Idyllic cycling in the Tuscan hills.

Or not

So we are in Tuscany to prepare the house for the next season, picking off the tasks one by one. Sweep up dead stink bugs?- done. Put ski stuff and woollies in the garage?-done. Feasting like kings? -always, Exercise?- crickets and tumble weed.

Before we left, Surrey was in the full throes of spring. GS and I had dusted off our bikes for idyllic country rides from village to village along the disused railways and rivers i.e. from pub to pub. In our village, with the train station 5 mins walk away, and my bike tied to the magnolia tree, I rarely drive anywhere.

We ummed and arhed about whether we would fly our bikes out with us. It’s costly to fly them around but bikes in Tuscany are stupidly expensive. We decided against as we will need them for the foreseeable future back in the UK. But, on landing at Pisa, we did detour to Decathlon to browse. I got a new helmet, some extra-large shorts and top with a telephone pocket. My new purchases have been sitting on top of the chest of drawers gathering dust for days. I have been trying to drink tea in bed and read the paper in peace but they have been emitting reproachful vibes.

We have been ticking off errands mostly in Vecchiano where we quickly colonised a local bar. One was the momentous moment when GS, newly minted with an Irish passport, presented it to our local commune and da-da became a resident of Italy. So, hence forth he will no longer be referred to as GS – Gianni Stranieri (Jonnie Foreigner) but Hugo.

Meanwhile, a week in and we have slugged around doing nothing but stuff ourselves silly; a wonderful dinner as always with friends, taking guests for the tasting menu at Termi di Massacuiccoli, making homemade pizzas. And in perpetual celebration at the joy of waking up under Italian skies have eaten our body weight in pastries and coffee.

Homemade pizza

It’s really difficult for us to exercise- there are far too many bars with delicious pastries, plus there is no one for me to play tennis with and Hugo doesn’t like going for walks (when we move I am hoping to sneak in a puppy. And some chickens, beehive and a pair of donkeys). But the weighing scales were starting to groan.

Then we went to another favourite restaurant – at the Osteria Antica di Meati whose onion soup is the standard by which all onion soups in our family are judged. Not wishing to be outdone in the flatulence stakes, I risked the cannelloni with salted meat starter before we both savaged slices of tender steak encrusted with aromatic herbs like blood thirsty vampires. GS, opps Hugo, quaffed a fighting young red wine which he tamed with a local amaro digestive. This had the collateral benefit of knocking him into a comatose sleep so and he slept through my impression of a human popcorn machine.

We awoke to another day of birdsong under blue skies. The morning weigh-in was groan and a doom call to exercise.

‘Let’s go out cycling’ I said

‘I keep telling you we don’t have bikes’

We have a number of bikes at the villa. There is the orange bike, Hugo’s pride and joy, which never leaves its altar behind the sofa. In the garage is an assortment of less exalted bikes.

There is the beautiful classic Raleigh one Hugo bought for my birthday years ago. I insisted on it even though he said it was far too heavy to be ridden. It turns out he was right, so that one has flowers tied to the basket and only goes to the village bakery and back on special occasions. There are a couple of other bikes. One is the one Hugo apparently had as a teenager, and another one, both of which had masculine horizontal bars, and then a black girlie one.

I love the black girlie one. It was in the garage when Hugo bought the villa back in 2012. He keeps threatening to throw it out but I save it each time. Originally we leant it on the outside walls of the villa as it had that quaint, vintage perfect-for- insta look. But the holiday guests actually tried to ride it, failed and complained so it went to live in the garage.

It is a sit up and beg bike with a comfy seat. But it is old. If it could talk it would probably tell of resistance escapades or trysts from the second world war. We know that the Germans were here as they massacred youths in the olive groves behind the house. The nuns are revered in the village as they bravely begged the bastard Germans to let them bury the decomposing bodies. The old archbishops palace on the top of the hill next to ours housed the SS. Our villa was requisitioned too, but as the party house- the Germans stole all the crockery from local houses and dragged in a grand piano.

Perhaps I should mention the local topography/ geology at this point. It is mountains and flat land that used to be marshland and before that was the sea. Our villa sits at the exact point where the mountain hits the flat lands- the front garden is flat, the back garden a steep hillside.

The surrounding mountains are steep and densely forested. Some of the sides have been cultivated into narrow olive terraces, or their sides hacked out into now disused quarries. The flat bits are criss-crossed by strada bianca- white stone roads and canals attended by solitary purple herons and flocks of snowy egrets. The Serchio river, a jade river with banks of reeds and occasional low level waterfalls, skirts the mountains through the valleys on its way to the sea. In spring it roars fed with snow melt, but at this time of year it moves with still determination, its banks deep with lush vegetation. It only just has enough gradient to keep it moving. The two rivers which cross here - the Arno and the Auser (as the Serchio used to be called in ancient times) are heavy with sediment. The sister rivers have dropped their cargo of silt over millennia and pushed the sea out. The river is sluggish, heavy, slow and lazy - perfect for me. Squinting at google maps it appeared there was an overgrown path alongside the river to Vecchiano 3.5 miles away. Reckoning that was a half hour I didn’t bother with suncream or water even though it was already a toasty 25 degrees.

Well, the new cycling shorts were a bit of a revelation. I imagine this is how it feels to stuff a loaf a Mother’s pride down your knickers. I waddled out, clicking my helmet under the chin. Hugo pumped up my tires.

‘I’m going to try to make it to Vecchiano’ said I, the last of the heroic explorers.

‘If it’s too tough, I’ll double back. If I make it, maybe we can meet for a coffee in case (likely) I don’t want to cycle back?’

Hugo made non committal noises.

Off I set. The start was a bit hair raising. When I say the bike does not have brakes, what I mean is that you can squeeze the handle bars as hard as you like but absolutely nothing will happen which meant that the toes of my tennis shoes got destroyed. And because it has no gears whatsoever faced with a road made of slabs of rock you have to dismount. I found out fairly quickly that this was best from a side saddle position- and having flung oneself off you then have to push the old girl along roads made of rock slabs. The bell chinked happily as I accidentally hit slabs of rock whilst a admiring the environs.

The Serchio was …idyllic. A river the colour of transparent jade in the sun, moss in the over hang of trees, rustling reeds, everything scaled large, tall, verdant and wild. I and my Merlin app recorded five birds in 15 seconds- Golden Oriole, Cettis warbler, Serin, Blackbird, Nightingale. A few jewelled lizards dashed out of my way, butterflies flitted by. Mostly it was complete wilderness but occasional ortes – vegetable garden- were full of fruit trees and neat rows of vegetables. I said ‘Buon Giorno’ to the chap mowing daisies and to a lady out walking but otherwise I was alone. The path narrowed, at first wide enough for an Ape, (three wheeled trucky- thing, not primate) then just about wide enough for a boar, and then even the boars gave up and it was just the thought of a path. The grasses bent high, flowers brushed my legs, I thought if it got any higher or the grass turned to brambles or nettles I would have to go back. But the next second I was on the last of the main road to Vecchiano. This was actually much hairier on account that I forgot that braking at the roundabout wasn’t an option. Pulling over at a junction I called Hugo jubilant at my success. I’d done 45 minutes in my bone rattler and that was enough.

‘Fancy a coffee? I’m a bit tired now, can you come and get me? I’ll be at our bar in a couple of minutes’

‘No’ he said ‘ I’m doing the jet-washing and the lorry is parked behind the car’ (Our friend and gardener has truck) I put the somewhat uncharitable thought ‘then ask him to move it’ down to my gasping for my morning coffee.

At our bar, where after a week of visits they now recognise me, they knew how to do my coffee (without foam, boiling, although an Italian just cannot bring themselves to make coffee hot) and my teeth were soon imbedded in apple turnover. My veins flowed with caffeine and sugar and a short flat peddle back seemed fine.

All I had to do to get home was take a flat tarmacked track between the flat fields and flat canals and hey presto, one gentle freewheel and I’d be back at the villa. To do that all I needed to do was navigate around the looming mountain/cliff faces and stick to the valley.

Off I pedalled. I followed ‘Lover’s walk’ how romantic. Surely that couldn’t be too difficult.

It was just as beautiful as the river route had been, but less of a bone rattler. At one point I cycled beneath a fig tree. There were figs all over the ground and as I passed them so I was treated to the scent of figs stronger than any bottled fragrance. Then I came to a junction of unknown places.

I knew, as the crow flew, the direction I was headed so I took that choosing to ignore the huge mountain with sheer cliffs in that direction. Surely the path wasn’t going there, for the simple reason that the only way off that mountain was by microlight or hand-glider presumably having approached it by the dip slope. Except this wasn’t a surrey hill or a Sussex down made of gentle dip slope and steep scarp slope. It was proper part quarried deeply forested Tuscan mountain. These mountains are nothing like the downs. They are ancient, even for Italy, full of fossils and dinosaur footprints from when the world was young, a garden of Eden of swamp, forest and toothy beasts. As it turns out, they haven’t changed much in the last 450 million years.

I ignored the looming mountain. BAD IDEA.

The problem with hope is that it is misleading. Up I climbed hoping that it would suddenly level out and go around and who would want to go up a mountain if you didn’t have to? Up and up. I was always hoping for a breakthrough that suddenly our village would spring into sight. Did it hell. Up I climbed, up, up relentlessly. In the absence of gears that meant pushing the bike the whole way. It was not a road nor a track but slabs of rock whether bedrock or placed there I have no idea. I didn’t look for fossils as I didn’t know about the dinosaur thing until I got back. I thought I saw cart marks at one point and felt sorry for the ghost horses before me. But they had four legs and muscle. I had two legs supporting a barrel of fat, and an old bike to push.

Up I climbed, breathless. Up and Up. I attempted to go back down, but without brakes that was as bad as going up as I had to hold the bike back.

UP and UP. Firstly Vecchiano unfolded beneath me, then as I got higher the distance mirage formed itself into Pisa. I turned a corner- another mirage this time Lucca. Up and up. Every now and again the bike hit a slab of rock and objected with a ping of the bell, or was it a ping of encouragement- and would it deter the wolves, bears and boars – or alert them that dinner was on its way, that and the heavy breathing and swearing? I was in a forest but the mountainside was so, so steep. Up and up, forks in the road – mountain to the left? Mountain to the right? Signposts barely legible pointing to hermitages, signposts no longer legible pointing to God knows where. I didn’t want to go to a wilderness hermitage to be alone, I wanted to be back in the 21^stcentury in a town with people and bars. Peeping through the trees, a long way down was a white twisty track. All I had to do was cross the olive grove before I was savaged by a porcupine or tortoise in the woods where no one would hear you scream or find your body.

But god knows how the olive grove was clinging to the sheer slopes. I’ve seen that grove before, clinging impossibly to the side of a terraced cliff. I’m scared of heights. I was trying to reassure myself that I couldn’t spontaneously fall down the sheer slope but my bike was bouncing and slipping as it was, even with my pushing it. Trying to self-comfort didn’t work so I did what any self-respecting girlie would do. I burst into tears. I then checked google maps and from what I could gather the route was taking me directly to the top of quarry cliffs. I could get back but I’d have to leap over a cliff four or five hundred meters up.

I turned around, quickly realised that attempting to cycle down the hill without brakes would be fatal and threw myself off the bike again. My hands were ripped to shreds from pushing it up the hill and squeezing the brakes to no avail. I looked down and saw a black and bloated dead toad, the size of a plate lying on its back, stone dead. It was an omen.

Surely Hugo would be worried where I was? It was two and a half hours since I had left home.

At first the phone rang out, then a jaunty and totally unworried Hugo answered the phone.

‘Can you come and get me from Vecchiano please’

‘Why, where are you, I thought you were at a bar?’ (our daughter had posted a picture of a bar. By the sea. In the south of France) I’m just having a coffee with the gardener…’

‘Well’ I said, darkly and somewhat growly, ‘ I suggest that you stop having coffee with him and come and get me’

And so Hugo, finding his inner knight in shining armour decided to come and get his damsel in distress.

Which was wise, as, between you and I, I have found the perfect place should I ever need to hide a body…

A very steep olive grove.