The Cycling Brit

I’ve never flown with a bicycle before. The prospect has always seemed daunting to me – it can be bad enough sometimes just getting on a train. With flying, get the packaging all wrong and you could be in for extra charges or even having the bike flat rejected at check-in. Then there’s the prospect of damage – we’ve all seen the footage of luggage being hoyed across the runway and bashed around by over zealous conveyor belts and ground crew. There’s a lot that could go wrong, or at least in my head there was.

The packaging

By 3pm Saturday afternoon I was off the FlixBus and in Warsaw, where my flight would be departing from 11pm Monday evening.

My main anxiety was getting hold of some kind of box to both protect the bike from damage whilst satisfying the airline’s rules. I was flying with the Polish operator LOT, who specify a weight limit of 32kg and maximum sum of all dimensions as 230cm (e.g. 130cm long + 30cm wide + 70cm high).

The weight limit had room to spare, but the dimensions…230cm didn’t sound like much to me. It should be just about doable when removing the front wheel, at least according to my dodgy tape measurements. I just needed a box.

The coach ride from Vilnius was more than long enough to comb through Google Maps for bike shops near to the hotel and see if any would still be open when I arrived. There were two candidates, so I headed straight to Reakcja Łańcuchowa opposite Ogród Saski park, a 15 minute walk from the hotel. They’re more of a maintenance workshop than a new bike vendor, but the helpful chap on shift took the time to go out back and have a rummage, returning with a large cardboard box for an E-bike. The staples had been pulled out so it was no longer in true ‘box’ form, but that could be solved with duct tape. About to close for the weekend, he stashed it under his car so I could return and collect at my convenience…top bloke!

It’s hard not to feel a bit eccentric walking through central Warsaw with a huge slab of cardboard on your head, but it’s the best way to carry such awkward objects, and on a cycle tour you have to embrace the fact there will be times when you look conspicuous, even outright strange. It’s a bit like day two of a music festival, there’s a point when self-consciousness goes out the window.

So I had a box, hooray! I celebrated by wandering down to the Old Town for a beer, and for the first time on my trip the sudden urge to get to a toilet ASAP washed over me. I think it was the hotel tap water that ran warm whichever way you turned it. Whatever the cause, I didn’t shit my pants in the centre of Warsaw so I’m striking that down as a win, even if it did cut the celebrations short.

Boxing day

It’s all good and well getting your hands on a box, but you still have to get the bike inside, and in my case I had to reconstruct the box itself from a cardboard shell. After cleaning the bike as best I could without caking the entire hotel room in oil & dirt, I got to work.

For a while I couldn’t even work out how the box fit back together. It seemed so enormous that I was trying to fold it in a way that halved the size – which didn’t work – before the penny dropped and it all made sense: it was just a lot bigger than I’d anticipated. There was a lot of unused space inside once the bike had been dropped in with the front wheel, handlebars and pedals removed. In fact it was nearly 50% over the maximum dimensions specified by LOT. Time for some modification, then.

This is where getting a bike shop to do the packing would have helped me. My attempt at cutting the box down to size was frankly piss poor: I used the serrated blade on my knock-off Leatherman knife which made cutting straight lines difficult, and my space saving idea to have one end tapered just didn’t really provide any bankable savings, instead making the whole thing look like it’d been cobbled together by class 4 at the local primary school.

I did manage to reduce the height of the box, and the width in places, but the length was still obscenely long. My tinkering had jeopardised the structural integrity and the box was still way over the size limit. I pinged a WhatsApp message to LOT customer services to see if there was some leniency on the dimensions – they simply reconfirmed the 230cm limit.

Plan B

I knew that if my bike was simply wrapped in some kind of plastic film it would easily be within the size limit. Bubble wrap seemed like the best option to keep it safe in transit, so I tracked down the nearest ‘B&Q’ style hardware store and – with my bike now dismantled in a box – hopped on a Lime electric scooter and joined the Monday morning Warsaw commuters. It was c.15 hours before take off.

I bought two massive rolls of bubble wrap and a fresh duct tape (it’s a good job you can ride a scooter with a roll of bubble wrap under each arm). The new plan was this: get back to the hotel, reconstruct the bike, ride to the airport, deconstruct the bike and wrap everything up there.

One benefit of Plan B was that it avoided the ordeal of getting a taxi to the airport. I still needed to carry the bubble wrap though and didn’t fancy the under-arm technique on a bike. Instead, I pulled out the trusty duct tape and taped them to the rear panniers, creating some kind of Blue Peter style homemade artillery unit.

There was one final bit of faff before I could go to the airport: dispose of the (now redundant) cardboard box. Obviously I could have just left it in the hotel room, but that could draw attention to the fact I’d been messing around with the bike in there and risk being hit with a big cleaning bill, so I headed out on foot to track down a suitable bin. Resisting the temptation to fly-tip, I quickly gave up and just took it back to the bike shop.

Warsaw Chopin Airport

Apart from stopping to re-tape the bubble wrap two or three times en route to the airport, the mission was on course for success. I picked out a space against a glass wall next to a bench in departures and began the process of dismantling then wrapping the bike.

It was quite slow going, but with over seven hours before take off at least I had time on my side. During a brief pause to sit down for a bit of lunch on the nearby bench I noticed in the corner of my eye a couple of security personnel inspecting my bike.

And that was it really. The bike weighed in at 20kg, well under my 32kg limit, and the dimensions were never even measured in the end…maybe I could have used the box after all?!

“Don’t worry, that’s all mine”

“Do you know this is not ok? You must be with luggage at all times. If we evacuate the terminal it is very big fine.”

I assume they didn’t bother to ask me first because there was an empty space between me and the end of the bench (where someone had been sitting), but you’d hope they would at least speak with the eye in the sky – who could briskly verify me as the owner – before evacuating the thousands of passengers and staff who were in Terminal A that Monday afternoon. But let’s face it, probably not worth the argument.

“No problem, my apologies.”

Perhaps this was not an optimal time to raise the fact I was carrying explosives? Nothing sinister of course, just my camping stove gas cylinder – I knew it wasn’t allowed on the plane but I needed to know where I could safely dispose of it. Rather than poke the bear in front of me, I asked the information kiosk instead who confirmed the oversize baggage area has a special bin for such items.

That’s a wrap

It was an awkward task to wrap the bike without a rotating platform to stand it on but I eventually applied what looked like a reasonable amount of padding. My panniers would effectively go as a single checked-in bag, so they needed to be all wrapped up together – for some reason I bought a roll of brown parcel paper for this purpose which was utterly useless, it would tear into pieces on the conveyor belt before it even left sight of the check-in counter. Instead I hatched a new plan: go to check-in, confirm they are happy with weights, sizes etc., then get the professional luggage wrapping kiosk to securely finish the job.

I was now faced with a dilemma: how to get to the check-in desk located 100m away with two massive pieces of luggage? The trolley I previously collected must have been yoinked when I nipped to the information desk, and if I left one piece of luggage behind and security clocked me that’d be their golden opportunity to fine me…I needed another trolley.

I discovered the majority of airport staff do not view fetching trolleys for stranded solo passengers (trying to maintain security of the airport) as part of their job description. And why should they? These people are employed to solely perform much loftier duties, e.g. to give one passenger every 25 minutes a 10 second tutorial on how to use the self check-in machine – nothing more, occasionally less.

I was close to asking random passengers for help before a high-vis clad hero came to my rescue. Maybe I should have asked random passengers from the outset, but that’s not my nature…I like to test if the system works before opening the floor to the kindness of strangers. Now suitably trollied, I received my long awaited knod of approval from check-in and the wrapping kiosk man (who was a keen bikepacker) finished the job. The airport luggage wrappers essentially use a strong grade of cling film (and a lot of it); it didn’t fill me with joy to see so much single-use plastic being used in one go, but it does give confidence that the whole thing isn’t going to unravel along the way.

From there on it was just like any other late night flight. I tuned out my surroundings with noise cancelling headphones and got in a few hours of something that loosely resembled sleep. I would need the rest, it wasn’t long before I’d be fending off prospective taxi drivers and rebuilding the bike in Baku airport car park, then riding into the city centre – wherever that might be?

Kudos to the taxi driver who gave up on selling me a fare and eventually lost patience watching me agonisingly unwrap the bike by hand. I didn’t want to publicly brandish a knife in my first 60  minutes on Azerbaijani soil but my new friend had no such qualms, pulling out a 4 inch blade from his glove compartment and making short work of it. I was just glad he didn’t accidentally slice my finger off in the process.

And a final kudos to the motorcyclist who couldn’t bear the pain of watching me try and reattach the front rack on my own. Sometimes all it takes is a second pair of hands to turn a difficult task into something quite straightforward – within 30 minutes I had gone from feeling surrounded by sharks trying to sell a (potentially overpriced) taxi to feeling supported by strangers willing to help me. It was a good first impression of the people of Azerbaijan.