Headwinds

Do you keep cycling into a head wind?

Cycling is so closely related to life. Cycling into a headwind is something we do all the time and often keep going because we don’t know what else to do. How do we know when to stop? When to delay? When to ask for help?

When I was a child, it seemed like Christchurch winds blew from the south every morning and the north every afternoon because I often had a headwind to and from school. How could this be? And why would the universe do this to me? However, despite the headwinds, I doggedly cycled as a far better alternative to catching the bus.

Headwinds are the worst aspect of cycle touring. Incomparably worse than hills. When you go up a hill you know it’s with a promise of the fun of the downside. If it gets too hard you can get off and push because you know how fast you will make up the kilometres on the downhill. However, headwinds rarely hold the promise of an uphill because you are unlikely to turn around and cycle in the opposite direction. There’s no benefit to come.

I thought about headwinds a lot yesterday as we cycled uphill into a headwind for forty kilometres. At least the weather was fine, although the slowness of our cycling raised the likelihood we’d still be on the road in the midday heat. Uphill plus headwind plus heat is right up there on the scale of no-fun cycle touring. Chris and I took turns at being in front vs drafting. 2.5km in front, 2.5km drafting. Once we’d covered 10km we sat on the side of the road for a drink and snack break.

“Should we stop and wait?” we asked eachother. The forecast was for the winds to swing around by the middle of the day. We would go twice as fast with far less effort in a tail wind. But that would mean waiting for the heat. And if the winds didn’t die down…

Cycling was so much effort I couldn’t even take my mind somewhere else in an audiobook – I had no spare brain cells for audiobook listening. That’s a weird thing I’ve discovered about cycle touring. You think you’ll have all this spare time while you are on the bike. Time to write songs, conjure up stories. Actually, generally either I’m going ‘whee’ on the downhill or with a tailwind, soaking up the scenery, or my brain is running in little repetitive circles doing things like counting a set number of pedal strokes before I can look at the distance on my speedometer again.

We got to a toilet block which, in Kazakhstan, often is associated with a small shop. “Do you want to go into the shop?” Chris asked. “I don’t care,” I said. This is a problem with getting too tired in a headwind – you don’t do the things that would improve your situation because all you can think about it whether you can keep your legs turning round. Luckily, Chris still had some operative brain cells so he bought a cold, sugary orange drink which made both of us feel better and my legs keep turning around.

Shortly afterwards, the wind eased while we weren’t noticing. We cycled through an airport development at the top of a pass where the steel frame of the future control tower stands proudly in front of a 3000m mountain peak. The goal of the Kazakhs is to bring many thousands of Chinese tourists into what is currently a very quiet valley. Someone will become richer. Will it be the locals? Will they have better healthcare and education as a result? And how will it affect the Kazakhs who currently tourist their own country with very few foreigners around. From the people we’ve talked to, visiting NE Kazakhstan is a dream for many. How might they feel if they are priced out by foreigners?

And yes, I know I’m a tourist in Kazakhstan but where have you seen a village, or city, or country, overloaded with long distance cycle tourists? There’s a natural limiting factor in cycle tourism that prevents the dilution of and damage to community by tourists that now plagues Queenstown. There’s no such limiting factor on tourism supported by commodity aviation.

Airport control tower in the making and trucks moving soil for new Katon Karagai airport. Click here for more pics.

I railed mentally against the intrusion of human infrastructure everywhere. Yesterday, I corresponded with the chair of a community association in Queenstown who’s trying to protest a new gondola, ski field and associated tourist accommodation immediately above the suburb of Fernhill. Currently, the area has only a walking and mountain bike track to Ben Lomond and into the Moonlight Valley through the tussock. The chair wanted a copy of my letter to the developer which had been published in a local digital forum. I wrote to the developer, a New Zealand medic who has lived in Australia long term. He doesn’t understand why people don’t want infrastructure which will make the place ‘better’. ‘Better’ is so relative to the individual, the situation, and human ‘better’ tends to have little thought for the non-human inhabitants. There was a good piece about that in The Guardian. Clearly, the wind in Kazakhstan had eased because my brain had enough spare neurons to fire up about a place half a world away.

Then there was some downhill, some lunch, only 10km to go and finally a coffee and a cheese pastry in Katon Karagay and thoughts of headwinds receded into being another day problem. If only it was as clear-cut whether the tourism headwind in Queenstown is one equally worth fighting or whether it’s better to turn and run away.