When I can get to some great bandwidth I’ll upload the HD version.

On July 12th 2009 Nicholas Ward and Adam Teale left Bangkok Thailand and rode their bicycles south through Thailand and Malaysia, and after 2100km and nearly a month of riding, made it to Singapore

Here it is via Vimeo:

Dude, where’s my Jakkayarn? from Adam Teale on Vimeo.

Download the 854×480 h264 version

6 Comments

• At Tue 24, November 2009, Patrick wrote:

  Awesome video Mr Teale!

  Where are you at now btw?

• At Tue 24, November 2009, Bart Verkoeijen wrote:

  Hahaha, awesome video. Gives a nice touch to all the reading. :-) Loved the spy cam. :-D

• At Thu 26, November 2009, Adam wrote:

  Thanks Guys!

  @Patrick - am in southern thailand hanging out on Koh Lanta island. You gotta check it out sometime!

• At Thu 26, November 2009, Luke wrote:

  Thanks for sharing the trip with us, great work on the bike-cam and editing. You two rock.

  L

• At Fri 27, November 2009, ano wrote:

  well done sir. quite jealous. next trip?

• At Fri 27, November 2009, Adam wrote:

  cheers fellas!

  @ano - Next trip - not sure, heading to Sydney to work until July next year. By then I'm sure i'll be keen to go on an adventure again!

  What about you dude??

Incline is my decline.

What started out as a seemingly cruisy ride up into the Cameron Highlands soon turned into some serious hard yakka.

10km south of Ipoh down Highway 1, after a great breakfast of roti and curry, we headed east along the A181.

After about 10-15km east or so I’d say we hit our first serious incline, dwarfing anything we had previously

rode up.

Unfortunately the problem of having to keep on pedalling up the mountains just didn’t go away.

For hours we battled those mountains with the hope that the next corner would reveal the “highlands” and some nice flat riding once again.

Well it didn’t. We eventually ran out of water and the heat was strangling.

Some guys were selling bamboo on the side of the street and were cool enough to go grab us some water from their supply up the road (i think from the water that was running off the mountain). I would have gone for that water earlier but after seeing the dead nappies in the creek the other day I decided against it.

The water powered us on a few more kilometres but it was just too hot.
I think by this point we’d made it about 2/3 of the way up the mountain – 30km from Kampung Raja.
Nick and I decided we’d best to try hitch a ride. So i stuck the thumb out and managed to get us onto the first truck that past.

Mr S (unfortunately I have forgot his name), was kind enough to tie up our bikes in the back of his truck and take us the 30km Kg Raja.

Mr S delivers the fresh produce from the farms in Cameron Highlands down to the markets in Ipoh. A great man who sounds like he’s had a pretty hard life – moved from India in the 1960′s to pick fruit for $1.20/day back then!

He even shouted us food at Kg Raja and wouldn’t let us pay – it nearly came down to a fisticuffs!

In Kg Raja the clouds opened up and bucketed down. For hours.

The place to stay in town was way out of our budget so we decided to brave the rain and cold (it’s very fresh up here!) and pedal on for 20-30 more km to Tanah Rata.

It’s very beautiful up here and another place in Malaysia that must be experience.
It almost feels like being in the alps up here.

Total KM: 90KM

6 Comments

• At Wed 29, July 2009, Bart Verkoeijen wrote:

  It looks very beautiful indeed! Good thing you went for the hitchhike, you don't want to get a heatstroke in the middle of nowhere.

  One thing makes me wonder, you guys are really living on a diet of dong lai cha and roti, isn't it? :-)

  Tell me something more about the food, my experience in Penang was very good on that part. But I'm wondering how that is in the rest of Malaysia.

• At Wed 29, July 2009, Mai wrote:

  Yay...! Congratulations you made it to the top. Sounds like a trip in itself. Awesome. The truck ride must be fun.

• At Wed 29, July 2009, Luke wrote:

  Nick and Adam, thanks for keeping up the consistent effort with the blogging, probably the last thing you want to do after riding is to jump on the computer and wait for photos to upload. Champs.

  Tour de France just finished on tele, made me think of you guys pushing through the mountains.

  Keep the fluids and electrolytes up fellas. Stay safe.

• At Mon 3, August 2009, Kurt wrote:

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• At Mon 3, August 2009, jAn'na wrote:

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• At Mon 3, August 2009, the tall guy wrote:

  Thanks for the comments folks!

  Yes maybe a bit of cheating, but we were going to melt in the heat!

  @Luke - man those guys on the tour de france do something like 40km/h up hill! We can't even get up to that on the flat road on a good day :) Thanks man!

“hey Nick… how’s you going?”
“…I’m running on auto-pilot…”

Around 160km per day seems to be a limit we reach before weird things begin to happen.
Time slows down, your body starts to spasm, the bike shorts feel tighter than normal, your hands are now more numb than ever. And you can’t stop thinking about what weird fizzy drink you are going to buy when you arrive at the destination.

After a previous day of loafing around Georgetown eating everything to be seen we left Georgetown bright and early.
Crossing the bridge to Butterworth on the mainland was pretty simple. We’d heard you had to pay a toll to get onto the E1 but that doesn’t seem to happen until you get out of Butterworth.




We stopped for a quick Nasi Lemak and checked the map. The E1 was the most direct route, but tolls are for sissies, there are lots of trucks, oh yeah and bikes aren’t allowed on the E1.
That solved that problem.
So we took Highway 1 all the way.
It worked out much better anyway as we were able to stop when ever we wanted.

The ride was pretty great. After passing Butterworth there was a bit of a strong wind in our face as a storm seemed to brew above us. But we powered on, out rode the storm and then spent the rest of the day in bright sunshine with a nice cool breeze blowing from the side. Very lucky! This whole rainy season idea hasn’t really hit us, or if it has, it hasn’t been bad like everyone said it would be.

So far in Malaysia we have had food at places where it’s a bit of a “choose your own adventure” style place. Lots of curries and things to choose from. Prices seem to range between 4-8RM per plate.

We pressed on and passed through a mountain range that reminded me a little of what we road through back in Thailand just before getting to Nakhon Si Thammarat. It was now pretty hot and I was sweating heavy. So when I noticed nice stream falling from the mountains and running under a bridge I figured we should stop. Well it looked nice, there was a waterfall and cascading pools of water.

Unfortunately the good swimming hole had a bunch of fishing lines dangling in it, and the other ones were deep enough to get your feet wet. Ahh and the one at the bottom had a family that had stopped to clean up their baby – leaving it’s shat-in nappy nicely positioned on a rock in the middle of the creek. Why do people litter?

We reached Kuala Kangar – the point where the E1 toll-way goes directly to Ipoh, and Highway 1 splits and does a long detour around a mountain to eventually get to Ipoh. We stopped for a snack in Sungai Siput at a small outside Chinese cafe/restaurant. I managed to order 2 ‘dung lai cha’ (all that time in hong kong is really paying off…) and Nick somehow managed to order us a chicken-rice dish.

I don’t know if it’s just the bike pants, but we are getting a lot of laughs and attention in Malaysia!

After the snack, which I think was around the 160km mark for us today, we slugged on for another hour or so and pulled into iPoh.

On the ouskirts of iPoh are some rocky outcrop/hills (can’t think of the right words to describe them – similar to what you get in Krabbi in Thailand) with some Chinese temples of some sort at the bottom with smaller temple-type buildings on the top.

At this point we went to the closest cheapest place we could find (the Hotel Tokyo – 43RM/night) and crashed out.
Since checking in we have discovered that Ipoh is quite massive and there was probably much better deals to be had for 43RM. It’s a pretty run down old place – the toilet doesn’t flush and the “hot” shower dribbles.

Malaysia is a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. The Indian, Muslim, Chinese and Malay cultures all mixing in someway together is very cool to say the least.

It’s great to hear different language being spoken at the same time, and Malaysia definitely has a lot of different food to try out.

Total KM: 185km

3 Comments

• At Tue 28, July 2009, Bart Verkoeijen wrote:

  Beautiful scenery along the road. I'm pretty amazed to see all those different types of clouds in just one day.

  I'd call those "hill's", limestone cliffs. But hey, that's just me, so I guess my Dutchy way of saying it is incorrect anyhow. :-)

  Good you're picking up on the Cantonese. Next try: "dung leng cha" without somebody insulting with a female body part... ;-)

  Come on, it's not that hard to order chicken rice, get those arms flapping! :-D

• At Tue 28, July 2009, the tall guy wrote:

  :) I tried the chicken dance - people just laughed. Might have received a better response had I not been wearing bike shorts.

  Yeah i think they are pretty much hills.

  Cool "old chinese painting" hills

• At Tue 28, July 2009, Bart Verkoeijen wrote:

  Yep, that's it. Planning on going there sometime, Guillin looks magnificent!