 8,400km long Iron Curtain Trail, from the tip of Norway to the Black Sea. But they aren’t an extension of a domestic routine — they are literally the only cycling I ever do. My home city of London is a bit of a joyless assault course on a bike, and I’ve successfully convinced myself that setting off on a vast ride completely unprepared is the only way to keep the flames of adventure alive. But though I’m now depressingly deep into my fifties, after that first awful day on the road my body always seems to heal with use. Cycling puts no stress on the joints. As long as you make a reasonably early start you will find it hard not to cover 100km every day. No matter who you are or what you’re riding.

With 180 years between them, the last three bikes I’ve commandeered must have dearly hoped that at their age the hard yards were over. When I showed a serious cyclist the tiny-wheeled communist-era East German shopping bike that I hoped would take me all the way down the Iron Curtain Trail, he assured me that my MIFA 900 would end up being hurled into the first unfrozen lake I came to. But a bike, even if it’s ancient, ridiculous or both, will always get you there in the end. It took me nine weeks to reach the Black Sea, but I made it having suffered just one puncture.

This ability to make decent daily headway is paramount: walking is a fearsome slog and does your knees in, but a few hours in the saddle can deliver you from one world to another. This time last year, I had breakfast in flyblown, parched Navarra and dinner in Vitoria-Gasteiz, the verdant, damp Basque capital. The weather, the language, the architecture, the food, the drink and every other socio-cultural trapping had all changed beyond recognition; the landscape was painted from an entirely new palette, and built on a very different scale. I had somehow bridged these two realms in a single day, and I had done it on an old pushbike.

Continents and cultures evolve around the cyclist, and experiencing these changes absorbs all five senses. My nose let me know when I’d entered Italy’s hazelnut belt, or left aseptic Scandinavia for treble-fermented Russia. I could generally tell when I crossed the old East/West German border by feel alone: a ridge of old cobbles or scabrous concrete against velvet tarmac.

With a reasonably early start you will find it hard not to cover 100km every day. No matter who you are or what you’re riding

Local interaction is guaranteed when you’re on a bike. There’s something uniquely disarming about a bike, something mundane, cheerful, slightly vulnerable. My Spanish ride was rooted in some very uncomfortable history: the race I was retracing had been won by Julián Berrendero, a man who’d spent 18 months in Franco’s concentration camps after the civil war. I managed to source a 1970s racer with Berrendero’s name all over the frame, sold at the shop he opened after retirement, and it was to prove an invaluable icebreaking prop which made difficult conversations very much easier.

In general, though, these are solitary endeavours, something nonetheless preferable to the alternative, as I’ve found that other touring cyclists are to be avoided. Halfway across Iceland, I shared an unbelievably remote hut with an Austrian enduro-freak who went through all the food I had packed, and angrily critiqued its disappointing calorific value/weight ratio with reference to a huge spreadsheet he had brought along. “Why did you not make such a study?” That was a long night.

These epic rides always end the same way, and it isn’t pretty. After traversing a large country under my own steam, or in one case an entire continent, I am powerless to resist a tidal surge of vainglorious arrogance. I spool back through all the mountains, the valleys, the endless hot plains, and consider myself lord and master of every conquered landscape. Parting the airport-terminal doors with my front wheel, I push through crowds of inferior humans, little people who have never and will never know the glory that comes with such hard-fought, heroic achievement. A strong connection with sunstroke and malnutrition means these delusions fade after two well-fed days at home, but my word they’re fun while they last.

‘Vuelta Skelter’ (Jonathan Cape) is Tim Moore’s latest book, an account of his ride around the 1941 Vuelta a España

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