Saturday November 1, 2014
7:00 a.m. Bird Nest Guest House
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

I’ve conceded victory to the animals of the Bird Nest. I now feed the rabbit a slice of bread every time I sit down, even if I’m not eating any bread myself. When I sit down to have a cup of coffee, I also get a slice of bread for the rabbit. Feeding him the bread is the only way to get him to stop biting me and bothering me. It’s a small price to pay for some peace of mind. He generally chews through half a slice and then has had enough and goes and lies down somewhere. That’s better than sitting beside my feet and then suddenly rearing up and sinking its teeth into my calves. As for the cat, I now lock my room door even if I’m only going to be gone for a few seconds. That cat is sneaky and fast. And I don’t give the cat any love. You pee on my stuff? I don’t scratch you behind the ears and under the chin.

I allowed the Doug insanity to overtake me yesterday morning, and I bought an MSR Hubba Hubba NX tent, a Thermarest Prolite mattress, and a fork, a spoon, and a knife. Those items are hopefully winging their way to Sarnia.

There was some confusion with the order. I tried at first to have it shipped to Malaysia. I realized that if I did so, I wouldn’t have to pay sales tax, and those savings might equal and cancel out the shipping charges. However, when I got to the final screen to confirm the order, I was told that the tent was on back order and would not be available for four to five weeks. I then went back to check if the same conditions applied to shipping within Canada. I ended up putting in my order and officially purchasing the tent and other items without intending to. I thought there was one more screen where I could review the order and see the shipping status and shipping charges, etc. but there were no more screens. When I clicked on “Purchase Now”, well, I purchased it. The order was confirmed and it said nothing about the availability of the tent. I hope that means there is no problem and that the tent will be delivered in four days. I haven’t checked my email yet this morning.

Having never seen this tent myself, I am, of course, a little concerned. There might be aspects to the tent that I dislike. However, I keep telling myself that the goal is to have a lightweight tent that is still roomy enough for me and my four pannier bags. Even if there are a couple of things about the tent I don’t like, it will be a worthwhile compromise for the light weight. My Marmot Peapod, for example, has double-layered doors. There is a regular tent fabric layer and a mesh layer. You can seal the doors with the tent material or unzip that and have just the mesh to allow for more ventilation. That makes the tent warmer during cold nights and cooler during hot nights. It’s a nice feature to have. The Hubba Hubba NX does not have this feature. From that point of view, the Peapod is more of a deluxe model, but it is also more than twice as heavy.

In any event, my feeling is that it is okay to simply order the Hubba Hubba NX and live with it. The key is that it weighs less than four pounds and packs up very, very small. I get tingles just thinking about it. It’s also a $359 tent from MSR, not a $39.99 tent from Canadian Tire, so all of the parts, the design, and the construction will be of the highest quality. I have no concerns on that score. Plus, if I do my usual thing and start researching like crazy and looking for a tent that has a dozen deluxe features, I’ll end up with another eight-pound Marmot Peapod. In the end, I’m pretty confident that this tent will serve me well. I can’t wait to see it.

I’m also pleased with my purchase of the Thermarest Prolite. I have one twinge of buyer’s remorse with it in that I wonder if I should have gotten the large instead of the regular. The large would fit my body better, but it was so wide that when rolled up, it would no longer fit inside the sleeping pad pocket on my pannier bag. So I went with the regular. My old Thermarest is a regular in terms of length and width, and it was okay. My feet stick off the end, but that is okay. My feet are always inside a sleeping bag or a sleeping sheet. I did often wish it was a bit wider to accommodate my elbows and arms as I slept on my stomach or back, but that extra width would mean more weight and it being unable to fit inside the pannier bag pocket. So I got the regular. Whatever its limitations, I will keep reminding myself that it is light and small. Light and small. Light and small. That is my new mantra.

The next item that has come under my critical eye is my sleeping bag. In most ways, this is the worst of the weight offenders, and it also shows how profoundly dumb I am. I seem to have mental blinders. I get obsessed with certain ideas and take them to an extreme and I’m blind to other points of view. I can guarantee you that I was the only tourist/traveler in the Philippines with a winter-rated, 4.5-pound pure goose down sleeping bag. I didn’t think it was that silly. At that time, I was thinking ahead to being in cold places like northern India, where such a sleeping bag would be necessary. I knew I wouldn’t need it in the Philippines, but I was thinking ahead. I like to be prepared for the worst. But it is insane to cycle up and down the steep mountains of the Philippines with a 4.5-pound down sleeping bag – a bag designed for winter camping in Canada. It just never struck me as that insane. I just accepted the heavy load on my bike as the price of bike touring. I didn’t think the heavy load affected me or the bike that much. But I realize now that it really did have a big impact. And this big impact goes all the way back to Ethiopia. When I think back, I find it incredible that I did all that traveling there with this heavy gear. I remember that it wasn’t that successful. I tried to hike through the mountains with my huge North Face backpack, this massive sleeping bag, my eight-pound Marmot Peapod, and a deluxe Trangia stove system. No sane person would attempt that. My first day of hiking was such a disaster. At the time, I thought it was because I wasn’t in shape for hiking. I literally wasn’t able to even stand up after a while. My leg muscles got pinched and strained by the heavy load to such an extent that my legs simply collapsed underneath me.

A large part of the problem of my brand of insanity is that I tend to do things in isolation. I’m not planning trips and doing things with other people. So I don’t get the input of people that are smarter and more experienced than me. And I don’t see things from the outside and from a different perspective. So I end up with a load of touring gear that would challenge the Incredible Hulk.

Anyway, I started this rant writing about the sleeping bag. I realize now that it is extremely dumb to cycle with a heavy winter-rated sleeping bag through southeast Asia. Sure, it might have come in handy had I made it to northern India. But would it be so handy that it was worthwhile to carry it around for months in southeast Asia? Obviously not. It would have been better to have a lightweight sleeping bag for southeast Asia and then if and when I got to a colder place, I could worry about it then and get a warmer sleeping bag or a blanket or whatever.

Well, yesterday I went back to my new favorite camping store. My goal was to buy some small carabiners for the four corners of my mosquito net. It was hardly a shopping emergency, but I like camping stores, so off I went. While I was there, I went over their sleeping bags and I saw all the lightweight options available. I’ve decided that I’m also going to get rid of my current sleeping bag. I don’t know if I’ll replace it right away, but I’m not going to do any more cycling in southeast Asia with that huge bag. I can’t remember what it is rated for, but with a Thermarest, I think it is good for temperatures down to minus ten Celsius or even colder. Weather patterns are changing around the world, but I don’t think it is going to drop down to minus ten or minus fifteen degrees in Indonesia or Cambodia anytime soon.

The Core Zone camping store had some nice sleeping bags for sale, but they were very expensive. And the ones I was most interested in had clearly been in the store for a long time.

Sunday November 2, 2014
6:15 a.m. Bird Nest Guest House
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Again, I have absolutely no business being up this early. I can feel that I’m exhausted and irritable, but I just couldn’t sleep. The whole night was bad. The Bird Nest was full of people last night and there were several groups of loud people in every part of the hostel including right outside my room. It was too noisy to sleep.

On my last trip to the Core Zone camping store, I had purchased a small bottle of methyl alcohol. I wanted to test the Clikstand with my Trangia alcohol burner. That test went surprisingly well. The alcohol burned poorly, I have to say. It didn’t burn nearly as well as the denatured alcohol I routinely used in the Philippines. However, to my intense surprise, I discovered that the Clikstand was more efficient than the original Trangia base and windscreen. I suspected that the opposite was true, but my test proved me wrong. I put the exact same amount of water into a pot and then brought it to a boil under the same conditions using the Trangia base and windscreen and then the Clikstand. The water came to a boil in four minutes with the Trangia and in three minutes with the Clikstand. That surprised me greatly. Not surprisingly, the Trangia was superior in every other way. It was more stable and easier to use. It was particularly superior when it came to lighting the burner and putting it out. This was quite difficult to accomplish with the Clikstand, as was assembly and disassembly. But I think over time, I will learn to use the Clikstand. And the fact that it burns well and efficiently pleases me greatly.

Having tested the Clikstand with the alcohol burner, I wanted to test it with the Trangia X2 Multifuel Burner. I have had very bad experiences with the X2 to date, so I was a little nervous about this. And I was right to be nervous.

The first step falls into a category I could call “Things That Only Happen to Doug.” I had to find a gas station and get some gas, and that turned into something like an episode of the Three Stooges. If I had the energy, I could write ten pages about the lunacy of it all. I really don’t know what was so complicated. I’m at a gas station and I want to buy some gas. It’s not complicated. But from the way the Malaysians reacted, you’d think I had shown up with a herd of elephants and asked for elephant feed. It was insane. I came very close to losing my temper. If they had engaged me at all, I could have explained myself, but they did that annoying Asian thing of flapping their hands at me and saying, “No, no, no, no, no!” It was a three-ring circus, but I did eventually carry the day and I walked away with my fuel bottle filled with gasoline.

The X2 burner – like all such stoves – works best with white gas. However, white gas is not available in Asia and the next best option is simple unleaded gas. The time I really needed this stove – during the aftermath of the typhoon – it failed me. At the time, I wondered if the gas I was using was contaminated and that is why it wouldn’t work. I was hoping that was true and that my test here at the Bird Nest would be successful.

It will be no surprise to anyone that the test was not successful. I spent the entire afternoon up on the roof of the Bird Nest trying to get this X2 stove to work. It’s a puzzle. A very annoying and frustrating puzzle. I joke about getting dumber and dumber, but using these stoves does not require a genius-level IQ. The steps are simple and I can follow the steps. But it wouldn’t work no matter what I did. I broke the stove down several times and checked every part and cleaned everything. I could see nothing wrong with the stove and every part worked as it was supposed to. Yet, I could not get the stove to light and stay lit. I think I lost another year of my life to the stress of this experience. Trying and failing to light the stove was not a simple matter of just pushing a button and then pushing it again. No, it’s a messy and complex business involving gasoline and soot. And every failed attempt resulted in a stinky, black mess all over the stove and all over my hands. It was an unmitigated disaster and after several hours, I gave up. Since then, I’ve been composing angry emails to Trangia in my head. That’s one of the reasons I couldn’t sleep. All night long, I kept writing that email.

The frustration of this test of the X2 was compounded by many factors. The main factor is simply how expensive this stove is. If I’d bought it for ten bucks at a garage sale and found it didn’t work, it would be no big deal. But this stove is the most expensive camping stove in the world. It is also supposed to be the absolute best and most reliable. When you read about this stove, they describe it as THE stove you want to have with you in the most extreme conditions when your stove absolutely must work. Not only did I fork out the insanely high purchase price for the stove, I then had to spend time drilling holes in my Trangia windscreen to accommodate the fuel line. (My windscreen predates the X2 and did not have the hole pre-drilled.) Then I invested even more time and money in buying a special version of the Clikstand – the model designed specifically to work with both the Trangia alcohol burner and the X2. I already lost one year of my life to the stress of finding out that the Clikstand doesn’t actually fit the X2 very well if at all. And now another year has been lost to the stress resulting from this test and coming to the conclusion that this X2 was a total waste of time and money and that I probably will have to buy yet another stove. When will it ever end? And the truly horrible thing is that there is never anyone to blame. Who am I going to scream at? Who am I going to punch in the face? No one. I’ll write to Trangia, of course, and I’ll get the usual unhelpful reply. They’ll refer me to the instructions for the stove and tell me all the things that I already know and they’ll tell me to do all the things that I’ve already done. The frustration continues because there really is nowhere else to turn but to the Trangia company. This X2 is not a popular stove in North America. There are no forums dedicated to its use. There are no reviews of it online. There is no community of X2 users that I can turn to for advice and help. There are tens of thousands of people out there who use the MSR Whisperlite and tens of thousands who use the Primus Omnifuel. But the X2 (which is supposed to be a modified Primus Omnifuel)? Nope. Just me, apparently.

Well, ridiculous as it sounds, I am now thinking about throwing away this stupid X2 stove and buying a different one. Even if by some miracle, I get it to work a little bit, I don’t think I can ever trust it. I’ve said a number of times that the new sensible Doug is going to do normal things from now on. Instead of buying an exotic state-of-the-art stove from Sweden, I am going to do what everyone else in the world does and use an MSR Whisperlite. At least, I am going to look into it.

Tags: Asia, Clikstand, Malaysia, tent, Trangia X2 Multifuel Burner