Dane Ketner's Blog: It begins!

Thank god for friends. Friends who show up at your house and casually make brunch while you ignore them and frantically pack for a nearly 4 month bike tour/climbing/work trip in SE Asia. You are way behind schedule and your plane leaves soon. In the garage, you drag your arm down the length of your work bench knocking all the gear you've laid out into a large tupperware bin. There was no final packing list, and the tupperware was improvisation, but you are out of time. Your armpits are soaked with anxiety sweat, Andrew comes in to tell you you're packing too much stuff, that you should relax. Emilee is passionately describing her stance on some subject, but there's no time for you to listen. Brunch is excellent, you'll think back on it fondly while you're in Asia, isolated from nearly everyone you know. You are packing up your bike with masking tape and pieces of cardboard. You know it's a hack job, 'it will hold...', its a lie and you know it. A call from your supervisor: your government passport has just arrived at work which you'll need for your 3 weeks of volcano work in Indonesia. You get there in record time, but you really aren't really supposed to drive that fast through a hospital. Passport signed, you point your subaru back home when it runs out of gas right there in the parking lot at work. You coast into the nearest spot, hop out, and start running/ maniacally laughing back to your house. You haven't slept much. Rena is there to give you a ride to the airport, but you aren't finished packing, so you make her late for school instead. In the garage, Jeremiah is wrapping your bike box in duct tape. (Dear Jeremiah, you saved my bicycle. The box was partially dissolved/ripped open by Seattle rain and handling and your duct tape job was the only thing keeping it from becoming a dispersed pile of loose wet parts). And that is how I left Anchorage, my apologies to anyone I interacted with that day.

All dressed up!

Bangkok is a confusing place to find yourself when you haven't had any sleep for two days. Tara eased me into it with a little Bangkok 101 and led me through the hot busy streets to find some ice coffee and fruit. Traffic is everywhere, and the traffic laws seem either non-existent, or at least highly interpretive. We spend a couple of days there with one tangible mission: to piece together a reliable bicycle for Tara to ride through Thailand and Laos on a budget. The place we found hidden in the greasy back roads behind national stadium: Sombat Kanamuji. Sandwiched between narrow store fronts and cavernous machine shops, SK occupies one corner of 2 intersecting sois (roads) with a row of bicycles on each side. Just inside, Mom and 3 boys are diligently working on separate bicycle projects, preparing them for retail. The shop inside is cluttered with bike parts and tools on the floor, stacked on shelves, and hanging from every available piece of ceiling real estate. The owner (Sombat) invited us inside after we were unable to settle on a display bike. Sombat and I talked bikes for a while. His descent English made it easy to communicate what I had in mind: a steel hard fork 26" mountain bike that can carry a load a take a beating from time to time. When I was finally allowed up to the second floor, what I saw both excited and frightened me. A wall of hundreds of used bicycles stacked on top of each other took up the entire floor. Eventually ascending to floors three, four, and finally five, I was dumbfounded by the sheer quantity of bikes. A motorized elevator shaft with a basket allows a small pile of bikes to be moved from one floor to another. I admitted to Tara that I felt way in over my head, but I began wading, sometimes swimming through the piles of bikes. I asked about a couple of frames and was told by Sombat, 'Not for sale, part of personal collection'. One was a rare looking Italian frame, not in great shape, but certainly unique. On top of being a great pack rat of bicycles, Sombat also seemed to have a keen eye for the value of a used bike. His 'personal collection' is apparently randomly sprinkled throughout the mountains of bikes. We finally settled on a Panasonic 'Moutain Cat', a great looking little 7 speed 26" frame from the late 80's. Sombat let us return the next day to fix it up and gave us free reign of his tools. Awesome. When she was all put together, Sombat and a tuk tuk driver tied her to the back of the tuk tuk and off we went to the great relief of the woman and three boys who wrench there. Sorry for the invasions guys, and thanks for all the patience as I pantomimed every tool and piece that I needed.