yeeeeeaaaaaaahhhhhhhh
You've been waiting for this, just so you could like it on Facebook without reading!
Especially Alexander, always whining, thirsting for my sparkling jokes.
And here I am, finally ready.
Right off the bat, piping hot, let's look at the burning question: how much for bikes on board aeroplanes and whether you can rent one instead.
30-40 euros one way (or per flight, if there are layovers).
You can rent one, but
1. They will predictably be worse or at the very least more unfamiliar than mine
2. If you want to ride here and there, it's unclear how to return it
3. You're limited by the place where you pick it up, you need to search for it in advance and book it, and it's not guaranteed they rent them out where you actually want to ride.
A few dry numbers just to make you not want to read to the end. The territory of Cyprus is seven times smaller than Latvia, but slightly over a million people live there, meaning the island is quite densely populated. It's mostly populated by Greeks and Turks, but the latter separated into their own local clique, and gobbled up a part of the island for themselves with the help of the metropole, which I'll talk about on occasion. Since Cyprus was an English colony, they drive on the left side there, which gave us a fair bit of a headache during adaptation. The weather in Cyprus is always excellent, in winter it drips a little, but otherwise from spring to autumn the sun blazes like nobody's business, and in summer it's a straight-up oven. It's quite fitting to go to the island in the spring, which is what I did — the rains are gone, and the temperature is still more or less tolerable, 15-20 degrees in the mountains, and a whopping 20-25 on the coast, which is already a bit too hot for me.
Let's leave the boring technical details at that, and direct our thoughts upwards, into the Troodos mountains.
I headed to Cyprus because those very mountains are there. Rumor has it, they are quite suitable to pedal through them on a mountain bike, just the way we like it: over rocks and bushes, with pain in our legs and butts, with climbs of a kilometer and a half a day. For a long time I didn't have a comrade-in-arms, but eventually Rybakow finally ripened, which is pronounced not at all the way you thought, and with the stress on the "a". But the Soviet Union, with its benevolent hand, made all peoples friends by shearing them under universal Russification, and Rybakow turned into Rybakov. Then the Republic of Latvia contributed its two cents (its "lepta") and renamed Rybakov to Rybakovs. By the way, I brought back from Cyprus some Greek euro coins with such an inscription, not Rybakovs of course, but lepta.
We flew out on a cold April night, and we had tied the bicycles down on a rainy, windy day. On the road to Vilnius, my dad, who was playing the role of the driver, told us that in any serious trip, three equally serious accidents happen. Not wanting to be all talk, the car, having listened to its owner, threw off its heavy burden, namely the boxes with the bicycles, right onto the asphalt. It definitely didn't do them any good, but it only came back to bite us in the next episode, since there was neither the need nor the possibility to drag the bikes out of the boxes anymore: there is nowhere to fix bikes at two in the morning on the Daugavpils-Vilnius highway.
The departure went without incident, unless you count 5 AM as one, and an introductory course into the worldview of jingoists along the way. Even though I asked my fellow travelers not to stage rap battles in the spirit of Putin-scumbags vs Libtards, Ukrops vs Vatniks, and Great Russia vs the civilized world, they happened anyway. Oh well, endure it for a couple of hours, and we are already on Cypriot soil.
I was planning to go for 9 days, Alexander Rybakovs for 7, since after prolonged climbs in the mountains that subsequently require replacing your knee joint with a titanium one, he also wanted to run the Stripro Skrejiens to finish himself off completely. Well, to each their own, and I’m no stranger to pedaling solo anyway.
True, I didn't count on having to do it right from the very beginning, and yet that's how it could have been. The thing is, the flight onto the asphalt didn't pass without a trace for Sasha's bike, and in fact, on the contrary, fashioned an ancient symbol of infinity out of his rear wheel, namely a figure-eight, and of such eight-ness that we barely made it from the airport to the city of Larnaca.
Next, intrigue awaited us: we had to travel another 150 kilometers with a transfer on two buses, and then 50 km through the mountains on a bike to our final destination, the apartments near the town of Polis, and meanwhile, the time was already approaching noon. The search for a bike shop was crowned with limited success: we only found a shed where kind old men were selling and renting out scrap metal that could only be called a bike by a huge stretch.
One of them deftly slotted the ill-fated wheel into a truing stand, and applied all of his magical skill to correct the figure-eight. He took nothing for his labor, so we left him a Latvian chocolate bar.
“They don't survive with such a diagnosis,” I said, referring to the rim, and I was as right as ever: Sasha could ride now, but slowly and not far — exactly as far as the next bike shop, packed with carbon road bikes for 4000 euros and equally road-specific Mavic rims for 400 euros a pop. Mountain bikes were represented only by the newfangled 27.5 inches, and there was no rim for Rybakov's 26". Maybe for the best, otherwise it would have cost like solid gold. On the plus side, the obliging and friendly employees of the stylish establishment pointed out where our path lay next, and even made a phone call.
A couple of blocks later we arrived at a local DEPO called AndreouBrothers, where a quite decent bike shop secretly sheltered on the second floor, right within our budget, although there was no separate rim there either. In the end, they took it off a crap-bike they were selling, but for a dirt-cheap price of around 50 euros for the assembled wheel, so it's a sin to complain. I didn't see any of this spectacle, because I was cooling my heels in the street heat. I managed to change into my cycling gear, do stretches three times, get a good look at the locals, tighten all the screws on my bike, and was already starting to get nervous. Midnight draws near, and still no sign of my dear Sasha - the time for the next bus, 15:00, was arriving, and riding through the mountains in the dark is a prospect, frankly speaking, not for everyone.
Such is the intrigue that spun up around us, but only in the next episode will you find out whether we managed to catch the bus, whether we reached the apartments at night through the mountains, and why for every good person there will definitely be a corresponding shithead.