Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Category: Travel Blogging

Posts on my experiences in travelling

Hamburg

Smiley by name & nurtureNothing much to report today, as if there is any day 🙂 A rather pleasant time pushing the very aptly named Smilla (9 months old) with beautiful  ‘pausbackem‘ apple cheeks in Danish or for me chubby chops 🙂 around the Alster river lake for a couple of hours.

I refound the Jody bike shop and bought the TopLight Line brake plus rear light to match my dynamo. This rear light increases in intensity when braking hard so should be interesting when braking in heavy traffic.

1-IMG_0202The park around the lake is interesting as it is used extensively by runners using the Alster auto electronic recording system (today’s record was 27 minutes, I took 90 minutes walking with the push chair & eating an ice cream! It’s good to see they still having drinking fountains instead of expecting everyone to buy bottled water.

Fascinating to go into a Curry’s type sho, MediMax to be told they don’t accept credit cards! What a country – I will just buy it from Amazon instead…

In the evening we went to the Harms & Schatt restaurant, excellent food & good views but perhaps not the best with two very young kids 🙂

According to Moves I’ve done 24,671 steps burning 973 cals over my daily budget in 3hr 55min. Fitbit says 25,122 steps and 3,087 cals burnt in 98 active mins. So not bad for a rest day..

Statistical end to my SE Asia bike trip

Geoff at the Merlion in Singapore
Geoff at the Merlion in Singapore

Now my little Hanoi to Singapore bike ride is finished. Here is a first glimpse of my stats

I biked 2,558 miles (4093km) with  55,000 feet (16,764m) of ascent. Pedalled  it in 218 hours with 40 days on the road.  My total time away from Cambridge (on this trip) was 68 days from 2nd Feb to 7 April.

Geoff's SE Asia Tour
Geoff’s SE Asia Tour

I dropped down 20 degrees of Latitude from Hanoi at 21 degrees North to Singapore at 1 degree North. Biked through 5 countries: Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia & Singapore.

I spent £1245 on accommodation in the 68 days, Apart from the stupendous hospitality of Daniela & Andre in Singapore the cheapest night was Ratanak in Borkeo for £4.83 most expensive was the White Sand Hotel in Hua Hin at £42.59 per night.

Longest daily distance was 97 miles from Phu Phong to Khong Dao. Highest average speed speed was 14.32mph for the 64.7 miles from Cho Ngoi to Dien Chau. Overall average speed was  11.75mph

No major bike repairs only a new rear bike tyre in Thailand. I think 5 punctures all in the rear tyre.

I will probably add to this as time goes on…

 

 

Klulang to Singapore Island

After nearly falling down one of the open drains that Malaysia specialize in I had my egg roti and said farewell to Sabine who was cycling onto Mersing for the ferry to Tioman.

1-IMG_1712My road was hilly, wide and quiet for the first half to Highway 1,  all be it deadly  monotonous  Sime Darby plantations.  Highway 1 was awful, the road narrowed and became busy, I guess because the main parallel  E2 has tolls which folks avoid. Things became worse as I neared Johor Barhu with the road turning into as bad as biking down the M1 in the UK with endless slip roads 🙁  I decided against staying in the town as it looked pretty awful so kept following the Woodlands signs which I knew was in Singapore. I followed the motor bikes through passport control and then biked over the causeway past the huge queue of cars and into Singapore immigration. The only problem was trying to fill in a card covered in sweat 🙁
On the island I took a wrong turn and ended up on the expressway, then having to walk down a slip road to get back on a normal road.  Eventually I ended up at Kranji MRT station where I quickly did the essentials: 1GB / 7 day SIM for $S10 , changed my money & used the ATM. After Facetiming Sally outside the racecourse. I was just about to leave when

1-IMG_8762

I saw some guy lugging an expensive mountain bike over his shoulder 🙁  apparently the rear tyre had split and in the process of re-inflating it  after patching, had broken his pump!  Fortunately I had repaired my Chinese pump the other day so it was quickly pumped it up!

Andre from the UK was so grateful that he offered to put me up in his big house with pool 🙂 Even better it has fibre internet at 50 megs up & down. So an excellent ending to a tiring frightening day.

Efectively that’s the end of my SE Asia biking tour. My next post will have all the stats…

Here is the Strava for my 87 mile long day today:

Kluang_to_Singapore___Ride___StravaA few photos are here.

 

Muar to Kluang on Geoff’s SE Asia ride

Muar is a delightful working town loads of real shops including a great bike shop who sold me a Panasonic inner tube for 10 Ringgits but didn’t stock puncture repair kits.

1-IMG_8736I started the day with some lovely egg roti’s at The Soup House, joined later by Sabine. As we were finishing the French couple appeared. They had decided to take the coast route to Batu Pahat which isn’t very far at all. Sabine and I had decided to head to Kluang about 100km away.

The road was very busy but we made very good time, with Sabine struggling ever so slightly to keep up 🙂 . In fact I started to think that maybe instead of having total rest days it might be a better idea to just have partial rest days doing like 30 miles  instead of zero, I’ve noticed after zero days my legs really hurt to begin with.

1-IMG_1700An advantage of having someone with me is that I can share a watermelon, they are truly delicious here, but way too much for one person and even for two a bit of a struggle. For lunch we found a guy making delicious peanut/honey pancakes 🙂

Close to Kluang we couldn’t resist dropping in to the Zenxin Organic Park for a smoothie and a look around, a bit like a garden centre and obviously used to demonstrate organic food growing although most of it was closed.

We managed to just escape the rain storms so arrived in Kluang without a soaking. The White House Hotel at £9 per room per night was OK but the internet was totally rubbish. Interesting that the last two hotels have been run by old men. Both Kluang & Muar have dozens of hotels and it’s really hard to see how they can make a living from it.

We ended up eating at  the Battown Hawker Centre after visiting a very disappointing heavily themed Kluang Rail Coffee cafe. An excellent day.

Here is the Strava for the day:

Muar_to_Kluang___Ride___StravaSabine’s take on the day is here