Trans Americas 2009 - The Blog

As I've already posted a mid-day report you'll already know that Jeff has fixed my bike and that it's now straight again, and with care should hopefully see me to the end of the world and back up to Buenos Aires...

He started his marathon work around 9.30am, when I fetched the bike up from the underground car park and put it next to the Transit out the front of the hotel. As he doesn't really like an audience when he's working, I went back to my room and left him to it... Some 2 hours later I woke up and went back down to see how he was getting on. The bike was still pretty much stripped down and he was working on the pannier rail, trying to get it straight again so he could refit the panniers. His conclusion about the front end was that there was nothing bent, and he showed me the suspension moving freely now he'd loosened everything up and removed the front shock. He then spent a further 2-3 hours finishing things off and putting it all back together. When he was happy with it, I went to the bike shop across the road and bought a new helmet, then took it for a quick test ride round the block. It ran beautifully and despite the cosmetics being a bit crap – the instrument panel is held together with some straps and cable ties – it handled just as well as it always did, at least as far as I can tell. With the bike back in the garage, I celebrated by buying a beer for those that were around before retiring to my room once more to let Tracy know the good news.

For dinner I'd promised to organise a trip to a Thai restaurant and had been busy researching them on the Internet, deciding that a place called “Ky” sounded the best. Warning the others that on arrival it wouldn't look like a restaurant, we jumped in 3 taxis and joined the heavy traffic, Santiago's rush hour seemingly extending to 8pm. We finally arrived outside a suburban house around 8.45pm, and pressed the buzzer and were shown in to a reception area and then into what would have been the front lawn had it not been covered and decorated by pissed-up, spaced-out art students. Odd it most certainly was, with large plastic panels of red, blue and yellow, and with black sheets suspended from the “ceiling”. The tables were all different, and there were other rooms that had different décor, giving the whole place the feeling of being in some college den or old-fashioned bourgeois whore-house. I loved it straight away, and fortunately the rest of the group also thought it was cool. We ordered some appetizers to share, chicken satay, prawns in filo pastry, caramelized Camembert and some sushi – all of which were excellent. For starter I had the “very spicy” Tom Yam Kung soup, which wasn't too hot (except for the piece of red chilli I ate that had me hiccuping and whincing in pain) and for main the prawn penang curry, which was more like a red curry than a penang and lacked any real heat, but was nice all the same. We washed these culinary delights down with a very nice bottle of single-vineyard Chardonnay, then several of us opted for the “miguel yacson” (pronounced “Michael Jackson”) dessert. This was a medley of chocolate brownie, caramel, white chocolate ice-cream and dark chocolate sauce and was quite possibly the world's best dessert... It's always worrying when you volunteer to pick a restaurant to take your fellow riders out to, especially as if it's a disaster then the Prat Hat will be yours, but by good fortune on this occasion I think I may just have pulled off something of a result...

Back at the hotel it was time for bed – as it was gone midnight by the time we got back. At some point I'm going to have to resume my “in bed by 10 o'clock” regime or I won't be up early enough to go out and ride... and after all, that's what I'm really doing here!