Preparing for Ethiopia 1 – Sun Rhino Rims and Alpine Spokes

I’d gone on three cycling trips before I decided to go to Ethiopia. The first was a short weekend trip when I was a teenager. I put a backpack on my back and rode down the St. Clair River from my hometown of Sarnia, Ontario in Canada. I learned on that trip why cyclists use pannier bags and pannier racks. You can’t really ride a bike any kind of long distance with a backpack.

My second trip was from Vancouver down the west coast of the United States and then just across the border into Mexico. I’d just finished a summer of building houses in northern British Columbia, and I guess I fancied myself as some kind of world wanderer. I had an old car, and I loaded everything I owned into it and drove down to Vancouver. In Vancouver, the transmission on the car gave out. It was far too expensive to fix, and I left the car there and continued on the bicycle I had in the back – this time with pannier bags.

I learned a lot about the technical and physical aspects of cycling on that trip, but most of all I learned how much I loved it. It suits me down to the ground. I love the independence, the feeling that you can go anywhere, at any time. I love the pace. It’s not so fast that you see nothing of the world around you. Yet it’s not so slow that you feel like you’re plodding along and getting nowhere. I love its physical nature, the direct contact with the contours of the planet. I love the fact that the bike, not my back, takes the weight of the tent and the food and the water. And perhaps most of all I love the delicious sense of semi-isolation. I’m on a road passing through farms, villages, towns and cities, and yet no one anywhere knows exactly where I am. I’m in the middle of human civilization, and yet I’m all by myself in my own little space that’s just a little bit out of step with everybody else.

My third trip was quite a few years later and took me most of the way across Canada from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Banff, Alberta. The bike I used I picked up in a pawn shop for $120. It was a pretty good bike for that amount of money, though I became very familiar with the concept of metal fatigue. It seems that the spokes on a bicycle actually compress and expand lengthwise as you ride. They don’t compress and expand much, but after a while the metal becomes fatigued and brittle. You can’t see the damage, but when you put a touring load on an old bike you soon begin to hear it. There is no more awful sound for the long-distance cyclist than the characteristic ‘ping’ of a broken spoke. I heard that sound a lot.

The tent that was my home for this trip was also a budget choice and was not very well designed. It seemed designed to funnel rainwater in rather than keep it out. It wasn’t much better with wind. The poles would bend so badly during a storm that I was kept awake by the roof of the tent smacking me in the face all night long.

My pannier racks for this third trip were neither bargain bin nor state-of-the-art. They were good, mid-range racks that were more than adequate. At least that’s what I thought until the day one of them snapped into pieces. It happened on a very fast Saskatchewan downhill (yes, there are hills in Saskatchewan) and nearly sent a pannier bag into the front spokes, which would have in turn sent me cart wheeling all the way to Banff. Some kind farmers at a diner helped me fix that with a piece of reinforcing rebar and about three rolls of electrical tape.

My one technical triumph was the purchase of a single-wheeled luggage trailer known as the BOB or Beast of Burden. A bike loaded down with pannier bags is top heavy and difficult to control. It has a tendency to spin out from under the rider. The BOB keeps your centre of gravity low to the ground, and the rider barely even notices the extra weight. I also enjoyed the BOB’s one giant duffel bag, the Yak Sak. It made setting up camp and breaking it down a dream. Put up the tent, throw the Yak Sak inside and you’re done. In the mornings, you stay inside your tent in perfect comfort, load everything into the Yak Sak and toss it outside. This speed was a great advantage when setting up camp in the rain. I loved my BOB and swore by it during and after that trip.

When it came time to purchase a bike for my fourth cycling trip, my trip to Ethiopia, I figured I was all set. I had the experience, and for the first time I had a bit of money to purchase a suitable bike and decent gear. Plus, I was very familiar with the available high-end touring bikes. It should have been as easy as walking into the nearest bike store, plopping down my money and riding away. But of course it wasn’t.

The first problem I encountered was availability. This was the beginning of the mountain bike boom, and nobody rode road bikes anymore. It was all mountain bikes in the shops. Mountain bikes were the only bikes that I could actually see and test ride. The larger bike shops kept a few road bikes in their catalogues, but nobody would order one in just for a test ride. I’d have to buy it sight unseen.

Ultimately, I did find one or two touring bikes in stock, but then ran into a new problem. The forks and brake systems on these bikes would only accommodate wheels with tires of a certain size and no larger. For all I knew such wheels would be fine, but with my experience of the dreaded ‘pinging’ spokes I was in the mood to overcompensate. I was willing to compromise on almost any aspect of this bike but not the wheels. I wanted monster wheels. I wanted wheels that laughed at rocky terrain and three-inch thorns. I wanted wheels about which the local people would compose songs after I left. And these wheels were not to be found on road bikes.

Once I made the decision to switch over to a mountain bike, I found I was facing a whole new set of problems. For one thing, I knew nothing about them. I’d been in and out of a hundred bike shops all across Canada driving the sales people crazy with my questions and requests, but I hadn’t even bothered to look at the mountain bikes. Now I was starting from scratch.

The main problem, however, was that mountain bikes, for all their toughness and durability, simply aren’t designed for touring. They are meant for extremely rough off-road riding without a touring load and therefore have very small frames. The idea is that you straddle the bike and let the bike bounce up and down beneath you, using your whole body like a big shock absorber. The small frame means that you won’t be caught in the crotch with the top tube. To accommodate tall people, they simply extend the seat tube. That’s why people in the city look so silly on mountain bikes. Perched way up there on these 4-foot-long seat posts, they always looked to me like they were riding clown bikes.

So when I started looking at mountain bikes, I couldn’t find anything in the frame size I wanted. Bike shops only stocked bikes with frames from about 16 inches to 19 inches. With my experience coming from road bikes, I wanted to try out bikes with 22-inch frames. Certain models had frames that large, but no shop stocked them. They were all special order items. And there was the problem of wheel base. Mountain bikes, I was told, are built with a longer wheel base for stability. This allows them to go up or down steeper inclines without tipping over. The bigger the frame, the longer the wheel base, and there was the risk that even though a 22-inch frame would suit me in height, it would end up being too long and I’d be too stretched out. The ‘geometry’ as they say in the cycling biz would be all wrong.

Most bike shop owners tried to dissuade me from the bigger frames. The industry guidelines insisted that someone my height (6’1″) should be on a 19-inch frame. I’d ride these things around and feel terrible. I felt like I had borrowed some 6-year-old’s bike. They were just too small. When I made noises about wanting a bigger frame they got all weird. One guy literally said that he would sell me a bigger frame but he “can’t be morally responsible.” These guys take their bikes very seriously.

Another problem was that the concerns of mountain bikers are exactly opposite to those of a long-distance tourer. Once again I was trying to get square bikes to fit into round holes. For one thing, they’re interested in downhill speed (lightness) perhaps at the expense of long-term durability. They need rapid shifting systems while a bike tourer wants simple shifting systems that are easy to maintain and repair. The ironic thing is that these trends become more pronounced the better quality the bike. Of course I was looking for a pretty good range of components. I needed strong hubs, tough gears and durable brakes. But the high-end bikes with these components were stripped of all the other features I needed. For example I needed a frame with attachment points for pannier racks and fenders. Serious mountain bikers see those sorts of things as meant for crappy city bikes. Who but somebody’s grandmother rides a bike with fenders anymore? Some of the cheaper mountain bikes had attachment points, but then all the components were not tough enough for touring. And all these high-end mountain bikes had suspension front forks, which I didn’t want or need. The suspension would be just one more thing that could break, and they made it difficult if not impossible to attach pannier racks and bags. I needed a bike with solid front forks. After a couple of weeks of intense shopping, it became clear that the bike I wanted didn’t exist on the shop floor. I would have to have something custom assembled.

Getting a bike custom assembled, I found out, is an entirely different thing from buying a bike off the floor and entirely different rules apply. In fact, I was looking at different companies, different technologies and different people. It turns out that there’s an entire world of exclusive companies consisting of one or two people in their basement turning out high-end bike frames. The obvious thing to do was to find a bike frame that was suitable and then piece by piece choose the components I wanted and put it together. Unfortunately I quickly found out that I couldn’t afford to go that route. Even if I was willing to pay $5,000 for the world’s ultimate touring bike, it didn’t make any sense because the greatest risks I would face would be theft and getting hit by a truck, and in that case, losing a $5,000 bike would be disastrous. Better to buy a $1,000 bike and if it’s stolen, I can buy another one. For the same price, I could afford to have four bikes stolen! So the totally custom assembled bike was a dead end.

To this point, I have to say I was fairly disappointed in the quality of the bike shops and the people that worked in them. They were very interested in selling me the first bike we stumbled onto on their shop floor but very uninterested in helping me find the bike that suited me. They didn’t exactly lie, but they managed to give the impression that the bikes they stocked, the ones in the shop at that time, were the only bikes available on the market. They were extremely reluctant to go to the catalogues and see what else was out there. I really had to push. And even when we turned to the catalogues there was another problem. Bike shops, for industry reasons I know nothing about, only deal with certain distributors who in turn only deal with certain bike manufacturers. That catalogue represented only a small fraction of what was available on the total market, but as far as that bike shop owner was concerned that is all that is available. He can’t sell me or tell me about products that he isn’t licensed to stock.

The light at the end of the tunnel finally came in the form of “Two Wheels”, a bike shop in London that seemed to speak my language. When I asked my usual questions, they came up with answers totally different from any bike shop I’d been into. And their answers were to my liking. For example my first question was about custom assembling a bike. Their reply was “no problem, we do it all the time.” I nearly fell over in surprise. It turned out they routinely “spec” bikes for people who do world touring. All I needed to do was find a stock bike with the frame I wanted. They’d order in that bike, strip off all the components and rebuild it.

And when it came to components they were also very helpful. They told me about products that I didn’t know existed. For example, it was my understanding that DT 14 gauge spokes were the toughest spokes on the market. Everyone agreed on that. My guy at “Two Wheels” (Mike) went into the back room and came out with a handful of DT Alpine spokes that looked like crowbars. “This is what you want,” he said and threw them on the counter. These spokes were so tough that when the wheels were built and I asked Mike for a few extra spokes to carry along as spares, he simply laughed at me. He sold me the extra spokes but told me I would be carrying extra weight for nothing, that I would never need them. And he was right.

Next, I asked him about strong rims and he gave me a look that said, “You want a tough rim? You wait right there.” He went back into his shop and came out with a set of Sun “Rhino” rims. I literally felt tingles up and down my body when I saw them. Indestructible, he called them. Bomb proof, which is the highest accolade you can give a set of rims.

Over the next two months my menagerie grew. To my Sun ‘Rhino’ rims I added Hutchinson ‘Python’ tires and Continental ‘Snake Bite’ tubes surrounded by bullet-proof Mr. Tuffy kevlar liners. All of it tough. All of it indestructible. Every time I thought of those completed wheels I had the tendency to snarl and growl. They were the foundation for the rough, tough, kick-ass monster bike I wanted to bring to Ethiopia.

Tags: bike, Ethiopia, Ethiopia Bike Trip, tent, Yak Sak