Hmmm, today's malaysia tryout didn't quite go as planned. Firstly, I was ill-disciplined and ended up watching "The messengers" on crunchyroll till like 2am.... So I failed to wake up at my intended 5:30am (What was I thinking....). Anyways, I left the house like just before 11:00, cleared customs at like 12:30 and was on my way to Kota Tinggi. (Interesting side track: I climbed under the motorcycle gantry when I saw the words "insert cashcard" because I decided that I wasn't liable to pay toll for cycling into Malaysia. hur hur)

Well, I immediately took out the map, and was lost right away. It was weird because I suddenly realised that the roads didn't have names.... Yup, so the only way to navigate seemed to be to look for the name of your destination on one of those road signs. Ok, SOME roads have numbers associated with them, but well I wasn't very bothered by it and decided to go by instinct.

Anyway, the first thing I noticed was the significant number of potholes that started appearing immediately. There were many many many potholes. And some of them made me think: "Hmmmm, I would be in a pretty sorry state if I went over that". Yeah, there was this one particular one on a slightly downslope but congested road which was 'shocking' to say the least. I estimate the 'pothole', or rather, ditch, to be about 2m X 2m X 0.4M. Even a car would have gotten trapped going over that. I had to come to an abrupt, complete halt and carefully around it.

The traffic throughout the day was heavy, and the roads were narrow. The malaysian motorcylists, as usual, emmit this reckless aura I thought only cyclists possessed. Yeah, they were there fighting for space with me on the LEFT of vehicles, and they even ventured off road onto gravel to get past (my bike can't leave the road). One of them even did a wheelie once the lights turned in his favour!! And you have your usual suspects, whizzing through traffic at like 130kmh.

My initial plan to go by a route I had traversed before half a year ago with Joey and Yingming failed as I over shot the turning. It supposed to be a road with little traffic and some nice climbs. Yeah, so after some initial portion of getting lost I ended up doing what felt like expressway cycling instead -_-'' . Malaysian roads seem to have road shoulders instead of pavements alongside, and I guess that's what gave me that feeling.

And the roads signs I must say need some improvement. For example, I'm looking out for "Kota Tinggi". I find it and happily follow, only to see new signages WITHOUT mention of "Kota Tinggi" but with many new names instead. Then, many minutes and kms and road signs later, I finally see another sign showing "Kota Tinggi". Yeah, that's what got me lost at first cos I had initially concluded that I MUST have missed the turning since the road was now leading to new destinations...

And the best joke was this (in chrono logical order): Kota Tinggi 48km.... Kota Tinggi 43km... Kota Tinggi 47km??????. I was like: "What's next? Kota Tinggi 50km?" Oh well.

The speed today was slow as usual. I crawled all the upslopes at 20kmh, sometimes slower. Downslopes were good at 40+ kmh. The only amazing section was on the return leg when I dunno how but I was constantly moving at 40+kmh amongst the heavy traffic. One portion I hit 61 kmh... It was like a long long rollercoaster ride with no traffic light stops. And I was passing some slow moving vehicles instead.

The weather was ok I guess, although it rained 3 times but I was mentally prepared.

As for photos... I tend not to take snap shots when I feel my life is in danger. With all those potholes around there was no chance...

Only thing left to do now is to fix disgusting shifting on my bike. I failed to rectify it so I guess it warrants a visit to the bike shop...