December 5th, 2011 · Nimzi - Honolulu · No Comments
Coming from the craziness of Honolulu’s streets full of potholes and terrible drivers, a vacation to Oregon was the Hawaiian cyclist’s paradise. Luckily with Hawaii powers, we brought the sunshine to Oregon and had fantastic fall cycling weather with wonderful friends. Our first stop was for a delicious Thanksgiving feast in Corvallis, home of Oregon State University. This college town is flat and comprised of over 90% bicycle lanes. We visited our part-time Hawaii resident friend and bike polo enthusiast Eilif, who lives at the Corvallis “Bike Haus”.
The Bike Haus residents graciously lent us polo bikes and took us on a mini bike ride on some paths and to downtown Corvallis.
Cuties Kevin and Shanna rocked the tandem bike!
Eilif even gave people rides on his bike rack.. Dave looks like he’s having tons of fun
And by chance, we ended up with the Corvallis bike and pedicab crew’s section in the holiday parade. The kids enjoyed the pedicabs, bike tricks and wheel guards on the polo bikes.. hopefully it made some of them want to ride bikes!
From Corvallis, we went to Portland for a weekend of bikes, beer, friends and good food. The Honolulu community bike shop KVIBE is getting a cargo bike from a local Portland framebuilder, so we went to the cargo-bike specialists at Splendid Cycles to check out the bikes, and pose for pictures.
The Ace Hotel where we stayed offered free bike rentals to hotel guests, which allowed us to explore the bike friendly streets of Portland with great happiness. Our friend Shawn gave us a tour of the North East Alberta district and other friends Brett and Megan biked us around the South East area.
Overall, a successful vacation from a tropical paradise to a cycling paradise!
Most photos by Sau Hsu.
September 4th, 2010 · Nimzi - Honolulu · No Comments
Last night, the Punani Pedal Club had a super wonderful epic turnout at our ride! Over 35 people showed up for an evening ride.. a record number! A few new lovely ladies and many of the AlohaFixed boys showed up to support and have a cruise ride through Waikiki and up the infamous Daimond Head hill.
A crowded sidewalk of cyclists waits for everyone to show up
Some tandem action from Joey and Jessica
Marissa and Kim, 2 new lady additions to the Punani Pedal Club with helmet safety
Naomi sampling Mike’s bike
The ladies in attendance (minus Marie)
Most of the crowd!
Cheers to everyone for this epic turnout, and special thanks to Michael Keany for the fab photos (per usual) and to Sau and Rob for promotion help. It was a great ride and a chance to meet a good majority of Honolulu cyclists. Everyone was friendly with the exception of an altercation with an angry driver, but an overall success! Yay for bikes bringing people together!
Yesterday morning I received the following email from a friend:
Hi,
So we were on our way home after pedaling the new pedal powered parade float through the big gay parade, when the master link on the drive chain from the back three pedalers broke.
So the float is parked in a 24-hour parking garage and we are putting together a new crew to pedal home when Colin replaces the master link today. Pedalers will get a Central Co-op gift card and love, in addition to slack-jawed stares and whoops from astonished passers-by.
BUT! i’m trapped in jury duty right now. i expect to be kicked out once they realize what a crackpot i am but who knows?
Please reply to me if you want to get on board and i will communicate soon.
Sounds like an adventure, right?! So of course I said “I’m IN!” The rest of the day at work was spent excitedly bouncing around the office and grinning, waiting for the adventure to begin. I’d seen some of Colin’s creations at various other events like the Dead Baby Downhill, but I wasn’t sure what to expect from the pedal-powered float.
After getting a cup of my favorite mango tea at Trabant, I set off for the parking garage at 3rd & Stewart. Upon arrival, I sighted the pedal-powered float on the 2nd story of the parking garage, but I couldn’t figure out how to gain egress without encountering a lot of very mindless drivers streaming up and down the narrow corkscrew ramps of the garage. Thankfully, the attendant gave me directions to the elevator around the corner, and my puzzle was solved.
My co-pedalers and I hung around, laughing and talking while waiting for Haulin Colin to arrive with a new Master Link to replace the broken one. He brought three, “just in case!” Finally, the broken link was replaced and we were ready to roll.
We loaded up our bikes on the back and secured them, tucked bags in, set up the cd player on full volume, and took our places. As the shortest pedalers, Kashina and I took the outer two front seats, and our co-pedalers filled in around us. Colin at the wheel: “It’s just like driving a regular manual transmission, but only 3 speeds, and the clutch is a little different.” I laughed hardest at this–I’ve never had a driver’s license, and I find myself very clumsy at the task of steering anything remotely car-like!
Each seat on the float is nicely set-up with toe clips/straps, a water bottle holder (or two!) and within an arms reach of a nice loud bell. Joe and I rang ours with impunity at first, then only when we were changing lanes, or to catch the attention of pedestrians, or just to celebrate…okay, we rang the bell a lot, it was fun!
After coasting down the corkscrew ramp, we paid the parking garage attendant and we were off. Pedestrians stopped in the middle of crosswalks to take pictures, giggle, and point. Other cyclists passed us, shouting encouragement and laughing. As we made our way up the hill, people were walking faster than we were inching along, so some folks would walk a few blocks up the hill in order to get a better picture.
One cyclist couldn’t believe his eyes, I thought he was going to crash as he looked over his shoulder at us again and again. Finally, he pulled off and took a picture without plowing his pretty grey and orange SS commuter into a line of parked cars.
I expected to get a lot of angry honks from cars, but people mostly just gave us waves and smiles and shouted nice things out their windows: “You’re awesome! You can do it! You’re almost there!” and gave us a wide berth, despite the fact that we were crawling through downtown/Capitol Hill at rush hour.
We passed two police officers and Web explained that we were just taking a Pride parade float home from downtown. They just waved us on, which was good–Seattle PD has been under fire recently for their use of unnecessaryforce, as well as overt racism, but I digress.
After getting over I-5, we started to get hot and tired, but we were only a third of the way there. We started imploring passersby, “bring us beer! cupcakes! ice cream! custard!” whatever we passed. Finally, someone heard our cry and brought us refreshment as we pedaled thru the tree-filled triangle park at Pike & Madison, nearly to the crest of the hill.
Coasting down the hill to the Union Street Farm we hit top speed, >30 MPH–that’s ~50 kilometres an hour! Colin deftly maneuvered us to landing without bumping into anything, and our exhausted and sweaty arrival was met with applause and shouts of congratulations.
All in all, an exhilarating and fun way to spend a Monday evening, and I giggled the whole exhausted ride home–tho Cheasty Boulevard has never seemed quite so long or steep. Much thanks to Web and Colin for the opportunity to wheel their amazing collaborative contraption! I’m already looking forwards to future pedal-float events. Sadly, my camera was at home charging its constantly-drained battery, but Byron over at Bikehugger was kind enough to upload a video. Maybe some other Seattle cyclists caught some pics? I’ll add them to the post if you leave a link in the comments!
Posts from me will be missing for the next couple of months as I embark on an exciting (but bicycle-less) adventure to do conservation work on a remote Hawaiian atoll, so I’ll do one bang of a post and catch ya all back at the end of summer with some giant updates of what the ladies have been up to here!
Last Sunday, the zoo was letting people in for free if you rode a bike! So fun! They hooked cyclists up with neat bags, brochures and lights (Modeled by Lani)!
Sau and I rode our friend’s latest acquisition.. this tandem bicycle. I look like I’m having more fun that I really am, since shortly after this photo, the rear tire went flat yet again.
As a last group ride before I depart, we made our way to the skate park again!
Mary having fun in the ghetto-drome!
Fun and Friends! The best way to kick off summer..
(Photos by Michael Keany and Nimz)
Thanks for reading and enjoying my posts.. I’ll be back with more honolulu bicycle love in a bit!
Primate Frames, maker of the lovely Candy Cranks frames and other bicycle beauties like The Wasp, has a new website. There’s an array of new bikes on display including mountains bike, 29′ers, single speeds, fixies, aerotube bikes, a 24″ as well as the monster downhill bike he’s building as a personal project.
The Creative Director from Specialized talks about the new S-Works shaft drive tandem. I’m not sure where it’s meant to be ridden but I’d love to have a go on it… Zoooooom!
After completing our tour of Shikoku, we decided to do the island hop, which starts at Imabari and ends at Onomichi. Its an 80km stretch that spans across 8 islands and seven bridges. It has some pretty spectacular scenery with parts of the islands looking almost tropical and other parts looking totally industrialised with shipping ports and metal work factories.
We planned on catching a ferry back from Onomichi to Imbari but we found out on arrival there were no ferries, so we had to ride back again. We camped for the night and set out again the next morning, it turned out to be quite a day.
Going back across the islands was lovely, we had some great food along the way. 80km into a nasty headwind we then had another 40km to the port of Sanjoi to get the ferry to Osaka. We got lost and arrived late and had to wait 5 1/2 hours to get on the next ferry which left at 10pm, then it was a 6 hour ferry ride. At this point we had run out of money and all the foreign ATM banks were closed. Arrived at Osaka and tried to find an open post office to get some money out, it was too early at 6am so we decided to ride straight onto Nara through 60km of full on traffic. I was so over it at this point. I hadnt slept in 24 hours, hadnt showered for 3 days, was covered in road grime, dirt and god knows what else, was hungry and tired and all I wanted to do was sleep. Tarn went off to go and find some fruit for me, he came back with this….
I didnt have the stomach to even taste it, it smelled like the strongest smelling banana youve ever come across in your life. Tarn had a few bites and then tossed it, only to come out with a vegetable Kit Kat!!! I stupidly tasted that one and regreted it immediately.
Then we arrived at Nara, found a hotel and it was like heaven! We stayed at a traditional ryokan with a zen garden running through the middle of it, hot shower food and sleep then I was ready for the deer. Nara has a ginormous park that is home to over 1000 deer that live and roam freely. I always get quite excited by deers so I was off to go and pat them and make like Snow White. There they were, looking all doe eyed and innocent, and as I soon found out, absolutely not to be trusted. I went and bought them some deer biscuits so I could lure them over and pat their cute little heads, unfortunately this was not to be the case. No sooner had I had the biscuits in hand than I was head butted in the arse by a rather lively male. I had thought it was cruel that they had chopped all their antlers off, but I could now see why. I spun around only to be head butted again by said deer. They were coverging on all sides, I felt like I was in Night of the Zombie Deer, I ended up throwing the biscuits at them and legging it, so much for bloody Bambi.
After a couple of days rest we decided to get the Shinkansen (Bullet Train) to Tokyo. It was a choice bewteen an 18 hour ferry ride from Shikoku to Tokyo, or a 2.5 hour ride from Nara to Tokyo, no choice really! It was awesome, it travels up to 300kmph, it’s quite disconcerting going that fast whilst being on land. The only thing I can compare it to is travelling down Foveaux St trying to catch Em and Jay at the last Alleycat ride I was in (hehe). The timing of the trains is unreal, you could set your watch to it, we left and arrived to the minute exactley as scheduled.
Arriving in Central Tokyo Station was a complete jolt to the system. Tarn had to build the bike back up in the middle of the mayhem while I rung around trying to find a hotel. I thought we were going to have to set up camp in the Imperial Gardens after 12 no more rooms available calls. We finally found one and then got lost several times trying to find our way there. Riding through Tokyo is a bit like being in The Fifth Element, added to that is Tarn who navigates through traffic like a maniac. I feel like Im strapped to one of those crazy NYC messengers and I cant get off the ride! I do love Tokyo, its sensory overload from every angle. We re going to check out the CWMC tommorrow, im really looking forward to it!
Hello again! Its been another week since my last post, I cant believe how quickly the time is going. Tarn and I have left the northern part of Shikoku following the Iya Valley, also known as The Tibet of Japan, with its lush green forests, vine bridges, emerald green rivers and waterfalls. We hit the southern most tip of the island and have been riding along the coast which is also beautiful, rocky and alot cooler than the mountains. We have been travelling through alot of rice fields, cute fishing villages and passing some amazing old temples and shrines.
There is 88 shrines on the island, its not unusual to see pilgrams walking around the island to visit them one by one. The best thing about travelling along the coast is getting to go for a swim after a long days ride, its like heaven!
We camped at a cute little surfing beach and went for a walk when we discovered Dr Evils secret hideaway! It doubled as an aquarium so we went in and checked it out, was so cool, proper 1960s decor, felt like I was in a Bond movie.
The one thing Ive noticed about Japan is the amazing array of creatures, spiders and flying insects they have, I am forever noticing new ones that look even cooler than the last one. I can see where Japanese animators get their inspiration from, check this guy out, he looks like he should be starring in a Batman movie.
We ve had a couple of hiccups with The Wasp (the tandem) We had out first stack the other day, nothing major, we got caught in a rut on the road which gave us death wobbles and tipped the bike over, I came off, unfortunately my foot didnt. Aggrevated an old ankle injury but nothing too major. We then travelled 30km up a mountain pass that turned out to be the wrong road, it was a loggers track that turned totally rocky so we have no alternative but to go back. As we were coming down the mountain we realised the back brake was gone. Some oil from the Rohloff had leaked onto the brake and it was not gripping at all. Then the front brakes started to cook and were also slowly failing. I started to get somewhat nervous as Tarn was giving me instructions on how to put my feet down in case of an emergency. HUH?!!! My feet dont touch the ground!!! We were picking up speed and clocked about 62kph when we came to a flattened out section on the descent, luckily we were able to slow down enough to stop. We had to wait for the brakes to cool down and then made a very slow and careful trip down the rest of the pass. The only other section of the ride that has been particularly hairy was going through a tunnel that was 2km long. Parts of it was so dark I couldnt see my hand in front of my face, it was literally pitch black until a truck or car went past and lit the way. I dont know what was freakier, not being able to see or failing brakes.
The day wasnt all bad, we did have lunch at a great onimiyaki restaurant. (essentially you have a grill in the middle of the table and you are given a dish of fresh food that you cook yourself.) We had no idea what we were doing so the super cool owner cooked it for us. He then showed us his jellyfish in a jar!
For 500 yen you can have a jar of jellyfish, oh if only I could get them through customs! We then passed a junior school that was having its annual Sumo Championships, how cool! Even the girls got to have a go, ( they have special uniforms made ). We hung out there and talked to some of the teachers, found out about the rules of the game.
We had an interesting end to the day, we were trying to find a camp site and got told it was on top of the mountain. We rode 300 metres up on a 3.5km long road, ( I thought Bondi hills were bad) hairpin turns the whole way, arrived at the top to discover no camp site. We decided to camp in amongst some tall trees and got woken at 4am to the sound of nut bombs being dropped on our tent. We couldnt see what sort of creature was above us ripping nuts of the trees and throwing the scraps on us, so Tarn decided to shine the torch into the trees to have a look. We still couldnt see what it was, but lets just say it didnt appreciate the light. If it could speak English Im sure it would have made a sailor blush, it went off its head! Screeching and squawking, we got back in our tent and turned the torch off.
We dont have much time left on the island unfortuantely, we re making our way to the northern tip on the western side tommorrow to leave to another island, we havent decided where yet. Ill be sad to leave, I love it here. My only regret is not being able to speak Japanese, we have had so many locals approach us for a chat and Ive always felt so dissapointed at not being able to converse with them. Im going to miss our morning ritual of packing up camp and then making our way to the nearest village to ride around until we find the bakery. Im addicted to their happy face buns that have chocolate or custard in them, totally unhealthy but totally worth it!
Sayornara for now!
I love Japan! Wow, what a place! Its been almost a week since Tarn and I left for our 4 week cycle tour and its been truly amazing. The country side itself is not only beautiful, so are the Japanese people. They are so friendly and hospitible.
We started out trip in Osaka, made our way to Kobe and then caught the ferry across to Takamastsu on the island of Shinkoku to start out trip. Day 1, about 20km of flat road out of the city, followed by beautiful mountains that seemed to be getting closer and closer until hello 1200ft mountain pass. The temp was 38 degrees celcius, humidity was high and the sun was scorching, I thought Tarn was going to have to pour me into a bottle and stick me into a bottle cage. But we made it, and what must go up, must came down, and down we came. All 200kg of us came flying down the mountain, talk about bullet train!
A couple of hours riding and then it started to rain, and rain, 4 hours of tropical downpour before the weirdest thing happened. All these little cute crabs starting coming out of the forest. Miles away from the sea in every direction, and there were crabs on the road! Bizarre. So then we set up camp on the edge of a river, the sun came up and all was good with the world again.
The Wasp (The tandem) is doing well, no problems to report apart from some squeaky brakes. Been getting plenty attention from the locals and had many conversations using hand gestures and head nodding.
We re leaving tommorrow for the south western part of the island, so far we ve been from the top down to the southern most town of Kochi. Given the lack of internet cafes I ve come across so far, it may be a while before I can post again. Sayornara for now!
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