6 ★ FTWeekend 16 January/17 January 2016

Travel

POSTCARD

FROM . . .

ZAMBIA

O bjectively it is the merestpimple of a mountain, butfor cyclists in London andsouth-east England, BoxHill inSurrey loomslarge. I

had climbed it hundreds of times, sooften that every subtle change in gradi-ent, every pothole, drain and blemish inthe tarmac was agonisingly familiar. Butthis timesomethingwasverydifferent. Iwas overtaking Graham, my longtimecycling partner and rival, then leavinghim far behind. I was flying up the hill,having to lean the bike right over so asnot to overshoot the corners. I felt likeLanceArmstrongorMarcoPantani.

Which is to say, I felt like a greatclimber but also something of a fraud.They both used performance-enhanc-ing drugs; I was benefiting from a newtype of cheating, something that hasbecome known in the professionalcycling world as “mechanical doping” —the use of small but powerful electricmotors,entirelyconcealedfromview.

Allegationsof theiruse inprofessionalcycling first emerged in 2010, when anonline video featuring Italian formerprofessional cyclist Davide Cassanibecame a viral sensation. It appeared toshow a bike whose pedals turned ontheir own, and went on to suggest thatthe Swiss cyclist Fabian Cancellaramight have used a motor to speed awayfrom the peloton before winning thatyear’sParis-Roubaixrace.

Most cyclists dismissed the video as aparanoid conspiracy theory. “It’s so stu-pid, I’m speechless,” said Cancellara(whose innocence was confirmed by thesports authorities). And while therumours and insinuations aboutmechanical doping have continued tocirculate — one television commentatorduring last summer’s Tour de Francesaid Chris Froome’s bike “seemed to bepedalling itself” — many fans still treatthe whole idea as a bit of a joke. WhenBrian Cookson, president of the sport’sgoverning body, revealed that it wastesting bikes for hidden motors duringthe Tour de France, he sounded almostembarrassed: “Although this subject

sometimes causes amusement and deri-sion, we know that the technology isavailable.”

That tiny, high-tech, hidden motorscould be available to amateur ridersseems even more far-fetched — none ofthe keen cyclists I spoke to in Londonknew anything about them. So arrivingat Box Hill, on a recent overcast morn-ing, Iwasdubious.

The bike I had come to try is the firstconcealed-motor racing bike from a UKmanufacturer. Built by Somerset-basedElectric Mountain Bikes, it will belaunched this month under the com-pany’s new brand, Goat Bikes, and willsell for £4,049. With a magnesium alloyframe, carbon fork and Shimano Ulte-gra gears, it looks just like any othermid-range racing bike. The slim, cylin-drical motor is concealed in the lowerpart of the seat tube (the vertical pieceof the frame which runs down from sad-dle to the bottom bracket) and connectswiththecrankaxle.

While early electric bikes had heavy,cumbersome lead-acid batteries, theuse of lithium means the battery can behidden within what looks like a conven-tional water bottle. A tiny black rubberswitch, on the end of the drop handle-bars, turns the power on; stop pedallingand it turns off. Tutorial over, I set off totest it,onmultipleascentsof thehill.

First impressions were of a very gen-tle boost (in time-honoured fashion,Graham still thrashed me to the top).But then Steve Punchard, founder of

From top: TomRobbins, right,rides the motor-assisted bike onBox Hill; the Goatbike; the motorand battery arehidden in theframe and bottleTom Jamieson

to the weight of the bike, but its han-dlingremainsunchanged.

As IdroppedGrahamandacceleratedup the hill, my mind began racing withthe implications of the modest-lookingmachine beneath me. Ageing riders willbe able to keep going later in life; cycleholidays touring the great Alpine passeswill no longer be restricted to the super-fit; couples of differing abilities will beable to ride together. Nervous noviceswill be able to join club rides withoutfearofholdingothersback,andonbikesthat look like any other and don’t markthemoutasrookies.

“It is democratising access to the bik-ing experience,” says Norman Howe,chief executive of Butterfield & Robin-son, which already offers electric bikeson its worldwide bike tours, though notyetwithconcealedmotors.“There’s thatego-anxiety around this stuff — of notwanting to admit you need the help —but the more discreet the systems get,the less that issueplaysout.”

Equally clear, as I whipped past otherriders on expensive-looking bikes, isthat there will be controversy. Muchamateur riding and cycle travel isgeared towards timed, mass-participa-tion events known as sportives or granfondos. Officially they are just for fun,but many riders take their time andtheir final ranking extremely seriously,trainingallyear tobetter theirresults.

“You’dbeverynaiveto thinkthatpeo-ple aren’t going to use them in spor-tives,” says Michael Hutchinson, aformerinternationalracerandauthorofFaster: The Obsession, Science and LuckBehind the World’s Fastest Cyclists. “At thispoint the technology isn’t that readilyavailable, but when that changes, some-one will argue, ‘Oh, well it will help mewith my training, I’ll get to work faster’.Then it becomes a much smaller step to

I felt like Lance Armstrongor Marco Pantani, which isto say, a great climber butalso something of a fraud

The hidden helping handCycling | Bikes with concealed electric motors could transform cycling events and

holidays over the next decade. Tom Robbins tests the first to be launched in the UK

be in a sportive and think, ‘Well I’ll justuse itupthisbithere . . . ”

In fact, though no mainstream bikemanufacturer sells such bikes and theconcept remains little-known in theEnglish-speaking world, the motors andbatteries, manufactured by an Austriancompany called Vivax, can already bebought through numerous dealers inGermany, Austria and the Netherlands.Inthosecountries,wherecyclinghastra-ditionally been a means of everydaytransportaswellasasport,electricbikesare far more common. “But I think Brit-ish people still tend to regard them asjustnotquitecricket,”saysHutchinson.

Though the invisibility of the Goatbike’s system will remove any stigma,one giveaway remains — a distinct whir-ring noise when the motor is switchedon. Future versions are likely to be qui-eter, but even the current system couldbe used while alone on a long climb, orto catch up if dropped by the peloton.“There are always going to be some peo-ple who are keen to cut corners,” saysIan Holt, founder of specialist tour oper-ator La Fuga, which takes hundreds ofcyclists to ride in European sportiveseach year. “People will be super-suspi-ciousofeachother.”

As I turned the final corner on BoxHill, I checked my time. At the peak ofmy cycling enthusiasm, I would climbBox Hill in seven minutes. Then, twoyears ago, a baby arrived and my weeklytraining mileage abruptly dropped from200 to precisely zero. But here I was,arriving at the hilltop café with a newpersonal best of just over six minutes. Ina world where many amateurs arehappy to spend fortunes on the lightestcarbon wheels or most aerodynamicframe, just to shave off a few seconds,that kind of performance enhancementmightprovetoohardtoresist.

i / DETAILS

For information on visiting Zambia’s LuangwaValley, see zambiatourism.com; Expert Africa(expertafrica.com) can arrange trips to bothNorth and South Luangwa National Parks

Simon Barnes’s book about the Luanga Valley,The Sacred Combe, was published this week byBloomsbury

B y January the place isunrecognisable. It’s asshocking a change ashappens to any landscapeon earth: a harsh and

vicious desert that becomes a soft,benign wetland.

The Luangwa Valley in Zambiaprovides the finest game-viewing inAfrica. At least, it did a few monthsback. Before it started raining. Beforethe place went berserk, before theplace exploded into greenness. Rightnow it’s hard to see a single largemammal because all that gloriouslushness gets in the way.

They even lost the elephants —thousands of them. It was the acceptedtruth that in the wet months theelephants left the valley entirely andascended into the Nchideni hills toamuse themselves until the dry timeswere back again. That turned out to bea rural myth. In the middle of the rainyseason, I took a flight over the valley ina microlight and, from this unexpectedangle, I could see great grey shapesmoving softly through great greenspaces. The elephants had been hereall along: it’s just that the wet abundantvegetation hid them from observerson the ground.

It’s hard to travel across the valley atthis time of year. All but a few of theroads are impassable, even to the

expert Land-Cruiserpilots who aboundhere. Walking isn’t atall easy: in many placesthe ground is treacherous.

And not just the ground. When thevegetation is thick, you can’t seethrough it. That’s a problem if youwant to take a nice picture of anelephant: it’s also a problem if you wantto stay alive. This is the most fabulousplace on earth, but it does tend to berather full of animals that can kill you.Right now you could walk into any oneof them round any corner, no matterhow good your bush-skills.

The most obvious change is in theriver itself: in the mad, rambling,

winding, untamed Luangwa. A coupleof months ago it was a narrow sluggishditch. You could have waded it withoutgetting your knees wet.

Now it’s as wide as the Thames atWestminster and fast as a millrace,eroding its own banks, creatingoxbows, adopting new courses andabandoning old ones, taking up treesand playing with them before dumpingthem in midstream as perches forkingfishers. This river has beenthrashing about like a wounded snakefor uncountable millennia, lashingitself from one side of the valley to theother: bringing life as it does so.

The valley doesn’t seem like adifferent place at this time of year.It is a different place. The colours havechanged entirely: the lion-colouredland has taken on the impossibly richgreens you find on the wings of white-fronted bee-eaters. The papyrusswamps turn an especially violentgreen, and a dull brown bird called thered bishop changes colour to become aliving flame.

You can find water anywhere youlook: puddles, ephemeral ponds,brooks, rivulets, along with turbulenttributaries to the Luangwa that at theother end of the year flow with nothingbut sand. It’s a kind land.

Most of the visitors come here whenit’s cruel. When there’s no water to be

found away from the Luangwa river soevery large mammal must stay withineasy commuting distance of it. Theland either side of the banks becomescrowded, to a staggering degree.

Two kinds of animals love this:human visitors and big carnivores.Lions loaf around the river, gorging onthe buffaloes that come down to drink.Leopards hunt for antelope in theebony glades at night; you can tracktheir hunts with a spotlight.

Hyenas revel in the times of plenty.In the river the crocodiles makewhiplash-quick assaults on drinkinganimals; I once saw a crocodile taking ababy elephant, to the appalling grief ofits mother. This is a frightening time:and that’s what makes the LuangwaValley the best wildlife experience inAfrica — perhaps the world.

But as intense womanisingsometimes leads people to specialisedsexual tastes, so my own glorious visitsin the dry times have given me a specialaffection for the rains, for the soft timeswhen you see much less, and havemuch less excitement. To understandthe dry you have to experience the wet.To understand the ferocity you have tounderstand the gentle.

For after all, there really is nothingquite like a land that can lose 5,000elephants.

Simon Barnes

The show: Nocorners havebeen cut in theBBC’s six-partserialisation of Leo Tolstoy’s epic. Thebig-budget production, on screen thismonth in the UK and US, has opulentcostumes, authentic locations and acast that includes Lily James, PaulDano, Gillian Anderson, JimBroadbent and Greta Scacchi.

On location: In the novel, the actionswitches between St Petersburg andMoscow but, with a few notableexceptions, most filming took place inLithuania and Latvia. The firstepisode opens at the St Petersburgsalon of society hostess AnnaPavlovna (Gillian Anderson). Thesescenes were shot in the Golden Roomof the Rundale Palace in Bauska,Latvia, the work of the same architect,Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who designedSt Petersburg’s Winter Palace andCatherine Palace. So convincinglyRussian are the palace’s interiors andfaçades that they appear in severalscenes as the family home of theRostovs, central to the novel’s plot.The palace and its gardens can bevisited on a day trip from Latvia’scapital Riga (rundale.net/en).

For the tsar’s New Year’s Eve ball —one of the most memorable set pieces— location scouts managed to go onebetter, securing permission to film inthe Catherine Palace, which was builtoutside St Petersburg as a summerresidence for the tsars in 1717. It’s herethat Anna Rostova (Lily James) firstdances with Prince Andrei Bolkonsky(James Norton) in the mirror-linedand candlelit ballroom (eng.tzar.ru).Other St Petersburg locations are the

façade of the Winter Palace, now partof the Hermitage (hermitagemuseum.org) and the Yusupov Palace(yusupov-palace.ru/en), whereRasputin was killed in 1916.

In Lithuania, the old town of Vilniuswas shut for two days while the crewtransformed the high street into19th-century Moscow. Many of thebattle scenes took place on farmlandoutside Vilnius, while the open-airmuseum at Rumsiskes, near the cityof Kaunas, was the location for scenesdepicting the officers’ quarters duringthe campaign. (llbm.lt/eng).

Where to stay: The Astoria Hotel inSt Petersburg (roccofortehotels.com)hosted cast members. In Latvia,Mezotnes Pils (mezotnespils.lv) is ahotel housed in a stately home thathas catered to tsars and empressesand is walking distance from theRundale Palace. Baltic Holidays(balticholidays.com) is offering aweek’s tour of Lithuania and Latviavisiting some locations, from £790.

Joanne O’Connor

In the UK, ‘War and Peace’ continueson BBC1 until February 7. In the US,it airs on A&E, Lifetime, and theHistory Channel as four two-hourepisodes, beginning on January 18

ON LOCATION

WAR AND PEACE

Electric Mountain Bikes, adjusted themotor to increase the cadence and eve-rythingchanged.

There was a marked boost in speedbut, perhaps more importantly, thepowerfeltcompletelynatural. Itwasnotlike sitting on a moped just watching thescenery pass (what would be thepoint?). You still need to pedal, yourheart rate is still raised; it still feels likeyou are engaged in an active, physicalsport. Unlike conventional electricbikes, whose large batteries can give apowerful boost for several hours, theconcealed one lasts for just an hour,making it suitable for getting over thetoughest summitonaride,orhelpinganexhausted rider over the final few miles.The motor and battery add about 1.8kg

Filming in the Catherine Palace

The Luangwa Valley

is the most fabulous place

on earth, but it does tend

to be rather full of animals

that can kill you

i / DETAILS

The Goat Race bikecosts £4,049. Seeelectricmountainbikes.com andgoatbikes.com;tel: 01458 550304

Pedal powerFor a video ofthe system inaction, seeft.com/travel

Mat

thew

Cook

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