After cereal and yogurt for breakfast, Re made a few more calls to our less than helpful potential shipping agents. Not all of them have been less than helpful. In fact, we did receive our first quote on May 18 and another quote today, but they are all still more than we'd hoped to pay. We pissed away the rest of the morning until it was time for lunch. Frustrated with sitting around, we fired up the bikes and rode back to Air Hitam to ride around the lake.

The ride up to the dam itself was the same as it was back on the 10th, but after that, we turned onto the one-lane motorbike road/footpath that circles the lake for a while. It was a shaded, narrow, twisty road that wound along the edge of the lake and eventually dead-ended at a gate. Just before the gate, there was a left turn that went up a hill. It was wet and leaf covered and very steep. Re said she wanted to give it a try, so we did.



The next couple of miles were all taken in first and second gear due to the extreme angle of the road. We continued climbing up and up, and eventually came to a fork in the road. The right fork led into an open valley, and the left fork continued up the hill. We knew that one of these roads was supposed to go through to the back side of the island but there was no indication which one to take.



We opted for the right and followed it out into the sunlight. We rode along the edge of the valley for another couple miles through farms and through a few people's front yards. The road came to a dead end at someone's house, so we turned around and headed back. Once we reached the fork in the road, we continued uphill for another half mile or so. The road here didn't appear to be used very often, since it was covered in wet leaves with no visible tire tracks. This section was steep enough that we were stuck in first gear, and we had a couple of instances where our rear tires spun on the leaves. We expected the road to begin descending soon, but it seemed to keep climbing. Due to the wet leaves and pavement, I was beginning to get a little nervous about our descent, so we decided to turn around.



We slowly made our way back down to the lake. On the way, I spotted a snake in the road, and we turned around to take a look.



Unfortunately, it was an ex-snake. It had no obvious injuries, but it was dead. This was the same kind of snake that Re saw on Koh Lanta, which we had identified as a red-headed krait.



When we got back to the parking area by the dam, we also spotted this snake at the old guard booth. A local told us it was a green tree viper, and another person said it was a coconut viper. Either way, it was a beautiful snake.

We rode back into town and spent a while chatting with Anh, the gentleman who owns the Star Lodge and two other guesthouses along Muntri Street. He was giving Re lessons in Mandarin, so we could at least say “please” and “thank you” at the coffee shops and hawker stalls.


25 miles in about 3 hours.

After roti for breakfast, Re called the last shipper we were still waiting for a quote from, and he assured her that he would get back to us by the end of the work day. Screw it, we're going to the beach. We loaded the bikes and rode up to Batu Ferringhi. The sun was out today, and the water was beautiful. We did some reading, talking, and swimming, before heading back into town in the mid-afternoon. After a late lunch, we returned to the room to get cleaned up. We received a text message from the last shipper, and their quote on Cathay Pacific was several hundred dollars more than the lowest we'd received so far. Sigh. Later, we went out to see “Men In Black 3” and then had a late dinner at the hawker stalls. We stopped out at the Corner Bar, where we made our decision on shipping.


20 miles in about an hour.

After breakfast, we rode to the offices of Worldlink Cargo to see Ms Goh. We finalized our shipping arrangements and left our Carnet documents with her so the paperwork could be started. Our bikes will fly on Eva Air, a Taiwanese carrier, from Georgetown to Taipei, and then on to Los Angeles. All in, it should cost around 2200 USD, which is still less than it cost to fly our bikes from Toronto to Cape Town, but more than we'd hoped.



In the parking lot, I spied this interesting shotgun exhaust on a Honda Cub and briefly thought about getting out the tools to see if it would fit our bikes. We hurried back to the room to purchase our tickets to LAX. Re's been watching the airfares, and right now, there is a relatively inexpensive flight from Georgetown to LAX, via Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo, on Malaysia Airlines. Fortunately, the fare was still available, so we bought our tickets for June 11. They are 670 USD each, which is the best fare we found by several hundred dollars. After we received the confirmation email, we both started to feel a little depressed that we are, in fact, going home. We knew this day was coming, but now it's here, and we don't like it.

After a kind of subdued lunch, we returned to the Star to find that Anh had a surprise for us. He had kindly brought us a package of good quality, fresh durian. For those of you who've never been to southeast Asia, durian is a well loved fruit in the region. Most westerners find the taste and smell highly objectionable. We first ran into it in Vietnam two years ago, when we walked into a store and thought their refrigeration system had failed and everything in it had turned. After seeing and smelling it through the rest of the region, we decided to give it a try in Indonesia, in the form of durian ice cream. There it was served as a parfait of durian flavored ice cream layered with a durian puree. Re described it as tasting like rotten onion ring farts and maple syrup. Not a good combination. Since we've been back in southeast Asia, we've become more accustomed to the smell but had yet to try it again. In conversations with Anh, he stated that the durian grown on Penang is famously better than anywhere else. He also explained that there are many different varieties, some sweet, some bitter, and that we must try it.



The package he brought had a combination of the two kinds, and Re made the mistake of choosing the bitter one first. The look on her face was priceless, and she very politely tried to finish it. After sniffing all the pieces, I chose one of the sweet ones, and it wasn't too bad. I ended up eating three pieces of the sweet, but none of the bitter. Re gamely tried a bit of the sweet, but just couldn't eat anymore. While the actual eating of the durian wasn't so bad for me, but the burps that I experienced the rest of the afternoon were ghastly. At one point I looked up to see that Re had been brushing her teeth and her tongue for at least five minutes, and we eventually ate an entire bag of sour gummy rings in an attempt to cleanse our palates. Unfortunately, the taste stayed with us until after dinner. It was a good distraction from the earlier events of the day.


(the Corner Bar on a less popular night. I always take Re to the nicest places...)

Later, at the Corner Bar, we met Alex and Ashley, a couple who are backpacking through Malaysia and Thailand. Alex is from England, and Ashley is from West Virginia. They met a few years ago in Kathmandu and have been meeting up ever since. They had just spent a couple of months in the Philippines and were on their way to Koh Phangan for a month. We didn't end up leaving until around 2:00 am and made plans to meet for lunch before we said goodnight.

Our plan was to get on the road as soon as we finalized our shipping, but that was before we met Alex and Ashley. So after a late and kind of short morning, we met up with them for a lunch of duck and pork and rice at Jit Seng.



After a delicious lunch, the four of us went to Penang Bowl, where we spent the rest of the afternoon enjoying good company and bad bowling. I bowled the best game I think I ever have and won the first game. Re then won the second, and Ashley won the third. A good and silly time was had by all, but I think we're all going to be a little achy tomorrow. Later in the evening we met up again for dinner, and after I ran back to the Star Lodge to watch F1 qualifying, we met back at the Corner Bar until after 2:00 am again. I guess we won't be riding tomorrow either.

After the late night last night and too many s, it was a late, ugly morning. We finally had our usual morning roti at 11:30 am. After a shower and some paracetamol, we got to work on plans for tomorrow. We decided we'd try to be on the road for between five and seven days, making a loop east, perhaps stopping at Gunung Stong National Park, before heading south toward Taman Negara (the national park), on to Bukit Fraser, north to the Cameron Highlands again, and finally stopping in Ipoh to see Ronnie. To do this, we had to repack everything that we've taken out in the past month. We haven't bought anything new, so it should all fit back in the bags it came out of, but for some reason, today it seemed more difficult than it should have. We finally got everything packed in time to catch a late lunch of chicken and rice. Later in the afternoon, we did a little writing and some laundry before heading out to an early-ish dinner so I could be back in time to watch Formula 1.

After breakfast, we loaded up the bikes and hit the road by 9:30 am and told the folks in reception that we'd see them in a week.



We took the ferry back to the mainland and then headed slightly north before turning east. The road today was very good but also very busy. Obviously, we haven't been doing much riding lately, and it showed. Both Re and I felt a little nervous with the closeness of some of the traffic. It was a pretty but uneventful ride across the state of Kedah and into Perak.



We skirted the northern end of the Titiwangsa Range, so the scenery was pretty, but there wasn't much elevation change.



Around 1:00 pm, we arrived at Lake Temengor, where we stopped for lunch and to look around. The sky in the east had begun to grow dark, so we decided it would be best to get back on the road.

A short while later, we crossed into the state of Kelentan, where the road became twisty and more enjoyable. In some of the tighter corners, it felt like the back end of my bike was moving around a bit, but I really didn't pay any attention and put the feeling down to not having ridden in a while. Dumb dumb dumb! After a while turned south toward Jeli. As we pulled away from a stoplight in Jeli, I shifted from first into second and had no drive at all. The engine was turning but my rear wheel was not. Since I was halfway through the intersection, I shifted into first, twisted the throttle, and got the same lack of response. I tried second again but got nothing. My first thought was that I had either done something wrong installing the clutch or was having a transmission problem. About this point, Re pulled up and said she had seen chunks of my cush drive coming out the back of my bike. Well now, that can't be right. I duck-walked the bike through the intersection and a little farther up the road. I looked back to see that, sure enough, there were chunks of cush drive rubber in the intersection. I looked at the rear end under my bike and could see that the rear wheel had pulled off the splines that are attached to the rear sprocket and drive the rear wheel. What didn't occur to me at this point was that I shouldn't be able to see inside my rear wheel with the axle securely fastened and a non-bent swingarm. While I ran back and gathered the rubber pieces, Re rode a bit ahead to scout for a suitable work area. She found a nearby parking lot, so I pushed my bike there and got to work. Once I sat down and looked at the rear end again, the reality sank in that something was really wrong. As is pretty standard, the axle goes in one side of the swingarm, through a spacer, through the wheel, through the other side of the swingarm, and then into a nut, which holds it all together. Somehow, I now had an extra half inch or so of space where there shouldn't be any. This can only mean one thing. Sure enough, I looked at the other side of the bike and there was NO AXLE NUT! Maybe that was why it felt like the rear end was moving around a bit in the twisties. Re volunteered to go back and look for the axle nut while I was in a mild state of shock and left before I could stop her. I think that the nut had been gone for a long time. Quite apparently, I am going to have to fire our mechanic, since that asshole didn't tighten the axle nut after that moron changed the chain... A minute later I went to call Re back and noticed that around the corner was a motorcycle shop. It just couldn't be any handier!



With Re's help, I removed the rear wheel and started to inspect the damage. While I did this and got out our spare cush drive rubbers (thank you Alliance Powersports) Re walked around the corner to the motorcycle shop with the axle and returned with a replacement nut. By the time she returned, I had removed what was left of the old cush drive rubbers, but I couldn't get the new ones installed. I carried the wheel back around the corner where the nice folks at the shop showed me how to install them. When I returned to the bike, we started to reassemble the rear end and that's when I noticed two other things: 1) the nut and washer from the right side chain adjuster were gone, and 2) the swingarm was indeed bent. The right side of the swingarm appears to have bent near the pivot and is now about a half inch too wide at the axle. Our swingarms appear to be made of molded, flat sheets of steel that have been welded together at the edge. I inspected the swingarm and didn't see any obvious cracking or wrinkles in the metal, so I levered it back into place while Re tightened the nut. One more trip back to the motorcycle shop got us a replacement nut and washer for the chain adjuster, and then everything was back together. I took the bike for a quick ride around a couple of blocks to make sure it was okay and then we decided to get back on the road since the sky was getting very dark. I wish I knew the name of the bike shop in Jeli since we couldn't have done it without them. The only money they would take was one ringgit (0.33 USD) for the axle nut.

We headed south toward Dabong and it began to rain. There was supposed to be some kind of government resthouse in Dabong, but we couldn't find it in the rain. There also didn't appear to be a petrol station, and we needed some. Betweem the rain and the bike problems, I didn't feel like messing around anymore today, so I made the executive decision to head further south to the town of Gua Musang. It was supposed to be a bigger town so hopefully, accommodation will be easier to find. Back on the road, it didn't appear that we would have enough fuel to make it, so we stopped in another small town along the way and bought some bottles of gasoline at the local mini mart. The extra liter each gave us enough fuel to make it, so we motored the last 25 miles into town. And what a 25 miles it was.

Shortly after refueling, the rain went from steady to torrential. As we came over a rise, it was like somebody turned out the lights. Even though it was only around 6:00 pm, it suddenly became night. Between the rain and the wind, we decided to make a dash for the awning of an abandoned gas station. We pulled underneath to hide from the rain and waited about 30 minutes for it to slack off. Not wanting to be riding in the rain in the dark, we decided to continue on once the wind died down. Pulling into Gua Musang around 7:00 pm, we saw some crummy looking hotels on the main street. We kept looking and Re spotted a sign for the Titiwangsa Hotel. You know I had to go check it out. It was a bit of an odd arrangement, above a healthfood store in a newer strip mall that was mostly unoccupied, but the room was nice, the price was okay, and hey, it's called the Titiwangsa (it's hard to believe I am not 12 years old sometimes...). The rain had let up by now, so we unloaded our stuff in the room and hung everything up to dry, turned on the fan and A/C, and went out for dinner. Just to make the day complete, I discovered a sore tooth while eating dinner. Great.


235 miles in 9.5 hours of riding, including 1 hour of roadside repair and 30 minutes hiding from the rain.

Since it poured rain overnight, we decided to skip the national park and instead go to Bukit Fraser (Fraser's Hill), another of the old hill stations in the Titiwangsas. Fortunately, it wasn't raining this morning, but the mist in the air was so heavy that visibility was down to less than half a mile. Wanting to give the fog a chance to burn off, we had a leisurely breakfast of roti and tea. The tea was so good that we ordered a second cup while we waited. After breakfast, I checked over my roadside repair and everything seems to be fine. While riding yesterday, I started worrying about all the things that could be wrong and narrowed my list to a cracked swingarm or ruined bearings. I can't see any cracks this morning and I don't hear any graunchy noises or feel any drag when I turn the wheel by hand. The good news is, I have a complete set of wheel bearings if we need it, the bad news is that I don't have a spare swingarm.

We finished packing the bikes by 10:00 am, and we headed south into the state of Pahang and had a beautiful ride. The mountains to the east were beautiful, and the ride was mostly fast and enjoyable. We did run into several construction zones and some intermittent light rain. At about noon, we stopped for lunch before continuing south to Raub. After fueling up we started the climb up Bukit Fraser. The road here was truly awesome.



The climb up the hill was filled with millions of corners and mostly good pavement, but the best news was that there was no traffic and the rain had stopped.

Once we reached the top we found a quiet and picturesque town. Fraser's Hill was an old English hill station, so most of the architecture is sort of British countryside stone houses set amongst lush greenery. Even though this week is a school holiday, there were very few people to be seen. Our immediate problem was that we didn't have a place to stay, and we didn't even have any recommendations. Re looked on line, but most of them were expensive (80 to 90 ringgit per night), so we thought we'd just look around once we got there. While we were looking at a large tourist map on a signboard, we were approached by several groups of people who took our picture. After posing for a couple of pictures, we met Philip, who had just arrived with his family to stay for a couple of days. It turns out that Philip is a State Representative from Selangor. The state of Selangor maintains a bungalow on Bukit Fraser for public servants to use. Philip asked us where we were staying and immediately invited us to stay with him and his family. Not wanting to intrude in their family vacation, we considered declining, but he was so friendly and welcoming that we agreed. We followed him further up the hill to the bungalow and what a nice place it was.



The caretaker said it was originally built in 1938, and it was grand. The ceilings must have been at least 14 feet high, and the rooms were all huge. We were given our own room, where we unpacked, took a quick shower, and came out to meet the family. In addition to Philip, there was his wife, his four children, a niece, and his mother.





We spent the rest of the afternoon walking around looking at the beautiful gardens and hillsides and talking with Philip. Later in the evening, we hopped on the Symbas and followed the family back into town for dinner. We went to a nice Chinese place, where Philip ordered for the whole table. We had lots of yummy food and good conversation. The mist had rolled back in earnest and visibility fell to 200 feet or less. After dinner was over, Re and I went for a short ride around town before finding our way back to the bungalow in the dark and fog. We spent the rest of the evening talking with Philip about life in Malaysia.


150 miles in about 5 hours.