The following is an excerpt from the "blog" that I wrote during a bicycle journey through western Cuba with Benoît. Along the way, we met David, a cyclist from Winnipeg. The accompanying photo shows the three of us, all smiles and in broad daylight, at a later date in Cuba having survived the petrifying night ride.The excerpt...
Our next challenge was cycling in the fading light. It was getting dark very quickly and there were no lights on the road. Before leaving for Cuba, our Cuban friend Roberto had advised us never to ride our bikes at night. We were expecting to follow his advice, but thankfully at the last minute I packed some little LED bike lights, just in case! So we all had front flashy LED lights, and David and I had the red rear LED lights. Benoit rode in the middle since he didn't have a rear light. With the lights and our reflective panniers, we were somewhat visible. Still, it was very scary. There was total darkness around us. It was almost impossible to see the road. And there were some extremely drunk people about, it being New Year's Eve and all.
It was a strange sort of sensory deprivation trying to cycle in complete darkness. I could feel the bumps in the road but I couldn't see when they were coming. My front light just barely picked up Benoit cycling ahead of me. I had to ask him to warn me if he was going to slow down or stop - if he didn't tell me, then by the time I saw that he had stopped, I'd have crashed into him. The only way I got through my fear was to concentrate on pedalling. I also kept reassuring myself that bicycles are inherently stable (who was that British physicist that published articles about his URB, the unrideable bicycle that he tried to design but in fact was still kind of rideable?).
[Comment: I looked up that physicist reference later ... David E. H. Jones, "The stability of the bicycle", Physics Today, 1970]
For all the nitty gritty of our bicycle trip to Cuba, you can read my bicycle log on Box.net:
- Cuba 2007: 30 pages, 163 Kb: cubablog2007.pdf
2 comments:
hay que estar loco para montar bicicleta de noche en Cuba.....con todos esos baches....la proxima vez que vayan a Cape Breton, denle la vuelta a Boularderie Island , its a really nice trip....
Yes, we felt "loco" pedalling in the complete darkness in Cuba. We know why our friend advised against it!
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