Transalp above the passes. An Innsbruck to Verona gravel route the hard way.

Moments

Hard route, creative solutions

At times this route is very steep for long periods and if you’re an ordinary person like me then this will be hard. With low enough gears you can go up almost anything, but at one point I was going so slowly I was overtaken by a hiker!

I found two really helpful solutions to this:

On these long steep stretches I’m pedalling at a reasonably constant cadence so I tried to forget my legs and focus only on breathing, slowing it down, almost meditating, thinking “This is good for me, just breathe deeply and regularly and enjoy”.

The other solution was that these are the mountains and there’s plenty of alternatives for going up them. I used a cable car on day 1 near Innsruck and on day 4 I used a funicular. Key rule… if you’re tired or expect to be then there’s no harm in looking at alternatives (they’re also quite fun experiences).

On a bike you’re closer to the world around you and can smell it

One thing that struck me on my climb above the Jaufenpass (Rinner Saddle) was that on a bike you’re really exposed to smells… so my memorable smells (excluding the ubiquitous cow shit) were:

- Unknown flower… climbing through through the meadows of Jaufental

- The warm angle grinder smell of hot brakes and tired engines from the vehicles on my way down from the pass

- The distinctive smell of fresh apples whilst passing the myriad of orchards in Val de Non

- Walking through Meran, a lush Belle Époque spa town, there’s the smell of dozens of tropical looking plants.

The history of South Tyrol weighs heavy

I took a longer detour to Bolzano to make up for cheating by taking the funicular. Two hugely important fascist buildings:

The Victory Monument was erected in 1928 by Mussolini as a giant fuck you to the recently subjugated South Tyroleans (although it is supposed to memorialise the dead from WW1).

It’s basically a giant set of fasces, the bundle of sticks with an axe, originally symbolising dominance and punishment (corporal and capital). The symbol was used by the Romans to represent the power of the magistrates, evolving over time until its widespread use as a symbol of justice. It’s contradictory use as a symbol of strength in unity (revolutionary France and the US) is probably of fabulous origin: Aesop described the fragility of a single stick vs a bundle. It’s easy to see how this widespread disparate use of the symbol has meant it’s harder to remove this symbol of Fascism from the West compared with the non-Western swastika.

It’s inscription means “Here at the border of the fatherland set down the banner. From this point on we educated the others with language, law and culture”, a clear attempt to impose Latin culture on the native German speakers.

It therefore remains a controversial monument, but has now been turned into a museum to provoke reflection and open dialogue on identity in South Tyrol.

The other key building is the Casa del Fascio, the home of the Italian Fascist Party. The most striking feature is a huge bas-relief telling the story of the “triumph of Fascism”, with Mussolini on horseback in the centre. Again modern politicians have found a way to retain the building yet refute its purpose: 

Hannah Arendt’s words “No one has the right to obey” now cover the relief, contrasting the fascist dogma of “Believe, obey, combat” with that of individual moral responsibility, suspension of which she argued is the cause of the “Banality of evil”. In 2025 this is something we could all reflect on.

Cyling to the station at home and getting off in a faraway land

For me there’s no form of travel quite so liberating and sustainable as combining long distance trains and bikepackimg/gravel routes in Europe. With a bit of imagination and time you can get anywhere in Europe by rail using night trains and normal trains. You then get to cycle for a few days and at the end get on another train and still get back home without ever packing your bike away.

A trip through art history in Hamburg

A big highlight of this trip wasn’t actually in the Alps, but in Hamburg at the Kunsthalle next to the main station. I went for Caspar David Friedrich’s masterpiece, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog: sometimes I’m trying to recapture that sense of freedom and confidence against the unknown whilst I’m cycling.

But the art museum isn’t just that one painting: it is a compactly curated trip through the history of Western art, well explained and manageable to a heathen like myself in less than 2 hours. If you’re changing trains in Hamburg there’s now some amazing, secured bike sheds to drop your bike and pop over the road for a couple of hours to the Kunsthalle (there’s also plenty of big lockers at the museum if you want to take some bags).