ruth is home!

ms ruth fuchs is home finally after spending 3 yrs, 7 mths, 3 weeks away from her home germany.

ruth is quite an important part of the puzzle as to why i took on the cycling expedition. when i first met ruth, it was nov 2005 and i was taking a bunch of st teresa's girls to OB Lumut. she was there to visit kiwi instructor julie, a friend of hers who had worked in a ski resort together.

i saw her cycling on the malaysian highway while accompanying the girls from their trek back to base. she was cranking it up and i was wondering to myself if i would get to know her... just to know what it was like to bike tour around.

ruth is a truly amazing lady. she left home to bike tour and work at the same time thru nz and aus, both of which she biked thru consequently. to get herself home (in the most inexpensive fashion), she flew to singapore and biked her way into china. hopped onto the trans-siberia train into russia and biked her way to germany from there.

respect!

while i'm still trying to come up with that consolidation of what i've picked up so far, i shall just blog about what's been happening since i've returned home.

well, for one, its certainly good to be home, where i can finally have that plate of elusive roast duck noodles which haunted me at most meals when i was on expedition. the back is not getting significantly better with the amount of rest i've been giving it lying on my thermarest...

but its not been great.

my room had been converted into a storeroom by the family, when i was away. i found funny things like unwanted encyclopedias, storybooks and even the vacuum cleaner inside. i was mildly annoyed to see what has become of my little refuge from the world. next to that, my father unceremoniously announced that my grandma was coming to visit and as usual, would take my room. i bit my tongue and decided not to argue, since my mother would come up with the usual line of how my grandma doted on me the most when i was a kid... (which she conveniently forgot about how she was ALSO disappointed that i wasn't a boy)

so for the last 2 nights, i've had to be camping in my own living room.

along with grandma came the maid, who is a nice sweet lass that does a great job at cleaning up the otherwise unworldly home. my mom's a working mom, who does a good job at cleaning the house, but we are a pretty much messy bunch tho. so as the maid clears up the messy place, i found shorts that belonged to 3 people - the father, the brudder and the sister all in my cupboard. no wonder it looked more stuffed than before i left.

the sister took the cable modem and router to her room. and now i'm subject to her conditions - the toilet door must be left mostly closed, the windows cannot be fully opened, the fan cannot be turned on to the max... blah blah and blah...

i guess i do sound rather contemptious at this moment of everything that's happening at home. and i would strive to improve things a little once grandma's off finally tmr, i finish off with that bit of work on my mountaineering team's comm service attempt and the writing of the other stuffs that happened along the expedition.

i find it strange to be home somewhat. or even that it was actually easier to live with a complete stranger over the last month. and find that the nomad in me wants to be away still...

the mother's having a hard time, because the father is considering trying to hide my passport, so that i won't take off as soon as the back is fine again. i can only say that i'm struggling with my own daily life at this point...


"Its when you are home that you wish you are on an adventure. And its when you are away, when you wish you are home."

i arrived back into Singapore late on sunday morning, about 3am instead of the initial 2am, due to flight delay. as i arrived into singapore, my younger brudder was waiting to help put the bicycle and luggage into the cab, which was great because i get to go home straight. home sweet home.

but as i woke up the next morning, i guess there was that nomadic part of me which didn't really want to be home at all. like i told my mom before i left, i had to go off to be a wanderer because i just had to see the world. and now that i'm home earlier than i expected, the surrounding comforts were kind of discomforting.

i took time to read steve smith's book - pedalling to hawaii, just to try consolidate my thoughts about the expedition, which will come along later this week. and there was this explaination he liked best about why he was doing the expedition then. the funny thing was that it came from someone who collected social graces "it keeps yer shit hard." i guess i do actually like it too. much as my shit is as hard as it can get, thanks to most of the crazy things that i do compared to my friends.

update on the back:
managed to book an appt with dr jason chia of sports medicine centre, at the changi general hospital for wednesday morning. doc chia treated me a year ago, when i tore my meniscus along with doc chang haw cheong, my surgeon. so its a kind of errr... odd reunion with the gang at CGH, sports med centre.

while the back is holding up fine, it gets extremely sore when i either stand for too long or sit for too long, so the solution now is to lie down for a long time. my thermarest is inflated for the first time in about 2 months, as i am typing this out.

i just saw jason off onto a bus towards Guanping, where I had developed the fever and he has had to dump his gear to send me back to Jinghong.

Well, its been an unexpected ending to the whole adventure - the whole lumbar problem. the fever's gone down significantly and mild enough for me to travel with. yes, i know everyone is nagging at me to take the cab home too... sigh. i guess its a weird way to stinge on money when i'm spending so much money to get my arse home as fast as i can. sometimes, i can't figure out why i have such thought processes either. but i reckon i would go home first....... well, really see how first.

i'm gonna try ask for an upgrade to business class. with the back like this, i don't think i can sit in an economy without back breaking in that short 4 hours flight home.

i'd try update on the flight no later, once the tickets arrive.

ok peeps. i can't fly home on sunday because the Silkair's run out of tickets. I'd be taking Yunnan Airlines home from Kunming on Saturday night... Arriving Singapore 2am. Will be staying at OBS SparkC campus till daylight and making a move home to save on transportation.

if anyone is kind and generous to sponsor a ride home... well, msg me at 98461743. cos my mobile cannot be called at all. :( dunno why leh.

Sorry that most of you haven't had an update in a couple of days. i had been down with a high fever suddenly and had to backtrack 60km back to Jinghong - the capital of Xishuangbanna Prefecture.

Well, as usual, its kind of like I've made a whole grand tour of every other darn healthcare place along the journey.

so i booked myself into this Xishuangbanna Hospital (supposedly the largest in town, don't think its the best tho), where the doctors aren't the least bit compassionate and don't give a crap whether you live or die around here, no washing basins in the toilets, people don't flush after shitting in the toilet, bedsheets get laid upon by every other ill person and changed only once a day, everything is cured with drips and injections, they make you drag your diseased body 400m just to make payment for your medications and to collect it and drag your body another 400m back to get shots...

they diagnosed that i have some kind of bacteria infection or its equivalent viral? along with some swelling in one of my lumbar discs... it is extremely worrying since i can't really sit well right now. my fever's gone down a fair bit tho.

so much as i had the grand hopes of going down to chengdu, shanghai and tibet... in lieu of medical conditions right now, i would be returning home very shortly to get proper healthcare and a decent look at my lumbar...

the plan is to fly out of jinghong tomorrow morning and get a connecting flight onto Silkair's MI913. I should arrive in Singapore at about 5.05pm. Well, stay tuned here for details...

BAD NEWS.

apparently my chinese visa cannot be renewed, cos its a "tourist visa". not even my china auntie's family lot of CCP officials can save this situation. the sg embassy has flatly refused to help "since the matters lie in the hands of the Chinese." i have 8 days of visa left starting on National Day. so while i am in limbo over this matter, the following options are:

1) fly to shanghai. go see xr and ben and recuperate there.
2) bike onto wherever possible and take a bus 2 days before the flight (current possiblity is 15 August on silkair). hide at sparkc till my face recovers before showing up at home.
3) kick up a big fuss at whichever red-tapey zone... just to make myself feel better.

yeah.

Again, I bought lots of my favourite fruit – zee mango. Wunderous mango. Very sweet and cheap. I realised that I still look remotely Chinese and never get ripped as often as poor Jason is. There was a fruit-seller that tried to rip him a little this morning. Oh well... I guess such things will constantly happen.

Well, of all strange things to out-eat Yenkai with... I've ATE it! I beat his last record of strawberry jam and tuna sandwich with my... pork floss-kaya bun! YIKES! It wasn't too bad. Guess that jam that looked remotely kaya-ish was the Chinese equivalent to mayonnaise. Of all strange and weird things... Gee. This adds to the record of eating bugs and drinking at unknown water sources.

5 August - The fever is on!

Jason's fever is still going on. There's a lighter alternative – sandfly fever. He's been resting while I'm watching oodles of Chinese period dramas. Haha... Well, it is one of my past times.

I went out to get some food and fruits for the 2 of us and saw some people playing mahjong. Its been a while since I last played and man... I miss it! Can't wait to lay my hands on some tiles. But I can't play with these people, because we play by different rules. Chinese and Singapore mahjong is just different. :( Oh well.

So the television in our room got zapped unfortunately from the lightning earlier, as in the antenna of the satellite dish up there got zapped. No more television programmes for now. I've been watching so many of Jinyong's wuxia flicks... in all the possible versions even! There's Duke of Mt Deer in both the new Jordan Chan version AND the old Tony Leung version! Then there's the Yi Tian Tu Long Ji, with both the antique version and the new even. The Chinese must be mad about the antique Journey to the West version! Its playing everyday! I watched that show when I was probably 6 years old... So imagine wadda classic it is!

4 August - Mengyuan

Today's the day that Melissa the idiot left her mobile behind at the last hostel. Wadda fish! I slowed down the expedition unwittingly and now we'd have to peddle a lot of a longer distance into Jinghong. We might not be doing the tea-pressing place at all now as well, since Jason is extremely short of time. I'm such a klutz. :(

The ride into Mengyuan (every village in Xishuangbanna is literally named Meng – Fierce, something. Unbelievable) wasn't too poor. Just 2 minor mountains to climb. Yes, I pushed most of my way up... But at least I didn't “put on the wussy cap and take a bus” (quote Dee Dee)

Friskandar from work messaged today about him taking a sailing book from my pigeon hole from work. Sigh... Frisky, if you are reading this blog as well, I miss you too :(

There's been a good deal of time that I really wanted to cry along the road – when I push my bike up a very difficult slope, when my leg gets all cramped up, when I start thinking of friends and colleagues at work... I guess the traveling has taken a toll on me. Life is just no fun without people like Candy, Kenny, DeeDee, BW, Flo, Xiao-yan-zi, Connel, Terence, Ber, Mario, Bro Chaw, Frisky and so many more. I really miss them, so much that I can cry. But no, haven't shed a tear since I got into the accident.

Looking at the route map for the expedition, we are at least a week away from Kunming still. Its approximately 680km away from where we are located... I can almost hear strains of Corrinne May's Journey “cos its a long long journey, till I find my way home... to you. Oh, to you.”

Poor Jason has come down with a fever. We haven't figured out what could be the cause yet. Hopefully it will go away after a night's rest and lots of water. We haven't been pushing distance in these couple of days either.

We just ran a malarial test on his blood to see if it could be malaria. As it is, there is a likelihood that he is afflicted with plasmodium facipadum (or something along that likes). We have started him off on a course of artemisinin, which I bought from a Chinese medicine hall in Vientiane. Hopefully it will work for him, if it is indeed malaria. But I'm hoping that its nothing more than just a fever from the rains that we are in and out of so far.

3 August - Mengla

We took a slightly longer ride into Mengla, the large border town for this part of China. The ride was extremely muddy, my sandals went buried into the mud and my bicycle was mudded along with it. Poor Winson, my bike mechanic, would be extremely heartbroken to see the nicely polished Scott Montana that he put in so much effort is in this current state. I am also quite heartbroken to see that the bicycle is scratched by all the sand/dust/grit and mudded. Haiz. Liddat how to sell it away? How to finance my road bike? AIYAH!

Anyways that aside, there's a teahouse next to our hostel today. And for the first time in my entire life I actually got to see the art of tea-drinking unfold in front of me (and my muddy feet). The ladies in the teahouse were extremely nice to entertain me. And after some PR-ing, we are invited to this nice lady's tea-pressing company in Jinghong, the regional capital. I am looking forward to taking photos of this ancient art of tea pressing, since it improved how tea is shipped all over the world. Turns out that Xishuangbanna (the region we are at) is actually one of the largest tea-producing areas in China.

Contacted Auntie Darren, who's located in Chengdu. Absolutely good news, since I'd have a host of some kind once I am there. Ah... Good ole Singaporean hospitality. :) Looking forward!!!