Yet another rainy day, but the fun of it today was I had some decent hills to ascend and come flying down, one problem with flying down the hills was the following,
· I only had a working front brake as the back one was worn out,
· Rain makes the brakes less effective,
· Heavy traffic,
· At the bottom of every hill was a set of traffic lights on red!!!!!!
To make things worse my left knee (which is one of the two dodgy knees I’m the proud owner of) was in a lot of pain, with no one to complain or cry to I just had to pedal on till I found a hostel. Riding in to KL was a pretty scary experience, I was on what was all in name a motorway with 6 lanes of traffic flying down and cars entering and exiting everywhere. Unable to accelerate sufficiently because on my knee I had to exit at every point to avoid becoming road kill. Eventually I got sick of this and found somewhere to have a cup of tea while investigating how to get to Chinatown with out being the latest cyclist to be added to the road statistic score board. I got some directions, got lost asked for some more, before I new it I was in china town where because Chinese new year is neigh, the 3 hostels I tried were full. At the 3rd hostel I got chatting to a bloke called Richard, he was Malay but his parents were Chinese, being brought up in Malaysia under British rule spoke superb English something I later found out was something he believes is need to be successful, also I think the fact he’d travelled a lot (even cycle toured new Zealand) helped. Before I knew it he bought me dinner then I was loading my stuff into his car to stay at his house with his family. He has two children both who like he seems have very good jobs and a wife. After grabbing myself a shower and using the internet to send some e-mails, he gave me a quick tour of KL and bought me dinner. I was really touched by his kindness, offering money towards the meal he stubbornly refused anything from me, this was the case for the whole evening. The car journey back he said he’d wake me at 7am so we could go for an hours morning bike ride, not wanting to be impolite and say this is the last thing I want to do, I agreed to such a thrilling prospect when infact I really want to let me knee recover. Its great to meet the local people and experience their hospitality, I hope I will do the same in the future.
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