I got the best present yesterday; went to a bike shop recommended by a new friend, thanks Kenny Chong, to see about my skewer. Kenny's a salesman for an Asian bike company, so he travels from town to town in Malaysia and knows all the bike shops. He said that if any bike shop in Malaysia is going to have a fatbike skewer, it would be one that is actually just down the street from my new house.
First impressions: what a shop! All the top brands, in a really nice modern shop.
Of course, no fatbike skewer. My Trek Farley (Shrek) is probably one of the only fatbikes in Malaysia.
I wouldn't say I was crestfallen, because I knew it would be a shot in the dark, but I was bummed, and my mind was spinning trying to fill the gaps in my workout routine with futsal and yoga.
But Kennt (owner of KHS) was still turning over a couple skewers in his hands, contemplating them. What he did next blew my mind.
He disassembled to pairs of skewers: the longest he had and one with a really small stack height, and put them together to make a rear skewer that will fit the Farley's unique dimensions (Trek uses a proprietary hybrid thru-axle / qr design somewhere between 170 and 190 mm. It was all over in about ten minutes. Voila. New skewers!!!
That's the type of service you just hardly find anymore these days. So impressed.
Which led to my first Malaysian fatbike ride. It's monsoon season over here, so it was an urban ride, all roads, parks and sidewalks. It was a one of a kind experience for sure.
Riding a bike in Johor at night is a super sensual experience: the smells are one of the things that really get you: the hot jungle sweating off the monsoon rains smell of death, decay, but also of bloom and riotous greenery; half the houses you pass are burning incense or piles of leaves, so there is acrid smoke mixed into sandalwood and jasmine; pass by the markets and hawker stands and it's flashes of charcoal, hot wok, boiling oil, rotten gutters, alleyways so stinky a New York hobo would shit his pants, again, passed one stall frying chili oil that made me gag and sputter for a few blocks; you pass by nightclubs and it's cigarette smoke and too-strong perfume from Thai hookers and soft floral notes from the the glitzed-up local girls.
Then you get the sounds. The edges of the jungle at night scream at you. Sometimes it seems like a warning, but sometimes it's an invite.
Dare to duck into the jungle for a bit, as I did last night, and it's bats and spiders, mud and birds. The hot jungle detritus rises in the air with the evaporating rains, so you're always parting a curtain of debris as it rises up into the canopy. Maybe Asians believe in reincarnation because here you can sit back with a flashlight in the jungle, and watch it happen. In the swelter of the soaked jungle, fallen leaves crumble, turn to dust, and rise up to the sky on unseen currents: a mass carbon rapture so thick you can barely see beyond, to the life still here.