Erstellt am: 1. 9. 2011 - 14:06 Uhr
A Superheroic Bike Journey
The journey across Europe to dip your toes in the Bosporus at Istanbul has always been epic.
When Patrick Leigh Fermor made the trip by foot and wrote about it in the brilliant A Time of Gifts, it changed the face of travel literature.
Fermor's journey "up the Rhine and eastwards down the Danube... into Transylvania; from Romania, on into Bulgaria" is currently being replicated by my friend Will, a.k.a. SuperCyclingMan. But he is doing it on a bicycle with a cape flowing behind him and his pants outside his shorts.
chris cummins
Fermor, who sadly passed away this year, was an autodidactic scholar. I'm not sure the same can be said of Will, who always appeared late for university lectures with a sandwich in his mouth and a thread-bare excuse for why his essay existed in theory but not yet in practice. Only time will tell whether the children's book he plans to write about his bike odyssey will rival A Time for Gifts in the annals of literature.
But Will deserves his superhero status because he is doing the journey on a zero budget, often camping in a mini tent he carries in a backpack and putting his trust in the open-hearted kindness of strangers. He is covering the distance from London to Istanbul in just 4 weeks, meaning a schedule of around 150km each day, so that he can get back in time for his day job as a primary school teacher. And most importantly he is doing it to raise money for the fight against cancer and Parkinson’s disease with every penny donated going directly to charity. Before he set off on this trip he'd already raised 15,000 euros for cancer prevention.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vitamindave/
SuperCyclingMan has survived his adventures on Transylvanian mountain passes with Romania's eccentric "Number 1 tour cyclist". He has survived a night in a bakery and also the harrowing experience of pedaling 60km of his 3,000 km route alongside me as we rolled from Vienna to Bratislava fuelled by Bratwurste. He is currently in Bulgaria and looks, after all, like an odds-on favourite to complete his mission and make it to Turkey before the school term begins.
He's visited many places but Vienna will never forget his services to public safety: