Sunday October 12, 2014, 7;15 a.m. Bird Nest Guest House
Kuala lumpur, Malaysia

Another day yesterday in the historic city of Kuala Lumpur. So what amazing tourist sites did I visit? What cultural events did I attend? What new foods did I sample? What words did I learn in a foreign language?

None of the above. As usual, I spent the day in bicycle shops. I’m not complaining about that. To be honest, I’m sure I enjoyed my time at the bicycle shops much more than I would have enjoyed visiting the local museums. The level of tourism is so high here that anything like that would feel like a trip to Disneyland.

First thing, I hopped on the LRT and went to the neighborhood with the Bike Pro shop. I had left my bike there after having had a new chain and a new cassette put on. I kind of wanted to just leave it there forever and never have to face Kuala Lumpur highways again.

I brought along my extra-large water bottle cage – the Minoura AB-1600 – to make sure that it would fit. I had some hopes that I might even be able to buy a second one. Each cage like that would represent the ability to double the amount of water I could carry. Even a large regular bicycle water bottle can carry only about .7 of a liter of water. With the large water bottle cage, I can carry 1.5 liters in each one. However, no matter how I played around with the various mounting brackets, I could only use one such large cage. Two would be ideal because I could carry three liters in just those two bottles, and then I could even use the third water bottle bracket to carry a fuel bottle. That would free up space in a pannier bag and keep the fuel separate from other gear. But it was not to be. The frame of a mountain bike is simply too small to fit two in.

It was a Saturday, so the bike shop was very busy. There was no way to hang out and just chat with Jason and the boys as I had done on previous occasions. I noticed that there were a number of families of white people there, all buying bicycles for their children.

Riding my bike away from Bike Pro was really hard. There was so much Saturday traffic that it was next to impossible to move even inside the shopping mall and strip mall parking lots. Forget about the streets. It was unreal. I was having some trouble with my gears, so it seems that even super-Jason hadn’t been able to get things perfectly adjusted. I suspect that the new 9-speed chain is not completely right for the front and rear derailleurs. I could change gears, but it was impossible to center the chain in such a way that it wasn’t rubbing against something and making noise. That’s another problem with bike touring, I find. Bikes in general just have too many gears and are therefore too complicated. I don’t need nine chain rings on the rear cassette. Just give me four or even three. I don’t even need the three chain rings on the front. I only ever use the medium one and the granny gear. I’m not a racer, so I don’t need the large ring. There are times when I’m going downhill that I could use it and pedal that fast, but I generally don’t. I find it’s too risky to ride downhill at 50 km/hr in the developing world. There are simply too many hazards to contend with. I prefer to go slowly even when going downhill just to be safe. When I make that decision, I’m not thinking about personal safety. I’m thinking about the bike. All it would take is one pothole, one coconut, or one goat to cause an accident and destroy my bicycle. I think if the rear cassette had four rings and the front crank had two, I would still be fine. I need the lowest gear for when I go uphill, a slightly faster gear for accelerating, a cruising gear for just regular riding on flats, and a fast gear for rare times when I need to pass something at speed. And that’s it. With just those gears, the engineering would likely be much simpler and you could build a derailleur system that would be much simpler and more reliable.

I had other shopping thoughts on my mind, and I was already scheming about which shop I was going to ask to store my bike for another night. Again, I had no interest in riding my bike back to Chinatown on the highways. So I had to buy something at one of the other bike shops. Otherwise, I wouldn’t feel right about asking them to store my bike over the weekend. I figured it would be much easer to ride on Monday than on Saturday. There was far too much traffic on Saturday.

I went first to KH Cycles. It’s a smaller shop, but they had a variety of Minoura accessories. I’d looked up this company online, and it has a reputation for producing high-end bike accessories. So I guess my water bottle cage is well-constructed. I was curious about these new accessories that people use to increase the amount of handlebar space for all their gadgets. People now bring so much in the way of electronics, including GPS systems and smartphones, that there is not enough room on the handlebars to mount them all. So bike companies have built little doodads that clamp onto the handlebars and provide more tubing for gadgets. I don’t have much in the way of gadgets, but even I had run out of room. I have my CatEye computer, my headlight, my compass, and my bell. With my new shifters, I had to push my gear and brake lever assembly far into the middle to give me access to the levers with my thumbs. And that took away a lot of handlebar space. I ended up having to take the bell and put it on the outside of my handlebars on the remnant of the plastic mounting assembly for my old broken mirror. It’s really kind of useless out there. One of these new doodads would allow me to move it back to the middle. Unfortunately, the doodad didn’t quite feel right. For one thing, it really only had space for two gadgets. And it used up one gadget’s worth of space on the regular handlebars. So all it really did was provide space for one more gadget compared to not having it. Considering that it would add weight to the bike and cost nearly $25, I wanted more benefit than that. Plus, the bar it provides is open on both sides. It isn’t a closed loop. It doesn’t really make a difference, but it feels like an invitation to theft. A thief would still have to use a tool to unscrew something and remove the gadget, but somehow just looking at the open-ended tube makes you think that you can just slide the gadget off the end. I think it would increase the risk of theft dramatically. Better for my purposes would be a much longer U-shaped tube that attaches to two places on the handlebars. That could provide room for five or six gadgets and be much more secure. However, I haven’t seen a design like that. It would be hard to design something like that that would be universal – able to fit all or most bikes.

From there, I went to the Merida shop. This shop carried the Selle SMP saddles, and that was the main purchase I was considering. I’ll cut the suspense and shorten the story by saying that I did buy a new saddle – a Sell SMP TRK saddle. Was it a wise purchase? That remains to be seen. The odds are that it will turn out to be a stupid purchase, but there is a chance it will work out. My current saddle is a Trek comfort saddle. It’s one of those giant cushy things that retirees put on their bikes – the kind with all the springs on the bottom that squeak a lot as you bounce up and down. I’m not sure that I would call the saddle uncomfortable, but it certainly was never perfect. I’ve mentioned before that when I stop for the day, it is always because I can’t take the pain in my butt anymore. It is never because my legs are tired or my arms are tired. It is always pain in the saddle area. And I do shift around all the time as I ride. Finally, I’ve had trouble with my legs cramping up. I get these sudden, savage cramps that stop me in my tracks. And the location of these cramps – in the inner thighs – suggests that it is the extreme width of this comfort saddle causing the problem. Racing bikes, as you know, have those extremely narrow saddles – almost like needles. They have those so that your legs can be closer together as you pedal. My saddle forces my legs far apart, and I think that has led to the cramping. Finally, and perhaps most important, this Trek saddle is extremely large and heavy. Actually, I had no idea just how heavy it was till they took it off in the bike shop and I could compare it to the Selle SMP. The Trek felt like a heavy club – like a weapon. The Selle SMP was light as a feather. It was clear that the Trek saddle was a ridiculous thing to have on a touring bike. It was just too big and heavy.

However, when they put the Selle SMP saddle on the bike, it looked ridiculous. It was so small that it looked silly to me. It hardly seemed like a saddle at all. I had to get out a measuring tape and measure it and then compare it to the other saddles on bikes in the shop just to reassure myself that it was not a child’s toy. In fact, this Selle SMP was WIDER than all the other saddles in the shop. As the shop clerks told me, the TRK model was designed for comfort and for more upright riding. But compared to my Trek saddle, it looked like a toy. It’s also one of those anatomical saddles with a very large cutout in the middle. The cutout is so big, in fact, that it makes the saddle look really weird. It also has a pronounced dip in the nose – like an eagle’s beak. This is all designed to take pressure off all the squishy bits in your groin. THAT design element I had no problem with. With the Trek saddle, I’d noticed a lot of uncomfortable and painful squishing going on. And over time, you can damage the nerves and all that. This saddle will prevent all that. I know that to be the case because I once had a similar saddle and it worked beautifully. It was the most comfortable saddle I’d ever had. That’s the one that was stolen in Sarnia during my disastrous attempt at working at the call center. (That experience still haunts me.)

The potential problem with this saddle is that it simply isn’t large enough to accommodate my butt and that it will not be comfortable. It’s much softer than regular saddles, but it’s still MUCH harder than the Trek saddle. I might have gotten the more expensive gel saddle, but they had just sold the last one. They only had the regular foam models left. I’d read online that the foam models were better, so I wasn’t too unhappy about that. And it saved me $35. The end result of all the design elements of this saddle is that you end up sitting right on the two “sit bones” in your butt. The theory goes that this is what you want. When you sit on a wide, flat, soft saddle, you compress all the flesh in your butt. This cuts of blood circulation and causes extreme pain over time. With a harder and smaller saddle, you perch right on those two tiny bones, and this means all the surrounding flesh is uncompressed and gets a decent blood flow. I was intensely aware of those two bones in my butt as I test rode the saddle around the shopping mall parking lot and the streets nearby. My instinct says that it would be very painful after a while. I wanted a bigger seat that I could actually sit on. But the experts all say that this is a better way to go. Well, I decided to try it and I bought the saddle. We immediately ran into the problem of my rusted seat post. I guess this is one part of the bicycle I’d forgotten about in my post-typhoon clean-up. Salt water had gotten in there and apparently had rusted the downtube and the seatpost so badly that they were welded together. This new saddle is much thinner than my Trek saddle, and so I need to raise the seat post. However, it won’t budge. Jason at Bicycle Pro tried to move it with a huge wrench – the kind of wrench you use in railroads to work on trains – and he couldn’t budge it. He said that all I could do is loosen the bolt and then ride the bike and hope that the weight of my body bouncing up and down will eventually loosen it. I haven’t had time to try that, so the guys at the Merida shop could not raise the seat post. The clerks at Merida were friendly, but they were not nearly as good as Jason or as helpful. The Merida shop was much more like a regular bike shop moving a lot of product and they didn’t encourage a lot of chatting and discussion of bike gear. Their mechanic kind of tugged on the seatpost, said it was stuck, and then left it at that. I left my bike there after I bought the saddle and said I would return on Monday to pick it up. I hinted that they could continue to try to loosen the seatpost in the meantime. As I walked out the front door, I saw them working on that, so maybe by Monday they’ll have managed it. I hope so.

While I was there, I also looked into getting new tires. There is plenty of rubber left on my old tires, but their mountain bike design has led to a problem and they need to be replaced. The problem is that I have mountain bike tires with giant knobs on them. I like having those giant tires. They provide a lot of cushioning for rough roads and prevent pinch flats. However, I’ve learned that there is a problem with them. The knobs are so pronounced that they are the only things in contact with the ground. Therefore, the entire weight of the bike, gear, and me can be concentrated on just one or two of those tiny squares of rubber. This square of rubber then pushes inward on the rest of the tire and over time it literally tore free from the rubber around it. The rubber squares aren’t worn out. The rubber of the tires themselves is not worn out. However, the little squares tore free of the rest of the tire. So now there is almost no rubber between the road and rocks and glass and the inner tube. I went to the Internet café last night, and I looked into having classic Schwalbe Marathon Mondial tires shipped to Malaysia, and I think it can be done. I’m going to go back this morning and perhaps place an order. I guess it’s time to do the normal thing and put touring tires on my touring bike. After all these years, I’m finally starting to do the normal things – put a light touring saddle on my touring bike and use touring tires. I saw a YouTube video last night from this guy documenting the “sad day” when he finally had to throw away his Schwalbe Marathon tires. He said he’d gone 60,000 kilometers on those tires. Anyway, everyone raves about these tires. The problem has been that I’ve only been able to find 1.5-inch tires. But I found a place online that has the 2-inch models in stock. Hopefully, they still have them by the time I place my order this morning. Will they arrive in Malaysia? Have to just wait and see.

The amount of work I’ve had to do on the bike in a short time is astounding. This is what I’ve replaced so far: headlight (twice), rear light (twice), mirrors, chain, rear cassette, brake pad mounts, brake pads, pedals, gear shifters, brake levers, cables, saddle, six broken spokes then all sixty-four spokes, water bottles, water bottle cage, tubes, and CatEye computer. Worn out and broken but not replaced yet: tires, compass. On top of that, I’ve had to overhaul the headset, bottom bracket, and both hubs. Still broken: seat post. On top of that, I’ve had to re-waterproof my entire tent. My sleeping bag is bursting with feathers going everywhere. I’ve also replaced my water filter. My kettle was punctured and had to be thrown away. And let’s not forget about my shattered super-wide-angle lens, broken camera, broken camera grip, and broken Kindle. I’m sure I could come up with a dozen more items that broke or wore out. Can we add erupting volcanoes, super-typhoons, tsunamis, and robberies to the list? How about losing my vision, a potential stroke, and incredibly high blood pressure? Mechanically and physically, things have not gone well on this little expedition.

Tags: Bicycle Pro, Bike Pro, bike touring, Malaysia