Oh nipple, why have you forsken me? Oh nipple, once so hard and stiff, but now just dust. Oh nipple, we’ve been together so long, over many kilometers, and many countries. Oh nipple, I will miss you.
Or maybe not. 1km into the ride, I heard a noise. Steve rode up beside me and said, “what’s that?” “It sounds like a broken spoke,” I said. We found a grassy field and pulled over to check it out. Sure enough, my spoke was hanging loosely in the wheel. Rear wheel, drive side, the worst place to break a spoke because that means you have to remove to cassette to fix it. I have a cassette tool but would need to find a mechanic with a long enough wrench to get enough leverage on it. Shit!
Looking closer, though, I noticed the nipple was broken but the spoke and thread on the spoke was still fine. Okay, so I’ve read about how to fix this without removing the cassette, but I’ve never done it.
It took some patience, but after removing the tire, tube, and pulling aside the rim tape, I was able to remove the broken nipple head from inside the rim and then drop in a new nipple into the hole. Bending the spoke as little as I could, I got it into the nipple and tightened it up, and good to go! The wheel is still slightly out of true, but it’s rideable, and I’ll try to true it up better this evening when it cools off and I can spend some time on it. Theoretically, I only need to tension that one spoke so don’t need to do a full truing.
Cycling today was mostly on lightly trafficked roads, some by the coast, by small fishing villages. But for the most part it was pretty boring non-descript roads with not much to see. Overall well paved though!
Cycling through Ratnagiri, however, was one of our busiest cities since Mumbai. We rode through a very busy bazaar in the city, and then worked up the courage to cross a four lane divided road to leave the city.
We didn’t see much on the map after leaving the city, so even though it was early, we decided to stop for a quick lunch. We saw a tiny place with food photos and about a dozen chairs, so we stopped there. We liked the vada pav (potato cake sandwich) from yesterday, so I asked the woman working there, “vada pav?” “Huh?” Trying another pronounciation I’ve seen, “wada pau?” “Huh??” Ah crap. Steve pointed to the wall, and said, “this”. The lady said, “ah! Vada pav!” Sounded exactly how I said it, oh well, I’ll keep trying. In the meantime I’ve taken photos of the food pictures with the Marathi script below it so we can pull up the photo and point if needed. Wish we were going to be here long enough to where I could learn more of the language, but in a few days we’ll be in Goa, and totally new language.
We ended up under $1 with four sandwiches and a bottle of water. Best vada pav yet, served with a mild green sauce and some kind of spicy, stringy, powder stuff.
On one of the non-descript roads, we were taken by surprise when a car coming the other direction came to a stop with 5 Indian guys in it. One camera-wielding gent hopped out of the car with a big smile and pointed at his camera and then at us. Haha, sure why not? We all posed for a few pics as another took photos. We all shook hands, and he bid us good bye and safe travels. His four friends looked amused by his behavior but went along with it.
We didn’t know for sure where we were going to find a hotel. There was a town Rajapur that would make a 90km day, or another town Devgad that would be 110km. Both too far with our mechanical issue, etc. There looked on Google Maps to be a few road-side hotels halfway between Ganpatipule and Devgad, so we hoped they were there and open. We passed a few that were definitely closed and then finally came across one that had an open gate and two people sitting on the steps.
A quick inquiry, “rooms?” was answered with a head wobble, so we looked at the rooms, agreed on a price, sat down, did our registration, and bought some ice cream. The butterscotch is one of our favorite flavors of the local ice cream so far.
They wanted us to leave the bikes outside, but we pointed in to the room, and one guy motioned to follow him and showed us the back door. Before he could object, we picked up our bikes and put them in the room. He looked a little surprised, but we said, “this okay?”, and he gave the head wobble that seems to mean, “maybe” or a reluctant “okay”. I think if you just smile a lot and pretend like it’s the most normal thing in the world to do, it becomes a non-issue. Nice warmish shower (in this heat, you don’t really need a hot shower anyway), and a patio to dry our clothes in the sun. And they have a restaurant for dinner and wifi that sometimes works. Nothing at all to do here except watch the rare car or motorbike drive by, so we are reading books and watching Netflix and blogging.
Soon, we have to start thinking about where we are going after Goa. The three options are: 1. Cycle inland to see Hampi then come back to the coast, taking about 2 weeks. (A lot of time, but an interesting very rural ride and really spectacular place to see) 2. Keep our bikes somewhere while we take the train or bus to Hampi for a few days and then come back. (More expensive and we’d worry about the bikes.) Or 3. Skip Hampi and head down the coast to Udupi. Any suggestions?