“charen” Upper Peirce Reservoir Park

Ok, a lot of things happened, bought some new assorted crap for my computer and got a new hand phone (the hand phone number hasn’t changed though) and spent the weekend migrating all my stuff over to my new phone and installing software and other crap like that, and on Sunday we cycled to Upper Peirce Reservoir park and it was ahem…. let’s put it this way, a rather interesting experience.

Ok, we entered from the road going to Lower Peirce, which…. argh you’ll know it when you see it, I can’t describe locations, I’m not a Geography student. And the first signs of trouble came when all of a sudden, a huge group of ‘hardcore’ cyclists came sweeping past us. It was the first indication of trouble ahead.

So it was all smooth and happy, except that there were small hills, which weren’t really that steep anyway, and then the hills got larger and larger and I had to switch gears quite a number of times.

I can’t imagine how hard it was on my sister, who was riding this crappy junk heap bike with no gears and lousy-ass brakes. Not that we didn’t own any good bikes, but someone had this “splendid” idea of bringing lousy-ass bikes so we could just park them somewhere and come back later to get them. Which was a dumb idea anyway, cause the road there was like =_=”‘ with steep slopes and steep descents and when we got there, my ma started making noise about people stealing our bikes and then we’d have to walk home and so we had to keep the bikes with us and didn’t walk around much after all. So we lost out both ways

So we were all on crappy-ass bikes, and now we were on the toughest road we had been on for a while… and don’t forget none of us had been cycling much. And it wasn’t so bad, until we reached a decent (the steepest one) and suddenly my sister’s crappy-ass bike’s brakes failed (as they always do) and I have no idea what happened, but her bike started to fishtail and it looked damn scary from where I was, and she was damn lucky a car didn’t come and descend the hill right at her.

Comment from my sister: “Next time, I need a topography map of Singapore”.

Well, after that she was pretty shocked, and she probably couldn’t make it up the steeper hills anyway with that bike she was riding (if you’ve seen the type of made-in-China market bikes with no gears you’ll know what I mean) so she pushed it up most of the hills. And we pushed our bikes along with her as a show of support, and then I got sick of pushing and, like a nasty unfaithful friend, rode it up the hills anyway *if there was a sheepish grin smiley it’d probably go here*

Lesson number 1: When you see hordes and hordes of those ‘hardcore’ spandex-type cyclists swishing past you, you should realise that the path you’re on isn’t going to be a piece of cake. In fact, it’s probably going to be far from it. Those people are looking for hills to climb, and if you follow them, you’ll probably find hills. And steep ones too. Wowwee.

Lesson number 2: When you notice a lack of unfit people with bikes at your destination, and the only other unfit people with bikes are unloading them from their cars, you know you just did something stupid great stupid…. argh whatever.

Well, the park was great, but we couldn’t find the boardwalk. Not that we tried very hard to, cause we were lugging bicycles along with us and we didn’t want to bring them into the reserve anyway.

On our way back, there were a lot of long-tailed macaques. And why were they all over the road? Cause they were waiting for their usual feeders, which were in the car behind us, which was waiting for us to go away so no one would see them feeding them. And they were also in the lorry in front of us, which was also waiting for us to go away. But we saw anyway. Ha ha.
The monkeys were standing on their hind legs gesticulating at the lorry, wondering why the people didn’t come down to feed them.

Because (ok, bad English, big deal) of what had happened earlier, I felt this need to conquer that hill that had ‘owned’ us earlier during the descent, and what better way to conquer it by climbing it on the way back? So I changed to my ’slowest’ (sorry, don’t know the correct term) gears and climbed it and and let me just brag a little, it just looked scary, it actually wasn’t that steep after all Not bad for someone who hasn’t even touched a bike in like, close to a year or something like that? and in a fit of nerves, couldn’t even balance the bike when she first got on it in the morning.

And best of all, I didn’t bust my weak knee in the attempt.

“We should do this more often,” I remarked to my companions.

And we probably will.

~*~

Whew, it’s so hot that my head has been hurting all day (and we don’t have air-conditioning cause we’re eco-friendly so I’ve been listening to Finnish metal to cool it somewhat). Ah, the horrors of global warming and urbanisation.