Iberia

By Julian Sayarer

'Iberia is Julian Sayarer's account of his impromptu journey across Portugal and Spain, from Lisbon towards Barcelona, undertaken during a pandemic on an old blue bicycle named Miles
Finding himself in Lisbon amidst a pandemic, Julian Sayarer decides simply to ride. Through hazy landscapes and on baked roads, he pedals east. During long hours in the saddle, his thoughts traverse matters big and small – hopping from post-colonial culpability to the supremacy of an orange picked at the roadside. Across 900 miles of sun-drenched olive groves, vast mountainscapes, and dormant towns glimpsed through driving rain, Sayarer's journey is punctuated by fleeting, beautiful moments of human connection. Iberia is a celebration of a shared humanity and community found in a uniquely fragile time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fox, Finch & Tepper
• Release date: Dec 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9780993046780

Julian Sayarer

Julian Sayarer has travelled widely by bicycle and as a hitchhiker. His first book, Life Cycles, tells the story of his world record for a circumnavigation by bicycle, and more Fifty Miles Wide recounts a bicycle journey through Palestine. He is a past fellow of the Royal Literary Fund and a recipient of the Stanford Dolman Book of the Year for Interstate, a depiction of an unseen USA. Iberia is his sixth book.

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PORTUGAL

ATLANTIC

LUIS

I FIRST MET LUIS not long after riding into the north of Hungary, ten years ago as I pedalled towards Shanghai and he cycled – well, he wasn’t sure where he was going. Luis was from Peru, a suburb outside Lima, and in the end he wound up riding to Moscow, where he worked some years without papers, washing dishes in kitchens, enjoying life, getting-by. At the time of our meeting, he had a line of dark black stitches, crossing his chin and that were just about holding, though being pulled at by the nasty wound he’d acquired when a gravelly descent in Albania slipped his wheels out from under him, and down he went. Luis had come-to from concussion, surrounded by villagers who loaded him into a truck and took him to a doctor, who stitched him up and would hear no talk of payment.

That day in Hungary, we rode together and shared old stories of riding in Albania. We talked of the total hospitality, agreeing that it was sometimes overbearing but probably, and literally, what the doctor ordered when in need of medical attention.

We camped a night in a recreation ground on the outskirts of a place called Győr, and next morning rolled into town to sit through a serious café session of four coffees and talk of the world, accompanied by bread and a budget Eastern European Nutella. Though still three months away, for reasons I shan’t trouble you with right now, I was on a tight schedule to get to Shanghai, my first stop on my way around the world, and as the third coffee was about to become the fourth, Luis asked me:

Are you sure you have time for another coffee?

And I paused.

What’s the point in cycling around the world, if I don’t have time for another coffee with a friend?

Luis would later go on to remind me that these were my words, as I walked back in to get the coffee, and I would always be grateful to him for keeping the memory. It’s nice to be remembered well by others, memorialised in one of those rare and glistening lines that we would like to think that we live by, and we can at least take comfort in the fact that this is how another is remembering us, even as we spend too many of our days not quite living up to the line.

LISBON

THE SECOND TIME I MET LUIS was last week in Lisbon. I did not know he was here. He now has a scar on his chin and we talked, laughing, about the Albanian hospitality that is sometimes overbearing but, we agree, the sort of thing that is not only useful in a medical emergency, but also makes a life worth living.

Luis now has a girlfriend in Lisbon and a two-month old daughter. He has spent most of the last five years living in my beloved Istanbul, still getting-by, and still enjoying life. He tells me about his last ride; through Iran, Turkmenistan and into Central Asia. He reminds me of the things that I have forgotten and that it is sometimes the joy of forgetting to get to learn anew.

He reminds me that he dances tango, and tells me how he first met the mother of his child dancing tango in Lisbon. He tells me of the time, while he slept on sofas in Iran, of how he taught a secret tango class in Mashhad, one of the most religious cities in the country. I am grateful for all of my friends, but perhaps particularly those I met at the roadsides, and who were also pedalling. In them somehow is a secret photo of the world at its best.

Away from the table where we sit, outside and in open air, drinking our beers, there is a pandemic on. I shan’t say much of it, for we have all heard enough of it already, and its scale is great enough that history will help remember it for us, without much need for me to elaborate on it here. Perhaps later I will write more of it.

I am supposed to go back to the UK, but although I left on an aeroplane, the claustrophobia of the idea seems too much for me right now. I do not like flying at the best of times, and right now is not the best of times.

Why don’t you ride? Says Luis with a smile, and I look at him, slowly, like it’s an extreme but also quite obvious idea.

I don’t know where I’d get a bike. I reply.

And Luis smiles again, like we both know that really isn’t a problem.

BINA CLINICA

THERE ARE ALL KINDS OF CAMARADERIE that unite cyclists and lovers of bicycles around the world, but perhaps the most common element in the whole culture is the smell of rubber as you walk into a bike shop. It is the sort of smell that you stop noticing after a while of working in a bicycle shop, as I did as a teenager and for some of my twenties, but it is the sort of smell that then reminds you of being home whenever you return.

I remember a mechanic, one of the older ones, those enthusiastic collectors of all knowledge. Even then, he was a dying breed in the bicycle world – replaced by younger men and women, with better tattoos, better dentistry and less knowledge – and he explained to me that the rubber smell is accentuated by the smell of dried, powdered fish scales, which are put inside inner tubes to serve as a sort of talc that absorbs any humidity. Rubber and fish scales, then. It is no boutique, but you’d miss this smell if it were gone.

Bina Clinica is to cities what this smell is to bicycle shops. You will always find it. It is next to the railway tracks, perhaps the wrong side of them. It is in an old warehouse space, set in one of a row of factory units from the days when cities made things other than flat whites and vegan wraps. It is piled high with used bicycles waiting for repairs and then to be loved again. It is piled as high with loved bicycles waiting for a mechanic’s touch.

At the back of the space is a workshop behind wooden countertops that – out of sight – I would put money on being constructed on top of salvaged pallets. There are large, cast iron blue vices, wheels in wheelstands, and everything is somehow covered with the shining grey veneer of oil.

This bicycle shop is a universal one. As universal as its smell of rubber, it exists from New York City to Melbourne to Santiago. It is a place where the misfits of a community, people who don’t quite fit a world of cars or a world of consumerism, come to gather. One day they will be driven-out by the landowner needing to charge some sort of a commercial rent, and then they will be replaced by a café. If – that rare thing – the landlord is decent, this day will come later and reluctantly, but it will come. If the owners of the shop are lucky or smart enough, they will just in time invest in a coffee machine, and put some tables outside, so that they can ride this transition and be both bike shop and café. For a while.

Eventually, as inevitable as the force of gravity that once pulled Luis from his bike on an Albanian mountainside, the units will be demolished to make way for luxury flats that will have no soul and none of us will ever own or visit. This is just destiny, but it is our job to resist that destiny for as long as possible. And meanwhile, it is our sworn duty to give our custom to Bina Clinica for as long it shall exist. By the time it is gone, another will exist elsewhere, in a part of town we once wouldn’t have thought to visit. I promise.

After some back-and-forth, a woman who runs the shop, whose name I do not catch and regret not doing, leads me outside to a blue bike with the pannier rack that is in truth all I need.

We have this one.

I look at it. A mountain bike, but, as I lift it, not too heavy. The tyres are knobbly, more traction than I need – will slow me down.

Can you change the tyres?

In Portuguese, she calls back to a mechanic in the workshop. He puts down what he is working on and walks out, lifting two tyres from a hook on the wall. They are fastened with a piece of paper that says €10. They are Schwalbe, Marathon Plus, and he smiles at me as he says it, but I think he rightly guesses that I know what this means.

Second-hand, but they are good.

I talk a little longer with the woman outside, who leads me inside to look at accessories on a further wall. I pull down a bottle cage and a bottle, which – for all the big money and the bespoke recommendations – are truly the only essential accessories you need to ride a long way. Then, the next most essential things; I take a puncture repair kit and then tyre leavers, chunky and yellow – Pedros. A brand, but, I concede, the best brand.

Are these your only levers?

Yes, she pauses. And I smile as she smiles, again knowing that I know, as if these names and items form a language all of their own.

She says it, straight: But they are the best.

At the counter she rings it up. €125.40 for the bike and accessories. She sweeps the tyre levers and puncture kit towards me.

But these I give to you as a gift. She pulls a business card from its plastic holder on the countertop. But if you tell us when you get home, it is nice.

I take the card, I take my gift. Thank you. And can we call it €130? and I gesture to her and the mechanics, so you can have some beers from me after work, to say thank you.

She nods with a surprised smile, thanks me. And between our reciprocal gifts, our little bicycle bartering and kindnesses in-kind, a little of the circle of life continues.

CAMPO

IT IS ONLY WHEN I AM CYCLING that I truly come to life, when I see the world as it could be, and I breathe again. Portugal opens for me, and I relish the knowledge that I have no precise timetable nor even destination. For now, I can just ride. In terms of direction, my only real thought is that north up the coast I go up and down the glorious but high orange cliffs, while turning east I could instead ride the flats of those river valleys that make their ways finally out between the cliffs and to the ocean.

Beyond this, I do not know. I may head towards friends who just left London for Barcelona. Perhaps I will spend a night on the balcony I like to imagine their new flat will have, and we can grill courgettes and chorizo on the coals of a barbecue we’ll light there. I may head further northeast, into France and then Dieppe; that road to the port I know so well, past the cidery of Monsieur Gentilhommière, who prints his name on the green glass bottles of his apple elixir, which it is impossible to drink without a smile also moving over your lips. Alternatively, I may make a more direct route to Galicia, Santander, and then the boat to Devon, riding home through the apples and cideries of my own country.

On a bicycle, the map seems suddenly dressed in opportunity; I see the world anew. Detail presents itself, and as ever the world comes alive in the places between the places; between the ports and the metropoles, where life still happens in ways that defy the clichés of contrived events and image-conscious images, by which media, marketing and surveillance now remake our cityscapes. An old man sits at a bus stop and plays the flute. And my soul drinks from this sight.

My bicycle has a name already. It is the first of my bicycles that I have named for some time, because in order to name a bicycle it must have character and to acquire character a bicycle needs a story. It is hard to name an expensive bicycle, because an expensive bicycle has less character. The expense normally buys a bicycle that, in its very reliability, removes the idiosyncrasy and the minor but lovable flaws in which stories are born. It’s not the bicycle’s fault, that’s just the way it goes.

My bicycle is blue, pure blue, the colour of the Atlantic now beside me with the sun on it. It is a blue that makes me think instinctively of ‘Kind of Blue’, the Miles Davis album, which is beautiful but also speaks to some of the sadness that the world right now has in it. And so the bicycle, I decide, is to be called Miles, because I also hope that it will carry me well enough across enough of them.

Miles is not, I soon realise, in particularly great health, though he is passable. The gears rattle more than I first noticed, though this is maybe down to a bent axle at the crank, or perhaps a chain-ring that once took a heavy blow. I worry that lurking here might be too many stories.

I look down at the axle and chain-ring, trundling, moving in and then out with each pedalled orbit. What this bicycle needs is one of those French mechanics; those gentle ogres with a moustache, dressed in grimy overalls and smoking a cigarette with a long column