Pt 12 Heading north to Pisa.

Wednesday 26^th May 2010

We walked around Stefans bike and then around mine, comparing luggage, comparing ride heights, drinking coffee and eating marmalade on toast. I told Stefan of my great desire to own a bike like his, and asked if he’d mind me sitting on it. “You can take it for a ride if you like Tim” He said, handing me the keys. A voice from above whispered ‘God don’t really do deals isn’t, but here you go I guess”. I looked at Stefan like he’d just given me a winning lottery ticket. “Really, are you sure?” He was sure all right; I was the same as him after-all, a biker on a journey, why shouldn’t he be alright with it. He gave me a quick run through the gear configuration and the various knobs and switches, and said I’ll see you soon, then he put some water on the boil, and I started up the bike.

To say the ride was smooth is to say the sea is made of water, or that the Stars are a long way off; but to say the ride truly was god-given is closer to the truth. The engine thrummed like a heavenly choir, and the gears changed up and down like they knew my very mind. I moved off from the grass and onto the gravel track where I opened the throttle, and felt the machine come to life beneath me. I took it over the pine-needled woodland floor and through mud-filled bulldozer tracks. I ran it third-geared up the side of rough-hewn track-land and down through the trees to the sandy beach abutting the camp. The bike was like an animal I’d come to know well, and never questioned for a moment the why’s and wherefore of my requests. It was a high bike though, and my feet could barely touch the ground less on tip-toe. It was nonetheless the most stable bike I’ve ever sat upon. Not for the slightest of moments did I have any fear that I might not be able to control it, nor that it would slide out from under me, nor lose it’s own footing on the loose, rough gravelled roadway, or the deep, muddy trenches I took it through. After a fifteen-minute ride through the woodland, I alighted from it back at the campsite, and ranted and raved like an excited schoolboy about how great it was, but not before Stefan took a photo of me sitting on it. My deal with God was done.

We shared another coffee, smoked another cigarette, and packed away our respective camps. With the sun rising high overhead we swapped e-mail addresses and backslaps and handshakes, and promised we’d stay in touch. Moments later, two thousand cubic centimetres roared in perfect harmony as we rode out of the camp side by side. At a crossroad, we turned in opposite directions, and with waved hands held high, we bid each other fare thee well. Then the road to Livorno and Pisa became my sole focus, and I was back on the road again, my guts burbling in time with the engines subliminal roar.

The road to Pisa was little more than a blurry and way too long experience I’d rather not have had. For the most part, I simply felt sick, my repeated attempts at inducing vomit amounting to nothing more than making my condition seem worse. I did however reach Pisa by about 4pm, and after a futile attempt to find the leaning tower, I booked myself into a hotel where I promptly dumped all my luggage on the floor of my room and almost immediately fell asleep. When I woke again, the sun was on it’s last legs, and I saw that I had slept for over five hours. I had a headache again and my stomach was bloated. I was sure I needed to eat though, and staggered off the bed and made my way to reception. The man on desk there was a miserable old sod who made no effort to communicate whatsoever. So despite my willingness to attempt his language, and after too many shrugged shoulders and ignorant looks of indifference, I smiled and said. “Well fuck you very much for nothing anyway”, and went in search of somewhere to eat.

The end of the road took me to the Pisa University restaurant, where blooms of twenty-year-old students were gathered; waiting to eat good food at heavily discounted rates. As I was neither a student nor a twenty year old, I kept on walking. A footpath sign read ‘Full English breakfast all day long’. Had I been healthy, the idea of bacon, eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms and sausage could have quite appealed to me, but in my condition the very smell of it made me queasy, so I hurried on by holding my mouth. A yoghurtaria took my eye, but I figured it would make a better dessert than main course, so I kept on walking but kept it in mind. The air was clear as I made my way northward past Italian restaurants serving too rich food, and street vendors selling tat and giftware from battered cases and dodgy-looking car boots. Above the tall roofline I could make out a shining castellation type structure, but took little notice as the lingering aromas of the town was both hungering and tormenting me beyond anything else. There had to be something simple around there surely, a sandwich-bar would have been perfect, but nothing that straightforward seemed to exist in Italy anywhere I’d been so far, so my hopes weren’t high. As the street began to broaden into a square of sorts, I found a small but brightly lit pavement café serving simple wraps, coffees and teas, chips and burgers and cold drinks. I sat down, ordered a chicken and salad wrap and bought a bottle of Peach flavoured Ice-tea. A man sat there going through currency exchange rates on an Apple I-pad, while his wife bemoaned the fact that their housekeeper had to return unexpectedly to Mexico. A young man sat in the corner on his own, chain-smoking cigarettes and jittering like a victim of shell shock. I scoffed the wrap greedily; it felt good going down, and the ice tea was cooling, and refreshed me somewhat. I paid the bill, and then walked on to see what the square held in store.

With the last of the suns rays playing rainbows on it’s tilted and lopsided length, the leaning tower of Pisa set within the Piazza dei Miracoli looked like a stick of kaleidoscopic Blackpool rock. There were very few people around, save those sitting in the peripheral bars and cafés enjoying the view from afar. The great Cathedral too was flood-lit, and the domed building of the Baptistery shone like it was lit from within, like a Chinese lantern perhaps, but alas, I had left my room feeling rather sickly, with scant regard for sightseeing or photography. I walked around the great landmark, admiring the sight I had known for as long as I could remember. Maybe I should go back and get my camera, I thought; but the very idea brought a convulsion to my guts, reminding me that I was sick, and that bed was the only real option. Heading back towards the room and the warm comfort of my recovery bed, I stopped at the Yoghurtaria and bought myself a cone of cherry yoghurt that I slurped on while covering the mile or so back to the Hotel. Back in my room that night, I began what I’d come to remember as a night of sleepless torture. A night where the bathroom and I became intimate companions, where my guts turned inside out as the demons of food poisoning were purged from my bowel; and where for eight or nine hours or more I forgot where I was, or for that matter who I was too.

Thursday 27^th May 2010

I must have slept at some stage, although I really don’t remember when, and the night of purging had taken a heavy toll. I felt completely exhausted, as if I had run a marathon or two and then back again. My head still thumped, and when I tried to stand up, I had to lean on the wall for fear of losing my balance. After a few minutes of uncertain integrity the fog began to clear, and then I realised I was feeling quite hungry, properly hungry in fact, like full English breakfast hungry. Could it be over I wondered, is that it? I sat back on the bed, gently prodding my tender stomach to see what would happen. No, it wasn’t over at all. I dashed to the toilet and continued where I’d left off sometime earlier. Definitely not over, I realised, but just as definitely getting through it. I gathered myself, gathered my affairs, and made my way downstairs to settle my bill. A different miserable old sod was on duty when I booked out of the place, so I like wise told him, “Fuck you very much” as I paid the bill. Then I loaded up the bike and headed back towards the Square of Miracles, and the not so kaleidoscopic leaning tower.

There were people everywhere now; like Ants they marched and walked and scurried and bumped into each other as they jostled into ridiculous pose, trying to ‘hold up’ the tower for a friends camera. I took the obligatory tourist shots to simply show that I had been there, but the sky was like mackerel and the crowd too big and messy to really make anything nice of it. I turned the camera to black and white and searched out some different shots. If I wasn’t able to capture the tower itself, then I’d get some reportage shots of the madness it generated. I moved along the edge of the crowd, pointing my lens at the posers and their comrades taking the pics. I shot the fat American burger queens, struggling their big-mac butts up the fountains steps. I shot the medium format photographer as he set up his Mamiya for a Pulitzer Prize winning picture. I shot the young glamour girls and the Japanese tourists. All the while, unshaven Police stood around in their shirt hanging-out uniforms and filthy shoes, smoking fags and generally looking disinterested as hundreds of tourists shouldered for position to strike the perfect pose. If I couldn’t get a good enough shot of the tower itself, then a postcard with someone else’s perfect shot would do me fine I thought, and went to a nearby souvenir shop and bought exactly that. After an hour my guts were talking to me again, something along the lines of “I really need to be emptied’. So that was it. Pisa had had its time and I was outa there. As I walked to the bike, I could feel a massive pressure building up inside of me. Oh god no; please, not here. I needed the toilet urgently, like yesterday urgently. I tried to walk quicker but that just made it worse. I clenched my cheeks together, trying to force it back in. Oh no, not in the middle of town…aaaargh!

The show that erupted from me was akin to the Ten Commandments, Titanic, Apollo 13, and world war two all rolled into one international event. There was nothing I could do but stand there and take the looks of horror and disgust as everyone within fifty meters of me heard it, and smelled it, and felt it’s massive power. It was mammoth, like biblical and cosmic; like the big-bang. It was the caf de foo-foo of flatulence. The stench was putrid, like the well-rotted flesh a murder victim left to ripen in the sun. People were gagging, and choking and covering their mouths and eyes. Mothers hurried their children inside and bolted the doors quickly behind them. Waiters cleared tables and brought down the shutters. Dogs and cats fled in panic, and the Police called for back-up. I stood there for five minutes with my trousers vibrating as wave after wave of chunder-inducing stink rumbled from my bowel and out into the quickly abandoned street. I began to feel light-headed as my body rebelled against the spasming muscular episode unfolding inside of me. I wanted to sit down but my legs wouldn’t move, they just stood there trembling as megalitres of hot, foul gasses emptied themselves from my inner sanctum and spread like mustard-gas across the cobbled courtyard, seeping in beneath doors, and finding cracks in walls and windows. By early afternoon the worst of it was over, and people were returning to the streets. I had managed by then to make my legs move a little, and had hobbled to a small bench that had withstood the onslaught and was still mostly intact. Here I sat and smiled contently to myself. The police had formed a skirmish line, with riot shields and batons drawn, but after the sniffer dogs had all expired, they decided I was too deadly a force to deal with, and gave me safe passage to leave. The tourists were gathered in a great crowning arc, and were pushing to see the man who’d brought the whole of Pisa to it’s knees. And oh the poor tower of Pisa itself, sadly it leaned no more. Now a crumbled mass of glorious stonework, it lay smashed and broken upon the ground, a victim of my thunderous Italian pay back. There were but two things left to say gentlemen….Oo- and fucking -rah.