After our second vacation at home from the trip, which included a short visit to C-U, and runs at Mahomet and Kickapoo, we boarded a plane for London. The next day we took a train to Brighton on the south coast of England, and I took part in an olympic distance triathlon. I didn't place particularly well, but this was the British qualifier for the international championships, so the competition was strong, and I was using a too small borrowed bike, not even my Global 2000 (which was still in Berlin).
We spent a couple of days and London and then bought tickets on EZJet to Berlin for $50 apiece (I wish you could get fares like that in the US). We got picked up by Gesa's brother and then delivered to their uncle's house, where we spent a few nice days and toured Berlin and Potsdam. I also retrieved my bike from the garage. During that weekend, the Berlin marathon was taking place. We thought about entering, but heard that it was full. Later we found out that at least 10 of the Odyssey group had managed to enter by saying they had mailed in their applications but they must have got lost. So, instead of running, we boarded a train with my bike to Amsterdam, where we would meet up with the group again.
Hotel space in Amsterdam was very tight, but after some looking we found a room in a somewhat sleazy hotel just off Amsterdam's famous red light district. We spent a couple of days there, then I set out to find the Odyssey. Though the itinerary promised Amsterdam, really they were in Noordwik and at least 40 miles out of town. It took me almost 3 hours of train, bus and a long walk to actually find the camp. The distance to Amsterdam did not go over well with a lot of people. They were all pretty surprised to see me after five weeks. I repacked my bags, and handled some visa paperwork, and then I returned to the city and spent another day there.
Gesa's Odyssey 2000 was over at that point. She spent another few days with friends in Amsterdam and London, then returned to the US to stay. Her Global 2000 bicycle remains to this day in the little town of Wetzen, in the north of Germany. I instead rejoined the trek, where we first took a bus to Cologne, Germany, and then boarded the flight to leave Europe for Australia and the Far East. Maybe another 6 riders decided their trip was over.
Canberra is a long way from Germany. We were 22 hours in the air, plus a short layover in Colombo, Sri Lanka for refueling. For reasons unclear, but probably having to do with the fact that the Olympics were going on in Sydney and we couldn't get landing rights there, our charter flight landed in Canberra. It is not an international airport, and thus has no immigration and customs facilities. The result was that we had to disembark and be processed in small groups, and it took a full two hours to get everyone off the plane. Did I mention the toilets had backed up by that point? One rider was found to have a gram of hashish on him, and was subsequently ordered to appear in court, and was expelled from the trip by TK&A. I finally did get off that airplane and into the bright Australian sun, and after patching a tire tube that had punctured some time during the last 48 hours, I rode the 10 miles to the hotel.
I really needed some sleep at this point, but somebody found out that Olympic soccer games were taking place in Canberra, and that there were tickets available that evening, so quite a few of us headed over. We saw the Norwegian women beat Nigeria, and the Japanese men beat Slovakia. Japanese partisans outnumbered Slovaks by about 15,000 to 8 in the stands. We missed dinner that night and I'm glad, because Karen-Ann went off on a tirade about how inconsiderate we riders were (to remind you, Tim Kneeland and Karen-Ann Sutter are the owners/organizers of TK&A).
The group spent a rest day in Canberra, which is an attractive, if a bit sleepy, capital city. Then we hit the Australian road (on the left side) for the 2 day ride to the Sydney area in the state of New South Wales, where we would be staying for 5 days. This was my first extended riding in many weeks, and as usual I suffered a bit. But the weather was fine and the roads were good. One particular highlight was coming down the Maquarie Escarpment at the edge of the Australian Alps. The destination turned out to be not exactly Sydney, but the town of Wollonggong; which is some 3 hours by train from downtown Sydney.
Some folks went to a lot of effort to get Olympic tickets. You could get them for some events by waiting in a rather long line, or you could buy them from scalpers. I took the train into Sydney twice, and went to see the women's marathon. I would have liked to see the triathlons, but we arrived one day late. Otherwise I spent a lot of time walking around Sydney and sightseeing, and also running and checking out the beach at Wollonggong.
At the end of our layover, the bikes were packed into a truck and we boarded a plane for Townsville, in the state of Queensland. This part of Australia is subtropical, with pineapple and sugar plantations, and quite a bit less crowded than New South Wales. The riding was a bit dull, long flat roads and not much besides farms and eucalyptus forest, but we covered a lot of ground. During this period, the third person was asked by management to leave the trip. It's true he was suing the company. Eventually we climbed again to a plateau, and stayed overnight at a Christian summer camp. No beer there unfortunately. Over the next two days we descended again, to the beach resort of Wonga, pretty close to the northern limit of the coast highway at the York peninsula. This was a nice beach resort, but you didn't want to swim in the ocean because of jellyfish. We spent a rest day there, and then cycled a relatively short day back south to the city of Cairns along some very pretty coastal scenery on a very hot day. For the whole ride through Australia I never saw a single live Kangaroo, though I did see quite a few road victims.
Cairns is the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef, so most of us booked passage on boats to take us out there on the first free day. The reef is some 70 km off shore, so it takes a couple of hours to get there by fast boat. The boat I was on stopped at a floating dock above the reef where we all disembarked. I first went snorkeling and saw an awesome variety of coral and fish. After lunch, I took my first ever dive with tanks.
They had an introductory offer of a dive with no certification required. After a safety briefing, we put on our gear and went down the rope. While I was at the bottom of the rope, waiting for the other 3 first timers to come down, my brain was telling me pretty loudly that I wanted to be at the surface. But I made an effort to calm down, and once we let go of the rope and were swimming freely, I felt good. I did, however, use up my air supply a bit quickly, so I must have been breathing pretty hard. While down there, I saw a sea tortoise and petted a large grouper.
That night, back at the hotel, Tim announced that they were having trouble arranging the flight to Japan, so our departure would be delayed. They had changed vendors at the last minute and were unable to get the necessary permits to enter Japan with our gear. Yet again, we had to wonder why all this was not arranged earlier. In any case, we stayed two extra days in Cairns. I didn't do much except to search fruitlessly for an American newspaper and sit through a bad movie.
Finally we flew out, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We had made arrangements with Malaysian Airlines for transport, and we had to pass through their home base. Kuala Lumpur has a brand new fancy airport, and quite a luxurious airport hotel. The next day we flew on to Japan, but without our bikes.
We landed at Osaka, at another new airport built on an artificial island, and then took a 2 hour bus ride to Kyoto, without ever leaving the megalopolis. We had one layover day, and I took a tour of the imperial palace and the shogun's palace, and several beautiful Buddhist temples on immaculate grounds. That night at dinner, we were told that the bikes could not be delivered in the next couple of days, and that once in Japan, it would be very difficult to get them to China. So the group was given the choice of taking the chance of getting to China without bicycles, or to forsake riding and Japan and be bused around. Nobody was too happy about that, but the latter seemed the better option. Also that day, the town of Tottori on the northern coast, and one of our destinations, suffered a magnitude 7 earthquake. There was not a lot of damage, but enough to make our stay there unlikely.
So we spent the next few days being bused from place to place. First to Amanohashidate, a coastal resort town, where we put up our tents at a combination campground/trash dump. On our off day, I ran up a mountain, and got a bad charleyhorse on the way down. Then we spent a long day, driving to Mount Sanbe where we camped in the rain, and another driving to the island of Myajima, with a short stop at Hiroshima. The bomb memorial in Hiroshima was somber as might be expected, but the Miyajima was quite lovely. And then another day on the bus, back to the airport at Osaka. All the places we stopped in Japan were nice, but the bus ride was torture for me. Despite my grousing about the bike riding, it was infinitely preferable to spending all day on a bus with this lot. I wished I had done like some people, and returned to Kyoto from the first stop, and hung out there. One rider bought himself a 3 speed beater, and actually rode all the Japan route.
From Osaka we flew to Hong Kong, but by way of Kuala Lumpur. This is something like going from Seattle to LA by way of Chicago. For the past few weeks, the organizers had been telling us that, since we would not camp again until New Zealand, that we should pack our camping gear in separate bags, and it would be shipped from Kuala Lumpur direct, and we would be able to travel lighter. But as we checked in at the airport in the morning to fly to Hong Kong, we were told that this plan was not happening, and we had to load our camping gear.
I was standing in line for a long time, waiting to check my bags, and I had a little personal crisis. All of a sudden, I had simply had enough of TK&A. I had little confidence that the trip into China would go well, and I knew that there would be long bus/train transits in Vietnam. I decided on the spot, that there was no way I was going in to China with this group, I was going to take leave as soon as I got to Hong Kong.
Having made up my mind not to go into China, I had to decide what to do once I had time in Hong Kong. I found a travel agent, and got myself a flight to Phuket in Thailand. Odyssey was scheduled to pass through there four weeks later. Whether I would stay there that long, I didn't yet know. I just hoped that Thai immigration wouldn't be asking me for the details of my travel plans, because I didn't have any.
I then had a couple of days to hang out in Hong Kong. It is an incredibly dense city of 6 million people. The first day was rainy, and everybody had an umbrella, that was held at just the right height that little pointy braces were right at my eye level. I had Chinese food and English beer (a nearly ideal combo in my opinion), and took a hike on Victoria Peak. I watched the Odyssey folks go to the ferry, to ride up the Pearl River into China. There were some 5 people that were bailing on the next leg of the trip, and we were standing in the hotel lobby as the others were getting ready. One of the people continuing remarked that "this must be the 3-digit IQ club". When the left, my bike was in a semi-trailer and unavailable to me, so it went into China without me. Traveling without it was a big relief.
I was sorry to miss out on China and Vietnam, but my spirits needing lifting, and I thought that spending a week or two at the beach in Thailand might do it. I arrived at Phuket, which is a large island just off the west Thai coast in the Andaman Sea. I caught a shuttle into town, where I managed to arrange a hotel room. Phuket town is a provincial capital, and charming in a peeling, mildewy kind of way. But there is not much going on there, so after three days, I moved to Kata, a town on the beach. I arranged a fairly luxurious hotel, with pool, a view of the beach and CNN, for $25 a night. I had arrived during the waning days of the northeast monsoon, so it rained quite a bit during the first week there, but I managed to occupy myself. I went sea-canoeing in the Phang-Nga archipelago, which are spectacular sea karsts, which you will recognize if you saw the James Bond movie, "The Man with the Golden Gun". I took a day trip to Ko Phi Phi, which you will recognize if you saw the movie, "The Beach", and generally just hung out, sometimes at my beach. It was pretty mellow, and perfect for me. I took one bike ride on a rented bike.
I took a trip to Cambodia while I had free time. I flew to Siem Reap and spent three days touring the Angkor temples, which are amazing to see. It was news to me that Angkor Wat is just one of the structures there. There are dozens of temples at the site, some of which are almost as impressive. I took a boat ride on the Tonle Sap (the inland sea) and then continued on to Phnom Penh, the capital, and spent another day, and stayed with some British ex-pats. Cambodia is still very poor, but it amazes me how they have recovered from the last few awful decades.
Every travel agent, dive shop and restaurant in the tourist areas of Phuket has a computer or two and sells internet time, so I could keep in touch with home, and with the folks still on the ride. I heard about some of the rough times they had. The facilities in China were pretty poor, and it made me fairly glad that I was not there. I also heard that Tim Kneeland had announced somewhere in China, that the trip would run out of money before the end, and that we would have to pay more to continue on to New Zealand. In the mood I was in, that was actually fine with me. I was tired of traveling and anxious to get home. I would meet up with the group, ride the rest of the way to Singapore, and then get a flight home.
The group finally showed up. I was getting a bit antsy after four weeks on my own. They stayed in the main beach town of Patong so I checked out and moved up there. Patong is everything you hear about Thailand, sin city to the extreme. Kata where I was, was nothing like it. We stayed there a couple more days then headed out on our bikes. It turns out that my bike had been cannibalized for parts in China, but I found someone who wanted to take the next couple of weeks off to travel in northern Thailand, and I used his.
The first day was a 110 miler. I had not ridden in at least five weeks, and I failed to adjust my new bike properly, and it was 90 plus degrees, so I had a miserable day. I developed a seat rash that made it painful to even consider sitting on a bike. The next day I adjusted the handle bars and seat height a bit better, and the bike was more comfortable but the damage was done. I only made it half the day before I had to ask for a sag. And the next day I didn't ride at all.
After a day's rest I was able to ride again. We worked our way across the Thai peninsula to the east coast, just as the southwest monsoon was starting over there. A few days after we passed through this region, the area got drenched with rain and seriously flooded. We were also heading south and moving from mostly Buddhist areas to mostly Moslem. We crossed over into Malaysia and rode down the east coast. The local governments were very glad to welcome us, they are trying to promote tourism there and they were very nice to us. On the whole stretch, all the children sitting on their porches would yell "Hello!". I probably replied several hundred times. One time, a young girl ran out to the road and said to me "Stop, mister!". I did and she handed me a piece of paper with her home address. I sent her a picture postcard once I got home. Half way down Malaysia, my wheel got badly bent, and there were no spares, so I got to ride in the sag wagon again. But on the last day into Singapore, I managed to borrow another bike and ride again.
Finally we reached the tip of Malaysia and took a short ferry ride to Singapore island. This would be the end of riding for most people. Some 60 people were willing to fork over extra money to continue on. The other 75% decided otherwise. Alot of them continued on traveling in the region on their own, but many like me, flew home. I spent one day touring the city and had a Singapore Sling at the Raffles hotel. We had a nice party at the hotel and said our goodbyes. Then the next morning, I was on a plane and after 24 hours and 10 minutes of traveling, I was in Boston.
So the trip is over. I'm trying to turn back into a normal productive citizen, and rest my rear end a bit. Overall, I had a good time and am glad I did it. TK&A's management style was too dictatorial and a bit too incompetent (not a good combination), but by not spending the whole time with them, I really got alot out of the year. I went to some great places and saw some great things. Some people had the time of their lives, and would do it all over again. Others are not so happy, and about 60 have joined in a civil suit against the organization to complain about broken promises, and particularly about the lost 30 days. I have learned during the year, that it's much easier to travel on your own than with a large group, and with a good guide (Lonely Planet is my favorite) you can come into town, make your arrangements and be comfortable, without alot of planning.
In the end I wound up riding about 7,000 miles for the year, I had hoped to do about 10,000. For the other riders, 5 did EFI (see chapter 1), some 10 people cycled 19,000 miles or more, There were about 50 DNF if you count Singapore as the end, or about 180 (including myself) if you consider December 31. And I suppose there were 3 DQ.