Quote of the Day: Pothole!! Oh well, too late.
WARNING: LONG AND WORDY, READ ONLY IF REALLY BORED
Don't you just love cycling? Feeling the rush of wind over your face while holding on for dear life? I know I did, despite the many accidents i had.
I got my first bicycle when i was four or five (not counting the kiddie, plastic ones). It was one of those with trainer wheels meaning 4 wheels all up, 1 in front and 3 behind (sounds like a spaceship now i know). I still remember having refused to take off the trainer wheels until i realized i was cycling without them touching the ground anyway. Those things were a little unbalanced, so if i really needed balancing help left or right, only the training wheel on one side was on the ground and the other was in the air. Soon i could cycle with both training wheels not touching the ground.
Let me skip a few years to Secondary 1and my first mountain bike. It was a blue coloured Mongoose brand machine. I still remember the material, Chromoly! Cool or what?! (No idea wtf that is really). Anyway, I had lots of fun with that, cycling around my estate endlessly in the afternoons. My estate is pretty darn hilly (that's where i get my legs from) and just to give you an idea, i could get up to the speed of 63km/h going downhill on one of the roads there! Not bad at all on a mountain bike. Also did a fair bit of trail riding and had just as many accidents, none fatal or serious thankfully. Though i did manage to split my helmet on a fall once. Thank god for helmets. Also had a bad accident on the roads when 5 of us were cycling in single file really close together. It's call drafting to cut wind resistance, but what DUH!! To get maybe 2km/h more speed we put ourselves in mortal danger?! Young and Foolish. Anyway, some bugger in a car decided to cut into a bus stop to pick someone up suddenly and we all piled up. After the dust cleared, i discovered a bicycle tyre mark running down the front of my shirt! Turns out i flipped over my handlebars and landed on the next person's real wheel! No major injuries fortunately, though i scraped my helmet up pretty bad, peeled off some of the hard plastic covering on the road. (WEAR YOUR HELMETS!!) People in that horrible crash, Joshue, Jeremy, Conrad, LeiHin and me. You might think that sudden breaking normally results in skids but honestly, the front brake provides about 80% of your stopping power, so if you jam both brakes, you'll find yourself launched through the air.
Soon we moved to Japan, brought my bike along of course. It was a paradise! Crowded roads with perpetual traffic jams which meant non moving cars with a straight line through between them :)) Between getting driven to school and cycling there, cycling would be faster, a distance of about 13km. And it helped that i stayed near the entertainment district Shibuya, just hop on and paddle there :) Also cycled along a few rivers in the area. Howveer, the greatest thing of note is my speed record, 89 km/h, which i attained on one of our trips to the mountain resorts. Just put the bicycle on a rack and my dad drove me up this stretch of more than 10km of road. Imagine, 10 km of downhill on road that is one direction traffic flow :) I reckon i could have gone faster but for my wind breaker which was causing drag! Too bad it all had to come to an end when i returned for NS (National Service).
NS was bad...until i got posted to Maju camp!! YES!!! LOTS AND LOTS of cycling! The camp is next to Ngee Ann poly and i stayed with an uncle and auntie near National Junior College. Those of you familiar with those places will know it's pretty close, about 8km or thereabouts. Anyway, I would cycle in to camp every day on my new bike (a red Mongoose one). However, the real fun begun after we came out of camp at night. There were some 5 or 6 of us who were avid cyclists (influenced by me mostly). We would end up cycling the into the wee hours of the morning...often covering about 120km all up. We were a pretty fit bunch afterall, being Physical Training Instructors :) (brag brag brag though i really shouldn't). Along the way, we sometimes had durians, but always had prata, teh peng (iced tea with heaps of condensed milk), Milo peng etc.
We've had countless accidents during these trips unfortunately. Haha, like when we were hurtling downhill at Fort Canning Hill and my friend (Bernard Lim, yes you!) lost control at a bend and smacked his head into a curb! He managed to split his ear in the process and required like 6 stitches. He was saved by the Japanese couple who ran the Japanese restaurant up on Fort Canning Hill, they drove him to Gleneagles where they charge an arm and a leg for medical services. Don't think he really cared, he was in so much pain and we were terrifed cos he was holding the side of his head and moaning "oh my head".
Another bad incident happened in some ulu place we decided to explore. Singapore may be urbanized and give outsiders the impression that it is all city but it ain't. There are some places that have good roads no doubt but only big warehouses are there and what these areas ALWAYS have are packs of dogs! You may ask so what, but these things zip around pretty quick and always chase people on bicycles for some reason! Anyway, we were on one of those said roads and there was a pretty big pack of dogs up ahead, so we turned around, yeah right! We built up some speed and zoomed right by them, thus emerging on the other side unscathed. Unfortunately, before we could slow back down to normal pace, we ran into the range of another pack...and another pack! Holy crap, it was an endless stream! Think LOTR: Twin Towers where that Arrogant rode out of the castle with the king and scattered the orcs!. We finally made it past all of them and stopped to get a rest. The road didn't look too promising anymore and we didn't want to run into more dogs, so we naturally had to turn around! Bloody hell, right back into the packs of hellhounds! Along for the ride that night, was a Muslim, don't know if you heard before, but dogs are considered unholy or dirty by Muslims, to be touched by one condemns you to hell (not quite). Anyway, as we were on our way out, disaster struck, one bloackading dogs managed to make him shy away a little and fall, in a skidding, heap. And he was the second last rider in our group. The moment he came to a stop, he began yelling, "Guys don't leave me, help me!" It's pretty funny now that i think of it but he was absolutely petrified. Fortunately, so were the dogs, they were nowhere in sight. They must have reckoned quite correctly that if we were willing to do that to ourselves, we would prolly skin them alive if it came to blows! this tmie we were saved by a pick up of Bangala workers and the contractor in charge, who piled all our bicycles and us on and drove us to a clinic. All this at 5am. Count your lucky stars Rasul, that you weren't eaten alive.
I had my own accident too, cycling full speed down Bukit Timah Rd in a rush to get home on a Stormy Saturday afternoon. The Singapore Turf Club used to be along Bukit Timah Rd so it was always packed with traffic on Saturday afternoons. Anyway, I loved that cos i could just zoom between cars....that is until someone decided to come out from the turf club's car park and cut me off...totally my fault cos there was no way she could have seen me coming from between cars. Suffice to say i skidded and ended up wedged under her car for what felt like an eternity but was only 10 seconds. Of course she'd stopped the moment she saw me if not i would have been run over! Surprisingly, not a cut at all and just torn shorts! Thanks to the ultra slick road no doubt. I was more embarassed than hurt so i quickly hopped back on and vamoosed, must have been pretty exciting for the 100 people at the bus stop who witnessed it. Anyway, i was wearing a PTI t-shirt, so i just reinforced how garang we were!
Not all my cycling experiences were with army guys; had a really great cycling kaki in Helena Tan. We had great fun cycling down Boat Quay, between all the people walking or milling around and startling them. Also remember your close call with a doubledecker bus, No. 157, near NJC's bus stop.
All this finally came to an end when i went to Australia to study...Ok, don't know about you, but i'm feeling a bit bored of this already...think i'll stop now before you fall asleep.
