Chain reaction

Circling the roundabout on my new electric bike (woo!) with Janine close behind on her electric trike (I was always jealous), I glanced at my watch. About 10 o’clock. Fine, we’d reach the beach in good time for a swim before the sun rose too high for comfort. Then I saw the other cyclist.

She was standing forlornly at the side of the road, a middle-aged lady in shorts, her green Dutch-style bike lying on the ground beside her. As we approached I watched her expression change from lost and lonely to dawning hope, a tentative smile. I braked slowly, heart sinking. Look, I’m just a normal human being and if another cyclist is in trouble I really don’t want to be there, I just want to carry on my way. But of course I stopped.

‘Qué pasó?’ What’s happened?

‘You speak English?’ she guessed, with a probably German accent. Not a Gomeran then, but that was obvious, she didn’t look Spanish and anyway Gomeran ladies don’t ride around on green sit-up-and-beg bikes. We quickly established that her chain had come off its front chainring. Good news in that it was a less demanding task than a puncture, not so good news that I would end up with oily fingers.

Also not so good was that her bike - with a low-slung frame designed for women to step daintily across without having to sling a leg over the saddle - had a chainguard, the classic kind that covers the entire top of the chain and wraps around the front of the chainring. Heart sank a little more. I had previous experience of chainguards.

You don’t see many of them on this island, at the moment. Pushbikes, as we used to call them, are in their very early days as a form of transport and are purchased mainly as a sports device. They have feather-light frames, wafer-thin tyres, no mudguards and certainly no chainguards. Slim young people wearing slippery shirts of rainbow colours and tight shorts with padded bottoms bend low over their handlebars, calf muscles swollen as melons, training for impossibly rapid ascents. They make me feel slow, even on my new electric miracle with streamlined battery and bright blue panniers.

But my bike, as I occasionally explain defensively, is not about speed and competition, my bike is my burro, my donkey. A beast of burden. Its capacious panniers are its reason for being in the world, or in my world anyway. Janine’s red tricycle is even truer to this role - cheerful, charming and with large baskets front and rear, it’s possibly the most attractive burro the island has ever seen. Visitors point as it hums past, pause to examine it when it’s parked. One Spanish visitor asked if we’d mind taking a photo of her sitting on it. Never mind your Instagrammers posing one-legged on clifftops, here’s one of me on a red triciclo!

There used to be six authentic, honking donkeys in and around our village just thirty years ago but now there are none. Bikes could at least partially replace them, but they haven’t. Two-wheelers with engines, yes, there are plenty of those, ranging from puttering little mopeds to roaring BMWs costing twenty thousand euros, but very few of them are used as a donkey equivalent. Not in the way that they are, for example, in a town called Durazno we visited in Uruguay where the entire population travelled around on motorbikes, often with two, three or even four passengers on a single machine, an entire family. If everyone in the world did that we’d be a long way towards solving the climate crisis. And the over-population problem as well if they tried to do it in Madrid, Paris or London.

So we’re not quite there yet in Gomera as an all-round cycling community. There is just one dedicated cycle track on the island, in San Sebastián, leading directly from the island’s very first traffic roundabout to the hospital. It’s far more popular with pedestrians than with cyclists. The planners failed to consult with Copenhagen before they built it so there’s a lot wrong from the cyclist’s point of view. A brave attempt, however, and I hope there will be more someday.

But, getting back to the lady with the chain problem: replacing a chain on its front chainring is usually not a difficult procedure. You take a small screwdriver from your travelling toolkit, hook it between the chain and the chainring then wind the pedals backwards while guiding the chain over the sprockets. Done in a moment. With a chainguard, though, you can’t get at the chain where you want to and even if you do, winding the pedals backwards will bring your screwdriver up against a support bracket of the chainguard and the chain will slip away from you. Aaagh!

‘I might have to take off the chainguard,’ I warned the German lady. She nodded sadly, in the manner of a wife agreeing to let a surgeon remove her husband’s leg. ‘I’ll put it back on again afterwards.’ She tried to smile. Anything, anything.

But I’m glad to report a happy ending. I managed to get the chain on without major surgery, fiddling my way around and inside the chainguard using a screwdriver, a tyre lever and several fingers. And although both hands emerged liberally covered in black chain oil, I cleaned them up with the disinfectant gel that has been part of my personal toolkit since the Covid-19 virus knocked us all off our sprockets.

Photo by Didier Ngoie of P&D Art