March 26, 2015
The boat search begins: I scrub up alright
Were this adventure as romantic as it should be my quest for a boat to take me to Australia would have taken me immediately down to the marinas and yacht clubs, where I would have busied myself saying “ahoy there” to as many people as possible and making acquaintances and connections that would eventually lead to me finding a skipper willing to have me along for the ride. But this is the digital age, and so I put all that on hold for a while, and first busied myself making profiles and posting adverts online via websites such as ‘findacrew.net’ and ‘crewbay.com’, websites designed specifically to match sailing vessels with crew looking to go the same way. As if understanding the importance of this task my laptop chose this moment to decide that it absolutely would not connect to the Internet anymore under any circumstances. Fortunately Andy was standing by to lend me the use of his Mac. Actually Andy was standing by a lot, being an architect and bicycle-adventurer who was presently between jobs and between adventures, he spent a fair bit of his days looking like this:
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Initially I enjoyed no success online as there were no boats at all heading from South East Asia to Australia looking for crew. Logistically it seemed my best bet for a lift would be a yacht going from Bali, Indonesia to Darwin, Australia and I did find one captain whose advert said that he was sailing the other way, from Darwin to Bali. So I wrote to him on the off-chance that he might have filled in his departure point and destination the wrong way round. Not that I would particularly trust a captain who got his departure point and destination mixed up, particularly as his username was Captain Grog, but I thought it best to at least try for a bit of networking. His reply was swift. No, he hadn’t got his ports confused, he really was sailing the other way, and he thought I’d struggle to find a lift at this time of year because the trade winds were blowing up from Australia, not the other way, (news which came as something of a knock to my spirits,) but he still thought getting down to Bali and asking around would be about my best bet.
So I needed to work out how to get myself down to Bali and Andy stepped in again to tell me about a local man who could help. This man had taken shortening words to the next level and was referred to simply as S.K. To introduce me to S.K. Andy directed me to meet him outside of the Tree In Lodge Hostel which S.K. was the joint-owner of. In another stroke of fortune this hostel was located right at the end of the green corridor so it was another stress-free four kilometer cycle there. Andy had to take the bus and meet me there, however, because rather unusually for a bicycle-adventurer he didn’t actually have a bicycle.
S.K. wasn’t around when we arrived and so Andy and I went to the nearby Sikh temple for lunch. Every day the temple provides free food for the local Sikh community and Andy assured me that they were quite welcoming to all. He even said that they were very used to foreign cyclists coming in because of its proximity to the Tree In Lodge, which itself has half-price rates for touring cyclists. Given cyclists natural attraction to both half-price beds and free lunches the sudden interest in the Sikh community that was generally aroused was quite understandable, with Andy even telling me about a Polish couple on bikes who had recently eaten breakfast, lunch and dinner in the temple every day for three weeks.
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The free lunch was very nice and it was an interesting experience for me, not having ever been in a Sikh temple before. I did, however, feel a little uncomfortable, partly because we were the only white people there and I didn’t want to appear like we were just taking advantage, but mostly because of the headgear. It was a relief to pull it off again as we stepped back outside and went back to look for S.K., finding him having his own lunch in a nearby hawker centre with another cyclist named Phuah.
S.K. was an extraordinary mine of information. He had himself cycled across Asia, from Europe back to Singapore, about a decade before me. Now he ran this bicycle-friendly hostel and seemed to know absolutely everything and was overwhelmingly keen to help me. Most importantly he was able to show me the Indonesian ferry timetable. There were ferries every day from Singapore to the nearby Indonesian island of Batam, and then from there I could catch one down to Jakarta on the 8th of April. After a rest day here another ferry could carry me down the coast of Java to Surabaya, from where I could cycle through the more-interesting east corner of Java and arrive in Bali by approximately the 18th. Taking these long distance ferries (the one from Batam to Jakarta being 36 hours, Jakarta to Surabaya a further 24) was a good way for me to get down to Bali relatively quickly and avoid wasting all of my precious visa time trying to cycle on the notoriously un-cycle-friendly island of Java (population 120 million). On the other hand there was the slight concern that Indonesian ferries do have a reputation for being overloaded with people, as well as being noisy, smelly, generally unpleasant, and quite likely to sink.
So I now had a rough plan (take ferries down to Bali and look for a sailing boat that probably wasn’t there) but there were a lot of other things going on during my first few days in Singapore. One of the things I needed to do was to collect my new panniers from the Ortlieb distributor. Ortlieb panniers come with a five-year warranty and with mine being almost five years old and effectively broken to the point of being unusable I’d contacted the company enquiring about whether or not they would be able to replace them. I certainly needed new panniers one way or another, if only because Australian customs don’t allow anything dirty into the country, and the dirt on my panniers was so ingrained that no amount of scrubbing was ever going to get them back to their original colour, which believe it or not was yellow.
At first Ortlieb had been reluctant and I’d been having a bit of back and forth with them by email for a few weeks until finally I sent them this:
Front left pannier:Tear (rip) in bottom left corner 5cm long that I had to stitch up.
Tear in bottom right corner 8cm long that I had to stitch up.
Tear along the length of the bottom, where the plastic connects, 20cm long that is impossble to stitch up.
Left hook for connecting to rack completely broken, I have to hold the pannier on with cable ties now.
Half of buckle snapped off.
Front right pannier:
Tear in bottom left corner 3cm long that I had to stitch up.
Tear in bottom right corner 10cm long that I had to stitch up.
Left hook for connecting to rack disconnected from pannier, now held on with cable tie.
Half of buckle snapped off.
Back left pannier:
Tear in bottom left corner 3cm long.
Tear in bottom right corner 2cm long.
Tear on top left side of pannier going 20cm down side of pannier.
Left side buckle completely ripped off, no longer closes
Top buckle broke completely.
Left hook for connecting to rack disconnected from pannier, now held on with cable ties.
Back right pannier:
Tear in bottom right corner 4cm long, stitched up.
Tear on bottom ride side where bottom plastic piece connects 4cm long and impossible to stitch up.
Tear on top right side of pannier going 20cm down side of pannier that I stitched up.
Top buckle broke completely.
Both side buckles broke completely, replaced.
Hole in side of pannier 2cm
Hole in top of pannier 1cm
Both hooks for connecting to rack disconnected from pannier, now held on with cable ties.
I have done my best to keep these panniers going for as long as I can, as you can see, stitching up tears and using cable ties in a variety of creative ways. But I can do it no longer, they are effectively unusable anymore. I need new ones. If you wish to claim that the above list of defects are somehow not covered by your warranty please do it quickly, because one way or another I need to order some new ones soon.
Thanks
Chris
Ortlieb’s reply was effectively ‘Oh god, okay, where can we send you some new ones?’ and when I said Singapore they told me that to save on shipping costs I could just pick some up from their distributor in the city. Funnily enough when we went to the bag shop that acted as Ortlieb’s Singapore distributor (happily situated just around the corner from Andy’s apartment) the owner didn’t quite agree.
“They say it saves on shipping costs,” he said angrily, “but I have to pay the shipping costs don’t I?”
He was a rather overweight man, who for the entire time that Andy and I were in his store never moved from the poor chair that he was gradually suffocating behind his desk.
“Do you have the old panniers?” he snapped, “I need to see them.”
We didn’t have them with us, and so we said we’d go and get them and were on our way to the door when the owner shouted out again, “Do you have a picture of them?”
By a stroke of fortune Andy had indeed taken a photo of them on his phone, in the tragic way that people sometimes can’t help themselves but take photos of disaster scenes. He showed it to our obese store owner.
“Ughh, Oh, Ughh! No!” he stammered, reeling in shock, “You know what, I don’t even want these things anywhere near my shop. Just take some new panniers. Just take them. Please. Don’t bring those things here!”
The owner was cowering in fear so much about the horrific possibility of having my filthy bags in his nice clean Singaporean shop that I think I could have walked around and taken as much as I wanted from all of the bags on offer, but I settled for a new pair of front and back roller classics as per the warranty.
After four days with Andy I relocated to the apartment of some other warmshowers hosts, James and Greta, an apartment which, by another stroke of good fortune, was one kilometer back up the green corridor. The day that I chose to move happened to be the day of Lee Kuan Yew’s funeral, and James, Greta, Andy and I all went to watch the procession as his coffin was transported across the city. Lee Kuan Yew, by the way, was the founding father of Singapore, the country’s first prime minister, a title he held for 31 years, and the man responsible for turning a small marshy poverty-stricken island into a global economic power.
So I had arrived in Singapore a few days after his death, during a week of national mourning, a historical moment really. His body had been held in state for a week, with people queuing for seven or eight hours to file past and catch a last glimpse of him. Those that had done so included Andy, Greta, and Bill Clinton (although I’m not sure Bill Clinton would have had to wait such a long time.) I decided against it myself, preferring to spend my time hitting refresh on the findacrew search button than to queue up to see the corpse of a 91-year-old man that I didn’t know. I was happy to join the others for the final procession of his body through the city streets though, so long as the coffin was kept shut.
Perhaps appropriately it poured with rain and it was a crowd of umbrellas that lined the streets to say a final farewell to a man that had shaped the entire history of the independent nation of Singapore. From what I gathered it seemed people had mixed feelings about Lee Kuan Yew. His inspired leadership had carried Singapore, an island nation with no natural resources, from obscure poverty all the way to the international stage, it’s people lifted from rags to riches over the course of a couple of generations. Yet he did so whilst holding an iron grip on power, imprisoning political opponents, controlling the media, and outlawing free speech.
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The procession appeared suddenly and the coffin whizzed past in an anti-climactic blur. Andy guessed it was traveling so fast in order to avoid any potential trouble. It seems the government remains somewhat paranoid about civil unrest, although Lee Kuan Yew’s passing seems unlikely to lead to any immediate change of course in Singapore, what with power having already passed to his son, now holding the reigns as prime minister for more than a decade himself. In any case, why would the people rise up against the government when life remains good? And how can they? A few days after the death of Singapore’s founding father a video was posted on youtube by a teenage Singaporean named Amos Yee entitled ‘Lee Kuan Yew is finally dead!’ In the video the youngster, unable of course to remember life before Lee Kuan Yew, launches into a foul-mouthed tirade against the deceased leader and his policies. The result? 16-year-old Amos was soon arrested and put on trial, and faces a potential prison sentence if convicted.
Welcome to Singapore. Life is good, so long as you just be careful what you say.
Oh, and no chewing gum either, don’t forget.
Today's ride: 1 km (1 miles)
Total: 39,957 km (24,813 miles)
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