Getting Rocinante ready for the trip

Four days were spent in thinking what name to give him, because (as he said to himself) it was not right that a horse belonging to a knight so famous, and one with such merits of his own, should be without some distinctive name, and he strove to adapt it so as to indicate what he had been before belonging to a knight-errant, and what he then was. - Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.

Well, it did not take me  four days to figure out a name for our horsey, which will have to carry Boris and me over all these mountain passes. It was quite obvious: A knight, somewhere from the outback, with the crazy idea of traveling through "the Stans" by motor bike; then the embassies in Bangkok, which indeed behave like the wind mills in the old story, acting like ferocious giants, hindering us to organize the visas required for our trip.

So, last week I stood in front of the mechanic´s shop, trying to get all these little, but important things fixed on theMBT, and the poor thing just looked so brassy compared to the fancy other bikes waiting to get a good drop of oil. So it was clear, Rocinante it must be named, meaning in the first place a work horse, brusque labourer, but also rough, unkempt man.

Fuark is the number one mechanics in town, and I had a list of things to be fixed/adjusted/added to the bike in order to get ready before our trip. Getting the vehicle to this point was real team work: Boris compiled the list of tasks to be done, Simon had to ride to the shop as I was too scared to ride it for the first time through the urban traffic, and finally Horst had to come in order to explain and translate into Lao what we actually wanted to be done.


Picking the bike up on Saturday I was quite disappointed. Lots of little things of course were perfectly fixed, so now Rosie is dressed in brand new tires (which we brought in from Switzerland and spent about three days of our holidays last October to find them...), has a flashy new LED headlight turning the night into bright, is filled with new oil and has a spotlessly cleaned carburetor. But the main issue, namely fitting in a new rear spring apparently did not work. "There is one part not matching" Fuark tries to explain to me, but he is missing the words, and I am missing basic understanding of the components of a spring. Well, I though it was about a spring only, but nothing on a KTM is "just a spring"...

... so tomorrow I will try to find out which part is actually missing or mismatching for the new spring. After all, we want Rocinante to really follow in the footsteps of his namesake and carry:

a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condition as a hack before he became what he now was, the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world.