In 2002 a study by the CIA revealed that the most dangerous roads in the world belong to Iran. The announcement dealt a severe blow to the Iranian tourism board, then just launching its “Hey, at least we’re not Afghanistan” campaign, and for the following 18 months the annual influx of international visitors to Tehran halved to five.
Imagine the jubilation, then, when a few dozen tourists arrived in Tehran this year. The fact that they came with Geiger counters, fallout suits and awkward questions did little to dampen the jollification; and besides, nervous officials might have argued, if things got messy they could always be sent on a little sight-seeing drive down route one (turn left out of Tehran, keep on until you hit the 14th century). Bad roads aren’t all bad.
It goes a long way towards explaining why Iranians kept hijacking airliners in the 1980s. There comes a point in every man’s life, usually when he is nursing a Peugeot 404 with no brakes along a precipice in Asia Minor, chickens rioting in the glove compartment and a lugubrious goat duct-taped to the hood, that he wonders if there’s an easier way to travel. Like in the cockpit of a British Airways jumbo, for instance.
It is possible that the report is now outdated, that fresh hells await motorists in different parts of the world. For instance, Iran would surely struggle to compete with the unique challenges of driving an open-topped Humvee up the Saddam The Magnificent Interstate Superhighway near Tikrit singing This Land is My Land.
But, as Ted Kennedy said en route to Chappaquiddick, bad roads do not a bad driver make. It takes more than a rutted Iranian riverbed-cum-highway or an Iraqi shooting gallery to push motorists to the limits of endurance. For that, you need to be in Cape Town on the weekend of the Argus cycle tour.
JM Coetzee once suggested that the bicycle is the only non-harmful machine devised by the West. As opposed to vicious machines like, say, alarm clocks. But it’s true: bicycles are non-harmful. Left alone in their natural habitat they struggle to reproduce, tending instead to fall over and rust. But man must meddle. We found atoms, we split them, and the result was nuclear bombs. We found bicycles, we sat on them, and the result was cyclists. And until the world unites to sign a Velocipede Non-Proliferation Treaty, we are doomed to the kind of mania the Argus race provokes.
The race itself is rarely an inconvenience. Capetonians pass the day in their basements, absentmindedly playing backgammon by lamplight, reassuring tearful children, slipping away unobtrusively to re-check the deadbolts on the door. At noon a caged budgie is pushed out of a ventilation shaft on the end of a long stick, and if it comes back without a spoke through its eye or spandex-burns, the day can resume.
But it is the days leading up to the event that lead to the trauma, when that particular mindset of the training cyclist — a disgruntled and stubborn self-righteousness, like a cow grazing halfway up runway one at Heathrow — is given free rein. The Argus of Greek myth was a 100-eyed giant, mercilessly teased at school (a brief stint with bifocals earned him the nickname “Two-hundred-eyes”) but unparalleled as a watchman. And one might enjoy the irony inherent in naming an orgy of tunnel vision after an omniscient being if one weren’t so busy dodging oblivious cyclists.
Up every available incline, around every blind corner, these self-propelled blind-spots wobble and veer. Their rumps, a year out of the saddle and grown mutinous through flirtations with chocolate eclairs, shimmer over the tarmac, zeppelins playing tag in a sky of violent pink spandex. Try to pass them, and they heave towards starboard brandishing their water bottles; creep behind them, and they gesture furiously for you to pass, their agitation sending them careening across the lane towards an onrushing petrol tanker.
But perhaps all of this is motorist’s sour grapes. Perhaps the white knuckles on the steering wheel and feverish fancies about the physics of winding a bicycle chain around a human neck are simple jealousy.
After all, the cyclist can demand the full protection of the rules of the road without obeying a single one of them. So when push comes to shove, halfway up Suikerbossie, he’s had his chocolate eclair and eaten it.