A day of thorns....

We decided that today was the day to go and ride the old road up the pass (the same pass that we always ride out of Lhasa) - we spotted it just below the new road the first time we rode the pass and we have been biding our time. It's just a small section of dirt road, maybe a km in length, and a bit of a climb, but it would be worth it for the rocky descent (so says the queen of rock :).

So we put A's new tire on the back of her bike (it's a decent tire - a Kenda Koyote that claims it's a 2.1 but it's more like a 1.95 - and it didn't break the bank and it's not heinously heavy) and headed out into the sunshine. We were basically going to ride 12kms each way for a 2km dirt ride...yes, we are insane :) So we hammered it out of town, also using it as a judge of our fitness (we have ridden this road a lot :) and we were feeling good on the unloaded bikes! We got out to the pass, chose our route over the open ground to hook up with the bottom of the old road and headed down. It was a nice little ride over the rocky ground (maybe 300 meters) and it was an easy hookup to the old road. Excellent!

We were ready to head up when we decided to check the tires....yikes, there was a thorn in my tire...and there was one in A's tire, too. Oops. We started a tire check and there were...*34* thorns in my front tire alone! Hmmmm, maybe riding this old road wasn't such a good idea. We didn't notice any thorn bushes on the way down. A was calling out the number of thorns that when she pulled them out they went "puff" - I heard 5....6....7...yikes! We decided to head back to town immediately and forget the old road. We were travelling light and I only brought one spare tube with me and our patch kit has been depleted over the last month and I hadn't refilled it - I had 2 patches. We were in trouble. By the time we pulled all the thorns we could see and walked the bikes back up to the road 3 of our 4 tires were flat - only A's new Kenda was holding a decent amount of air (but it was still slowly leaking).

We pulled the tubes on the three wheels and checked to see what we had...well, A's front had 8 punctures in it :) My front had 5.... Since A's rear tire was the only one holding any air we gave her front tire the new spare tube and off she went in to the village that was about 2kms away to see if she could get some spare tubes or have the two holey ones patched. Forty-five minutes later (it's all down hill there and a climb all the way back - we were on the pass :) she arrived with the the tubes unpatched and 10 patches - the guy had no spare tubes and we could patch them just as easily has he could. I got to work and patched just the big holes (3 on each tube for my front and rear) and we pumped them up and rode to town as fast as we could - pumping twice on the way :)

We could have done with some of those self sealing tubes....or the Slime we have sitting in our luggage in Delhi! Oh well :) We bought some new tubes from the shop next door - the same brand as we have been using - so we are back in business! Ah, what an exciting day!!!!