The Bike

Here it is, all decked out for a ride across the Himalaya:


The story of ... "the bike" ...

For the Himalaya, the preferred ride is one that is robust and easily repairable. Although I've got two other mountain bikes, the fact that both of them are alumnimum frame (can't be welded in the field), have hydraulic disk brakes (I have no idea how to repair those!) and shocks (something else to go wrong) meant that they weren't quite appropriate for a trip like this.

The other significant factor is, well, that I didn't want to risk losing one of my nice bikes over in India!

So, I was going to use my old 1992 Scott Mountain bike that I'd bought in Germany and cycled up the Karakoram Highway, but sadly it was stolen from a friend of mine. Thus began the hunt for an appropriate bike.

A few weeks of lurking on Craigslist and trying a few bikes, and I finally found something close to what I was looking for - a ~1995 steel frame Kona Hahanna. Decent bike, but needed some tweaks to it. Over the next month, I:

• Replaced the head stem to raise the handlebars and bring them a bit closer;
• Replaced the rear gear cluster - finding a 32-tooth 7 gear cluster was a bit of a challenge, but found one at the Bike Doctor
• Replaced the chain
• Replaced the front large chain ring
• Replaced all the cables
• Replaced the brake pads (probably good to have decent brakes in the Himalaya)
• Replaced one of the shifters, fixed up the other one (multiple visits to Our Community Bikes to find the right bits)
• Put on 3 water bottle cages
• Put on rear carrier (original from the Pakistan trip, so should be solid) - required just a little grinding to make it fit
• After much turmoil, got an expensive Tubus front rack, and figured out a hopefully strong way of mounting it on the front fork
• Swapped out the single wall wheels with the double wall wheels from Killaine's old mountain bike (Thanks, Pumpkin!)
• Put on some fancy Schwalbe Marathon Tour Plus tires. Much gnashing of teeth trying to decide between 2.0s and 1.75s. Went for the 1.75s in the end.
• Bar ends, of course
• Mounted the speedometer
• And, finally, swapped the seat with the comfy one from one of my other bikes.
  

Phew, that's it. Hopefully it'll hold together! It's all packed and in it's box downstairs. Copious amounts of foam & bubble wrap will also hopefully protect it on the long flight and bus ride from Vancouver to Shimla, via Toronto, Brussels & Delhi!