Good thing the Agriculture Dept. doesn't take apart bottom brackets when we return from these adventures

Bottom Bracket Dirt

You find the darndest things when you remove a bottom bracket from the frame sometimes. This is what we brought home from Tibet and Southeast Asia. No matter how much grease you use, eventually dirt and grit find their way into your frame. We’ve brought home teaspoons of soil from Australia, Asia twice, and I’m sure we’ll bring some back from South America. If we could just stick to nice paved roads we wouldn’t have this problem, and not so much fun either.

I have corrosive sweat!

Do You Have Corrosive Sweat?

Above is another good reason to take your bike completely apart between tours. After our Silk Road trip, I noticed some corrosion when I replaced the handlebar tape. It didn’t look too bad, so I just replaced the tape before going on our Shangri-La tour of Tibet and SE Asia. I guess the heat and humidity of SE Asia, combined with my corrosive sweat, really did a number on the bars. This time I was able to flake large pieces of soft aluminum from the bar, and even poked a hole all the way through with a knife. The bar would probably have broken somewhere in the Amazon Basin, if not sooner. New bars, and replacements for worn out brake levers on the way.

1.25" headset on Cannondale tandem

Can You Rebuild A Headset?

Even though the headset felt great, I dropped (pounded) the fork out and disassembled the headset. Guess what? The bottom set of bearing cages dropped several bearings on the ground. The races looked good, and the bearings smooth, but obviously the bearings were worn a bit. Phil at Pima Street gave me a few bearings. After cleaning the cages and races I pressed new bearings into the cages and crimped the cages a bit. Now they all stay in place, and I’m good to go for a few thousand more miles, after liberal application of some quality grease I got from Steve Wilson Jr.

I could let someone I know and trust do all this, probably quicker, possibly better, but I think it’s important for me to re-familiarize myself with every part of Zippy. Who knows, I might have to go through a street mechanic’s inventory of loose bearings somewhere in Tibet or the Amazon, and put the thing back together sitting cross legged in the dust. I want to be able to look like I know what I’m doing! It’s a man thing.

We have our tickets! No turning back now.

Zippy Entering Cambodia on the Mekong

Long bicycle tours can sometimes lead to what looks like a dead end, like ending up in a Mekong River border crossing between Vietnam and Cambodia; the road forward was a path. In this case it was more practical, and more fun, to travel in a multi-modal manner. The four-hour river boat ride into Cambodia cost us $10 and was filled with images of life on the Mekong we would have missed from the shore.

We’ve traveled, with our tandem, by taxi in Azerbaijan , bus in China, train in China and Vietnam, ferry everywhere, airplane between Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan (for political reasons), rental car back to the airport in Iceland, and the slow local water taxi on the Mekong. Hefting a loaded tandem on to a bus, train or water taxi, can be taxing, but ultimately worthwhile.

Zippy gets a Lada ride in Azerbaijan

China Train Ride Aftermath: Coal Dust

Helper at Almaty Airport

Passing a freight train on the way to Saigon

We play the mult-modal card whenever it is appropriate to our schedule and goals. It’s more difficult with a tandem, but the special connection the tanem give us with the people of the countries where we travel, makes the sometimes very difficult size issues, worthwhile.

A footprint in sand. Soon to be erased by the breath of time. A mark. An instant. One step of many. Why make it special? Do you note your marks? Do you listen to the sound your foot makes in sand? Do you feel the pressure, the texture, the cool or the heat? Just a thought.

Maybe we didn’t focus enough on these deadly little guys in our many presentations of our In Search of Shangri-La adventure. We got lost for two days along a little traveled branch of the Hoh Chi Minh trail in Laos, and we probably stepped over some of these, or phosphorus bombs or worse. We knew the risks, many kilometers beyond the last of the bomb clearing units, but had to push through the jungle toward Vietnam or run out of food and water.

Our risk was nothing compared to the average Laotian farmer, wandering children, firewood gathering women, who know every single day of their lives, that their next footstep could mean death, or for some worse, maiming, in a poor country where everyone must contribute.

Some facts: 270 million of these bombies were dropped on a country the size of Utah. Of the more than 50,000 people killed or maimed by the bombings, 20,000 have occurred after the end of the war. An average of one person a day is killed or maimed in Laos now, nearly 40 years later. I could go on, but I suggest you go the the January/February 2011 Issue of Sierra Magazine for Karen Coates’ excellent, if short, story. I want to know more about this chapter of our history, a chapter I might have taken part in except for a bleeding ulcer.

Lost in Laos on a branch of the old Ho Chi Minh trail

Read more about our Laos adventure and more on our In Search of Shangri-La bicycle journey.

Claire found this quote In World Wide Travelers, Birds of a Feather group newsletter, of the Escapees recreational vehicle club. The editor, Kathy Howe puts together a great monthly newsletter from Escapees who travel abroad.

My take: We live our lives not in our homes, spectacular or humble, not in our careers, renowned or unheeded; comely or homely, wealthy or underprivileged, we experience life through our emotions. To a great degree we determine, by our choices, the emotions we experience. Travel, markedly independent travel, lifts us from our daily milieu, out of our comfort zone, stretches us in untold ways, and surges us with unfamiliar emotions.

Often, due to The New Bohemians’ penchant for bicycle travel in the developing world, we are confronted with discomfort, sometimes a modicum of danger, fear, unknown foods, and disagreeable hygienic conditions. We meet those challenges to our normal way of living with a fresh eye to new learning, and a relinquishing of preconceptions of how thing “ought” to be. Humor is a tool to be kept close at hand, at least in retrospect.

The rewards are innumerable, the memories priceless.

Come to gasp, and laugh; go away with a dream.

Monday February 7 at 7pm, Greater Arizona Bicycle Association meeting at Pima Medical Society Building 5188 E. Farness. Between Grant and Pima on Rosemont, turn east on Farness.

To read the article and see more of Bob’s photos from China and SE Asia follow the link: The Many Faces of Buddha

Merrill Rovang, our brother-in-law, has Parkinson’s. Like Larry he won’t give up and is an inspiration to us all. Ride with Larry is worth watching whether you know someone with Parkinson’s or not. These two men show us how to live life, one day at a time.

Leftover snow with underlying ice made the going a tad slow in places. Seven miles and 3,000 vertical feet to Linda Vista, a good hike for my feet. Nice to be breathing in the fresh scents of the desert plants and stimulating  conversation with friends. A new trail for me. Maybe next time,after the ice melts, The Finger, a thousand or so feet higher.

This remote city in Sichuan Tibet is located at an altitude of over 4ooo meters, a few hundred meters higher than Lhasa, putting it in the rarefied company of highest elevation towns on Earth. A little over a year ago we rode our tandem bicycle from the Chengdu basin through Litang, in our quest for the figurative Shangri-La. A layover in exotic Litang almost led us to believe we’d found the (or one of) inspiration for James Hilton’s Shangri-La.

Litang is far from a tourist town. The roads are so bad that the Han Chinese find it quite an adventure to travel there via modern SUV to view the, strange to them, Tibetans. They found it quite strange to find two Westerners, a couple, riding a tandem bicycle, on the roads and elevations they found so daunting. They are daunting, and took a physical toll on us, leading to a well deserved rest in a town we came to love, and found difficult to leave, despite the high elevation and wonky weather.

Seasoned traveler and bicycle tour operator Peter Snow-Cao in Chungdu told us we would be visiting the real Tibet, even though it is outside the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Sichuan and three other provinces were once part of historic Tibet, before the Chinese divided it up to better control the Tibetan people. It seems to have worked, along with hefty presence of Chinese troops at any given time. At one point we were passed by several convoys of troop filled trucks numbering more than one hundred. One such convoy passed through Litang while we were there, and a scuffle broke out in the town center. It was very quickly put down and the convoy didn’t slow.

The Tibetan people’s spirit does not seem to have been broken, and the government constantly fears insurrection. Such an uprising in unlikely, given the tight control over the region. We were stopped nearly daily at national police roadblocks and required to show our papers, and once even show the pictures on our camera.

Litang is a worthy destination of the ancient Tea and Horse Route, and the people as interesting as any in the world.