The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [122]
Fortified by our rapt expressions, he continued, “There are rules. First rule: always bike on the cliff side.”
The group burst out in murmurs: What?!? On the cliff side??
“If you want, you can bike close to the rock-wall, but when a bus comes screaming around the corner you have less than a second to react. You’re going to be squashed like a little bug. Either that or you skid out of the way and break every bone in your body on the rock face. We had a guy break both wrists, several ribs, a collarbone and lose all his front teeth that way. Had a gorgeous scar across his face,” he drew his finger above his jaw-line, “skin ripped clean off. If you want several seconds to see the bus and react, bike on the cliff side.”
Duly noted.
“Second rule: always get off on the right side of your bike. We each go at our own pace, so to let the people in the back keep up, those in the front will be stopping from time to time. Couple years ago, there was a French woman, real nice lady, got off on the left side of her bike. Most right-handed people tend to do that. How many of you are right-handed?” He paused to survey the group. Every single person raised their hand. “O.K., listen up then. This woman gets off her bike on the left side. Now, what’s on the left side? That’s right: the cliff. So her friend takes out a camera, tells her to take a step back, and—fft! She’s gone. Blank picture.”
I sat riveted. Bike on the cliff side. Get off on the right side. Bike on the cliff side, get off on the—
“Third rule: you lose traction, especially on curves, last thing you wanna do is brake. That causes you to skid, and you’ll skid off the cliff. So whatever you do, DON’T BRAKE ON TURNS. Ride out the bumps. Keep your gears low to angle yourself and keep your inside knee high—that’s very important. Stay to the outside of the hairpins, on the left of the track since cars are coming on the right. Go straight through water, always look forward, don’t look down. Ignore what your body tells you. You have to override those signals if you don’t want to end up off the cliff. You have to listen to every single one of these rules, because you can’t trust yourself. You trust the rules. If you don’t, you’re fucked.
Any questions?”
We stared at him dumbfounded.
“Great!” he grinned fiendishly, “Let’s get going then.”
O.K.. Totally doable, right? I peered down into the shifting mist, catching glances of the sharp ridge that marked the cliff-side. I just needed to bike there, along the gravelly brink, and make sure not to brake, especially if I skid…towards the ravine where they would never find my broken body and I would die among thousands of rotting corpses! No, alright, calm down. Just remember the rules. Bike on the cliff side. Don’t brake on turns. What was the second rule again?
“You’re over-thinking it, Bergmann,” said one of the other bikers, a tanned Aussie in his mid-thirties sporting a dime-shaped goatee.
Over-thinking! I wanted to shout at him, I’m supposed to be following the rules! I gave him a look of indignation, which may or may not have disintegrated into a petrified plea for help.
“You’ll be fine,” he said, the last word pronounced foyin.
I nodded at him, still unconvinced, and he joined the end of the line of bikers. Those in front of me had already taken off, their tiny figures bouncing over the rocks, each one looking like a discombobulated Raggedy-Ann on ineffective seizure medication. Pebbles flew from their tires. When they came to the first bend, they skidded around the corner and plunged out of sight. When it was my turn, I took a deep breath and stepped on the pedal. I lurched forward, and I felt like Icarus must have felt when he realized the wax was melting from his wings.
My first instinct was to go as slow as humanly possible. I clutched onto the brakes as if I could fuse them to my hands, which didn’t slow me down as much as create a lot of turbulence. To say that I was biking would be inaccurate.