I ride an E-MTB through western Crete, usually beginning from my home in Kokkino Chorio in the Apokoronas. From there the possibilities spread remarkably quickly. I can leave the sea behind, climb through olive groves and small villages, take an old track into the limestone hills or continue towards country where the White Mountains begin to dominate everything ahead. Much of my riding is off-road, and over time those rides have become inseparable from another interest: trying to understand the ground through which I am travelling. Normally, every ride becomes a story.

I record the route, but the GPS track is only the beginning. Something encountered along the way—a church, a ruined building, an old road, a memorial, a name on a map, sometimes nothing more imposing than an object beside the track—raises a question. I stop, look, photograph it and, once home, begin investigating. The bicycle may be back in the shed on Sunday afternoon; by Wednesday I can still be trying to establish what I saw.

That is how many of the stories on this website begin.

Some have led into the Battle of Crete and the resistance. Others have taken me into Ottoman Crete, ancient routes, village history, churches, forgotten military positions and the lives of people who once crossed the same ground. What begins as an E-MTB ride can end with old maps spread across a desk, military reports being compared, Greek place names checked against earlier spellings and an increasingly unreasonable determination to identify a pile of stones that I could quite easily have ridden past.

I rarely do.

Then something changed.

Anyone who happens to follow my rides on Komoot may already have noticed it. My last ten rides appeared there in the usual way, dutifully recorded by GPS: a line wandering across western Crete, the kilometres completed, metres climbed, gradients negotiated and all the other numerical evidence necessary to prove that both bicycle and rider left home and eventually returned.

But there were no photographs.

There were no proper titles.

And there were no stories.

At first, that probably looked like procrastination.

After ten rides, I think I can reasonably claim it was deliberate.

A Line Across Crete

Open one of those rides on Komoot and there is no mystery about whether the journey happened. The evidence is presented with the unemotional efficiency of a clerk preparing a case for the prosecution. Here is where I went. Here is how far I travelled. Here is how high I climbed. Here is how long it took.

The elevation profile rises and falls across the screen, entirely indifferent to whether a particular ascent was magnificent, unpleasant or accompanied by language best omitted from a respectable website.

The line itself is extraordinarily precise.

It may leave Kokkino Chorio, cross familiar country and then disappear onto tracks running between villages or into the hills. It records every turn and diversion, including those which, viewed afterwards on a map, give the impression of deliberate exploration.

Some of them probably were.

Technology is wonderfully discreet about the others.

What the line cannot show is the country through which it passes.

That matters in Crete.

The Island Beyond the Map

There are mornings when the light across Souda Bay seems to sharpen every headland and ridge. On other days the mountains withdraw into haze and the country immediately around you becomes more intimate: olive trees, dry-stone walls, red earth, limestone and the occasional cypress standing dark against everything else.

Climb higher and the scale changes again.

The sea that dominated the beginning of the ride becomes a strip of blue behind you. Villages that seemed separate from below reveal their relationship to one another. Tracks cross folds in the ground that roads avoid. Ahead, the White Mountains rise beyond the lower country, sometimes clear and hard-edged, sometimes partly lost in cloud. There is beauty here, certainly, but not always the comfortable sort presented in holiday photographs. Crete can be hard country.

The summer burns the grass pale. Limestone breaks through thin soil. Tracks that look perfectly reasonable on a map can become loose, steep and thoroughly unreasonable on the ground. In winter, water returns to places that appeared completely dry a few months earlier. Wind can change an exposed ridge in minutes. Then, quite unexpectedly, you enter a sheltered fold of land, an olive grove or a deserted stretch of track where everything becomes still. There may be no traffic. No voices. No machinery. Sometimes even the wind disappears. You stop the bicycle and hear almost nothing. That, too, is Crete.

And perhaps I had become so occupied with investigating the island that I had stopped noticing what happened when I simply allowed it to be there.

What Did He See?

The ten rides contain no photographs. For anyone accustomed to my normal stories, that removes one of the principal clues. A photograph tells the reader that I considered something worth stopping for, even when its significance is not immediately apparent. An old doorway, a stone trough or a few courses of masonry may not look especially promising, but experience has taught me to be suspicious of apparently unremarkable things in Crete.

They have an unfortunate habit of acquiring history.

That is usually where the trouble starts.

I stop the bicycle because something does not quite fit. I look at it, walk around it and take a photograph. Then another, because the first does not show its relationship to the road. A third records the masonry. A fourth is taken from farther away.

By this point the ride has effectively been ambushed.

Back home comes the apparently innocent question:

What is it?

From there matters deteriorate rapidly. The modern map gives one spelling, an older map gives another, a wartime document uses something entirely different and a nineteenth-century traveller appears to have heard the name from a man in a kafeneio and written down whatever he thought he heard. One source contradicts another; a third cites neither.

Before long, the Sunday ride has acquired footnotes.

There are worse ways to spend a week.

But not this time.

For ten rides I took away the photographs and the narrative. The routes remained, but the explanations disappeared.

So what did I see?

Where did I stop?

Was there something beside the track?

Why did I turn there?

What was beyond that ridge?

I could answer those questions.

I have decided not to.

When Riding Becomes Fieldwork

An E-MTB changes the scale at which I experience Crete.

A car is excellent for getting somewhere, but getting somewhere is not always the point. On a bicycle, particularly once the tarmac has been left behind, connections in the landscape become easier to see. A track that appears insignificant on a modern map may make complete sense on the ground. A ridge explains why movement has been channelled around it. A spring or well helps explain settlement. A ruined building occupies precisely the place where, once you are standing there, you realise a building ought to have been.

Gradient matters. Water matters. Visibility matters. So does distance, but not always in the way a road map suggests. This is one reason my riding and historical research have become closely connected. The bicycle allows me to reach ground I might otherwise pass at a distance, while moving slowly enough to notice it. When investigating military history, that can be particularly important. A map may suggest that two positions are close; the ground may reveal a ravine, a ridge or a brutal climb between them. A route described casually in a written account can look rather different when you actually ride it.

The E-MTB has therefore become part transport, part field instrument and, on certain climbs, an expensive means of discovering that contour lines were telling the truth all along.

But there is a danger in all this.

If every ride becomes fieldwork, when do I simply go for a ride?

The Tyranny of the Interesting Object

It begins innocently enough. You are riding along a perfectly good track when something appears beside it. There is absolutely no requirement to stop. Nobody has asked you to investigate it. There is no editor waiting impatiently for 2,500 words on an unidentified piece of Cretan masonry. You could continue riding. In theory. Instead, the brakes go on. This is partly curiosity, but Crete encourages it. So many periods occupy the same ground that one layer repeatedly intrudes upon another. A modern road may follow a much older route. A village can retain traces of several administrations. A church may occupy ground used long before the present building existed. A wartime position may have been selected because geography had already channelled movement through the same place for centuries. Once you begin looking, it becomes difficult to stop. And once you begin writing about what you find, another subtle change takes place. You begin wondering whether the next ride will produce a story. That troubled me. The bicycle came first.

Ten Rides Without a Story

So I rode. The routes were recorded automatically, as they always are. Komoot received the tracks and displayed its maps, elevation profiles and statistics. Anyone following me there could see that another ride had appeared. But nothing followed it. After two or three rides, perhaps it looked as though I had fallen behind with the writing. By ride six, an observant follower might reasonably have suspected either an experiment or a prolonged attack of idleness. By ten, it had become something else. I began to wonder what happens when I remove myself from the reader’s experience of the ride. Normally I decide what matters. I tell you about the difficult climb, the abandoned building, the view from the ridge or the memorial beside the road. I provide the historical context and explain why the route took me there. Even when questions remain unresolved, I have chosen which questions to ask. Take away the story and that relationship changes. All you have is the route. Now you have to decide what interests you.

Reading an Empty Map

There is a curious pleasure in looking at a route when nobody has explained it.

The line leaves one place and heads towards another. It climbs unexpectedly, abandons a road for a track, crosses high ground and somewhere makes a peculiar diversion before returning to its original direction.

Why?

Perhaps there was something there.

Perhaps the view was worth the climb.

Perhaps the track looked interesting.

Perhaps I was investigating something.

Or perhaps I was lost.

All are perfectly respectable explanations, although some are more likely to appear in the published account than others.

Without photographs, the uncertainty increases. There is nothing to establish what the weather was doing, what condition the track was in or what appeared around the next bend. A route across Crete displayed on a screen is geometry. On the ground it is limestone, dust, loose rock, vegetation, heat, cold, gradient, smell and sound.It is also light.

That is something no GPS track records particularly well.

There are moments when the late sun catches the limestone and the whole character of the ground changes. Olive leaves turn silver in the wind. The sea appears unexpectedly between two ridges. A village that seemed ordinary when approached by road looks entirely different from a track several hundred metres above it.

Sometimes I stop because of history.

Sometimes I stop because Crete is beautiful.

There is no deeper explanation required.

What the Numbers Know

We have become remarkably good at measuring rides.

Distance, elevation, speed, gradient, moving time and stopped time can all be recorded. Surface can be classified. With enough equipment attached to bicycle and rider, it is probably possible to return from a mountain knowing considerably more about one’s performance than about the mountain.

I use this information because it matters. For an E-MTB route, distance alone tells us very little without ascent, terrain and surface.

Twenty kilometres on tarmac and twenty kilometres over broken Cretan limestone are not remotely the same proposition, however firmly the computer insists that both contain twenty kilometres.

Yet there remains an enormous gap between recording a journey and experiencing one.

The data can tell you where the steepest climb occurred. It cannot tell you whether I stopped halfway up because of the view, because I noticed something beside the track or because I needed a rest and subsequently discovered that the view provided an excellent excuse.

It cannot record the smell of wild herbs crushed beneath a tyre, the sudden coolness beneath trees after a long exposed climb, bells somewhere on the hillside, or the moment when a rough track reaches a crest and the Libyan Sea appears far below.

Nor can it measure silence.

The GPS records position.

Memory records experience.

Writing chooses what survives of both.

For ten rides I removed that final stage.

The Question I Had Not Expected

I began thinking about these rides because of what was absent from them. Somewhere along the way, however, the absence raised a different question.

Why did I think every ride needed a story?

Nobody had imposed that rule.

There is no contractual requirement that a Cretan E-MTB ride contain a minimum number of historical incidents before the rider is permitted to return home. A perfectly good morning can consist of climbing into the hills, following a track because it looks promising, discovering that it is not, finding another one, stopping for coffee and eventually arriving home with dusty shoes and considerably less battery than anticipated.

That is enough.

Indeed, for years it was the whole point.

The research came later. The stories grew from the riding because Crete kept presenting questions. I do not want to lose that. Fieldwork has changed how I understand the island, and the bicycle allows me to examine ground in a way that reading alone cannot replace.

But the order matters.

I want stories to emerge from rides.

I do not want to ride because I need another story.

There is a considerable difference.

The Sound of Silence

And so those ten routes will remain as they are.

Together they form a collection I have called The Sound of Silence.

There are no missing photographs waiting to be uploaded and no half-written accounts sitting on my computer. I am not going to return to the routes retrospectively and manufacture narratives because an empty space appears to require filling.

The empty space is the point.

If you find the collection on Komoot, you can open the rides and examine the evidence. The tracks are real. The climbs happened. The kilometres accumulated. The wheels crossed the ground and eventually brought me home again. Komoot itself describes Collections as a way of bringing routes and activities together around a common thread; in this case, the common thread is what I have deliberately left out.

Follow the line when it leaves the road.

Notice where it climbs and where it suddenly changes direction.

Wonder what might have been beside the track, beyond the ridge or around the next bend.

Decide for yourself whether an inexplicable deviation represents exploration, fieldwork or navigational incompetence.

I know the answer.

You don’t.

For once, that is how I intend to leave it.

Because riding through Crete has taught me something that all the research, maps and historical documents occasionally make easy to forget. The island does not have to explain itself to me. There are mornings when it is enough to climb out of Kokkino Chorio with the sea behind me, follow an old track into the hills and watch the country change as I gain height. There is enough history beneath the wheels to occupy several lifetimes, but there is also the immediate Crete: limestone and olive, mountain and sea, heat and wind, villages appearing and disappearing among the folds of the land.

Sometimes I will stop and ask what happened there.

Sometimes I will come home and spend days finding out.

And sometimes I will simply ride through it.

Perhaps that is the real sound of silence.

Not an absence of anything worth saying, but the decision, occasionally, not to say it.

And next Sunday I will wheel the E-MTB out again and leave Kokkino Chorio without knowing whether I am setting out on another story or simply another ride. Somewhere ahead there will be an old track, a climb I have forgotten is quite so steep, perhaps something beside the road that demands investigation, and almost certainly a moment when Crete itself provides sufficient reason to stop. If a story comes home with me, I will write it. If it does not, the mountains, the olive groves and the empty tracks will have lost nothing by my silence.