A mountain bike, I think. She doesn’t strike me as the electric bike type. The route along the (former) Iron Curtain won’t be some gravel-colored path with white lines down the middle and the occasional chunky drawing of a bike.
A mountain bike with, dangling from the handlebars, a bag that looks like those cooler bags from the supermarket that you get for free when buying a six-pack of beer. A bag with a window, through which a camera lens pokes.
It sounds delightfully old-school—a camera in a bag. Spy-style. Raincoat and fake mustache-ish.
Paulien is cycling the curtain in stages. The entire curtain—from Finland to Bulgaria. Finland is rebuilding its section. Exactly where the old one stood? Something different, but also to do with history: in English theaters, the heavy front stage curtain has been called the Iron Curtain for centuries. And Finnish curtains are known to be thick as well. Thick enough to block the light.
Paulien’s journey starts on May 9. She’s doing the entire Finnish-Russian border and returns from that on July 13.