March 11, 2008
Epilogue: Back home
For the trip home from Bangkok we decided to pack our bicycles in the plastic sheeting we bought in Jinghong. We never needed it and since we had five flights with our bikes (four with naked bikes, one with boxed bikes) and they suffered no damage at all, we felt confident that the bikes would survive this last flight equally well.
I don't know if a cardboard box offers more protection and we were just lucky the other times. Or is an unpacked bike handled better than something all wrapped up? Or is possibly LTU, now Air Berlin, a bad address for shipping bikes? Perhaps it's all a matter of luck, I can only speculate. Anyway, my rear rim was seriously damaged in transport. I'm glad this didn't happen while we were still travelling. It would have made it quite difficult to even leave the airports in Jinghong, Kunming, and Phuket. In Munich my son picked us up at the airport and we didn't discover the damage until we unpacked the bikes the next day.
| Heart | 0 | Comment | 0 | Link |
The impressions from our trip are still very fresh but I do have a few ideas what I might do differently next time, if there is to be a next time for us in Asia. Before we started I thought the time might be too short for all the places we wanted to visit. Now I think the time was too long and our program was too ambitious. In the future, I would prefer to do a shorter trip and concentrate more on one area.
I had been worried about how to prepare myself for encounters with dogs but that turned out to be unnecessary. In the areas we travelled they were either lazy or friendly. Only once did we have an unpleasant run-in with an aggressive dog which unexpectedly rushed out of a driveway forcing us to veer off into the car lane. It was a dangerous situation since we were on a fast highway. I wouldn't have had time to use pepper spray or throw stones. Fortunately the dog gave up the chase very quickly but we both got a scare.
I had also worried about bad roads and poor maps, that was justified. Good maps are not always available and it's often difficult to get reliable information on road conditions. This discouraged us from riding long distances into what would have been the unknown.
All in all we had a fantastic adventure and a successful trip, but not really a great tour in terms of cycling, having covered only about 1,400 kilometers under our own steam. It was great to have our bikes with us, I wouldn't have wanted to be without them. However, for the little cycling we did, we had a lot of extra stress lugging our bikes on buses, trains, boats and planes. In other words, for the convenience of having our bicycles at our disposal we paid a price. This is very subjective of course, but for our needs and taste we can do much better cycling here in Europe.
And the next trip? For a start France is looking good to us. And the next trip to Asia? Not too sure, but our stay in China was aborted by cold weather, we weren't really ready to leave.
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 0 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |