The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold: Adventures Along the Iron Curtain Trail - Couverture souple

'Bill Bryson on two wheels' Independent

Scaling a new peak of rash over-ambition, Tim Moore tackles the 9,000km route of the old Iron Curtain on a tiny-wheeled, two-geared East German shopping bike.

Asking for trouble and getting it, he sets off from the northernmost Norwegian-Russian border at the Arctic winter’s brutal height, bullying his plucky MIFA 900 through the endless and massively sub-zero desolation of snowbound Finland.

Sleeping in bank vaults, imperial palaces and unreconstructed Soviet youth hostels, battling vodka-breathed Russian hostility, Romanian landslides and a diet of dumplings, Moore and his ‘so-small bicycle’ are sustained by the kindness of reindeer farmers and Serbian rock gods, plus a shameful addiction to Magic Man energy drink.

Haunted throughout by the border detritus of watchtowers and rusted razor wire, Moore reflects on the curdling of the Communist dream, and the memories of a Cold War generation reared on the fear of apocalypse – at a time of ratcheting East-West tension.

After three months, 20 countries and a 58-degree jaunt up the centigrade scale, man and bike finally wobble up to a Black Sea beach in Bulgaria, older and wiser, but mainly older.

Tim Moore – Britain’s indefatigable travelling everyman – has walked 500 miles across Spain with only a donkey for company (Spanish Steps); roamed the continent from Liverpool to Lisbon to track down the Eurovision contestants who suffered the entertainment world's prime humiliation (Nul Points); sort-of conquered the Tour de France on a diet of ProPlus and rosé wine (French Revolutions); and ridden the 3,200km route of the notorious 1914 Giro d’Italia, handicapped by a century-old, wooden-wheeled bicycle and an unbelievably daft period outfit (Gironimo!). Now, in defiance of the ageing process and every pleading dictate of basic reason, he undertakes an odyssey more ambitious – and more silly – than all of those combined. Somehow, he still lives in London.