Bike-related dramas

Our Thorn bikes are lovely and when we've emailed Thorn with queries about maintaining them we've had helpful, clear advice from Lisa who sold us the bikes, Andy who designed them and Robin who founded the company. Having top notch bikes reduces anxiety. Ish. We have had a few bike-related dramas, not all of which we're happy to admit to:

Thanks to Vicki B our bikes arrived safely at Stansted in a fish van and thanks to baggage-handlers at Stansted, Berlin, Dusseldorf and Beijing Airports they arrived safely in China. After our first day elatedly zooming around Beijing Hannah reckoned she had a slight kink in her front wheel and – to cut a long and upsetting and embarrassing story short – ended up turning a slight kink into a monumental f-up. The moral of this story is do not ever attempt to true a wheel unless you know what you are doing. Fortunately a bike shop in Beijing (Windspeed's Chaoyang branch, to give them credit) made the wheel perfect again the next day for about £2.

Another long and painful to recall story resulted in us being told that we could not, as intended, take our bikes on the 40+ hour train all the way from Beijing to Hanoi. They'd have had to go ahead on a freight train but that train doesn't go right to the border and we'd have had to disembark somewhere in southern China in order to retrieve them, blaa blaa blaa. To our great disappointment we had to fly. So it was back to Windspeed bikeshop who dismantled and boxed our bikes for their unexpected flight, again for about £2. No problems with the bikes on arrival at Hanoi Airport.

In order to get through Vietnam within the one month permitted by our visas we took an overnight train from Hue to Saigon. Lots of people send bikes and mopeds on the freight train, they'll be fine, everybody assured us. On arrival in Saigon our bikes were there, but they were not fine. God knows what they'd done to them but both bikes had large scars on the frames and Hannah's had damage to the saddle and handlebar-ends. The moral of this story is box a bike for a southeast Asian train journey as you would for a flight; southeast Asians do not seem to recognise push bikes as precious, potentially valuable items.

On a related note, in Vietnam every place that we stayed allowed us to store our bikes inside their garage or courtyard or even indoors. We always locked the bikes together and, whenever possible, chained them to something immovable. We tried to explain to people that we have to be super careful as we need the bikes in order to complete our trip (and added that our behaviour is conditioned by living in London), but our locking the bikes usually caused bafflement and, we fear, sometimes offence. It's a similar story here in Cambodia.

On a more positive note we have (apparently successfully) done our first bit of non-routine bike maintenance: we've resolved chain-slackness by rotating the “eccentric bottom-brackets” on both bikes (cue much mirth from Famille Darvill) and by removing a link from the chain on Hannah's. [Hannah discovered the consequence of chain-slackness the painful way when the chain slipped off while she was standing on the pedals, causing her to land hard on the cross-bar (bringing the first tears of the trip, ouch!) and to almost lose control of the bike - much to the confusion of the three hay-carrying cyclists she was trying to overtake at the time.]