The first time I rode a proper motorbike on a public road was in 1996 in Nepal. Faced with a day’s hiking to go from Dhulikhel to Panauti and see a Buddhist temple in the Himalayan foothills, Jenny and I decided to get smart and hire a motorbike. That should reduce our day trip to a mere couple of hours, then we could go and look at other interesting things in the afternoon.
I didn’t have my driving license on me, but such formalities would not prevent the shifty hotel proprietor from parting me from a nominal fee (nominal to me, probably two days’ pay to him), which got me a pukka motorbike (the sort that goes buka buka buk rather than yim! yim!) and a crash helmet. Indians and Nepalis were getting very safety-conscious by then — the driver of a motorbike nearly always wore a crash helmet, even if there weren’t enough helmets to extend to the wife sat on the back with a basket of chickens in her arms and the baby strapped to her back, and the two sons sitting on the handlebars.
I got on the bike and the guy asked me if I had ridden one before. Having got thoroughly into the swing of Asian style communication by then, I gave him a confident “yes”, by which I meant I’d read about how the clutch and gears worked, and had ridden a kiddie bike at a fair a decade ago. After a first couple of mix-ups, instinctively treating the clutch as if it were a brake and watching the owner mentally say goodbye to his beloved, I managed a lap of the hotel’s rocky carpark, took on my pillion and headed off down the hill.
We were travelling by Nepal’s vaunted Arniko Highway, roughly equivalent in social terms to our M1, but in physical terms a lot like the B1224 between Bickerton and Bilton-in-Ainsty, only without the road markings. First, we had to pick our way down the hillside road, which was essentially scree, and onto the flat land below, where the roads were mostly baked red clay earth.
After a brief spell on the highway, we turned left avoiding a homicidal jeep and started down a much tougher road of large pebbles laid in clay toward the temple. It was not long after the monsoon, and the clay had turned to what potters call “slip”. And we did.
After some time motocrossing like this, we eventually came to what may with understatement be called a “tyre rut” in the road. With no sane means of getting the motorbike through, we decided to leave the bike by the road and walk the rest of the way.
We had about a litre of water between us, and two hours later we were casting about us for a place to get a bottle. (You really don’t want to drink the non-bottled stuff over there). We turned down offers of local fruit from villagers, though now I think that was stupid. We bore the amusement of the local sherpas with dignity “yes! come! this easy way!” as we toiled, and they ran, up the steep, eroded hillside, we with our daypacks and they with steel milk churns held with a band at the forehead. We met a friendly TV repair man, hiking for most of the day to fix a set in a mountain village. His pay was nrs50 a day, or about 90p.
When we reached Namobuddha temple, we found that the milk churns had contained, among other things, bottles of Coke. In that economy, bottles win over cans because they can be returned, keeping the price down to that of the contents. We had already seen vendors getting extremely nervous when we walked away with our bottles, not knowing we planned to return with the empties. A bottle of Coke cost typically nrs12. I imagine the deposit on the bottle was probably the same again.
We declined to buy “Thums Up” water because of its bitter taste and because Jenny had seen a sign for “Star” on one of the villages at the bottom of the hill. So we rested, then returned the way we had come. Pink, panting and sweaty, we arrived at the shop to discover it sold Star Beer, not Star Water. So we pinkly and sweatily panted our way back to the bike.
Once aboard, the wind in our hair somewhat restored our energy. Despite by now being purple-skinned and drenched in sweat with flies in her teeth, Jenny still drew wolf-whistles from the locals as we putted through their villages.
Finally we got back to the foot of the mountain our hotel was on. The schools were turning out, and a stream of uniformed children was making its way up the path. Jenny jumped off, I think to arrange the next day’s bus, and I went to return the bike. I got a lot of strange looks from the kids as I accelerated past them up the hillside. I figured it was the usual reaction to a pale skin in the more rural areas of Nepal. After being forced to bunny-hop a couple of fairly deep ruts in the path, and more pointing and sniggering by the children, I remembered the previous day’s journey to the hotel. It had been on foot, up the deeply eroded path-cum-streambed-cum-fissure that I was on now, rather than the wide, scree-topped road that joined it at the top and bottom.
Fortunately the helmet was a full-face one, and in any case my face was already red from the heat. After moto-crossing my way back to the bottom of the hill, I returned by the right path. Jenny had spotted my mistake right away, but her warnings were inaudible in the helmet.
Over the last couple of weeks, my Past and I caught up with one another.
Introducing: The Joy Vibes, Southend-on-Sea’s #1 girly-pop combo 1991-1994.
This should be a happy blog. I finally fixed my PeeCee:
Well, OK. “finally” is a little optimistic at this stage, but I spent an evening researching bits, made sure I avoided a VIA chipset, got a motherboard whose chipset matched the graphics card’s chipset, bought it as a bundle, so the tricky really static-sensitive parts all fitted… and £300 later I have a working PeeCee. Well, it’s effectively a new PeeCee in the old case.
Then of course I had to tell the SO that I had spent this money. She took it rather well considering how I’ve been banging on about how we can’t afford anything ever in the known future ever. So now everything hangs on this PC (a) working (b) lasting for a few years and (c) coming in useful (in a feminine perspective. playing computer games and writing websites does not count).
So there I was last night tinkering at it, and my (female) housemate gets home.
“Hi, how’s it going?”
“Yeah, not bad, I FINALLY got this computer fixed so I’m pretty chuffed!”
“Great! So you can sell it now then?”
“No I’m keeping it.”
“But haven’t you already got a computer?” (pointing at the Mac)
I’m beginning to suspect they have been conferring.
Being grown up sure does cut down on things to blog about. Shall I go into great detail about the sofa? The washing machine? The mortgage? There is plenty of drama at work but it’s not blogworthy as (a) it would only make sense to about 40 people worldwide and (b) it’s all commercial-in-confidence anyway.
Last night I was off the leash, so a bit of salsa followed by a curry and Shaun of the Dead on the telly was had. I hope it gets better than this!
“Peace Broke Out”.
I’ve heard this a few times, most recently on Radio 4. Peace doesn’t “break out” you idiots. Peace descends, peace settles, peace comes, peace arrives, peace is attained. Peace is passive. (I think there’s a clue in the name).
When people use the phrase “Peace broke out” they are shedding a ray of dullness onto the English language.
* can you have a series of 1?
On this day each year, I like to remember those who died in the twin towers of the World Trade Center. I like to remember that George Bush was not actually voted in by the American people. I like to remember that Osama Bin Laden was Saudi not Iraqi. I like to remember that the twin towers have almost no connection whatever to the invasion of Iraq. I like to remember that Iraq was invaded to counter the immediate threat of weapons of mass destruction. I like to remember that no WMDs have been found to this day. I like to remember David Kelly who died within days of going on record that Iraq had no nuclear weapons. I like to remember Halliburton and Enron. I like to remember the first time I saw barry.mov.
I like to remember that slogan: “Not In My Name”.
My games PC has been broken for over a year. I’d really like to play UT2004 some more, but I can’t figure out what’s wrong with it. I want to try replacing the motherboard, but I don’t have the time to do the research to get up to date with what will plug into what these days. That leaves me with buying a new PC, and I don’t want to play UT2004 to the tune of UKP600. Next thing I’ll have forgotten how to program the video…
Oh wait, nobody uses videos any more do they…
I got this bike offa ebay, supposedly from the ’60s and missing a couple of brake parts, but in fact it had bent forks. Forks are not the kind of thing you can bend back again if you like your chin the way it is before having scraped along the tarmac.
Yesterday I rode it down to the bike reclamation project to see what they had going on down there… the answer: a whole bunch of cool stuff. They identified that the bike was actually from 1978 (gutted about that), and spotted that not only were the forks off to the right, but that they were forward too. Fortunately, they had a whole box of forks knocking about somewhere. Unfortunately they were unable to find the box. But I ended up taking away a powder-coated fork for a tenner, which was probably reasonable.
Here’s a picture of the old fork, lined up to the decking so you can see the jaunty curve.
Oops.
Now, here’s a shot of the replacement, powder-coated fork offered up for comparison.
Notice anything? Like, that it’s about 2 inches too short to get the retaining nut on the top of the headstock.
Double oops.
Notice also that the fork is one colour, then the hidden part of the fork tube is in a sort of bronzey metallic green. This is clearly the original colour of the bike, especially as my hands were covered with flakes of the nice green by the time I’d finished working with the bike.
Triple Oops.
In short, this bike’s rather a dog. At least I don’t have to feel guilty about leaving neutral feedback on eBay.
On the other hand, the bike that I picked up to be parts for this one is turning out to be a beauty! On the downside, it does need rather a lot of cleaning up, but on the up side, it has its full quota of brakes and doesn’t seem about to kill me any time soon.
/Addendum: Jay reminded me that I’ve been considering a cargo-bike project. This would make a great donor if I’m going to keep and ride the olderer bike.
Bah, apparently it’s OK to lie on your website as long as somebody else wrote it.
Dear Steve Carter,
Thank you for your email of 05 September 2007.
I would advice to take up your query on the product you outline with the manufacturer. As PC World displays products with the manufacturer guidance.
Creative web site is www.creative.co.uk
If you need any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Yours sincerely
[name supplied]
PC World Customer Services[...]
Opinions, conclusions and statements of intent in this e-mail are those of the sender and will not bind any DSG international company unless confirmed by an authorised representative independently of this message. We do not accept responsibility for viruses; you must scan for these.
[...]
That URL isn’t even creative’s website!
Ask the librarian on the Titanic.
I figured I would like my bookmars toolbar to keep in step between work and home, and between my mac and laptop, etc. So I did a (tiny) bit of research and got OnlineBookmarkManager (looks like it was written by a German judging by the Longconvolutedcompoundnouns).
It’s a tad on the clunky side. You have to sort of wrestle it between importing and exporting and syncing, and choose whether you want it to add or replace in various circumstances. I’ve managed to end up with all my bookmarks from anywhere on every machine. Which is a bad idea when one of those machines is covered in Hewlett Packard Trojanware.
Time to get deleting. Again.