Monday October 13, 2014, 7:00 a.m. Bird Nest Guest House
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

I finally took the chance, and yesterday morning I ordered a pair of Schwalbe Marathon Mondial tires from Chain Reaction Cycles in Britain. I’ve found that the bike shops and camping gear shops in Europe are much easier to deal with than the ones in the US. They are much more accustomed to shipping to international destinations and aren’t paranoid about it. It’s probably a symptom of a much larger problem that the world’s superpower – the USA – is so scared of the rest of the world. They’re so scared that they won’t even ship their products to other countries. I suppose the real reason for that is that they don’t have to. Their own market is so large and rich that they can afford to piss off the rest of the world.

I almost ordered a couple of other items, but I decided to play it cool and wait for a bit. I really want to get a ClikStand for my Trangia. Unfortunately, the titanium version (the lightest one) is quite expensive and it is a risk to order one without being able to try it in person. The regular steel one is considerably cheaper, but it doesn’t save that much weight compared to the full-on Trangia base and windscreen. My worry is that the ClikStand won’t be as efficient as the Trangia base and windscreen and that it will take twice as long to cook anything and therefore use up twice as much fuel. The ClikStand has its own windscreen, but you have to purchase it separately, it adds weight, and it is quite small. My Trangia pot won’t fit inside it, and I’d have to buy another much more expensive and smaller pot. Anyway, it’s complicated.

I also want to buy one of the BikeBuddy water bottle racks. I’d also like to put in an order at Mountain Equipment Coop, but they only use Canada Post for delivery, and that could take weeks. I think I’ll be here for at least another week, perhaps two weeks, as I wait for my camera to be repaired. I still haven’t heard anything from Olympus. I’m getting annoyed with them. The woman shouldn’t have told me that it might take as few as three days to give me an estimate on repairs. Now that it’s been more than two weeks, I feel angry with them. What happened to the three days?

Not much else to mention. I spent a long time in the Internet café downloading from the NEO. I either have to stop writing so much drivel or buy a computer. The downloading process is simply too time-consuming. I was in the Internet café for six hours total, and I still didn’t finish all of the downloading. That’s insane.

While I was in there, I was also uploading pictures to SmugMug for storage. That is working very smoothly if slowly. The problem is that I used the art filters so much at the beginning and I didn’t delete many pictures. So I have thousands and thousands of bad pictures. I could weed my ten thousand pictures down to a hundred good ones probably, but weeding them down would take as long as uploading them all, so I’m just going to upload them all.

Then came lunch at the Indian restaurant and an evening of reading. I’m reading another strange but funny book called “Indecent Exposure” by Tom Sharpe. That’s a weird aspect of staying in hostels. You end up reading strange books – the ones that you just stumble across on their shelves.

There was another big storm – a huge one. There was even hail. Odd to have a hailstorm in a tropical country, but I guess it really doesn’t matter. Go high enough into the atmosphere, and it gets cold no matter where you are.

And that’s about it. My six hours in the Internet café really wore me out. I ended up not sleeping well and I’m super tired this morning. I tried to stay in bed, but I wasn’t able to sleep. And I had my usual anxiety dreams all night long. Those things drive me crazy. They’re exhausting.

Tuesday October 14, 2014, 8:15 a.m. Bird Nest Guest House
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Slept a bit later this morning. That’s because I was up a bit later last night, and I have no plans to get to the Internet café before I start my day. My goal is to go get my bike and ride it back to Chinatown. That’s going to be brutal. Hopefully, they managed to break my seatpost free. If not, it will be a strange ride – sitting low over my bike.

I read a lot of reviews of the saddle I bought, and they seemed really strange to me. People couldn’t say enough about how wide, how comfortable, and how soft the seat was. When I tried it, I had the opposite feeling. It felt narrow, strange, and hard. I realized that is because we were coming to the saddle from opposite directions. Other people had narrow racing seats on their bicycle before. I had a massive plushy retiree’s comfort saddle on mine. So in relative terms, we were both right. I’m just hoping that the saddle we turn out to be more comfortable for long distances. And I like that it is lighter. Much lighter.

I got an email from Chain Reaction Cycles saying that DHL had picked up my tires at 9:33 a.m. There was no time zone attached to that email, so I’m not entirely sure what time that was. It doesn’t matter. I was just glad to see that action was taking place. Now the tires just have to get through customs and get to my door here. My instinct is that it will all go wrong.

No big adventures yesterday. Almost no adventures at all. I had been told about another bike shop called Green Bike. It was located quite far away but within walking distance of a type of subway station, so I went to check it out. I found it, and it was a nice enough place. The owner was very friendly, and he rode a touring bike himself. He proudly told me all about the features that made it a touring bike – the attachment points for water bottles and pannier racks, the butterfly handlebars, etc. But they didn’t carry any touring equipment or anything else that I needed and there was no reason to spend much time there.

After that, I tracked down a Leica store in a fancy mall. It belonged to the man who also owned the camera store I’d visited earlier. The owner had invited me to visit his other store. I had a lot of trouble tracking it down, but had success at last. I felt, again, like an impostor as I walked around the extremely expensive and luxurious space attached to the high-end hotel. I assumed everyone could tell that I was poor and that I didn’t belong there. The Leica store, as one might expect, was not exactly a bustling, friendly place. It was as austere and clean and bright as a medical clinic. The one man working there added to that impression by wearing a long white lab coat. Leica stores are strange because you can sense that you don’t ask questions. People who can afford Leica gear are not the type to worry about the details. They simply hand over their credit cards with unlimited credit and buy whatever they want. Anyone who asks questions about the different cameras almost certainly can’t afford to buy them. So I kept my mouth shut and just looked around.

Throughout the day, I’d had a lot of trouble with the transit system. My opinion of that system has gone steadily downhill since my first favorable impression when I saw the map. I’ve since been learning day by day how much of an illusion that map is. It shows a coherent and smooth set of subway lines. The truth is that it is a hodgepodge of different systems with extremely poor transfer points. I kept finding myself lost and having to walk very long distances to get from one line to another. The worst case came at the end of my day. It was time to go back to my guest house at the Pasar Seni station. It is conveniently located just one stop north of the main KL Sentral station. The monorail line terminates at KL Sentral, so it was an easy thing to take the monorail to KL Sentral, hop onto the other line, and go one stop north to home. However, after the very long and uncomfortable ride on the poorly designed and very slow monorail, I learned that even though the monorail terminates at KL Sentral and the maps clearly show this, they are not physically connected. I had purchased a token to take me all the way to Pasar Seni, but there was no way to get from the monorail station to KL Sentral. I had to use my token to exit from the monorail and then go on a long and complex walk to find KL Sentral and buy another token to get back into the system. When I first exited the monorail, I tracked down a transit system employee and asked him about this mystery. I told him that despite looking for a very long time, I had been unable to find any way to get from the monorail to KL Sentral. He informed me that there was no such physical connection. To make the transfer, I had to physically exit the transit system and then buy another token to get back in. I pointed out to him how ridiculous that was, and I put a bit of juice into my voice to let him know I was annoyed. I pushed it pretty far in the hope that he would have the power to get me a free token for the rest of my ride. I had found the original fare of 3.4 ringgit pretty pricey for a short ride to Pasar Seni. And now, because their system was so poorly designed, I was being forced to buy a second token. But the dude never did help me out, and I left him with the bold statement that I was NOT going to buy a second token. I was going to walk instead. It was only one stop after all.

I found my way out of the giant mall complex around KL Sentral and started walking with a sense of purpose. I quickly gave up, however. I had no idea what direction to go in and I found my way blocked by the freeway system. I examined my map, and I realized that despite only needing to go one stop, it was impossible to walk. Impossible. I turned around and went back into the complex and after a lot of walking found the entrance to the transit system. There was a very long line at the token machines. These machines are extremely inefficient and create huge bottlenecks in the subway system. I was somewhat mollified when I saw that my token for going just one stop was only one ringgit. The train was aboveground and so I got to see the terrain of endless highways and expressways I would have had to walk through to go just that short distance. It was astonishing, and I was so glad that I had given up the attempt to early. It’s unlikely I could have made it through on foot, and even if I had, it would have been a horrific experience. This city is not designed for walking.

Wednesday October 15, 2014, 7:45 a.m. Bird Nest Guest House
Kuala Lumur, Malaysia

The troubles with the bike continue. I went back to the PedalSpot bike shop to pick up my bike with the new saddle and ride it back to downtown. Unfortunately, when I got there, I was told that they hadn’t been able to loosen the seatpost. It was still stuck – rusted into place. Worse, while working on it, they had stumbled across a distinct bulge in the downtube of the bike frame. It looks and feels like a snake that has swallowed a mouse. Was this bulge always there? Was it created by the rusting seatpost? I have no idea, but it sure didn’t look good.

The guys at this shop had tried everything they could think of, but they hadn’t been able to budge the seatpost. I had no choice but to take my bike and seek help somewhere else. The seat felt not uncomfortable as I rode away, but I was sitting far too low. I needed to raise the seatpost for this saddle. In any event, I had to be able to remove the seatpost in the future to be able to box up the bike.

I rode to Bike Pro first, but they weren’t open yet. While I waited, I rode to Van’s bike shop – the one with the all the folding bikes – to see what they could do. The guys there were very helpful and friendly, and they gave it their best shop with giant wrenches and near-sledgehammers, but they weren’t able to move it either. After they gave up, I rode back to Bike Pro. I was a bit nervous about that because Jason had been so helpful in the past. He had been so helpful that he’d strayed into doing me favors rather than charging me as a regular customer. So now I felt weird going back there. I didn’t want him to think that I was presuming on his friendly nature. I just wanted to be a customer and pay for their labor in fixing my bicycle. My fears were justified, because I could see on Jason’s face that he was annoyed to see me again, and he told me that he was really busy today. That annoyed me a little bit, because he was assuming that I was demanding that he work on my bike right away and do it for free. And, obviously, I wasn’t. I told him about the problem and I said that I wasn’t in a rush. I could leave my bike there and he could work on it when it became my turn whether that was today, tomorrow, Thursday, whenever. He still seemed unhappy and just kept telling me that he was really busy. He wanted me to go away. But I was really stuck. I was as stuck as that seatpost. If I didn’t remove it, I wasn’t able to use the bike, and since I don’t have my own tools and shop, I have no choice but to rely on bike shops. So I persisted and eventually, another mechanic jumped in and said that I could leave my bike there and they would see what they could do. I rode my bike around to the back of the shop and left it there in their storage area.

Later on, I did some research on the Internet, and I felt a bit better. This is a common problem and there was lots of information online. Solutions ranged from using penetrating oil to dry ice. People turned their bikes upside down and put the seatpost in a vice and then twisted the entire bike frame to break the seatpost free. I was most comforted by the final solution – if all else fails, you have to destroy the seatpost as you remove it. You have to buy a new seatpost, but at least you get your bike back. You do this by cutting the top off the seatpost with a hacksaw. Then you insert the hacksaw blade down inside the seatpost inside the frame and carefully saw through the seat post without cutting into the frame. Once you’ve cut the seatpost from top to bottom, you grab the top corner with a vice grip and twist it inward in a spiral to pull the seatpost away from the frame. Then you can pull it out. It takes a long time to saw through the seatpost and there is the danger of cutting through the bike frame. But it is at least a solution. Now I just have to wait to see if Jason is successful first. If not, it’s time for the hacksaw.

After my bike adventures, I had another delicious lunch at an Indian restaurant and returned downtown by LRT. Back at the Internet café, I was doing my research, uploading pictures, and checking on the delivery progress of my tires. By late last night, they had arrived in Hong Kong via Belfast, London, and somewhere in Germany. They will be well-travelled tires before they even get on my bike.

I was still looking into ordering a Clikstand for my Trangia stove. There was some confusion about whether my Trangia pots would still fit. I wrote to Clikstand and I got an email back. Unfortunately, the info in the emai was different from the info on their website. So I had to write back and ask for clarification. It made me wonder once more why everyone is so bad at their job. The woman at Clikstand who wrote to me didn’t seem to know anything about their own products and about Trangia products – and this was despite the Clikstand being designed specifically to work with Trangia alcohol and multi-fuel burners.

The problem with the Clikstand is the price. It’s expensive. The only reason I want it is to save a bit of weight. But perhaps there are much cheaper ways to save weight. Everything I have is heavy. There are probably cheaper things I can replace to save the same amount of weight or even more weight.

Still no word from Olympus. I’m definitely going to call them or visit them today. This is getting ridiculous. I’ve been reading a book called Railsea by China Mieville now. It’s a type of sci-fi fantasy novel. It’s interesting so far.

Tags: Bike Pro, Bird Nest Guest House, Clikstand, Malaysia, Pasar Seni, Trangia