I managed to track down more beer and ice yesterday. I doubled down on the beer this time, and as a result I’m a little bit out of it this morning. I slept quite a long time, but I don’t feel like I got much rest. Alcohol affects me that way.

I had fun with the ice and beer, though. I went back to the grocery store where I’d been successful in getting the ice at the end of the previous day. I went through the long process of locking up my bike and going inside as usual, but they didn’t have any ice this time. There were long, skinny bags of water in the freezer at the back, but they were just water, not ice. I asked for ice, but they said they only had ice water. I left that store and went to a series of other places, none of which had ice. I finally came across a little convenience store that, though it didn’t contain ice, did contain a very nice woman at the front counter, and she pointed out various sari-sari stores in the neighborhood that might have ice. I went to four of them without any success. The fifth actually had ice.

At this fifth store, something else funny happened – something that is indicative of many of my interactions with people in the Philippines. The woman said that they had ice and that it cost the very reasonable sum of 2 pesos. That was fine, but I had no idea what kind of ice she was talking about. She was waiting for me to tell her how many “ice” I wanted. But I couldn’t tell her that without knowing what I was buying. I kept asking her about this ice, but she didn’t know what I was asking. In her world, the ice she sells is a known commodity. Everyone knows what kind of ice they sell in sari-sari stores and what you will get for 2 pesos. She can’t grasp the idea that a customer was standing in front of her – a big, dumb white guy from Canada – who had never purchased this ice before. In the end, I could only make a guess. I figured that for 2 pesos, you wouldn’t get very much ice. How could you at that price? So I asked for “five ice.” That would only come to 10 pesos, or about 25 cents. This woman reached down into a cooler and took out five rather large bags of ice. I realized I didn’t need anywhere near five bags of ice of that size, but it was too late to stop the deal now. She put the ice in a huge plastic bag and walked it out of her store to give it to me. It was too large to fit through the sari-sari store’s little window. I had to work pretty hard to get it all to fit inside my pannier bag. Without an audience, I would have left some of the ice behind. With an audience, it would have been a bit weird to buy a bunch of ice in a store and then just leave most of it on the street. I was worried my pannier bag was going to snap off the pannier rack it was so heavy.

The last time I’d done this, I’d had to make quite an effort to break off a chunk of ice that would fit inside my plastic coffee mug. This time I cast about for an alternative, and I came up with a brilliant solution. I had purchased some water in big plastic water bottles. I took my knife and cut the top off one of the plastic bottles. The resulting container was almost exactly the same diameter as the big tubes of ice. I took the ice glaciers out of the plastic bags and simply slotted them inside the water bottle. It was like feeding shells into the barrel of a tank.

I had purchased all this beer to enjoy while I fiddled with my bike. I had gone to a bike store right after lunch and purchased a few things. The main thing I was interested in were heavy-duty pinch-proof tubes. I hadn’t made up my mind that I wanted to buy them. I was definitely interested in the heavy-duty nature of these tubes. I enjoy having confidence in the strength of my bike. It would be great to ride around with indestructible tubes and feel nearly immune to flat tires. There is a price to be paid for this confidence, though, and that price is weight. These heavy-duty tubes are much bigger and heavier than regular tubes. I’m not talking about twice as heavy or even three times as heavy. I’m guessing they are four or five times as heavy. That’s a lot of extra weight to carry on the bike. And this weight would be in the tires themselves. I’m not sure what the technical term is for that, but it’s a kind of rotational weight. The heavier your wheels are, the more effort it takes to get them turning. So adding weight in the form of heavy tubes has a greater effect on the bike than simply adding weight to a pannier bag.

I hadn’t made up my mind, but it was worth a look, and I went back to the bike shop. The first thing I noticed was that these tubes had Presta valves, not Shraeder valves. This was almost a deal breaker for me, since gas stations and the like generally only have air pumps with connectors for Schraeder valves. My bike pump can handle both Presta and Schraeder valves, of course, but I could imagine a situation in which my pump breaks down and I need to get air from somewhere else. Then I would be stuck. I wouldn’t be able to use the air hoses at gas stations. In the past, I’ve dealt with this by carrying Presta to Schraeder adapters. They worked very well. Unfortunately, I didn’t have one with me having left from Taiwan with only tubes with Schraeder valves. I’d completely forgotten about the issue and hadn’t gotten any adapters.

The tubes themselves weren’t expensive, which helped me make up my mind. They were Kenda tubes – made in Taiwan – and they cost 240 pesos each. That’s about six dollars. I would have expected them to be more expensive. That low price made me suspect they weren’t high quality tubes. But after some thought, I decided to take a chance on them. I could try out the tubes and keep my old tubes in the meantime. If they didn’t work out, I could just switch back to my original tubes.

I also wrote before that I was considering getting some lights for my bike. My idea was to simply get a flashing light for the front of the bike to make me more visible. I wasn’t that concerned about lighting up the road with a headlight type of light. In the end, though, I purchased a headlight. They did have a variety of flashing LED lights that I could probably rig up to attach to the handlebars. But I knew it would never be satisfactory. I wouldn’t be able to remove such a light easily. So the light would be sitting on my handlebars permanently and would make my bike more of a target for an opportunistic thief. It’s best not to have your bike dripping with accessories when you have to leave it locked up somewhere. A regular headlight generally has a quick-release system, and I’d be able to just take it off the bike whenever I wanted and then click it back into place, just like my Cateye bike computer.

I’m sure there are better headlights out there in the world, but this store only had one type in stock. It took 3 AAA batteries and didn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, but it looked like it would do the job, and I bought one of those, too. The brand is Infini – also a Taiwanese product. The build quality seemed reasonable and it had a fairly nice design. It also had a couple of nice features, the most important of which is that the main button to turn the light on and off is a big button on the back and is recessed quite deeply. That is important because it means that though it is easy to turn on while it is on the bike, it won’t turn on accidentally when you toss it inside a pannier bag or a pocket. The recessed button will prevent that. Many electronic devices –flashlights and radios and the like – that I’ve seen over the years have suffered from this flaw. The buttons get pushed by accident when the unit is inside your backpack and the unit gets turned on and when you go to use it next, you find that the batteries are dead. These devices need either recessed buttons or, ideally, a lock. My headlight doesn’t have a lock, but the recessed button seems like it will serve. In fact, now that I’ve had the light for a day, I’m more and more pleased with it overall. I had wanted something slightly smaller and lighter, but I’m happy with this unit. It’s really not that large or heavy. I haven’t used it at night as a headlight yet, but it seems more than bright enough. It also has a setting in which the light just flashes.

The last item I bought was the most problematic – bicycle gloves. I’ve never had bicycle gloves before. I shy away from anything that smacks of being a uniform. I’m riding a bike, sure, but that doesn’t mean I have to dress in skin-tight lycra so that I look like the cyclists I see on TV. I don’t feel the need to wear a cycling uniform. And bicycle gloves are the ultimate cycling accessory. But there are a lot of arguments in favor of them. The main one, of course, is the padding they provide. I haven’t spent very long days in the saddle on this trip so far, but even so, my hands have gotten very sore and my fingers have gone completely numb. Cycling gloves might prevent that from happening.

Cycling gloves might also help me change gears. Right now, I have to keep a washcloth draped over my handlebars and put it over the grip shifts in order to change gears. My hands are far too sweaty otherwise, and I can’t grip the shifters hard enough to turn them. I was eventually going to wrap some cloth around the grip shifters and have it in place permanently, but cycling gloves might serve just as well. I was worried that it would be a huge pain to remove the gloves several times a day. They are very tight and I figured I’d have to slowly tug up on the edges of each finger bit by bit and slowly work each glove off. But upon examining the gloves more carefully, I realized that there were small loops of cord connecting each pair of fingers. These loops had puzzled me the first time I saw them. But yesterday, I realized that they were there to make taking the gloves off easier. I can simply pull up on those cords and remove the gloves quite easily. I wasn’t convinced that these gloves were of acceptable quality, but they were the only gloves in the shop, and I decided to take a chance on them.

My final bill for the two tubes, the headlight, and the gloves wasn’t a lot, but it was a significant amount. It was particularly significant when you consider the amount of money that I’d already spent on gear of various kinds. After all that buying and preparations, it seems weird to STILL be buying gear. It makes sense though. As much as I thought about going on a bike trip after I left Taiwan, and as much as I thought I was planning for it and preparing for it, I really didn’t do very much. It was all I could do to leave Taiwan and get to a new country. When it came down to it, I hardly cared what country I went to and what condition my bike was in. I just wanted to get somewhere new – sort of a shoot them all and sort them out later approach. From that point of view, coming to the Philippines was a good choice. It’s the kind of country where I can purchase bike gear and camping gear quite easily. This concern was why, in the end, I shied away from flying directly to a place like Africa. I wasn’t ready for that kind of traveling. I needed to go to a country where I would have the luxury of taking stock and making changes if I needed to. So far, I’d had to make a lot of changes. I shipped a heavy box of extra gear back to Canada from Legazpi. Here I was buying lights, cycling gloves, and heavy-duty tubes. I can imagine making lots more changes as I go.

I brought all my purchases back to my hotel and then carried my bike up to my hotel room to do the work. I had my giant plastic tubes of beer going, and I had the TV tuned to interesting programs on TLC and National Geographic and Animal Planet, and I passed an enjoyable afternoon and evening working on my bike and gear. I put the new tubes in without too much trouble. I was a bit worried that they would be too large. My tires are huge at 2.35 inches, but these tubes were rated for 2.35-3.15 inch tires. So 2.35 was at the lower end of their rating. In fact, when I got the tubes out of the boxes, I noticed that the tubes were stamped with 2.4 inches as a minimum size, slightly larger even than my monster tires. But they fit inside my tires and I switched my pump over to the Presta valve setting. My air pressure gauge even has a Presta setting. It is much more finicky than the Schraeder setting, but with some practice and care, I figured out how to use it properly. When I was done, I felt very good about the new wheels, heavy as they were. The last thing I wanted to do was spend a lot of time at the side of the road fixing flat tires. Hopefully these monster tubes will help prevent that.

I mounted the headlight without too much trouble, either. I was pleased with that. Most times in my life, I find that things I buy come with problems. They always just barely fit and have to be adjusted and changed and adapted. This headlight came with two different clamps for handlebar stems of different sizes. There were also two different thicknesses of rubber shims. I quickly figured out which combination would fit my handlebar stems. And the mounting bracket didn’t even require tools. It had a unique design with a bolt that could be tightened by hand. I liked that feature. I had to move the other items on my handlebars to make room for my new headlight. I now have the CatEye cycling computer and the compass on the left. The bell and the headlight are on the right. I’ve thought about getting a cheap digital watch and mounting it somewhere on my handlebars as well. I actually had a watch in Taiwan that would have served very well, but I didn’t think of it at the time. In fact, I had no intention of putting the compass on the handlebars either. I just happened to own these little compasses, and I threw them in my luggage. I didn’t think a compass would be that necessary on my bike. But so far, I’ve found it if not essential at least very, very useful. It has helped me get oriented many times – such as the other day when it told me I was heading due north when I thought I was going south to the MacArthur monument.

Finally, I found that I was pleased with my new gloves. I did that silly thing that people do with new clothes – I put the gloves on and then wore them all afternoon while I was making coffee and doing other things. I just wanted to see if the fingerless design would allow me to manipulate things easily. And I just enjoyed wearing them. Made me feel “cool”. I’m very interested to see how they feel when I am on the road and cycling for a long time. The hope is that all pain and numbness in my hands will disappear.

 

 

Tags: bike, Canada, pannier bag, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Taiwan