Cycling > Articles > Buy 'Em, Ride 'Em, Sell 'Em

Bicycles are like trousers. Yes, they are! Well, okay, obviously not exactly. In fact...um, well...actually, not at all, really.

Except in one significant way. People seem to buy them both - bikes and strides - in similar ways. For far too many folk getting trousered up means nipping into the nearest chain store to buy something 'fashionable' in Sta-prest with lots of unnecessary pockets and ill-advised flapping at the ankle. They then haul into the nearest Bikes'R'Us to purchase the cheapo cycle equivalent; mild steel body, components built out of tinfoil, and Synchro-Suprise-Shifto gears.

Meanwhile a discerning, (and loaded) few go for the made-to-measure options - Kevlar and titanium frame, say, with well thought out chainset and ergonomic leather saddle if it's a set of wheels, or something classic built in Italian wool-silk mix by a craftsman tailor if it's trews.

Then again, I’ve got one friend who apparently picks up both his leggings and pedal-powered transport in charity shops. From the discount bin at the back. And he still haggles over the price.

This trouser/bicycle thing works the same way abroad. There you are in the souk in Marrakech, and suddenly a pair of sahwel, with the dimensions of a duvet cover, a crotch around your knees, and mid-calf cuffs, seem the most desirable of trousering. You buy them. And then you wear them. All over the Atlas mountains. You find them absolutely perfect, rather dashing even - cool and airy in the heat, loose for walking or squatting in off the track coffee houses. The locals think you a bit of a card for pulling on the local culture. You think the locals have trousers sussed.

Well, it's the same when it comes to local bikes abroad. They're inexpensive, they're simple and they work. Just like local trousers.

I sort of discovered the benefits of using local bikes for long distance trips by accident. I'd run out of money in Burkina Faso on a shoestring trip across West Africa. I still had three countries to cross to reach the coast and my homeward flight from The Gambia. So, in the market in Ouagadougou I blew my remaining capital on a second-hand import Chinese Flying Pigeon and set myself to pedalling.

For 20 quid I’d bought the freedom of West Africa. And a museum piece. The bike's handlebars swept around to meet my knees on every turn of the cranks. The black paintwork was decorated with gold lines and curlicues like an Edwardian dandy's carriage. The bell had the resonance and weight of something out of a minor cathedral. Best of all was the dynamo run light; a chromium beacon that when switched on dragged the bike to a crawling pace and shot a spotlight ahead of me, dazzling oncoming donkeys and camels. It was so powerful that the manufacturers had thoughtfully provided a dip-switch for it.

I joined a world of similarly biked-up characters. Lads keenly Norman Tebbit-ing the few hundred kilometres to Mali to look for work; quacks hawking snake oil from one village market to the next; a girot touting his one string guitar and satirical songs from town to town; the one-legged crocodile hunter peg-leg pedalling from river to river, his musket and ropes tied to the down-tube.

You could put anything onto the back rack of a local bike; I had a guitar and rucksack to mine, but that was nothing. Any Fulani husband could get his wife, sitting side-saddle, onto his, with two kids in her arms, and another straddling the crossbar. A Mouri delivery man could balance boxes of fruit twice as high as his head on the back and make it to Senegal. For a day I cycled with a chicken merchant who strung his livestock, heads down, over every part of his bike like a Duchamp surrealist artwork. Everytime we picked up speed downhill the chickens would lift their heads into the slipstream and flap their wings, and Amadou would disappear in a cloud of feathers.

The huge advantage of a local bike was that there wasn't much to go wrong. Tubing like scaffold poles, 28" wheels to bounce over 27" potholes, and the minimum of moving parts gave them the strength of a tank. When I did manage to bend the front forks on my very-close-to-Flying Pigeon, by going off a corner and into a baobab tree, the next village produced a mechanic with a selection of rocks and hunks of metal. After a moment's looking over the problem he picked up a stone, hefted it, and then wacked everything back into place with a practised hand. When the freewheel fell apart in the middle of nowhere, I merely picked up those few ballbearings I could find in the dust and packed them back in, greasing them with a gob of the peanut oil and mutton fat that were the contents of a handy sandwich for good measure.

My transport of delight was finally stolen on the headwaters of the Gambia river. I covered the last couple of hundred miles to the coast by hitchhiking. But I’d learnt the joys of bike travel.

Unfortunately, I’d only learnt half the lesson. I wanted to do more long distance trips but hadn't realised, fully, the advantages of using local bikes. So, I went straight out and bought a state-of-the art mountain bike with Brooks' saddle and more gears than 20 Flying Pigeons put together. Then I took a ferry to Algiers and ground my way across the Sahara to the Hoggar mountains. The bike was certainly faster, more comfortable, more complicated and flasher than anything under local bums. Which, of course, meant that it was eminently stealable, and that even the smallest problem really required a mechanic with a shop full of spares rather than the West African 'different sized rocks' approach I was using for repairs. I completed some of the toughest thousands of kilometres I’m ever likely to endure to reach Tamanrasset. And then realised, (I’d genuinely overlooked this part of the trip) that I was going to have to pedal the whole way back to Algiers. Or abandon the most expensive article I’d ever owned. I cycled.

This didn't stop me taking the same bike up to Iceland to do the 1,600 kilometre ring road around the coast. Just getting it onto the plane could have been the basis for a Duke of Edinburgh award. And once in Iceland I realised that a bicycle wasn't the most inspired way to travel. There were endless dust roads, storms, snow, emptiness and a constant 360º head wind. The Icelanders, including the beautiful blonde woman who took me off for a day's jeep and horse travel to show me the right way of doing things locally, all thought I was mad. And not heroic Cortez-eyeing-up-new-continents mad, but, more, the inept, sad, deluded brand of looniness. I still wasn't prepared to abandon my valuable bike but did rather want to give up. Like the Polish guy I met, bumping along on a Reykjavik bought bone-shaker. He wasn't too happy with cycling, either, but whilst I continued on to the end, he merely abandoned his bargain priced bike up against a rock, pulled his rucksack off the rack and stuck his thumb out. Within minutes he was sitting in the passenger seat of a jeep and roaring over the horizon. I was left to pedal and ponder. Suddenly it all fell into place. The buy 'em, ride 'em, leave 'em theory of long distance bike travel.

On my next trip, to India, I followed the new rules. Avoid the trauma of taking your own precious bike halfway around the world, for a start. Get to a place which promises good cycling country by any other means of transport. Nip into the nearest bike shop or market and hand over what would buy you a top of the range bicycle pump in England and pedal off on something more than adequate for a few hundred kilometres. Relax in the knowledge that with a few thousand of the same kind of bike around, yours is no more likely to be stolen than anybody else's, and that any village bike doctor knows all the tricks for keeping it on the road. And then when you get to where you're headed or the trip just isn't fun anymore, abandon the bike, or give it away, or sell it.

Carla and I walked into the local Hero Jet dealership in Jodhpur and bought two brand new bikes for twenty quid apiece. With all the trimmings. Kick-down stands for parking in the treeless wastes of Rajasthan, a foot pump, racks strong enough to carry a whole family let alone our meagre packs, and in my case a handlebar mounted, spring loaded reading rack that could hold open a paperback for in-flight entertainment. We added a couple of plastic Jerry cans for water, and a tiffin box, all to be slung from the cross bars. Finally we signed triplicate invoices, (signifying that we were making a purchase which for many Indians is equivalent of buying a car) and we were ready to aim for Madhya Pradesh way off to the east.

Everything worked perfectly. Instead of notching up the average daily 120 kilometres of head down mileage I’d been doing in the Sahara and around Iceland, we settled back to local speed. The Rajasthani warriors sharing the roads and tracks with us obviously saw their bicycles as a miraculous invention that allowed them to go at walking pace for much, much less effort. But then their turbans had the aerodynamic effect of those parachutes slung out of the backs of rocket-fueled drag racers to stop them when they run out of track - and the same colours, but brighter. We went a bit faster, but not much, and relied on the one gear change option we had, getting off and walking, whenever we hit hills.

In every village we passed small boys ran out yelling; "Hero Jet! Number one in world," in an obvious success for the Punjabi maker's advertising slogan. We were invited to stay in people's houses, our bikes stabled with the oxen and sheep. When a passing shepherd, hands full of a bowl shaped nan bread holding curdled milk, stopped to watch me fix 11 punctures with a mere two patches, he offered dubious assistance by very quietly hissing between his lips as I struggled to locate the holes.

We pedalled, and then pushed, up into the Vindhya Hills, sleeping out in the jungle when we couldn't reach villages. We stopped at roadside chai stops as just two individuals amongst the slow moving millions sweeping back and forth across the Indian subcontinent. We stayed in government rest houses waited on by aged retainers in mess suits, or fell into the deserved luxury of hill stations. We reached places we would never have known about if we weren't on bicycles.

When we reached Bhopal, (Yes, 'Union Carbide, ecological disaster' Bhopal - the lake's water worryingly effective at cleaning up the bikes' chromium), we stopped. Having brought the bikes a thousand kilometres further east, they'd gone up in value. We sold them in the market, pocketing a profit of two pounds.

After the success of the Indian trip, I found myself buying and borrowing bikes all over the place. A cherry-red bomber bought in El Jadida on the coast of Morocco, which I rode to Marrakech in the wheel-prints of Budgett Meakin, who'd made the same trip with his companion, Dr Rudduck, in the 1890s. A ramshackle Chinese horror exchanged for a few dollars in Cuba to pedal around the west of the island. A town bike loaned by an Afghan kitchen porter in Interlaken, which I took on a half-day, 90 kilometre, 9,000 metres of climb, loop through the Swiss Oberland, trailing a frighteningly fit friend riding something with a billion gears, shock absorbers and, I suspect, a small engine hidden under the seat. I borrowed another bike in Ireland and did an exact third of the country's length, from its most northerly point, in a day. In every case it was harder to decide which was the greater pleasure; doing the ride, or the relief of walking away bike-less, and free at the end of the trip.

Foreign bikes, like foreign trousers, come with one warning. However excellent they might seem in their homeland, that's just where they belong. The whole point of the buy 'em, ride 'em, sell 'em bicycle game plan is, exactly that; to sell or otherwise abandon your temporary wheels at the end of the trip. And this is so much truer of trousers, otherwise you end up walking your home streets in a pair of embroidered sateen loon pants, or Peruvian half-mast, canvas sailors trousers. Then your life is over.


Little of this eulogising about the joys of cheap local bikes is relevant to those setting off on epic trips with the sole purpose of cycling, say, down the Pan American Highway, or Europe end-to-end, or even through the Loire Valley. Then you need the best bike you can afford, and if you're heading off into the back of beyond, the spares to go with it - extra spokes in the seat-tube, a fixed block on the other side of your back wheel so when your deraillieur explodes you can flip the wheel around and keep pedalling, chain-breaker; that kind of thing.

The buy 'em, ride 'em, sell 'em virtues come into their own when you find yourself with a week or so to spare in a new country. Or to do the single segment of a journey which would be fun on two wheels, though the bits either side certainly wouldn't be. Or to try out a country which may or not be interesting or practical to pedal through. Or to avoid the horrors of air travel with a bike in tow.

Buying local bikes only works where the locals have bikes. In Mongolia buy a horse. In Los Angeles buy a Cadillac.

In countries where there are bikes but not much else (Cuba, for example) it pays to take a basic bike survival kit: pump, lock and chain, puncture repair kit, dumb-bell spanner. If you're planning on doing mileage consider a slip-over gel saddle cover. All this stuff makes welcome presents to new friends when it comes to leaving.

Nearly all local bikes worldwide are Chinese made - they're to pedal power what the Japanese are to small cars.

If you're struggling up some rough track on a single-speed clunker and cursing the lack of gears and sprung saddle, (as you will) remember that you've already saved the equivalent time, energy and discomfort by not having carried your own bicycle halfway around the world as deadweight hand luggage.

When the trip isn't fun anymore, sell, give away or abandon the bike. That's the whole point.

Articles

• More from Jasper Winn
• More on the same theme