Day 4 - Tuesday

Got up early as usual. Grr. Wandered over to the restaurant for brekky and true to form, it wasn't ready. DEcided to come back to the room to pick up our stuff and carried it back to the hotel lobby (near the restaurant) in preparation to get loaded up in the van. Had my usual mouthfuls of toast and tea for breakfast. Mmmm..NOT.


The brudders on the morning of the 3rd stage

The cyckeworx team

The race start

The lovebirds


Loaded up into the Anza van and followed the guys out to the rolling start. Again, the rolling start was kinda disorganised.. with guys peeing and the race starting on them. Followed the 1st group out and Dave (the guy in the van with us) was pretty concerned about his son, Andrew who was riding in the 30-39 category. Turns out he was dropped early on, and not being familiar with racing, he wanted to stop to check on him. BP was pretty livid cos Kale's group had since long gone and he wanted to follow him to make sure he was doing ok since he had a good chance of doing well. Both guys didn't see eye to eye, and after some drama, we picked Andrew up and then headed off to make sure Kale was doing ok. We saw Terence ride by looking ok while we were waiting, and he as usual was all smiles, despite the agony he was in with the heat and all.. that guy is always good for a laugh!


Kale at the start of the race

BP giving Kale a drink


CAught up with Kale and he was doing good.. we drove straight to the finish line and I was able to catch Kale coming through the finish line.. JUST behind Colin.

Drove down to this little staging area where the drinks and prize ceremony was. They had some locals dancing in the heat in traditional costumes.. poor things. No one was really paying attention to them anyhow! Got our keys and then drove up the hotels. Urgh.
Some of the guys - Terence, Eddie, Raymond, Richard, Kale and Fadzli

The little dancers


This was the worst one yet! It looked like a school dental clinic! It had louvred windows on one end and crappy swing-out windows on the other end so you could see through the room. There were metal bedframes with tacky "starry" bedspreads and nasty wooden furniture. The worst thing was that there was only 1 small stand-alone a/c unit and it did nothing to cool the room down. The bathroom was equally vile.. they provided slippers for the bathroom (yes, that's always an indication of the state of the bathroom) and the sink tap lever lifted right off unless you used one hand to hold it down while using the other hand to lift it up to turn the water on. Eugh. AND AND AND.. get this, the towels came in plastic wrap. Yup. GROSS. I was pretty much at the end of my tether at this point. The day's drama had gotten to me and I didn't want to deal with the hotel room. It was just a bit too much!!

I helped to get the luggage off the truck and broke a nail in the process.. told Kale that he owed me a mani and a pedi and ironically enough, he heard "you owe me MANY".. and i left it at that! ;p heh!

The management of the hotel were smart enough to weld the keyring shut so you couldn't leave the key tag in the slot to keep the electricity on in the rooms. Kale and BP made short work of it with a pair of pliers. Yusoff and Mimi then rounded up the driver and we headed off to find proper muslim food since they hadn't had a real meal in yonks. A 20 min drive later, we find ourselves in some random restaurant by the river. The owners didn't speak english, we didn't speak thai, the menu was entirely in thai so we relied on sign language to get our food. To give you an idea, we pointed at a plant in order to get vegetables. Yeah.. it was that sad. The food was AWESOME. And it only cost us SGD5 a head!


Kale trying to break the key off the tag

Us in ghetto hotel #1


We drove back, tried to cool down, Kale took a nap, and I was too uncomfortable in the room to do anything so I pulled my book out. The vans came an hour and a half later to ferry us down to dinner.

Dinner was equally sad.. the usual tom yum and stuff... we headed over to the minimart to get ice cream again. The atmosphere was charged as everyone realised the next stage would be the last stage. Everyone was resolved to finish this stage being the last.

The evening was kinda odd, I was called into Mimi's and Yusoff's room (kinda like being called into the principal's office) to settle some stuff with Tiny regarding the day's earlier drama. We then had a team meeting to sort out the logistics the next day.. and called it a night.
Calisthetics?? Kale and Uncle Richard - 20-something vs 50-something