It’s the whistle of death I know so well from my breakdown in Pakistan. The brand new battery which I bought three days ago in Bangkok is cooking again and the end is near. I’m 150km from Chiang Mai in the middle of nowhere. It’s absolutely beautiful here and the road is in perfect shape but that’s all moot with a dying bike. I turn around and hope that one of the thousands of Thai Gods looks favourably on me and let me make it back to Chiang Mai and its KTM dealership.
I should be able to make the 150km in two hours but deep in my heart I know this battery won’t make it that long. It’s hotter then hell and clearly on its last legs. I’m glad that it’s located underneath the engine on the 990 and not under the seat like on so many other bikes. You don’t want a battery to explode while sitting on it…
After 100km of riding with clenched buttocks and perched ears, it’s over. With a last bark of the exhaust, the bike dies. Luckily in a village so I can park the bike in the shade and decide on next steps. I call the KTM dealer in Chiang Mai and explain my predicament. He tells me it’s probably the regulator that has packed in. A 40 USD part that he unfortunately doesn’t have in stock, it has to come from Bangkok. He will order the part and send a pickup truck to fetch me and my bike. Which will take an hour or so. Or two hours, might be three. He actually doesn’t know and doesn’t seem to care. For once I’m ok with that rather whimsical Thai approach to time keeping. The Thai don’t mind a little wait and I reckon I can try and do the same.
So I settle in underneath the sun shade of a fruit seller stall and ponder my faith while watching the world go by. I envy all the bikes passing by with working batteries and alternators and kick myself mentally for not sorting out the overcharging battery problem when it first reared its ugly head in Pakistan last month.
The receptionist of our hotel in Quetta told me that he knows a very good mechanic who could fix my battery problem. “The best in Pakistan!” he proclaimed. Seemed a bit of a bold statement but as we were waiting for our travel permit from the local police chief and confined to our hotel anyways, I didn’t think it could do any harm for the guy to have a peek.
My fellow riders all had plenty of ideas what could be wrong with my bike (although all their guesses turned out wrong…) and all thought having a local numpty hack away at a high-tech bike like my 990 was a very bad idea. But the only other option was getting the bike trucked out to India and I wasn’t ready to entertain that solution as long as the bike still ran. So enter Khalid, who arrived just when the sun starting to set, eight hours after the hotel receptionist called him…
Khalid was a cheery fellow and greeted us with vigour. His sunny disposition almost made up for the fact that he arrived without any tools or any prior experience with fuel injection bikes and ECUs. Not being hold back by those facts, he tore into my bike with verve borrowing my measly set of tools.
With growing concern we saw him taking off more and more parts. None of which seem to have anything to do with the battery or the electrical system. “The self, the self” he muttered when we asked him what he was looking for. Among the five of us, we had no idea what he meant and together with the fading light, our confidence in him finding the problem and then putting the bike back together again, faded as well. When he started to take off the air filter housing, I had enough. Clearly the man had no idea what he was doing.
“Please stop mate, this isn’t working. You’re messing up the whole fucking bike!”, I urged him. “No, no, is OK, need to find self”, he answered, still full of confidence. It was now pitch black dark and the only source of light was a head torch one of the Austrian bikers lent him. “Fuck the self, put it back together, I had enough” I barked. And so he reluctantly did. When I tried to pay him for his efforts, he shrugged, refused and walked away without another word. I clearly had insulted him. Little did I know that with the self he meant the alternator. He knew exactly what was wrong with then bike all along, he just needed to find the actual alternator, which on a KTM 990 is hidden away somewhere underneath the engine. He might even have been able to fix it. We’ll never know as my mistrust of things (and people) I didn’t know, took over from trusting your fellow man. Just because he wasn’t dressed as a mechanic and did’t have tools, did clearly not mean he wasn’t one. I should have trusted him and the receptionist who recommend him. Instead I went for the ‘don’t trust what you don’t know’ approach, purely based on archaic preconceptions.
The other way around is also ripe with pitfalls, as I learned the hard way in India. There the mechanics looked the part and had all the tools but no clue and subsequently did quite a lot of damage in the process of “fixing” my bike. Book, cover, trust and all that jazz, people…
After a four hour wait, my Kindle runs out of juice and the world passing by has no more secrets for me. I try calling the KTM dealer again but no one picks up. Then my phone runs out of battery as well. It’s not a good day battery wise… I get up and search for someone willing to charge my phone. Contrary to popular belief, English is not that common in Thailand. At least not outside the tourist areas. After a while I find a shopkeeper who understands that I don’t want to buy a phone or phone credit or a charger but just need an electrical socket. Actually, I don’t think he understood what I wanted until I walked behind his counter and plugged in my charger myself.
As soon as my phone powers up, it rings. It’s the driver telling me that he has been trying to find me and calling me for the last hour (that’s a bit of a stretch, given that my phone only ran out 10 minutes ago..). Where am I? I hand my phone to the puzzled shopkeeper and low and behold, five minutes later a pickup shows up. With the help of some bystanders we load the bike into the pickup and I squeeze in the cabin, next to the driver, his wife and his two young children. No idea why the whole family came along but there you go. My love of children is rewarded by the mum dumping one of the kids on my lap, where it sits frozen by fear, looking up at me with big black eyes. Frozen by fear, except for drooling all over my brand new Ramones shirt… The other kid sits next to me, fascinated by the blond hair on my arm. He likes to touch it, which is fine with me until he decides to bite my arm. A swift smack on the head (by his mum, not me…) makes an end to that but has a crying toddler as an additional result. The one on my lap chimes in as well. Both kids keep on crying until we reach the KTM workshop 30 minutes later. Such a fun way of ending a rather disastrous day.
Feeling sorry for myself, I mope while waiting for a taxi to take me to a hotel. While moping, I spot a damaged 990 in a corner of the workshop. Most of the bodywork is smashed up and the handlebars broken off. It turns out to be the bike of a Malaysian rider who crashed on the highway doing 160 km/h. He’s recovering the in hospital with broken bones and it will cost thousands of dollars to fix his bike. Not that I’m gloating about other people’s misfortune but his predicament makes my situation look significantly insignificant. I stop whining and man up. It’s just a minor set back, one of these unexpected happenings that makes travel so, eh, adventurous.
Two days later I’m again passing the point where my battery died. It only took a day to get the part from Bangkok and KTM Chiang Mai didn’t even charge for the courier costs. True gents they are. With the bike running well and some of the world’s best road before me, all is good again.
Little did I know that I’d find myself in another KTM dealership only 2,000km later…
short stories about a rather long trip 