Wheels of fortune

Summers been and gone in the old country, my mum reported foul weather back in the UK while I sat bare-chested under the blast of a struggling air-conditioner.
My last ride was simply delicious, non-stop rain from the moment we set off until we returned some 5 hours later.
Its always a trade off, good for bad. Lovely cool rain means you dont overheat or burn but once you get rolling down hill the grit starts flying and it invariably goes in your eyes. Glasses are a waste of time in these conditions so I find a tight squint and keeping my head held just off to one side of the centre line helps to minimise the sudden blindness brought on by a lump of mud in the eyes.
The soppy conditions do mean that you dont go quite so fast and that your brakes dont overheat. All in all I prefer the rainy rides to dry sunny ones.
Best conditions? out here an overcast windy day is the ultimate, maybe a little drizzle, like a glace cherry on a cake.
I have been avoiding the subject of 29ers on this blog because I always felt quite ignorant. In real life I have only actually seen one in the flesh so to speak, in a shop in Sydney, I noticed it straight away, the wheels really do look bigger and the whole bike seemed to be a different shape.
Now I understand how it would roll better, there is ultimately a larger curve which would mean that it deals better with uneven surface and there is more of the tyre on the ground at any given time. Thats all just basic physics.
I read that they suit larger people better, that is something that I hate because I am what can be described as 'not very tall'. I'm no midget but does that mean that if I went and spent a pile of cash on a 29er to discover that my inverticulatedness meant that it was a load of rubbish? Someone needs to definitively state the facts here and let us know just how tall you need to be to get any of the benefits of these machines. Obviously the manufacturers wont, they just want to sell their products magazines wont because they only print what they are paid to print (or given free stuff). That leaves the independant bloggers and forums.
If anyone can point us all in the direction of an honest guide to 29ers I for one will be most grateful!
Now go out, oil your chain, get on your bike and ride to the pub.....

Wearing pink pyjamas

Some kind of roadside sculpture, no idea what it means...

An international cast, who weren't very fast, but had a blast....

A week is a long time in politics.
On a mountain bike saddle it is far, far longer I can tell you.
Five days it took us, a team of six, to circumnavigate Mount Kinabalu. Five riding at a time and one driving the support vehicle.
Its always a surprise to me just how unfit I am but never more so than after 6 hours riding, facing a hill in the midday heat.
Had it not been for the great company I was in and the fact that my bike seemed to be working quite well it would have been a trial. As it was we all enjoyed it on the whole, sure there were times when it was quite tough and we weren't enjoying ourselves 100 percent but I've yet to ride a two hour climb that I loved all the way up!
While we have been using this route for the last eight years or more we have decided to shorten it to a three day ride which is both easier and more fun. Starting at Park HQ and ending at Sorinsim substation it has jungle trekking, technical riding, villages and farms and never gets boring.

Too good to be true

Its easy to feel victimised by fortune, bad luck besets a great many of us, some shoulder the situation with fortitude and stoicism, some complain, some use faith, some use drink or drugs and some simply crumble like a biscuit under a falling rider.
I'm a complainer, the other options are useless to me, silent stoicism would make for a rubbish blog (even rubbisher than this one), faith took its leave long ago and while I do quite like a drink I think my particular poor fortune doesnt really warrant developing a serious addiction.
Its a matter of degrees anyway, my crops didnt fail, I havent been diagnosed with a terrible illness and I havent caught my wife getting jiggy with the gardener (yet), but my mountain bike woes continue to do two things that bring me down; Firstly the fact that I cant get my machine to work properly implies that I am a crap mechanic and that hurts (truth = pain), secondly I seem to have spent a skipload of cash and a long time to find myself in the same headscratching situation all the time.
Tubeless tyres, now demystified as far as fitting goes except that the rear one has suddenly decided to start deflating after a couple of hours, I thought tubeless tyres were less hassle? If it was my old tyres I would just change the tube, what now?

New brakes, heres the thing; my old brakes (Avid Juicy 5's) squeaking like crazy the whole time, local bike shop charged me and made it worse, I got fed up and bought a set of Avid Elixirs, guess what? oh you got it, making a bloody racket they are, shouting like a baby thats lost its bottle.

To top it all the seatpost has started slipping, I cant get the clamp to go tight enough to hold it, now I slowly slide down as I ride.

So picture this: tyre deflating, seat sliding down and brakes that are making a hell of a noise. Is it any wonder that I dont find stoicism, faith or addiction any kind of comfort? This problem is TOO BIG for regular reactions.

There now, a problem shared is still a problem but thanks for reading anyway, I may soon be selling a very good, trouble-free mountain bike if anyones interested (preferred buyer should have addictions, religion or basic mechanic skills).........

Breathing fire

A choice of three brake sets, two were Avid Elixirs and one was a cheapie Shimano. The difference in price was interesting, lets just say I saved over 100 quid by wandering across town.
Anybody got a pile of money and wants to set up a bike shop in Borneo? Its a sure-fire winner, all you need is a small selection of bikes, a mechanic that knows how to bleed Hydraulic brakes and a reasonable selection of stock. Two dark, dingy and grubby old units is what we have here, which is wierd considering how many people have good bikes and like to go riding. Its no wonder that everybody buys online or goes to Singapore to find their bits and bikes.

So thats me, back on the trails. A good thing as I am about to head down to start work in Tabin Wildlife reserve where the riding is fantastic if you can avoid the elephants and snakes.

Bleeding Brakes

Enough is enough, I have stood by Avid Juicy's above and beyond the call of duty now, its time to call it a day and see what I can find to replace them.
This is the third time that they have let me down and only a few weeks after being fully serviced which is enough to piss anybody off. Dont get me wrong, when they were working they were awesome, sensitive, quick to cool and bloody strong, all they lacked is reliability.
I have been offered some Avid Elixirs but I wonder if that is not just tempting fate so I am on the lookout for something else. Here in Borneo we have little to choose from, with only two bike shops worth stopping at its all down to what they have in stock and whether or not the dragon is behind the counter.

Dismantled biscuits

Thats right, crumbs.
Imagine the scenario; you are on a new descent, you know the kind of trail you are on, watching for rocks, watching for patches of mud, taking conservative lines around the bends, head up, everything is just fine. In fact its a ripper of a trail and even at a reasonable speed you are pretty gripped with a tense grin under your mud-spattered sunnies.
In a split-second it all goes wrong, a tiny quantity of time but a complicated sequence of events that leads to, well, lets get back to that.
It all goes back to the time that I hit upon the neat idea of using tennis racquet grip covers on my handlebars to counter the slippiness of sweaty hands. A very good idea that was born when I had another crash not 5 kilometers from this scene of shoulder-pain. What happened (back then) was that I was a tad sweaty (its 33 degrees here with 98% humidity for goodness sake), I did a little bunny-hop over a small rock and as I lifted the bars my right hand slipped off the bar, you can imagine how good the landing was with one hand....SPLAT!
Back to the present and now those towelling tennis racquet grips are quite old and have a lot of threads hanging off..... threads that flap around and get attached to the velcro on my gloves.
I sat up as the trail levelled out, glad for a few moments to relax went to look at my watch and as I took my hand off the bars I turned left extremely quickly, well the bike did anyway, I went straight on quite quickly but without a bike to stop gravity from claiming me.....SPLAT (again)
Once the adrenaline had worn off and the self-loathing was getting started I took out some snacks in the form of individually wrapped chock-chip cookies which seemed to have taken the brunt of the fall, right after my shoulder had as I rolled over and were almost dust.
The shorts I was wearing now have a hole in which makes them indecent and to this day I have never touched a tennis bat again.

A diamond in the dirt

Hands up if your time in the saddle mentally recharges you in exactly the same way that it physically exhausts you?
I thought so, and in times like these there are plenty of reasons to get away from the pressures and distress that flood every day life.
Lets face it, there are very few of us that are able to say that we have had a bumper few years recently, well unless you are a banker(!) and if you are then shame on you (may your fancy carbon frame fall off the back of your Land Rover and get run over by a very big truck).

Its clear to me that I get a primitive urge to do certain things, drink beer (that one is more frequent than I would like), listen to old rock music very loud and go mountain biking. Yeah yeah I know what you are thinking but some things are best left unsaid....

Sometimes I am so ready to go out for a ride, ready to hurl myself down the ugliest, slimiest track knowing that I better get it right and I think its because I need something to challenge me so much that it needs to scare me a little too. Without conscious effort I am swilling out the garbage in my head and almost without exception get back to my car with a daft grin on my face and all the worries put a little closer to perspective.

I pity people who have not found mountain biking as a life tool, it seems sad that people actually go through life without having that fix of two-wheeled fun to provide succor in difficult times.

This is the gospel according to MTB.......