Day 138-139
Sleeping location: Asimba guesthouse, Mekele, Ethiopia
Distance (km today/total): 1 / 10495
Estimated climb (m today/total): 0 / 70200
New components: shiny
Distance (km today/total): 1 / 10495
Estimated climb (m today/total): 0 / 70200
New components: shiny
Day in three words: Much needed rest
We set the alarm so we could have breakfast with Beth and Sean before their early transfer to Lalibela. It has been lovely to spend time with some familiar faces, not to mention a lot of fun. They headed off about 8.30am and we promptly went back to bed until noon - might as well make the most of this luxury whilst we’re here. After this we moved the bikes into the garden and set about trying to fit the new chainrings and cassettes that Beth had brought out for us. Immediately it became clear that I didn’t have the right tools for the job, and also no idea of how to remove our cranks, which did not work in the same way as the ones on the internet articles. I asked Chris if he had a torque wrench, which he did not, but he knew a guy who knew a guy who said he’d send a guy over with some tools. In the interim we got to work removing the cassettes and doing some general cleaning, aided by the 2-year old Natan (or “Baby” as most people seemed to call him) who took great delight in spinning our wheels and touching the dirtiest possible parts of the bikes.
A guy then turned up with a collection of tools (although no torque wrench) and immediately got to work despite not being asked to. He seemed to know what he was doing so I just watched, and therefore got to watch him strip the threads on both of my cranks, rendering them unremovable in the conventional way*. He did Rebecca’s in the conventional way and then went to get some more tools, which turned out to be a hammer and a bottle of clear liquid. He then proceeded to squirt and whack at the cranks until eventually they came off. Reassuringly he did then help me extract, clean and grease the bottom bracket, so he wasn’t a total hack, although it remains to be seen how all that whacking affects the crank long term**. I fitted the cassette whilst he did the chainrings, then I put a new chain on and Maggie was good to go. Alarmingly a large piece of a screw in my saddle then fell off, but it seems to be unimportant.
We went out for dinner in town, and I was pleasantly surprised by how affluent the centre of Mekele seemed. There were lots of nice coffee shops, regular shops and bars, all of them busy. Having grown up with stories of Ethiopian famines and destitution it’s nice to see that (at least some of) the people are doing well. We had some unremarkable western style food as my tummy still wasn’t feeling right, at a place that had a menu item called “meat boil passion pizza”. On the way back we found some ice cream, the first since Egypt, so we indulged even though it was actually pretty damn cold. In the last couple of days the overnight temperatures have been below 10 degrees, and when we go out in the evenings we have to put most of our clothes on to be comfortable.
The next day we had a lie in because we could. My tummy still wasn’t good so at breakfast we made the snap decision to stay one more night. This place really encourages lounging. Rebecca went out to explore the big market and I spent most of the day either in bed or in the garden blogging of playing with Natan/Baby. He loved my little keyboard but I had to stop him playing with it after he deleted several sentences and posted a string of gibberish as a blog entry (no change there AHAHAHAHA). In the evening we went out for more simple food, but our club sandwiches turned out to include a ludicrous 6 slices of bread each so we had to take half of it home. On the way home we went to a pool hall where we discovered that Ethiopian pool, like most other Ethiopian things, is different from the rest of the world. We were told some of the rules and made up the rest***, and had a good time despite some wobbly balls and uneven bounces.
*ie using a crank extractor tool. To be fair this may have been unavoidable as they were really really stuck on there. Rebecca’s came off no problem.
**Mainly writing that so I can say I TOLD YOU/ME/HIM SO if the crank snaps at some point
***As it turns out, completely erroneously
We set the alarm so we could have breakfast with Beth and Sean before their early transfer to Lalibela. It has been lovely to spend time with some familiar faces, not to mention a lot of fun. They headed off about 8.30am and we promptly went back to bed until noon - might as well make the most of this luxury whilst we’re here. After this we moved the bikes into the garden and set about trying to fit the new chainrings and cassettes that Beth had brought out for us. Immediately it became clear that I didn’t have the right tools for the job, and also no idea of how to remove our cranks, which did not work in the same way as the ones on the internet articles. I asked Chris if he had a torque wrench, which he did not, but he knew a guy who knew a guy who said he’d send a guy over with some tools. In the interim we got to work removing the cassettes and doing some general cleaning, aided by the 2-year old Natan (or “Baby” as most people seemed to call him) who took great delight in spinning our wheels and touching the dirtiest possible parts of the bikes.
A guy then turned up with a collection of tools (although no torque wrench) and immediately got to work despite not being asked to. He seemed to know what he was doing so I just watched, and therefore got to watch him strip the threads on both of my cranks, rendering them unremovable in the conventional way*. He did Rebecca’s in the conventional way and then went to get some more tools, which turned out to be a hammer and a bottle of clear liquid. He then proceeded to squirt and whack at the cranks until eventually they came off. Reassuringly he did then help me extract, clean and grease the bottom bracket, so he wasn’t a total hack, although it remains to be seen how all that whacking affects the crank long term**. I fitted the cassette whilst he did the chainrings, then I put a new chain on and Maggie was good to go. Alarmingly a large piece of a screw in my saddle then fell off, but it seems to be unimportant.
We went out for dinner in town, and I was pleasantly surprised by how affluent the centre of Mekele seemed. There were lots of nice coffee shops, regular shops and bars, all of them busy. Having grown up with stories of Ethiopian famines and destitution it’s nice to see that (at least some of) the people are doing well. We had some unremarkable western style food as my tummy still wasn’t feeling right, at a place that had a menu item called “meat boil passion pizza”. On the way back we found some ice cream, the first since Egypt, so we indulged even though it was actually pretty damn cold. In the last couple of days the overnight temperatures have been below 10 degrees, and when we go out in the evenings we have to put most of our clothes on to be comfortable.
The next day we had a lie in because we could. My tummy still wasn’t good so at breakfast we made the snap decision to stay one more night. This place really encourages lounging. Rebecca went out to explore the big market and I spent most of the day either in bed or in the garden blogging of playing with Natan/Baby. He loved my little keyboard but I had to stop him playing with it after he deleted several sentences and posted a string of gibberish as a blog entry (no change there AHAHAHAHA). In the evening we went out for more simple food, but our club sandwiches turned out to include a ludicrous 6 slices of bread each so we had to take half of it home. On the way home we went to a pool hall where we discovered that Ethiopian pool, like most other Ethiopian things, is different from the rest of the world. We were told some of the rules and made up the rest***, and had a good time despite some wobbly balls and uneven bounces.
*ie using a crank extractor tool. To be fair this may have been unavoidable as they were really really stuck on there. Rebecca’s came off no problem.
**Mainly writing that so I can say I TOLD YOU/ME/HIM SO if the crank snaps at some point
***As it turns out, completely erroneously
Comments
Post a Comment