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[P|B]usan Ho

Is it Busan or Pusan? The answer is it’s both. You see in Korean there is no real distinction between the “p” noise and the “b” noise, at least as far as romanization goes, and particularly true in the pronunciation of this city. Go ahead; try for yourself. They are pretty similar.  Coincidentally, [P|B]usan was where we were headed that day. So we relished our last fried eggs and toast breakfast at the Bebop house, before bidding our friends there farewell, and strapping our belongings onto the Speed TRs for the ride to the airport.

The sky was bright blue and speckled with fluffy white clouds as we headed towards the Seoul’s central railway station. Even the giant pollution monitoring units broadcasted that it was going to be a beautiful day.

The ride to the train station was just long enough to really get the blood flowing, and burn up whatever was left of the eggs and toast. When we arrived, we noticed quite instantly that the station was huge. There was a decent amount of time spent searching for the hall in which we could buy tickets for the trans-Korea trains, but with only some minor scolding from security and a few mistaken rides in glass elevators, we found our selves in a huge shiny hall, filled with flat panel displays and orderly lines of Korean people.

Our beloved Schwalbe big apples squeaked comfortingly against the waxed floor as we wheeled our fully loaded cycles into line. In spite of some rather disparaging looks from a few of our fellow passengers, we deftly purchased two tickets on the next slow train to Pusan.

With that out of the way, it was time to eat a little more. We selected a crowded and efficient looking restaurant across the hall from the ticket counters, and made a huge pile out of our bags and folded bicycles, which angered the staff just slightly less than the amount which would have prevented them from serving us.

We ended up ordering a couple of soba meals, which were delicious, and came complete with a couple rolls of sushi (suspiciously similar to kim bab), some tempura, and some random Korean salads. We never quite deturmined if this was a Japanese or a Korean restaurant. We know there is some overlap. But the food was tasty enough, I guess. Ok, to be honest it was not great. But AsiaWheeling can’t bat grand slams every meal.  In our defense, we were in the train station. I dare you to get soba in an Amtrak station.

The next task was to acquire snacks to fuel us during the train ride, which would take most of the remainder of the day. Luckily Korea is a great place to buy interestingly packaged products.

Laden with snacks (well, to be honest, mostly laden with cans and paper cartons and little bottles of coffee drinks), we made our way to the platform.

When the train came, it was time for the old how-will-AsiaWheeling-fit-all-its-stuff-on-the-train hustle. Lucky for us, we had the rearmost seats in our car, which gave us just enough space to cram the bikes in. Inevitably, we would eventually get seats in the middle of the car, but we’d cross that bridge when we came to it. We’d managed to get the bikes on board in Uzbekistan after all.

The subsequent ride gave us some much needed time to catch up on correspondence for you, dear reader, a task which we relish. We took breaks from writing and sorting through photos to do shtick with the Wikireader, speculating about all manner of things (not least among them the White Stripes) and reading about Pusan in the lonely planet PDFs.

It was night when we finally arrived in Busan. It felt good to get off of the train and unfold our bikes. It was a warm night, and there were plenty of people out for a гулять. Not only was it nice outside but this was a tourist-town of sorts and we were fresh with energy from being cooped up on the train ride (the canned coffee helped too). We could afford to be picky with hotels, we thought, and so we started riding around, ducking in and out of inns, and comparing relatives prices/amenities.

A few things began to become obvious to us as we rode conducted this research: price fluctuation in lodging was high, fluctuation in amenities less so; our blood sugar levels were plummeting, and this was unlike any tourist town we’d ever been to. It was much more like a border town and though I might have been mistaken, I think I even detected a hint of Hekou, mostly in the concentration of brothels and strip joints. While the less than savory establishments of Hekou had catered mostly to the traders who crossed between Vietnam and China with goods on everything from semi-trucks to wheel barrows, Pusan seemed to cater to sailors on shore leave, a fair number of which were probably Russian, for we saw more Cyrillic writing here than we had in Harbin, a place much closer geographically to the federation.

Eventually, we found a place to stay. It was a “love hotel,” which I think technically means a place designed for a customer of one of the brothels to bring his …er… service person. The room reeked like smoke, and the woman who ran the front desk was almost certainly a demon, but it seemed clean enough for AsiaWheeling, and the price was right, so we threw our things down.

Without any more dilly dally, we headed out in search of food. We were hungry enough that we just ate at the first restaurant we saw, which was literally two buildings downhill from the hotel. It served over-priced and under-portioned fish and, much like the soba place earlier this day, was underwhelming. We vowed to get back on the  epic-feast-train the next day, but for now just felt good about being full. We even indulged in a quick after dinner stroll, which was effective in solidifying our suspicion that we were staying right in the heart of Pusan’s sex industry district.  Someone had even slipped literature featuring lewd portraiture with corresponding phone numbers under our door.  We could have been missionaries!  Shrugging it off, we rested for another day of a different type of godswork.


Give me an ice cream cone and a leather jacket

We woke up the next morning at the Sivir Hotel, none too eager to leave Krasnoyarsk, and headed back to the good old Travelers Coffee for a last bit of internet before striking out to pick up provisions for our next train ride. We were feeling fine, as we walked along eating ice creams on the sunny streets of Krasnoyarsk, and looking even better in our new leather jackets.

It took us a surprising amount of time to find a large grocery store, but when we did, we were able to load up on all our favorite supplies: a couple loaves of black bread, 3 dollar jars of caviar, nutty Siberian cheese, thinly sliced sausages, thick aged pork fat, bags of bacon and scallion flavored chips, and a few cans of Kvas.

I was so excited about our purchases, I accidentally stole the key to the locker that they asked you to place your backpack in while shopping. I laid it on the pavement outside the Hotel Sibir, hoping some good samaritan might return it for me, for we were getting very close to missing our train to Irkutsk.

We did not miss the train, though, and after stowing our cycles, relaxed into our seats to let more of the beautiful Siberian countryside just slide right on by.

We shared our bunk cluster in patzcart with a couple of fantastic people. One of them was a 30-50 year old man who spend the entire train ride slowly drinking giant 2 liter bottles of warm beer, and reading thick Russian history books. The other was a perhaps 50 year old woman from Chita, who had been on the train for three days already and was more than happy to share her vast supply of tomatoes and huge canister of mayonnaise to dowse them with.

After about 5 hours, the train stopped at a particularly busy station and we climbed off to see what was for sale.

The answer was everything.

We wandered around investigating all the options for a while, and ended up buying a bag of salty home made pickles, a few hard boiled eggs, some meat cutlets, and a fried river fish.

We were tempted by this gold mine brand beer, but decided it was probably terrible.

Back in the cabin, we layed into snacking. I found the pickles to be especially out of this world. Scott was a huge fan of the 3 dollar caviar. Oh, heck, I was too. Eating on Russian trains is great.

Soon night fell and we were whipping along through the darkness, blasting through tiny clusters of township and then vast swaths of pitch black forest.

Krasnoyarsk: Who Knew?

We pulled ourselves out of the starchy comfort of our ржд sheets, stuffed our things back into our packs, grabbed the Speed TRs from the overhead rack where they had been stored, and headed out into Krasoyarsk.

Our first thought, after noticing the lovely imperial Russian style of the trainstation was: Holy Cow! It was cold, here!

We needed those leather Jackets pronto. Huffing and puffing huge clouds of condensation and wearing most of our clothes, we rode hard towards the center of town, and the Hotel Sevir (which means the Hotel North). We found the place in short order and checked in, throwing down our things and taking a moment to appreciate those little touches that separate one cheap Russian flophouse from the next.

There would be no use in lounging around the internet-less hotel room not wheeling, so we climbed on the Speed TRs, and headed out into the city.

Breakfast and coffee seemed like an obvious first move, so we made them our primary goal. It took some time, though, before we settled on a place. This was mostly due to the fact that the majority of restaurants in Russia, you see, are closed in the mornings, presumably since one is expected to have a mother or wife that is making that meal for you. So we wheeled on past tons of closed places, huge Soviet and imperial buildings, all the way down to the shores of the Yenisei River.

We did eventually find a place to eat, though. It was another hotel, in fact, and we were essentially buying into their included breakfast program.

We chose the English breakfast, which ended up being a rather nutty bowl of porridge and a couple of peppered eggs. Lovely.

We moved on from there, heading downstream, pedaling along with the river on a system of dedicated paved trails.

Perhaps our assumptions that Siberia would not be a place were wheeling was popular were misguided.  We couldn’t help, as we pedaled down recently repaved roads closed to cars, that this road might just be a pro-wheeling Krasnoyarsk initiative.

About the time that we were passing this fantastic no parking sign,

we spotted a bridge leading across into a gigantic park that nestled up alongside the city, on the opposite side of the Yenesei. The park proved to be even more of a wheeling destination, with kilometers and kilometers of paved bikeways.

Well, we couldn’t resist, so we just kept going, on out of the city and deep onto the park.  But all good things must end, and in a spectacular pile of gravel that could only say “well the budget ran dry” the paved path ended. So we turned around and wheeled back into the city.

Not long after we’d re-entered the fray, Scott spotted some Chinese characters on the side of a nearby building. With all intentions to investigate further, we headed over to what turned out to be a Chinese imports market. The market was full of, surprisingly enough, Chinese people. And suddenly, after we locked our bikes to a Uyghur snack cart (big ups Uyghur’s!), for the only time on the entire trip so far, the locals were speaking both Scott’s and my foreign languages.

With both Russian and Chinese on our side, we felt had immense bargaining power. So we headed in and immediately began trying on leather jackets, or perhaps I must more accurately describe them as imitation leather jackets.

Realizing we’d digested all the “English Breakfast,” we headed to the back of the market where there was a very pleasant lady serving up Russian-Chinese food from large blue plastic tubs.

We ordered two bowls, which came with a pile of white rice and a little of each kind of Chinese food, topped with a serving of Russian cabbage salad. While not particularly Chinese in flavor, they were quite tasty and the bill for both of us was less than 1 USD.

That market was great, but we were unable to find exactly the right leather Jackets. We were getting close, though, and we headed from there towards Krasnoyarsk’s central market.

When we got there, we realized we’d definitely come to the right place. The market was more than 60% coats, and the vast majority of those were at least in the style of leather or fur. So we locked the bikes to the railing of a nearby canal and headed in.

Some of the lady’s coats in this market were truly something to write home about, with wild colors, multiple types of fur, huge colors and sashes, and giant gold clasps, this place was all about load winter ware.

Not far into our investigations, we found Scott the perfect jacket, a black leather job that fit his torso like a glove. We haggled for a while with the lady, and eventually pulled the trigger. As we were leaving, we were investigating the similarly gigantic selection of fur and leather hats, when one of the hat salespeople came over to us. They were not interested in selling us a fur hat, though, they just wanted us to try some of the more ridiculous ones on and take a few pictures. Listen up viral web marketing teams, this is the way to do it.

Not long after that we found the perfect jacket for me as well, and called the entire mission a success.

Feeling more savage and raw than ever before, we climbed back on the cycles for a little new leather jackets wheeling.

We wheeled on into a residential neighborhood where we lingered for a bit scrutinizing a South East Asian elephant topiary and fake palm tree exhibit thing that had been erected in the middle of a divided highway, and then wheeled on back towards the center of the city, sweating hard in the leather jackets, but refusing to take them off.

We stopped next when we spotted a large honey market. We were of course seduced by the “black living honey” and could not resist buying a small tub to take back with us. It ended up being a very delicious, though clotted with pollen and wax. I am assuming here that the pollen and wax were features and not bugs.

From the honey market, we wheeled on, past this most interesting bright red obelisk in the center of town (more information about this is welcomed in the comments), and on home to eat a little more honey.

Strolling in search of a restaurant, we found that the people of Krasnoyarsk organize themselves for some latin dancing on the street every once in a while.  The spectacle attracted many an onlooker.

We went that evening to a Pelmyni restaurant, and ordered who huge bowls of boiled Russian dumplings to dip in sour cream.

With stomachs full of Pelmini, we headed over to a café which we knew to have wifi. It was a coffee place by the name of “Traveler’s.” Being travelers ourselves, we thought it might fit.

So we sat down and began working. That was when we were introduced to one of the lesser know features of Siberia: the forward women. Not only had we been noticing that the women here were absolutely gorgeous, but they were coming up to us and asking to talk. Such behavior was completely unprecedented, and frankly we did not know what to do.

Scott had a call with a mentor of his, and I was working on correspondence for you dear reader when two gorgeous girls came over and began feigning a need to use my computers to check something “really quick,” which rolled into a conversation. The conversation went on for an hour or so at the end of which they asked us if we’d like to go with them to a night club called “Coloradsky Papa.” The night club had been actually recommended to us by the Siberian Bureau, but for one reason or another, we decided to decline the offer, perhaps idiotically.

Meanwhile, while I was turning down two beautiful women who wanted to go out dancing on a Thursday night, Scott was receiving unsolicited messages from other women complimenting his mustache.

As we walked home that night from the café, we looked at each other…

“Krasnoyarsk, eh?”

“Agreed, brother. Who knew?”


Welcome to Platzcart

We woke up our last morning in Novosibirsk feeling we had spent way too little time there, headed down for another huge breakfast that couldn’t be beat, feasted on the internet for a good 4 hours, and then decided to head out for a bit of wheeling.

Part way through the wheel, we decided to stop in to a little cafeteria style restaurant to get some plates of meat, salad and Grechka. Grechka is a very Russian and particularly tasty buckwheat pilaf, which you can imagine playing a role similar to rice in many meals.

We then headed to the grocery store to load up on supplies for the trans-Siberian ride over to Krasnoyarsk. The grocery store ended up being full of fantastic products, like this apple juice, or these cream filled candies.

There had been some trepidations, mostly among my half of the team, as to whether we’d be able to find somewhere on the Trans-Siberian trains to store the bikes. Now AsiaWheeling is pleased to officially report that there is plenty of room for folding bicycles and the Trans Siberian Railway.

We were also, at the advice of our Siberian Bureau, riding Platzcart, which is the lowest sleeper class on the train. AsiaWheeling is also pleased to officially report its strong support for travel in Platzcart. One is given more room for one’s luggage, placed in an environment where one is more likely to make friends, and in our opinion given more security for one’s belongings. Due to the cheaper nature of the tickets, thieves are less likely to snoop around. Also, they are forced in platzcart to do so in the open, in plain sight of all the fellow passengers who you’ve just made friends with, and who are now offering you bites of home grown tomatoes and shots of cognac.

Some of platzcart characters include:

(More Here)

So with the bikes stored, we had nothing to do but sit back and watch Siberia roll by. And my goodness was Siberia lush and green as it rolled by. We understand that we came to visit during the few months when it is not brutally cold, but ladies and gentleman, you’ve got to give credit where credit is due.

As we rode along, the train would stop from time to time in cities along the way. When it did so, many of the locals would run out to sell things to passengers on the platform. We always made sure to run out and look for interesting food and drink, or savage bargains.

That evening, we retired to the dining car where we watched soviet cinema on the monitor there, and chatted with some of our other travelers.

One of them spoke English in fact, having traveled in America as part of the work and travel program. Which we were soon to find was extremely popular among Siberian youth interested in America. And as far as we can tell, most Siberian youth are interested in America.

After chatting with him about the best things to see and do in Krasnoyarsk, we returned back to our platzcart and drifted off to sleep.

Christmas In July

Twas the night before Uzbek when all through the stan,

not creature was wheeling, not even a man.

Claudia’d been sent back to the States in a plane,

Meanwhile gifts from Santa and Elf had just came.

We ran to the door to see what could it be,

It was our dear friend Alp with a package for me.

T’was a big cardboard box, wider and fatter,

We shook it around and heard intriguing clatter.

By Santa and Elf we mean Allan and Tan,

The Speed Matrix Depot and My Bike Shop Man.

See, our tires were worm from eons of wheelin’

And our rear ends were chapped up and down right near peelin’

So we tore in with delight in our eyes,

To find joy in our hearts at savage surprise

For what to my wondering eyes did appear?

But new handles, new saddles and tires (front and rear).

Rido seats how they twinkled, Big Apples how merry,

If the trip were an ice cream, twas surely the cherry.

Thanks Speed Matrix and My Bike Shop!

And Merry Christmas, every one!


Refueling in Hong Kong

As it did during the pilot study, Hong Kong played the role of refueling station, a place for breathing, recouping, and preparing for the second half of the trip. And, as was the case during the pilot study, it rained most of our time there.

Though if I were to use the rain as an excuse for the fact that our cycles spent most of their time rusting on the balcony of our gorgeous apartment, I would be lying.  Most of our time was spent on foot, in fact, and much of it even apart, as I wandered the city with my mother and John, and Scott caught up with his many friends in the old British Colony.

So please forgive your humble correspondents for fast forwarding through a few days spent wandering through rainy city streets, folding and unfolding umbrellas, dashing in and out of shops, purchasing much-needed goods, and generally replenishing body and spirit. Though perhaps during the fast forward, it might behoove me to mention a certain mission.

Hong Kong has long been famous for its tailors, and AsiaWheeling happens to subscribe to a certain Mr. William Cheng (and Sons). When not traipsing across the globe, sweating profusely, or bargaining over provisions, even your humble correspondents at times need to look sharp. And for that we look to Mr. Cheng. My mother and John had been somewhat impressed with the shirts I had procured from the man during the pilot study, and had decided to have some items of their own made. For John, a few shirts and a jacket, for my mother replicas of her favorite shirts and blouses. The mission was an eleventh hour success, culminating in Mr. Cheng sending one of his minions to our apartment to do some final measurements and last minute alterations to the garments.

And then, quite unexpectedly, it was our last night in Hong Kong.

We made reservations at a certain hot pot restaurant, which had been recommended by Scott’s friend, Rob. The place was jam-packed with people when we walked in, and a table with a large hole in the center was waiting for us. Inside the hole in the table was a burner,  and onto the burner, of course, would go a large bowl of boiling broth. We chose a split broth, half pear and fish, and half spicy Sichuan. This meant that the boiling reservoir would be split by a metal divider into two separate sections, each of which would be filled with a separate broth. We also ordered a vast array of meats and vegetables to plunge into the soup.

With the ordering done,  we headed over to a section of the restaurant where diners were encouraged to create their own dipping sauces. Here, you could choose from a wide array of oils and sauces, chopped herbs and spices, and unknown pastes. We dove in.

As is the case with most Chinese restaurants, the food came fast, and it seemed we were no sooner back from the sauce-concocting table, than the hot pot arrived, already nearly boiling. Another thing about hot pot that is particularly enjoyable is that it takes quite a bit of time to eat. We enjoyed a few hours of slowly working our way through the vegetables and meats, burning our tongues plenty on the boiling broth, and managing to splatter bits of hot oil everywhere.

As the hot pot boiled, the spicy Sichuan section began to grow increasingly intolerable. It consisted of what I believe was a pork or chicken broth with a great many floating hot peppers, and a startling kind of numbing peppercorn called Ma La (麻辣 – literally meaning numbing and spicy). It seemed that as the peppers boiled, they released an increasing amount of truly corrosive chemicals into the soup. Now, dear reader, I would be the first to challenge a fellow world traveler to a spicy food eating competition, but this soup began to get the better of even me. My stomach became a boiling furnace of spicy oil, and I too was forced to throw in the towel, switching all focus to the pear and fish broth.

It was my first defeat by a spicy dish on AsiaWheeling, and I considered it a great success. As I rode back in the cab, breathing through my fiery indigestion, I gave a solemn tip of the Panama hat to those who dared concoct such a demonic broth.

The next morning, all was well again in my stomach, and I awoke at the crack of dawn to walk my mom and John to the airport. While John packed the last of his belongings for the flight back to Iowa, my mother helped to clean a heavy coat of rust from the chains of the Speed TRs. Then we were off. As we rolled their suitcases over the uneven pavement and into the metro, I thought back on the supremely comfortable nature of travel in China. Hong Kong seemed to me the epitome of a manageable city: well-organized, predictable, easy to navigate, well stocked. And in all honesty, mainland China is not so much more difficult, especially for those who speak a little Chinese. What a fine country this was. Hong Kong had been a good introduction, but I felt that next time I needed to take them to the mainland, where the noodles and the price performance easily eclipse the old British colony.

With my mom and John safely on the airport express, I returned to the apartment to find Scott hard at work on the Internet, feasting on the last few hours of megabyte-per-second connection. Our flight was that evening at the somewhat uncivilized hour of 00:05. As a major consolation, however, it was going to be a flight on Emirates, one of AsiaWheeling’s favorite airlines. As the hour of our flight grew nearer, the sun began to sink in the sky. With a fair bit of frantic searching around the apartment to ensure that we were not leaving anything of great value behind, we once again grabbed our bags and the Speed TRs, now with freshly cleaned and lubricated chains, and headed down to the street.

We unfolded the cycles and strapped down our belongings, pulling into traffic. A constellation of one way streets continually pulled us away from our destination: the Hong Kong Central Station. An attempt to ride “subversively” as it is referred to in the latest edition of the AsiaWheeling field commands, resulted in a stern talking to by a Hong Kong police officer. No doubt had this occurred in the post-Soviet world, such an interaction would have terminated in a fine (graft). But here the policeman only politely told us to ride on the roads not the sidewalks, and to obey the same laws the cars did. This seemed reasonable, and he also explained how we could get to the station.

Hong Kong sports a large central tram-line, and it was along this that we rode. The speed of the trams is significantly slower than that of even a fully loaded wheeler, so we were easily able to use these tramways as an effective mainline to the station, ever aware of the danger of putting a wheel into the rut next to the rail.

At the central station, we checked our bags (including the Speed TRs) at a dedicated Emirates counter. The service was complimentary along with the purchase of tickets on the speedy airport express train. So with the bikes folded, padded and bagged, now in the careful hands of the folks at Emirates, we climbed onto the train. All concerned were in high spirits and excited to embark on the next chapter.

We had certainly heard many stories about Dubai. A great city, built in a matter of years out of the desert. It had been called gaudy, unsustainable, reckless, and the epitome of “Nouveau Riche.” It had also been called one of the greatest achievements of human engineering, a fascinating melting pot of cultures, and one of the most breathtaking cities in the world. Certainly, we needed to wheel it.

Team Wheeling in Sangklaburi

The next day, we saddled up to the counter at the P.Guesthouse in Sangklaburi, and began the arduous process of procuring bicycles for the entire nine-person team. With the Speed TRs always around, Scott and I had forgotten how much time we had spent during the pilot study finding bicycles. And how piss-poor the cycles usually were.

Three guest houses, a few repairs, and many rejected cycles later, we took off, all in a great mass, headed for the town.

We were quite a squadron, most of us on cycles that were too small for us, and almost all of us riding bikes that moaned and squawked with each pedal. Our first waypoint was the van station, where some of the team was to purchase tickets to go back that evening. Scott and I would be staying for a few more days, so we took that opportunity to acquire a few cups of iced coffee from a delightful local vendor, which while she spoke no English, took very good care of us, providing us with strong iced coffee, made with freshly ground beans in an old plastic espresso machine, and giving us a plate of friend banana pieces, which were sugared and spiced in a most intriguing way.

With tickets purchased, we got back on the cycles, and set into the wheel. The sun was hot, and we were an ungainly group. We quickly made our way out of town, not so much because of the speed of our wheeling, but because the town itself was rather small. Soon we were wheeling along the fantastic, rarely trafficked roads of rural Thailand.

The road was made of bright pieces of poured concrete, and wound among the steep hills that make up this landscape. This time of year, the air is thick with the smoke from slash-and-burn farming practices, so we were unable to see very far. But the presence of the smoke gave the entire experience a kind of mystical feel, which might be directly related to computer games that I played in my youth, such as Bungie’s Myth Series, which due to my slow graphics card, would need to save memory by shrouding the world in smoke.

We were rolling deep, manhandling the rusty old iron cycles, and sweating in the bright sun, which, even filtered through the smokey air made sunglasses essential. We had burned down a long slanting straight-away, when we suddenly we came to a large concrete bridge over a section of the man-made lake, followed by a giant uphill section, which we could see from the surrounding morphology would be long and arduous. I called a waypoint and we turned to the group. We were sort of between a Newtonian rock and a hard place, having already descended a fair way down  the recent straight-away. Our goal was to wheel across to the Mon village on the other side, to eat a little Mon food for lunch.

The Mon are an ethnic group from Myanmar, living mostly in Mon State along the Thai-Myanmar border. Things in Burma had grown tough for the Mon, as well as for many other people as the junta grew in power and activity. One of the earliest peoples to reside in Southeast Asia, the Mon were responsible for the spread of Theravada Buddhism in present-day Burma and Thailand. In Myanmar, the Mon culture is credited as a major source of influence on the dominant Burmese culture. Regardless, the Thai side of the border is full of small Mon villages, some of which double as brick and mortar refugee camps. One of these was to be found across the river, and was only one giant climb (and presumably a subsequent descent) away.

Back in Sangklaburi, we called a brief meeting of the team and finally decided we would go for the ascent.

As we all climbed back on the cycles, most of which had gears, few of which had the ability to change between them, and began to hump them up the hill, it occurred to me that you, dear reader, might be wondering who are these people we’re rolling with? Well, let me tell you:

Hood — A Thai fellow of Chinese descent, Hood is a comedian and a party animal. He is a warm person, and a loyal friend, notorious for his Photoshop prowess, and ability to create imaginative depictions of people, transported through space and time, often with additional organs affixed to unusual locations on their bodies or the surrounding scenery. He recently got involved in a project selling posh motorcycle helmets. We wish him luck.

Dane — Our fearless Bureau Chief, he is a giant among men – literally. Despite his size, he is quite gentle and intellectual. With his recent purchase of a Mono Machine, he is also becoming quite the electronic musician. His Thai is superb, and his lifestyle consists of making many many competing plans, most of which will never come to fruition, but the few that do produce quite glorious results. These were his last few weeks in Thailand before leaving to return for a short bit to the US. Many plans to return to Asia are cooking for him.

Karona –  From Japan, she’s whip smart, caring, and a woman who counts her words carefully. One might confuse her for being meek when first meeting her, though during our time together she proved again and again to be a tough cookie, never complaining, and always going for it.

Samara — A Canadian by birth, she comes from a mixed lineage of Canadian and Burmese peoples. She was living in Thailand studying South East Asian… studies. Samara is an easy-going intellectual woman, always willing to lay into a debate, and exhibiting that oh-so-hard-to-find, but most refreshing, ability to separate an argument from a fight. The first time I met this girl, she lied to me for 15 minutes telling a fanciful tail about Bedouin camel traders and arranged marriages. Entrancing.

Nico — A laid back French dude, dating Alice, Nico is 110% bro. Cracker Jack guy, friendly, and acutely stylish. He is as quick to share his hilariously stylized diving techniques while swimming in the lake, as he is to lay into a busted iron cycle. The man works in film distribution, and was also on his way out of Thailand to go work for the Cannes Film Festival in southern France.

Alice — Alice is a spunky, logical, and delightful person to be around. She’s dating Nico, that lucky duck, and works for a French company in Thailand. She is devastatingly stylish and makes a fantastic addition to any social gathering.

Golf — Golf is a giggly, friendly Thai girl, and a helpless romantic. I first met Golf on the eve of our departure. She arrived at Dane’s apartment with well over 300 roses, recently purchased to celebrate Dane and Karona. She is a warm and caring person, whose English skills are getting better by the day, thanks to a few American teen celebrity adventure novels.

Back on the roads, we were sweating hard and reaching the top of the hill. Nico and I were the first to reach the crest, followed shortly after by Dane and Scott.

As the rest of the team made its way up the mountain, a pickup truck pulled up, and out hopped Hood. He reached into the back and swung his rusty hulk of a bicycle over the side. It seems he had lost interest in climbing the hill and just hitched his way up.  Oh Hood, you sly dog.

Now that the worst was over, we could indulge in the pleasures of a breezy downhill into the smokey valley and the Mon town. Inside the town, we found many people selling hand-made crafts, and quite a few restaurants. We tucked into a meal of pig blood soup, pork fat curry, fried chicken and rice.

We crossed back to the Thai side of town over a long snaking wooden bridge, one of the longest in the world we later learned.

Communities there had sprung up on the water, living on pontoon houseboats.

Back at P. Guest House, we took a quick dip in the lake, before bidding goodbye to our new friends and fellow wheelers. As they climbed back into the van toward Bangkok, Scott and I returned to the hotel where we could relax into the womb of free wireless there, enshrouded in smoke, in the middle of the Thai countryside along the Burmese border.

ReExploring with Vasco da Gama

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.

Highway Speeds in Kuala Lumpur

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.

Landing on Our Tires in Kuala Lumpur

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.

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