Our train to Cochin had been scheduled to arrive at 7:30 am. But in what seemed to us a completely uncharacteristic maneuver for the Indian Railway, it arrived nearly 45 minutes ahead of time, meaning that we were quietly snoozing in our bunks when the rest of the passengers detrained and wandered into the misty morning. It was the mechanic who finally came to wake us up, no doubt curious what had become of us (and his tip), what with the train completely empty and the bikes still locked near the rear lavatories.

We did our best to rouse ourselves and unload our luggage with all haste. I tipped the mechanic, and with all our worldly possessions thrown in one great pile on paan, spotted the hissing railway platform at Ernakulam, We began to take stock and form our strategy. It was just before sunrise, and the train station was a ghost town. As you no doubt already know, dear reader, Cochin is an island-like peninsula, whose sister city, Ernakulam, is separated from Cochin by a thin body of water, which we needed to traverse in order to arrive at our hotel.

The hotel, was a place by the name of Vasco Homestay, which Scott had booked last night on the train, named thus for the principle reason that it happens to cohabit the house in which the famous barbarian and Portuguese colonial explorer, Vasco de Gama, died.

It was for this very reason that we were attracted to the place, and, if you might indulge me dear reader, I would like to briefly diverge to the story of Vasco da Gama and how he came to die in Cochin.

Vasco was originally the son of a knight and governor back in Portugal and as such was trained to be a mariner. This was during a time of much speculation as to the existence of a oceanic trade routes around the tip of Africa and over to the Indian ocean. Vasco proved himself to be a ruthlessly effective commander, fighting with French privateers off the African gold coast, and when his father was given the task of proving or disproving the rumored trade route, Vasco lobbied for the job.

As luck would have it, he got it, and set off in 1497 with four ships and 170 men. They set forth working their way down the coast of Africa, seeking a wind pattern known as the South African westerlies, and when he finally caught them he was able to make his way around the southern Horn of Africa into waters which had hitherto been unexplored by Europeans. On his way through, since it was around Christmas, he named the coast of south Africa “Natal” which means Nativity. The name stuck, more or less, as that part of south Africa is currently called KwaZulu-Natal. Nice one Vasco.

In hopes of building good favor among the people of the Arab-controlled east coast of Africa, Vasco assembled a party of men, put them in costume, and face paint designed to impersonate that of Muslim traders, and in this getup, managed to book an audience with the Sultan of Mozambique. Unfortunately, the Sultan was unimpressed with Vasco’s unglamorous gifts, and the locals proved none too fond of black-face, eventually sending Vasco and his men running for their ship, pursued by a hostile mob. Vasco fled the port, firing his cannons into the city in frustration.

With the failure in Mozambique, poor morale began to reign on board. Vasco addressed this by beginning a policy of attacking and looting unarmed Arab trading ships. This improved morale significantly, while continuing to erode his reputation with the Arab traders, who denied him entry to the port of Mombasa. This proved to his advantage, however, when he arrived a little later at a port called Malindi, in modern day Kenya, a city that was in conflict with traders from Mombosa. The fellows in Malindi provided Vasco an expert pilot, whose knowledge of sailing in monsoon winds allowed him to cross the rest of the way to India in only 28 days.

Vasco landed first in a largish city called Calicut, Kerela, where things refused to go his way. The local authorities had close ties with Arab traders, who in turn were not fans of Mr. da Gama. Likely through a combination of assault and battery, Vasco was able to get an ambiguous letter referring to reservation of trading rights, but when the locals requested that he leave some goods behind as collateral, he became frustrated and left without any goodbyes, leaving a detachment of men behind, but taking all his trade goods with him. The men were told to build a trading post. Tough assignment.

Vasco set sail back to Portugal in August 1498, this time sailing against the monsoon winds. Consequently, the journey back across the Indian Ocean took about five times longer than first trip. So long, in fact, that half the crew died on this leg, and the rest were extra-scurvy by the time they reached Malindi. All in all, only one of the four ships and less than a third of the men made it back to Portugal. Vasco also brought no trade goods back with him. Sounds like a total failure, right?

Wrong.  Vasco was met back in Portugal with a hero’s welcome, and showered with riches. He was given the title, “Admiral of the Indian Seas,” and awarded a lordship, giving noble status to him and all his offspring forever more. So at the beginning of 1502, Vasco came to the royal family in Portugal to pitch a return mission, this time with a request for 20 warships, and all the fiery rhetoric of a good revenge flick. The king gave the mission his blessing, and Vasco was off. With all that fire-power, the urge to pillage and privateer was too great, and plenty occurred along the way. When he finally reached India, Vasco found that the detachment of men he had tasked with establishing a trading post in Calicut had been put to death shortly after his departure. Ouch. So he bombarded Calicut quite savagely, leveling much of the city, and split for the more southerly city of Cochin, a smaller place, more of a fishing village really, where word had spread of his destruction of Calicut, ensuring that he receive a warm welcome.

He traded a mixture of European goods (assault and battery) for some gold, spices and silk, and headed back to Portugal, leaving more men to begin to build a more intense Portuguese settlement in Cochin. On the way back he took a detour to hunt ships traveling to and from Mecca, laden with goods, and a fair number of famous and well-to-do Arab merchants. He would capture these ships, steal all they had, then lock all aboard below decks and order the ship burned. This kind of behavior proved quite effective in lubricating a treaty with the greater government of Kerala, ensuring the success of his trading colony.

As he sailed back, he engaged in plenty and even more heinous profiteering against Arab trading ships and demanding tribute from cities along the way, demanding signed letters from local leaders, agreeing to favorable trading relationships with cities along the coast of Africa. It is no surprise that he returned home to an even more intense hero’s welcome. He was showered with more riches, made an earl, and carried with him now a quite fearsome and Mr. Wolf-esque reputation as a “fixer.”

He returned back to India once and for all to take up his position as Viceroy over all local Portuguese possessions in the region. When he arrived he promptly died of malaria in his house in Cochin. And we had every intention of arriving at that very same place.

Meanwhile, in 2010, Scott and I were pedaling the Speed TRs, fully loaded down with baggage through the gray and still sleeping streets of Ernakulam, toward the ferry terminal. We found our way there quite easily, and finding that the tickets were approximately four cents per person, plus another two cents per cycle, decided to board the rickety craft. We were, by this point, profusely sweating, badly in need of coffee, and nearing the edge of madness.  Luckily, scurvy had not yet set in.

Once we had unloaded our bikes from the boat, we were able to seek counsel  from some local fishermen, who were erecting their stalls in the local market place, as to the location of the Vasco Homestay.

And, thanks be to God, we soon we found ourselves wheeling up to the now quite humble and charmingly crumbling ex-residence of Mr. da Gama himself.

The owner, a charming and quite helpful fellow by the name of Santosh, showed us to our chambers. They were gigantic, and packed to the gills with curios and old furniture. We could just imagine the savage barbarian himself, stupendously fat, covered in a cold sweat and very near death, propped up with pillows in one of these very beds, in the act of dictating his final wishes, the joints of his hands cracking too painfully with gout to write himself, pausing for some time between each word, calling out weakly for water, and forcing himself out of the swimming delirium of fever to do this one last task. The extremes of experience indeed.

We threw down our baggage and attempted to breakfast at the restaurant connected with the Vasco Homestay, but found that the richness of the place seemingly ended before the coffee pot, so we unfolded the speed TRs and headed out into the city. We were stopped shortly into the ride by a fisherman who explained to us that he had a terrible disease,  the only cure for which was a ride, just a short one, around the square on the Speed TR. We indulged him, and he thanked us with the recommendation of good breakfast place.

The place proved so delicious that we would end up eating there for the majority of our remaining 12 meals in Cochin. It was a very unassuming South Indian coffee shop, run by a tall smiling man in a lungi with the voice of James Earl Jones, and a way with dosas, vadas, and coconut chutney that would make a grown man weep. He also expertly whipped up South Indian coffee served in the traditional two containers, one tall and thin and one short and fat. The coffee could them be poured between the two to attain the desired temperature and surface area to volume ratio. Brilliant.

Much refreshed, we climbed back on the cycles and wheeled into what they call Jew Town. A Jewish part of the city, one of the very few places in India where you might see Hebrew, directed at other than Israeli tourists. To be frank, the presence of a Jewish community at all was quite odd for India.

Christianity, though still a minority, has quite a presence in Cochin due to  the Portuguese influence. Cochin was certainly the most Christian town we had visited since we left the American Southwest.  In fact, we saw quite a few people sporting a cross on their heads, drawn between the eyes with bright colored powder, in much the same way we have seen Hindu Indians wearing a colored dot between the eyes. A fascinated meld of religious practices.

We then wheeled south and found ourselves on the busy main road, which took us across a bridge and into Ernakulam. At the entrance to Ernakulam we found a giant repository of cut wood, each piece bearing unique markings.

Any speculation as to the details of this system is welcome in the comments.

Ernakulam proved busy and boisterous, jam packed with all manner of motorized vehicles, all honking and revving their way around one another. By this point in the trip, though, we were becoming quite at home amidst the chaos. We were learning the vocabulary and the rhetoric of the road, giving way and taking way, signaling our intent, and ringing our bells relentlessly.

We called a waypoint at a Vodaphone shop, where I was to get a SIM card. We locked the bikes and I went inside while Scott was to take a stroll. The Vodaphone people we extremely friendly, and a fellow there by the name of Vinil helped me to gain and activate my SIM despite some complicated rules that would otherwise have necessitated a stay in Cochin of at minimum one week.

We were just getting to the final steps of the deal-making process when a security guard came in breathless, and informing me that our cycles were locked in an illegal spot. I came outside to find that Scott, lacking the key to unlock the cycles, had undone the latches and begun to actually fold the Speed TRs in such a way as to allow entry to the parking space that we had blocked, effectively wrapping the bikes around a railing, still leaving the rear wheels locked to a nearby pole.

This acrobatic, of course, attracted a large crowd, and he was now handling inquiries from a diversity of personnel — from passers by, to Vodaphone security, to the Vodaphone manager who had just managed to squeeze his car into its spot. All was made well, and a fair bit of head wobbling later, we were back on the road.

We ate lunch at a kind of point-and-eat restaurant that served food on large square trays, something like what one might find in a middle school cafeteria.

We spent the rest of the afternoon wheeling our way up and around Ernakulam, past the port and a sprawling but perpetually closed city park.

Back in Cochin, we retired to our chambers at the Vasco Homestay, giving our best regards to the owner, and settling in for a bit of well deserved relaxing.

Flipping through the newspaper and finding a particularly curious listing of commodity rates, we marveled at how trade had tamed since the days of the gruesome Vasco da Gama.  Settling down for the evening, we slumbered under the very roof in which he shuffled off this mortal coil.

We discovered a new and quite welcome philosophy prevailed at the Hotel Femina with regard to check out times. Here, the rule was that checkout occurred exactly 24 hours after check in. This worked perfectly for us, since we had an overnight train to Cochin that evening, but would be free to leave our things in the hotel room, and use it to clean up after the day’s wheel.

We breakfasted at a south Indian coffee shop, which we quickly found was a local institution. Its interior was well lit by skylights, and it was crowded with many, many people ripping into vadas, idilis, and dosas.

And well staffed by uniformed and quickly moving servers. The manager of the shop quickly noticed and greeted us, showing us to a table that had been vacated just seconds before. Our server, perhaps the only one in all of our travels in India who was a female, wiped our table down with water and an open hand.

We ordered a couple of idli and vada, a few dosas, and cup after cup of scrumptious South Indian coffee. Feeling refreshed, and quite content to be once again in a land of large portions, we hit the streets.

We wheeled north into the city, bouncing our way over crumbling concrete streets, which dissolved from time to time into gravel, dirt and sand. Our first waypoint would be a temple complex in the north of the city, but we were unsure of the exact route.

We knew that once we got close, we would be able to see the thing looming in the distance and chart from there, but first we needed to traverse the five or so kilometers of city, which lay in a tangled patchwork of poorly maintained streets between us and the northern outskirts.

We called a waypoint to consult a local street coffee vendor and sample his wares. Before we could even order coffee, we had a attracted a large crowd, all of whom were men dressed in a kind of man skirt called a lungi, most of whom where silently scrutinizing the speed TRs with hands crossed behind their backs.

One emerged from the crowd, explaining to us that he was the manager of a painting operation, which was at work next door slathering the interior of a shop with electric orange enamel. He asked us to survey his men’s work, and insisted on buying us coffee (which we nervously drank from a couple of sticky communal glasses).

He then commenced a long chain of introductions, first introducing us to  his team of laborers, followed by most of his extended family, who, for one reason or another, all seemed to be walking by at that time.

All the while, the crowd of people standing around us was growing larger and larger. They were ringing the bells on the Speed TRs and clicking the shifters. When we finally had gotten through the pleasantries and began asking directions to the temple, we hit a roadblock in communications, culminating with the painting manager insisting that he would travel with us on his motor bike to the temple. We did our very best to decline this offer graciously, tried to pay for our coffee, thanked the giant crowd for their kind attention, and remounted the cycles.

Through a system of extemporaneous field commands, we were able to make our way out of the city and into the farmland that encircles Trichy. Strangely enough, the roads actually seemed to improve out here, and as we rode, we waved and helloed with everyone we passed, young and old, even if they were in the distance, operating a piece of farm machinery. Speaking of the distance, there, in it, was the temple. Looming tall and ornate in the hazy pollution. We were certainly heading in the wrong direction, but we now knew where it was, and that was an important step.

We briefly entertained the idea of cycling along the outskirts of the city in order to reach the temple, but as it turned out, all roads lead into Trichy,  so we had to ride back into the city, in order to get out of it on the northeast side rather than the northwest. By now, we were beginning to know our way around, and made short work of the crumbling streets, sending up our own clouds of the red sandy soil of Tamil Nadu.

Suddenly a man ran out into the street, eyes wild, and waving his hands in the air at us as if to say “Stop the show! Hold everything!” We dutifully brought the speed TRs to a halt next to him, where he began to scream to us. “A great man! Only one great Man!” He then violently pulled up the sleeve of his shirt to show us a tattoo on his arm.

“Only one great man! M.G. Ramachandaran.” The tattoo was of a somewhat blurred male head with sunglasses. “One!” he screamed again, holding up one finger, “Only one Great Man!”

“We non-verbally agreed with him, and repeated the name, M.G. Ramachandaran. Upon hearing this he most vigorously shook both of our hands and we were off wheeling again. The extremes of experience indeed.

Here, dear reader, you might be interested to learn: MG Ramachandaran, or MGR as he is more colloquially known in Tamil Nadu was an actor, film producer, and politician. From 1977 until 1987 he was the Minister of Tamil Nadu. For more info, I highly recommend the wikipedia article on this fellow. We found it quite engrossing when we devoured it on the wikireader.

Back on the road, we found our way onto what seemed more like the correct route, marked by much more intense traffic, and a great number of tour buses. Like tributaries into some great river, we channeled from road to road, until we finally found ourselves joining a boiling mass of all types of traffic to cross a great bridge over a large dried out lake.

So intense was it that on the other side, we decided to stop for another cup of delightful South Indian coffee, and some small chocolate flavored shapes, designed no doubt by some chemist to remain unmelted even in the boiling south Indian heat.

Refreshed by our coffee break, we bid farewell to the small crowd which had once again formed around the Speed TRs, and pedaled toward the temple, which loomed larger and larger in the distance.

When we gained on it, we found the place to be much more of an elaborate conglomeration of structures than anticipated, with many ornate gates and sub-complexes.  I’ll let the photos below speak for themselves.

Wheeling around the complex proved to be laden with obstacles and activity.

Back on the road, it was nearing time to call it quits, lest the exertion and the intensity of the sun induce the kind of fatigue that brings with it imprecise and dangerous wheeling habits.  We looped back, passing schools and byzantine village paths.

To return to the city though, we needed to wrangle once again with some 5km of tangled, crowded, and crumbling roads.

At first, we found ourselves stuck in a massive traffic jam, sandwiched between giant buses, cargo trucks, and auto rickshaws in a great cluster of gridlock, but with our more nimble steeds, we were able to slowly make progress where others could not, and soon we had found our way to a great flyover, which allowed us to soar over the city on well paved, elevated, startlingly empty highway.

Why were the other hoards of traffic not taking this route as well? We may never know. But it allowed us to make very short work of the return. Taking us directly to the train station: an important waypoint for later that evening.

And from there, it was a short 5 minute wheel back to the hotel.

We enjoyed the last bits of our 24-hour stay at the Hotel Femina, lounging and working or correspondence.  The battery backup power supply provided ample current to support the blogging session.

As the sun set, and once again, the street vendors lit up their hissing gasoline lanterns, we climbed on our cycles, fully loaded down with gear, and made our way to the station. Our train to Cochin was easy to find, and in stark contrast to our experiences of India on the pilot study, essentially on time.

As the engines started up, and the giant iron snake began to hiss and squeal its imminent departure, we hurried to purchase some Lays Magic Masalla flavored chips (very highly recommended), some Indian spicy fried lentil snacks called Bhel Puri, and a few packets of Good Day Cashew biscuits.

Now, dear reader, I must note, we had no plan for how to deposit all our luggage onto the train. And as we struggled to enter the 3rd class A/C compartment fully loaded with packs and cycles, we made quite a spectacle of ourselves. Bubbling spurts of Tamil and Malayalam punctuated with the word “cycle” followed us everywhere we went. When we found our seats, there was certainly no place to store the cycles and almost too little space for our packs. Luckily, our fellow bunk-mates were quite friendly, assuring us that we would figure it out, and inviting us to sit down. The two fellows were traveling together to Kerala, and were just finishing a vast meal that had been packed by one of their wives. Seeing our sorry stash of Magic Masala chips and Good Day Biscuits, they began to quite vehemently offer us some of their food.

We, of course declined, though it looked very good. They countered with even more vehement offerings, and assurances that they were quite full (which I believe they actually were… it was a huge meal) and began to refer to a newspaper wrapped, twine-tied packet of “surplus chapati.” Well, I’ve never been one to look a surplus chapati in the mouth, so we accepted, found them to be warm, slightly crisp and some of the best chapati of our lives, and began to relax into conversation with these two fine blokes.

Soon a fellow introducing himself as the compartment mechanic, came over, followed by another who after some misunderstandings we confirmed to be describing himself as the Ticketeer. The mechanic offered us a solution to the cycle storage problem. For a small tip, he would allow us to store the cycles in a pile by the rest rooms at the very end of the train where, there being no further cars, the rear door was replaced by a the kind of roll-down security door used to close down shops in Greenwich Village at night.

This seemed like a good solution, so we did so and returned to find the Ticketeer still waiting, harboring little interest in our tickets, but much in our story. We chatted with him about AsiaWheeling and about his previous life as a field hockey champ until he was called away by the arrival of more passengers, namely two young water filter moguls, who demanded masala dosas and chatted with us late into the night about the Indian water filter business. Let me assure you, dear reader, the Indian water filter market is doing just fine.

As the train rattled on into the night, our bunk mates began to call their families to wish them goodnight. They then dutifully passed the phones to us, where on the other end I found myself chatting with the very small and adorable voice of Indian school-girls, who explained to me in English that she liked to sing, and that she was 10 years old. Finally, when we had all said goodnight — our bunkmates, their families, the Ticketeer, the water filter guys, the mechanic, and the drunk fellow who was seen frequently walking back and forth between the bathroom and his seat, we removed our shoes and set up the bunks. It was time to sleep.

And as the train rattled on into the night out of Tamil Nadu and into Kerala we slept the sleep of those who, more foolish, might think the deck was full of aces.

Our last morning in Malaysia began with a visit to the restaurant that had produced the delightful Nasi Lamak and coconut rice pancakes that Smita had brought back for us the previous morning.

The place turned out to be a splendid little roadside stall, a few plastic table s with an outdoor kitchen, a crack squad of fellows, yelling at each other, and some very serious dedication to the speedy delivery of Indian-Malay grub. It was Chinese New Years Day, and the city was pretty deserted.

Most of the clientele there seemed to have a celebratory Sunday out with the family feel. The coffee was incredible. The food was as good or better than we had remembered it. Ah, KL.

So splendid was the place, in fact, that we were tempted to linger there for some time longer than scheduled. Long enough, in fact, that we were rushing to purchase a few snacks at a local wholesale grocer, and wheel back in time to pack our things up for the cab ride to the airport.

We collapsed the speed TRs in the parking garage at Smita’s residence, taking longer than usual, as we were for the first time, using a set of foam protectors which Tan from My Bike Shop had provided us . Meanwhile, Smita sprung to action arranging and negotiating with the cab company. We were sad to be saying goodbye to Malaysia and KL in particular. Kuala Lumpur had earned a firmly applied asiawheeling stamp of approval. But the open road and the wonders of India beckoned, so we bid Smita a fond farewell, and off we went.

Our AirAsia flight departed from the Low Cost Carrier Terminal, which was some distance from the airport proper. The entire terminal, it seemed, was there primarily for AirAsia flights, and we struggled some time to find, in rather low light and among what must have been nearly a hundred AirAsia counters (some for check in, some for baggage, some merely staffed for the sake of staffing) the appropriate counter for our flight to Trichy. We were finally able to find our counter, which was behind another seemingly random security checkpoint, and made all the more obvious by the large line of Indians, sporting lungis and saris, which poured out from a small counter, that may have at one point proclaimed check-in for the flight to Trichy, but now just displayed a 404 Firefox error message.

Most of the line turned out to not be a line, just people standing around chatting, so we were able to work our way quickly to the front, where, in an act of great kindness, redeeming them from all sour feelings over miscommunicated departure times, minute portions, and confusing service personnel, AirAsia waved the “sports equipment fee” for our speed TRs, marking them as merely fragile luggage and sending us, smiling, over to the luggage loading booth, where we patiently waited for a group of young children to climb off the baggage conveyor belt, where they had been most violently enjoying themselves.  Where were their mothers at a time like this?

Luggage dispatched, we headed into the terminal and joined another large group of Indians masquerading as a queue, but were in reality, just chatting and passing the time.

After eating a few shapes, we perused the airport bookstore, which was chock full of business-guru books for middle managers like “25 Sales Habits of Highly Effective Salespeople,” as well as a selection of unsettling magazines.

After shuffling around in the waiting hall looking for power and discussing the feasibility of a high-design beverage business, we boarded the flight and were soon airborne.

As an American, one assumes international flights should be long.  So we were quite surprised when only a couple hours later we arrived in India.

Indian customs proved to be a painless and quick affair, consisting mostly of head wobbling, and then we were set free into the baggage area, where we were to spend the next couple hours, tortured by thirst, and waiting as a poorly designed, bent, and crumbling luggage conveyor suffered through many,  many bags.

The machine seemed to have been designed for maximum impact, taking the luggage and first hoisting it up a long ramp, only to send it tumbling down a steep but grippy conveyor which would halt from time to time, sending the luggage on it tumbling under its own momentum, end over end, crashing down to ground level again.

We watched with bated breath, hoping that the cycles could handle the descent. Our bags slowly arrived, tumbling harmlessly down the spout, but the cycles were nowhere to be found. We paced and waited out the agonizingly slow process. Finally we saw our cycles begin to climb the conveyor, then the system stopped. It seems part of the cycle must have been caught in the machinery, or perhaps would not fit through some bottleneck in the interior of the system. Whatever it was, it was in our great favor, as the attendants finally, got up from where they had been sitting observing the goings on, and climbed into the interior of the machine to retrieve the Speed TRs, laying them at our feet, safe and sound.

The airport was tiny, sporting only a short strip outside for both pick-up and dr0p-off. After changing our Ringgit into Rupees at a truly predatory rate, we found chartering a ride into Trichy reasonably easy.  Drivers were plentiful, and, of course, the Ambassador was spacious.

As we drove, Scott selected a hotel from the list in the Lonely Planet, and our driver made short work of the journey.  With all the swerving and honking, we were reminded that we were definitely back in India.

At first the Hotel Femina seemed reticent about showing us the room before we paid. This was, of course, unacceptable, but after some hemming and hawing outside, and consultation with the locals about other options for lodging in Trichy, they relented and showed us a roomy unit with its own private balcony and a serviceable bathroom. “Oh good, a shower and a little sit in the Condor’s Nest,” we thought, thinking back to the many fine hours we had spent on balconies and porches in Indonesia. So we pulled the trigger.

With lodging out of the way, we unfolded the speed TRs and took to the street, finally getting some much needed water, locating a much needed Automatic Teller Machine, and indulging in some incredibly affordable and much needed Indian food. All the while, as we wheeled from waypoint to waypoint, I found myself startled at the degree to which India was. Everywhere I looked there were people, transacting, yelling, sounding horns, working, chatting, spitting, urinating, littering, or just sitting and passing time.  At every corner, Tamil men would question us about the bicycles and interact in all manners of communication.

The traffic was much slower than any we had yet experienced, consisting of mostly auto rickshaws and large noisy buses. Trichy, it seemed, was a transit city, and as night fell, it did not let up one bit. Street lights flickered on, and street vendors lit up hissing gas lanterns, and the city just kept churning.

And it was loud. Rickshaws, buses, bikes, and people, everyone was honking, screaming, and clanging bits of metal together. The traffic whipped up a dust that clung my sweaty skin, and the smoke from engines burning oil, the spicy scent of street vendors stirring great pots of boiling liquid, and the sickening sweet smell of the open sewers all blended together into an invigorating potpourri.

Ah, India. The extremes of Experience at last.

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It seems our most valued adviser, Ms Smita Sharma, had been awake for some while by the time AsiaWheeling dragged itself from bed. Having already breakfasted herself, and to our great excitement, Smita presented us with a couple of thin rice pancakes, soaked in a kind of of sweet coconut milk.

We were just digging into these, when she presented yet another most welcome surprise: two cups of homemade mellow Malaysian coffee, a variation on the fried in butter type we had found in Penang and Malacca. So delighted were we with this breakfast, and so excitedly were we looking at two slightly greasy looking goodies (known as Nasi Lemak) wrapped in brown paper (which seemed also to be part of our meal), that we were almost oblivious to the fact that as we ate, the apartment was becoming increasingly full of Tamil workmen wearing large gas masks over their bushy mustaches. Some of the workers were carrying large cans, from which they began to spray a foul and acrid liquid into the corners and along the base-boards of the room.

The arrival of the exterminator had also created the perfect excuse for Smita and her sister, a newly barred local lawyer, with an excuse to visit that great mecca of the budget conscious but mildly design oriented homemaker: Ikea. So, as the fumes began to fill the room, we grabbed our brown paper shapes, and made a mad dash for the cycles, swearing to Smita that we would meet again some day. As Smita and her sister faded into the poison mist, Scott and I made a silent prayer for their safe passage, and climbed onto the bikes. Nasi Lamak safely strapped to the rear rack, next to our waters and bike locks, we whipped down the street, passing buses, and scooters, screaming out the field commands and singing “She’s a Lady” in two part harmony above the din of the traffic.

Let me tell you, dear reader, we were feeling great. KL is an excellent city for wheeling, as long as you can maintain the high voltage. And that morning we could. In fact, we didn’t want to stop.

So when we spotted a coffee joint, we called a waypoint to re-amp and dig into the Nasi Lemak. The Nasi Lemak was one of the tastiest things I’ve eaten for breakfast in my entire life. As I write now, I find myself salivating over its sticky rice interior, dampened with fishy red sauce and roasted peanuts. Oh my.

Ready for anything, we poured back onto the streets, noodling through the downtown, allowing ourselves to be siphoned this way and that by the plethora of one-way streets. Before long, we had taken one siphon too many, and found ourselves on a raging highway. Malaysian traffic was whipping by us, and though they gave us plenty of space, we were still periodically given a good case of the willies by the giant signs that advertised blatantly that cycling on the freeway was prohibited. Though we swore to take the next exit, it proved to be only an entrance onto another raging highway. Finally, we called a waypoint to address the situation.

In the distance, on the opposite side of the highway, I could just barely make out what looked like a cross between an exit and the kind of steep gravelly uphill that one sees not so uncommonly in the American Rockies as a last resort for runaway trucks. This, it seemed, was our best chance at escaping the current predicament, so after a unanimous vote and closing of the meeting, we began the painstaking process of waiting for a break in the torrent of traffic that was doing its best to escape KL before the next day (Chinese New Year). After what seemed like an eternity, a break came, and we were able to make it across. Clling a very earnest “highway speeds!” we took off toward the exit.

Thankfully, it did prove to be an exit of sorts, dumping us off into a very lushly vegetated and expensively developed neighborhood of mansions. We caught sight of a sign directing us toward a side road if we wanted to “re-enter the rumah”. We thought anything must be better than attempting to re-enter the raging highway, so in we went. The road wound down the side of the mountain for some time; overhead we could hear monkeys scurrying about and from time to time we were forced to dodge little bits of debris sent earthward by the primates. At the bottom of the road, we found a small settlement of brightly colored houses, with inspirational mottoes such as “This is your test,” and “There is truth in the light and light in the truth.” Middle aged men were sitting in the shade at a number of pucick tables playing cards, and all immediately looked up at us inquisitively. We pulled an uber-rauchenberg and began to climb back up the hill in search of some way back into the city without using the highway.

It was only later that evening that we solved the mystery of the rumah. Rumah Pengasih is a Non-Goverment Organisation that provides treatment to rehabilitate drug addicts by using a “Therapeutic Community” approach. So it was a kind of halfway house community that we had wheeled into. An interesting waypoint to be sure.

From there, we were still badly in need of an avenue by which to regain the city that would not put us on the wrong side of the law. Eventually, we found one.

A great sewage canal bisects the city of Kuala Lumpur, and as we were noodling through what was now becoming a significantly less wealthy neighborhood, we came upon two men doing some kind of maintenance on the many layers of piping that help to empty the offal of the city into this canal.

Along the edge of the canal was a mostly paved service path, which seemed to lead for as far as we could see in the very direction we wanted to go. Thinking to ourselves, this could only be a step in the right direction, we hoisted the bikes over a section of rubble and pointy bits of metal, paused to chat a little with the municipal sewer workers, who seemed quite chagrined at the entire idea, and then hit the road -  or as it might better be put – the service path.

Finally after riding for some time, past fellows fishing in the canal, fellows swimming in the canal, and even some ladies that appeared to be doing laundry (the darks) in the canal, we came to a large metal bridge.  Across the water, garbage burned.

It was then only another minor portage over some sewage pipes, and back onto the road. It was then that I realized my rear wheel was about to fall off. It seemed that all the jostling of the last few days of journey had helped to bring the rear bolts to near the point of falling out of their sockets. Thankfully, the problem was quickly rectified by dashing into a local motorbike repair shop, where they were more than happy to lend me a wrench for a quick repair. During the repair, Scott ran to purchase waters and documented a large outdoor on-store advertisement for a Taiwanese bridal boutique.  Subtlety has its place, but clearly not here.

We were getting back to the main city, just in the nick of time, when the hunger pangs began.  We wheeled to safety back in Lot 10 Hutong.

We began with an immediate and emergency Egg Tart.

And moved onto Honkee porridge and other delicacies.

Smita called us and informed  us that after the meal she would like to meet in an Indian part of town called Brickfields.

It turned out to be another highway intensive wheel, for try as we might, we seemed completely unable to get to that part of town without at least spending some time on highways.

These, at least, were not emblazoned with anti-bicycling signage, and after a few false positives, we found ourselves surrounded by the tell-tale Tamil signage, increased levels of smoke, garbage, and Bollywood, which heralded our entrance to Indiatown. The day’s wheel had been very intense, and Scott especially was quite frazzled by our hair-raising highway rides. It was high time for a coconut. And luckily one of the roadside Halal Indian joints was ready to provide. The establishment used a curious system for cooling the interior. The entire seating area was outside and sheltered from the blistering sun by a large patchwork of lacquered canvas awnings. The management had piped water up into the awning so that it gurgled and trickled down, dripping like rain onto the pavement around the place. Inside, the seating area was covered by strategically placed panning and misting fans, the same kind we had seen so many times in Penang.

The coconut water proved delightful, and once again slightly fermented. We relaxed and allowed our bodies to absorb some of the moisture and energy from the coconut, while I read the wikipedia article on coconuts.

Of particular interest was the fact that coconut water is sterile and can be (often is in Sri Lanka and parts of Southeast Asia) used as an intravenous solution in a pinch. Scott and I briefly entertained the notion of contracting some terrible dysentery in the middle of the Laotian jungle, losing consciousness outside a pit toilet and discovering through a haze of dehydration and malnutrition that we were in a hospital built from bamboo and grass, where a fellow in a loincloth was sterilizing a needle with a lighter and attempting to attach us to a coconut.  No doubt the other fellow would be standing by with a camera.

Then we remembered the steadfast support of Surgical Associates of Grinnell, and thanked goodness that we carry antibiotics, and that we are careful about what we eat, and that the sun was shining and we were healthy and safe, and that the phone was ringing and Smita was done with her business at Ikea and wanted to go wheeling some more. So back on the cycles we climbed, and deeper into Tamil town we wheeled, where we found Smita, on her folding cycle ready to give us a tour.

We wheeled through Brickfields and up into Smita’s old neighborhood, a rather posh expat and nightclub area called Bangsar Village, where we stopped to drink a little more coffee at a local institution.

From there we continued our wheel on foot though block after block of nice restaurants, malls, and little boutiques, all set on this little hill overlooking the greater city of Kuala Lumpur. Once again, AsiaWheeling was forced to take a moment to consider how very well this city was doing, and how truly cosmopolitan it felt.  We did so while enjoying a delicious and hitherto unknown fruit of incredible taste.

We dined that night at another local institution, where we enjoyed a scrumptious Malay-Indian hybrid feast.

It came complete with Tandoori Chicken, some Malay curries, an interesting pressed rice dish, a towering dosa, and a strawberry hookah for desert.

We dined like royalty, allowing the meal to stretch into the night as we debated the finer points of Barak Obama’s implementation of his presidency, and Malaysian Feminism.  Feeling as though we had determined a suite of adequate solutions to most of the world’s problems, we climbed back on the bikes, with the goal of folding them up and hopping a train back to Smita’s neighborhood. Unfortunately, the skies had another idea altogether, and began to pour on us so heavily, that fearing our Panama hats might dissolve completely, we took refuge in a parking garage.

With no sign of the rain letting up, we negotiated permission to leave the cycles in the garage, and use a kind of underground passage that would allow us to enter a nearby mall with only about 10 meters of travel in the rain. In the passage, we found a very, very tattered and ancient cat, which nearly brought me to tears, and in the mall we found a very interesting store selling beauty products, which exhibited one of the most distinctive and well executed examples of branding of the entire trip.

When we left the mall, the rain was done, and we were feeling energetic enough to just wheel all the way back to Smita’s.

The wheel proved quite wonderful, with the entire city lit up with lights, and preparing for the Chinese New Year, which was the next day. It was hard to believe, when we arrived safely back at Smita’s most luxurious abode, that we would be boarding a flight for Tiruchirappalli (Trichy), India, the next day. Malaysia had proved comfortable, welcoming, and quite wheel-able. But was it too easy? India held untold extremes of experience, new problems to solve, and the sage advice of our India Bureau Chief, Nikhil Kulkarni. It was time for the next chapter, but we could not help feeling a little sadness, as we looked out over the city through the floor to ceiling windows of Smita’s apartment, while fireworks went off all around us. It was New Year’s Eve for the Malaysian Chinese, and they were showing their excitement and hope for prosperity in the Year of the Tiger in a most incendiary way. We decided there was no better way to consecrate the occasion than to crack open a couple of the local beers by the same name, and toast our brief re-exploration of Malaysia.

The Sim City 2000 theme song poured out of my phone and, with it, we from our beds. We made our way downstairs to the finest breakfast of the entire trip to date. The Hotel Puri had filled the garden courtyard with a lavish buffet.

A central round tiered table contained all kinds of pastry, fruit and yogurt. A side table contained many steaming trays of traditional Malay breakfast foods (fried noodles, fried rice and a kind of salty porridge, alongside flapjacks, (chicken) sausages and home fried potatoes. A central beverage bar served (admittedly mediocre, but infinite in quantity) coffee, teas, and juices. And in the back corner, a fellow was dutifully raging on eggs to order. We were quite thrilled, and when the cab that was called for us by the hotel was quite late, we wandered into the street and flagged one of our own, making our way to the bus station in plenty of time.

The ride to Kuala Lumpur (or as the locals seem to all refer to it, KL) seemed to take only 15 minutes, so furiously were the two of us working on correspondence on that bus. When the bus began to unload we were quite startled to find ourselves not only in the giant and teeming city of Kuala Lumpur, but also unloading not at a central bus station, but at a seemingly random corner in the city. We piled our things and sat down on the curb, pondering our next steps. Scott made radio contact with our Malaysia Bureau Chief, Smita Sharma, while I began to field questions from the group of English-speaking KL-ites who were mostly well dressed business people. They were gathering around us, curious about the cycles. The city of KL was clean and mechanized, not so dissimilar from Singapore, at least from our then vantage point. I was demonstrating the Speed TR’s folding capabilities to a fellow who had come over to ask us if we needed a taxi, and then stuck around. I explained to him “no, we are going to cycle;” Scott had arranged a rendezvous with Smita at the most obvious landmark we could see, a large reddish tower emblazoned with the gold lettering “Times Square.” So, bidding adieu to AsaiWheeling’s new friends, we climbed on the cycles, fully loaded, and careened into KL’s traffic-clogged streets.

Wheeling in Kuala Lumpur proved to be (perhaps unsurprisingly) something in between riding in the reasonably quiet, regimented and rule-bound traffic of Singapore and the snarling honk-filled madness of a city like Jakarta. We had yet to see a bicycle in this city, though the traffic seemed to consist of at least 35% two wheeled machines, and traffic treated us for the most part with respect. Through close communication, and careful signaling of our intent, we were able to make it to Times Square, sweating and starving, but in very high spirits. We then found ourselves sent on a wild meandering goose chase by security guards trundling conflicting views as to where it might be appropriate to park our cycles. Eventually we locked them to a fence that seemed to serve a similar purpose for a number of motor scooters.

The ground floor of the Times Square building in KL proved to be a sprawling mall, where we promptly set up shop in a Starbucks, and were sipping iced coffee and enjoying the free wireless Internet when we noticed a short-haired woman in a Grinnell College tee-shirt hammering on the glass of the window near our seats. This, we realized must be Ms Sharma herself, with a folding cycle that was propped seductively behind her.

We dispensed with the trivialities of small talk, ice breaking, and the like, and dove right into the meat of the issue. Smita informed us that she was ravenously hungry, had a restaurant in mind, and wanted to depart right there and then by bicycle. Scott and I were able to instantly relate, and with the regulation of blood sugar playing such a starring role in AsiaWheeling already, we knew we had found a fine adviser. She also rode hard and fast, which we like, signaling her intent, and demanding her place in traffic. This is, in the humble opinion of your correspondents, the safest way to cycle. A cyclist who lingers at the side of the road, riding slowly and nervously, invites cars to whip past them, and risks an inability to make turns because he or she is forced to be re-entering traffic constantly. A confident cyclist can take his or her place with the slower traffic, and through effective signaling of intent and confident lane occupation, navigate traffic with no decreased fluidity relative to the rest of traffic. With this lesson already well ingrained, we had only to begin the process of the teaching Smita the Field Commands, and she would be ready to wheel with the best of them. We’ve introduced many a person to the craft of wheeling, and Smita proved to be one of the few wheeling pupils for whom we never had to repeat a single command. Needless to say, we were quite impressed.

After parking the bikes, she lead us into the basement of yet another gargantuan sprawling mall, where we found a gargantuan and sprawling food court, called “Lot 10 Hutong.”

“The creator of this food court,” Smita explained, “selected all his favorite street food hawkers and put them all together in one place.” And my goodness, what a place! I enjoyed a bowl of pork noodles (one would have expected these to be a rarity in this Muslim country), Scott a plate of sweet-smelling noodles in dark sauce, and Smita a Penang style curry dish.

Scott completed the experience by running to a nearby shop and buying a number of interesting fruit juices as we commenced the process of making one another’s acquaintance.

We decided to leave the cycles locked there, and climbed onto KL’s monorail system, connecting to the elevated train system, and eventually getting off outside the city center where Smita showed us her apartment. It was delightful, and situated high up in a skyscraper, overlooking a number of apartment blocks, parks, and mosques.

She delighted us with a tidy room to stay in, with its own private bath and shower, bountiful wireless Internet, and a little round of refreshments before we dashed back out for more wheeling.

Back in the city, center we were making our way through traffic, Smita  confidently taking bishop, and Scott and I gawking at the massive city that towered around us. KL was certainly a city of malls, and we passed one after another.

Some of them were giant hyper posh projects, which were, Smita explained, kept afloat by middle eastern oil wealth, which would come to KL on shopping tours.

At one point we (for not the first time) became siphoned onto a giant highway. In KL, though it is extremely hard to get to some places without using one, it is actually illegal to ride a bicycle on the highways Luckily, here we were able to make our way back onto legal roads, by taking a shortcut through the campus of a giant Chinese funeral center. An interesting waypoint indeed. Due to the short cut and the whims of the local highway designers, we found ourselves once again somewhat unsure of our exact location.

The streets had become quite empty, and all around us there were giant and seemingly empty apartment blocks. The surrounding grass looked as though it had not been cut in months, and at times was threatening to swallow up what once had been signs of habitation (playgrounds, signage, and the occasional long parked car).

Soon, up ahead of us, there appeared a kind of wall of trash. It was the kind of barrier that one might expect to be erected in cases of street warfare, behind which a soldier might hide from bullets. We rolled to a halt in front of this, and after some conversation, hoisted our bikes over, and began to wheel deeper into the beast. Here in the middle of a towering and crowded city, a crumbling and empty world… the extremes of experience indeed.

We hoisted the cycles over two more barriers and past a couple of burned out cars before we made our way back into civilization. We stopped at an Indian food vendor’s shop and asked what it was we had just wheeled through. “A government housing development,” he answered Smita in Malay. Still under development, we would assume.

We stopped for a cool drink at a local convenience store, and Smita explained how startled she was at the quality of the Indian’s Malay. “He’s been here two years, and his Malay is better than mine…” she grumbled. Even given that Smita had spent about four of the last five years abroad studying in the U.S.,  we had to admit, this was impressive. It speaks not only to the steadfastness of the fellow’s Malay study, but also to an observation we had made again and again with both Malay and the very closely related Indonesian languages: They are considered some of the easiest in the world to learn. It would be my guess that given a language where the mechanics are quite easy to get down, then the elements that separate the good from the best must be the more subtle, use-based qualities, such as accent, deftness of vocabulary selection, and the like. Regardless, such qualities suggest learning Malay or Indonesian at some point in my life would be very interesting.

We headed to a favorite spot of the Kuala Lumpur literati, the Annexe gallery.  Here we observed some contemporary art, including photographs, drawings, and mixed media work.

Before leaving, we consulted the gallery’s management on the location of our next waypoint, which required a mapping session.

Moving onward and upward, we mounted the cycles and again took to the streets.

Our next waypoint was likely the best known in all of KL. As,you ,dear reader, have no doubt already surmised, I mean the Petronas Towers, the pair of giant silver banded twin monoliths that loom over the city. We tore through the city traffic, lichting and rausching our way to the base of the great towers, where we found a very interesting piece of rotating corporate art and a decided lack of bicycle parking.

Guard after guard directed us from place to place, all of which would have been completely legitimate parking spots, many of which were already populated with cars and motor bikes, but none of which seemed to be sanctioned for bike parking. In the end, we were forced to ride some half a kilometer from the base of the towers ,where we parked in an almost identical lot full of motor bikes.

So be it.

We strolled through the large and decadent park that lay at the feet of the towers and took in the view. I thought aloud how Malaysians must come to this city and feel pride in their country. “Or feel frustration at an entire country’s wealth spent in the development of one city,” Smita added. A valid point… I guess more research is needed.

We strolled into the mall, taking a moment to pause and note one particular floor that Robert Mugabe’s wife is quite fond of.

We dined in the food court at the mall, which lay in the belly of the towers. It was delightful, markedly devoid of western chain restaurants and quite affordable.

That night we enjoyed a cocktail at the rooftop bar of a local hotel called Traders, where we were treated to a most glorious view of the Petronas towers, now completely lit up with bright halogens.

By the time we set up to wheel home through the Kuala Lumpur night, they had already turned the lights off, no doubt to save on the electricity bill, and we enjoyed a high-voltage night wheel home. Kuala Lumpur was proving a delightful, albeit high-voltage wheeling city. As we whisked by Indian street food kiosks, noble glowing mosques, and high-rise apartments decorated with kaleidoscopic swaths of drying clothing, I thought to myself that, perhaps, I might even consider spending some years of my life living in this place.

Our second day in Penang began with the same breakfast of toast and banana bread at the Hutton Lodge. Our plan for the day was to wheel north to a beach area called Batu Ferringhi. After crossing our hearts and swearing to make no puns or allusions to Star Trek, we brought the speed TRs downstairs and unfolded them for the wheel.

We made our way northward past towering hotel after sky-scraping condominium, discussing the best way to design an algorithm to separate signal from noise in the wavering of our compass reading, which at times became quite violent on the bumpy roads. Soon we found ourselves in a region that called itself Miami. We took a short side wheel here to explore more of the sparklingly posh housing developments. The sea to our side was becoming cleaner and bluer the farther we traveled from the busy port in Georgetown, and soon we were looking out at white sand beach on one side, and think jungle punctuated by expensive housing developments on our left. Both Scott and I could not help drawing parallels between this wheel and a popular wheel in San Francisco and Marin County known as Paradise Loop. Both sported good smooth roads, gentle elevation changes, cliff-side views of the sea, and generally expensive real estate. We had, in fact, enjoyed a very similar wheel during the planning phase for this trip. I know, dear reader, it was a mere three months ago, but now it feels like many ages have passed. The extremes of experience, indeed.

Back in Penang, Malaysia we were nearing Batu Ferringhi, and not long after we passed the Hard Rock Hotel Penang, we decided to stop for refreshment on the beach.

We sipped from very cold and slightly fermented young coconuts. It was our suspicion that the coconuts had sat for some time in the fridge, but the yeasty flavor was nice, and the meat had a tang that we quite enjoyed. If this was not a local delicacy, we would petition for its installation as one.

We drank and ate these, allowing the sweat to evaporate from our bodies and clothes, and watched 40-50 year old European tourists take horse back rides on the beach, or try their hand at para-sailing. When the coconuts were done, and at least five Avril Lavigne Songs had played on the Malaysian pop station at the restaurant, we decided it was time to climb back on the cycles.

We kept riding north, right through and out of Batu Ferringhi, into the more rural northern parts of the isle of Penang. Traffic thinned and jungle and beach began to dominate our view from the road. Soon we found ourselves at the entrance to a new, more rural settlement. This one seemed much less dominated by tourism, justifying its existence as a fishing community, and a kind of commuter’s suburb of the more touristy Batu Ferengi. The hunger was beginning to clench around us, and we called a Rausch into the township.

We rode around for quite some time before selecting a shop. None of them looked clean, so we needed to survey the area to find the one that was most popular. Our hypothesis was that if we were unable establish an estimate of cleanliness from the exterior of the business, perhaps the presence of as many un-diseased patrons as we could spot would point us in the right direction. And, dear reader, this it did.

We ended up parking the cycles outside a joint by the name of the Cafe Ibriham. It was a buffet style restaurant, where we were given a large plate with a dollop of white rice, and set loose upon a table piled high with large metal trays, filled with various dishes, just swimming in their own succulent juices, and regrettably covered with flies.

But it was a choice between full on starved lunacy, and this food. And to be honest, the smells coming from the buffet were intoxicating. So we put our faith in the doxycycline and dove in. The food proved absolutely delicious, exhibiting such diversity of spicing and texture.

My plate for example contained some curried fried chicken, a roasted fish, a pile of squid gravy, some cinnamony red sauce full of tiny fish, a paprika-filled fried egg, and a little pile of very American tasting homefries.

Delightful. Truly delightful.

As the blood sugar surged back into our systems, we took to the streets, wheeling hard and fast back toward Georgetown.

Back in town, we called a waypoint to sip a milk shake, and then took back to the streets. Cursed by the unbelievable number of one way streets in Penang, we found ourselves again and again siphoned onto the same streets. We were searching for the coffee place we had seen on the previous evening’s wheel. Finally, we were able to make our way back into Little India, where we were forced in desperation to just ride against traffic, until we found the place.

Sure enough it was vacuum pot coffee, and at 10 ringgit a cup, the owner was quite happy to explain the entire process to us at length.

Afterward, we wheeled down the streets to a music store selling Tamil super hits.  We indulged in a Rajnikanth mp3 CD with 27 films worth of music.   Below, the video from one of our favorite tracks:

That evening we made our way to a local mall food court that was set up in the local emergent restaurant style.  Tables in the food court were flanked on either side by stands selling individual and specialized delicacies.  Some vendors had appeared for the evening, and others had begun their Chinese New Year vacation early.  There we were able to try a number of local delicacies, such as Ais Kecang, a red bean and ice cream medley for dessert.

With our stomachs filled and blood sugar once again on the rise, we decided to indulge in a night wheel through the surrounding and very Chinese neighborhood. We called a waypoint when we heard some commotion, and found a little carnival tucked into a pedestrian mall. It appeared to be in celebration of the fast approaching Chinese New Year, and we were enthralled by the strange carnival games and terrifying deathtrap rides, which constituted the operation.

Once again, thrilled at our good fortune, with full bellies and smiles on our faces, we wheeled back through the night to the Hutton Lodge.

The Hutton Lodge was in a place called Georgetown, named after Britain’s King George III, and breakfast at the Hutton Lodge was quite nice, and as a nod to the British, served in the courtyard. We munched on buttered toast and a kind of banana lemon poppy cake, while washing it down with cup after cup of lackluster instant coffee, lightened with nonfat powdered milk.

Feeling quite refreshed and refueled, we took to the streets.

The first waypoint was Citibank, where we were not surprised to find that CitiGold status here too would not allow us to change currency, only withdraw funds. The Citigold lounge with free coffee, filtered water, and plenty of Chinese fellows chilling out was almost enough to make us forget all about it.

We stopped at a beef bone noodle joint for lunch and were invited into the back kitchen for a lesson on local coffee preparation. The Penang style, we found, was to take raw beans and fry them in butter until they were very dark brown.

The coffee was then made by boiling these buttered beans in water and filtering them through a kind of sock.

The resultant brew was creamy and oily black.  The coffee was truly some of the best we’ve had on all of AsiaWheeling, up there with Cafe Grumpy in New York City, Pointage in Tokyo, and Pablo’s in Denver.

The fellow also took a moment to explain to us another local delicacy, which was a kind of sweet nutmeg drink, served hot or iced.

Back on the cycles, we worked our way toward the looming forested mountains that back the city of Georgetown. They seemed to be collectively called “Penang Hill,” but to this Iowa boy they seemed to be much more like a bunch of small steep mountains.

At the base, we selected one of the many small snaking roads that worked its way up into the hills. We climbed for a while, eventually finding ourselves at a kind of park. Turning off the main road, we noodled into the park, where we spent about as much time riding as we did portaging the cycles over stairs and other obstacles.

One quite steep descent and a bone rattling ride over some frighteningly large bits of gravel later, we were back on the road, wheeling toward the city center, calling waypoints from time to time to explore some of the stranger and more beautiful pieces of Penang’s modern architecture.

A short waypoint was called to investigate a Protestant cemetery that felt like something out of a Washington Irving tale rather than a feature of this Malaysian island.

Back on the cycles, we decided to indulge in a wheel through Penang’s “Little India,” enjoying the music as we traveled.

There we made special note to revisit a very interesting looking coffee joint, advertising a kind of siphon coffee. My suspicion was that this was a variation of vacuum pot coffee, but it would be interesting to see how it was implemented in a retail setting.

At the advice of a local Tamil magazine vendor, who was also able to provide us, to our great joy, with an issue of The Economist, AsiaWheeling’s favorite publication, we tore on toward a local giant shopping center called “Pacific.” The Tamil fellow had explained to us, through his very large mustache that we would find the largest selection of chips and snack-food there. This was true, but we found ourselves almost unable to enter the establishment due to the blisteringly loud broadcast of its theme song, “Pacific, Pacific… something in Malay, something in Tamil, dedicated to your customer value!”

We barely escaped with our sanity and a load of local chips, the most delightful of which displayed a small child struggling as though immersed in some kind of viscous fluid. The chip itself was a fish-flavored curl of fried lentil flour. Highly, highly, recommended are these Murku Ikan.

That evening we dined at a local Indian restaurant. This was the first re-introduction of authentic Indian cuisine for AsiaWheeling since our time in that strange and wondrous land during the pilot study. We instantly became very excited about our upcoming travels in India, and delightedly dug into our dosas, tandoori chicken, paneer naan, and vegetable biryani, knowing there was plenty more where that came from.

Exhausted and happy, we settled into our room at the Hutton Lodge, and quickly drifted to sleep.

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Our goodbyes to David had to be made through the fog that accompanies undersleeping. It was 5:00 am again, and the Rucksack Inn was still filled with the same six – eight zombie-like Internet users that had been there when I had retired for bed some four hours ago.

As David climbed into his cab to Changi airport, and we climbed into ours to the train station connecting Singapore with Malaysia (mysteriously not connected to the subway system…), we bid farewell to the strange and wondrous chapter of the trip that David had ushered in, with a phraseology that David and I had used in college: “Goodbye forever,” I told him, knowing full well that I would see him in the next year or two. “Yeah, goodbye forever,” David replied.

And then we were off. Our cab driver was extremely polite and efficient, sporting a cab full of flat screen monitors advertising Chinese New Year’s gifts to us. We lugged our shiny new bikes into the crumbling white colonial behemoth that was the entryway to Malaysia, and I sat on the steps playing Mama Rock Me, watching the sun rise on Singaporean Tamil men unloading goods from lorries, and  machines scrubbing the street with rotating brushes.  Inside the railway station, we took stock of our surroundings and confirmed the tickets.

Scott dozed in the giant waiting room, and in no time we were working our way through a system of inspections, detections, and checkpoints, making our way to the train.

The train itself was old, but comfortable, with plenty of space to store the bikes.  The lack of a window near our seats, played a supportive role in our sleeping through the majority of the 14-hour ride.

At one point, we were awakened by a loud, but unintelligible transmission coming from the overhead speakers. All transmissions on the train were ushered in and out by a rising and falling set of tones, which must have at one point or another been quite similar to those used on the metro systems of Hong Kong and London. However, due to some malfunction in the innards of this behemoth of a machine, the train’s announcements were subjected to a kind of radical Doppler shift, creating disconcerting parabolas of tone that were quite effective at rousing both one’s attention and the hair on the back of one’s neck.

From what we could tell, this transmission was commanding us to exit the train and go through customs, which we did, exiting Singapore, and receiving a number of stamps on our Malaysian entry cards. Eight hours later, when we next awoke from our slumbers, we were deep in Malaysia. It seems somehow, we had missed the official entry into Malaysia, and had made our way into the country without getting a stamp. We said a short prayer to the gods of immigration and customs, in hopes that this would not cause us trouble down the road, and fell back asleep, rocked by the rails, snaking our way through the Malaysian jungle toward Butterworth.

Butterworth was the end of the line, and the sun had already set when we packed up our things and climbed off the train. We followed our fellow passengers toward the ferry to Penang Island. So far, peninsular Malaysia felt very comfortable. The presence of moderate amounts of rubbish and less well maintained structures was comforting after the sterile polished exterior of Singapore. We were quite surprised to meet a school teacher from North Carolina, traveling with her two young children. It was one of our first clues that Malaysia would prove very safe and manageable. Most everyone we had yet encountered spoke very good English, and even public signage was almost always translated.

We were able to purchase tickets on the Penang ferry for about USD 0.35 and spent the ride over to the island gawking at the very developed, well lit island on which we were to spend the next three days and down at the brownish sea, which was quite visibly crowded with large white jellyfish, pushed aside by the hulking ferry. On the other side of the water, we mounted the cycles, and rode into the city. Penang was well lit, and festooned with red lanterns and banners in preparation for the upcoming Chinese New Year. As we had seen in Singapore, most everyone here appeared to be of either Han Chinese or Tamil descent. The sharp cheek-boned islander ethnicity  we had seen so much of in Indonesia, Borneo, and even on the train ride to Butterworth seemed absent here. Perhaps this is what our Malaysian Bureau Chief, Smita Sharma, had meant when she described these as Chinese straights towns?

Thanks to the ease of communication in Penang, we were easily able to find our way to the Hutton Lodge, an establishment that had been recommended to us by our most esteemed Malaysian Bureau. As would prove the rule, the recommendation was stellar, and the Hutton Lodge welcomed us with a clean room, a nice view of the courtyard, friendly staff, and promises of free breakfast with infinite coffee.

We dumped our belongings on the beds and quickly unfolded the speed TRs to head back out into the fray in search of food. Since we had slept all the way through the train ride, we were operating on just a few biscuits in the stomach, and even without having wheeled that day, we were starving. Luckily, as Smita had outlined for us, Penang was a food lover’s destination, sporting a new style of restaurant, which AsiaWheeling had not  yet experienced. It was a kind of emergent restaurant, where the many cooks establish small kitchen stalls around a central seating area. Patrons are then issued a table in the seating area by some central authority and invited to peruse the surrounding stalls, from which the many cooks quite vocally tout their wares. Diners select foods that look appealing, order, and the food is brought to the table.

We feasted that night on fried chicken wings, a local fried noodle dish by the name of Char Koay Teow, and some strange medicinal soups from a Chinese vendor. With the exception of the soups, which were just a little too medicinal for our liking, the meal was delightful, and we climbed back on the bikes, ready to get a little shuteye after our long day of sleeping on the train.

Rucksack Inn Singapore Toast Graph

Toast Making at the Rucksack Inn

With stomachs full of rapidly digesting toast, we struck out toward Clementi station on the MRT, Singapore’s devilishly efficient metro-rail system. Scott and I made like locals and folded our Speed TRs, rolling them on one wheel through the crowded metro terminal.

On board we did our best to adhere to the posted signs and placards, demanding silence, respect, no transport of durians, no spitting, no eating and drinking, no panhandling, and stern reminders as to the proper way to escalate depending on one’s preference for standing or walking.

At Clementi station, we were instantly met with the problem of finding My Bike Shop. Strangely enough, the locals that we asked seemed somewhat baffled about the correct direction, though we thought we were using reasonably well known and large roads, such as the West Coast Highway.  Still baffled after a number of queries, we took a break to drown our sorrows in a kind of Shwarma that was being sold in the vicinity of the train station. The Shwarma ended up consisting mostly of iceberg lettuce and thousand island dressing, but hit the spot nonetheless.

With renewed energy we made our way, albeit somewhat circuitously, to My Bike Shop. Tan was once again thrilled to see us, and greeted David by name, having already familiarized himself with the AsiaWheeling advisory team using our website.

We were all set with a zippy little cycle for David and were invited to relax and cool off in the shop. We allowed ourselves to indulge in another delicious cup of coffee from the My Bike Shop Nespresso machine, and allowed the folding bicycle enthusiasm to wash over us.

Now positively bursting with energy, we laid into the day’s wheel. First order of business was teaching the esteemed Mr. David McKenna Miller the rules of wheeling and the field commands.

“The first rule of wheeling,” I explained as we meandered our way through sleepy Singaporean residential neighborhoods, “is to always signal your intent.” We practiced our Rausches and Lichts until David became reasonably comfortable following the bishop, and even taking the lead himself from time to time before striking out onto the streets.

Our first waypoint was a local park, where we meandered our way past the docks and over to a section called the “bicycle obstacle course.” This seemed a good place to cover some of the more advanced wheeling maneuvers.

Below, Scott demonstrates the “Rough Rider” position on a demanding section of bumps.  Such position requires the midsection of the rider to be placed behind and below the bicycle seat, as if to sit on the back bumper of the bike.

David follows, executing the command with a champion’s fervor.

The obstacle course certainly did not hold back. Most of the obstacles seemed to be variations on the theme of slaloms, huge bumps, and downhill segments that dumped the rider out into a sandy gravel pit where balance and steering were almost impossible.

Well, David, we’ve seen better and we’ve seen worse, but you’re not bad for a rookie .

We also had to call an extended waypoint and dismount when we discovered an interesting playground, filled with fantastic geometric structures, and Singaporean school children who appeared to be using the playground to learn some rudimentary physical principals. David, who is among other things a school teacher by trade, remarked quite positively on the use of experiential education in this strange and gleaming city.

In a rare occurrence, AsiaWheeling stopped at a McDonalds adjacent to the park for a much needed refueling.   The fare consisted of 20 McNuggets, two Milo McFlurries, and two glasses of ice water with ice.

Back on the cycles, we struck west, ducking in and out of residential neighborhoods, retirement centers, shopping malls, and the like. The more we rode, the more we became amazed at the sheer number of retirement communities that we passed. Each one was a large compound with towering housing complexes and sloping manicured lawns.

Next stop was a Chinese grocery store nestled into the side of one of these cookie-cutter concrete communities.

The grocery was chock-full of goodies that would have no doubt been thrown in our basket if the hunger demons had been rumbling.

We purchased copious amounts of water and cloudy apple juice, purported to be one of the great undiscovered natural wonders.

We continued on exploring the Clementi area, which brought us to overpasses and underpasses of the West Coast Highway.

Soon we found ourselves on a newly paved exercise path, which followed one of Singapore’s canals.  It was a surprise to find, and a joy to wheel.

The canal snaked onward as we passed the many healthy joggers of the city.

It was nice to be out of the traffic, and we followed this until the sun began to set, and the imminent closing of My Bike Shop called us to return.  We made our way back, through the many urban obstacles of Western Singapore.

After an unsuccessful attempt to cut through the United World College Singapore (the guard here was cold at first, but soon David was able to warm him up enough to chat with us, but not to let us onto the campus), we rolled back into My Bike Shop tired and sweaty, but happy as clams.

Allen, from SpeedMatrix, was waiting for us, and in an unexpected and humbling gesture, offered to fund the repairs to our cycles. He also provided Scott, David, and me with a set of fine biking jerseys sporting his company’s logo.  Looking at the forthcoming selection of folding kayaks really got the gears in AsiaWheeling’s heads turning.

We warmly bid Tan and Allen goodbye, and sadly parted with the Speed TRs, which would be repaired while we were diving in Borneo, and piled into a cab.

We were already quite late for a dinner engagement with some Indian colleagues of Scott’s from when he was living in Pondicherry. Rajesh and Pappu were in good spirits, and not put off by our tardy arrival.

We made our way toward a local fish head curry restaurant. It served a kind of Singaporean Indian food, which was delightful.

We feasted on fish head curry (of course), along with some fried chicken, a buttery curry, and some knock-your- socks-off biryani. By the time the jet lag began to hit David, we were all quite full and completely smitten by our wheel in Singapore.

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