Bonanza Motyel, Whitehorse

Exceedingly hot.

To while away the time we find an internet cafe and each purchase an hour. I spend half of mine composing a two-page A4 e-mail to Mary, graphically describing our woes when - phut! - out go the lights the fan, the computer - and Godammit! - my E-mail. I cannot summon the moral strength to re-write it, so send a pathetic three-liner instead. I am so tired of this shit.

At the appointed hour, Mr. Honda takes the rear wheel apart. Guess what? Nothing wrong. I'm aghast. They check the inside of the cover; they check the wheel rim; they check both inner tubes. All OK. At least I'm not going mad. They replace both inner tube valves and wrap the inside of the rim with boundless duct tape. "This", pronounced the service manager, "will last one hundred years". It lasted fewer than 100 km.

Just how can this be? The twelve days in Fairbanks were bad luck. Awful, unprecedented luck. Then yesterday. Three punctures, two of which are phantoms. And now today. I'm running out of anguish words. Just what the f### is going on?

Determination
(A doctor writes: both Jeff and Graham are understandably immensely depressed right now but Jeff is being unduly hard on himself. By the very nature of this trip, the technical side was always going to be by far the most difficult, and the one most likely to be challenged - and it's also an area where Graham is not able to offer much support. As both the engine and flat tyre problems unfolded, Jeff worked immensely hard, applying calm logic at all times, under very difficult conditions, and he is to be congratulated on his gritty determination. He will get over it!)

It's a beautiful day. I get the laundry going while Jeff moves the bikes into the shade to start removing the back wheel, done in a matter of minutes now. We remove the inner tube and test it. And here, by the way, is our sixth blessing: we even have a bath in our room to test for punctures in inner tubes! Once again, despite both trying very hard, the tube proves totally airtight.

Then two independent pieces of information. First. while Jeff works outside fixing the charging system on my bike, a local guy he chats to becomes enraged we he learns that the local Honda dealer advised it was OK to drive on tyres with patched inner tubes. "In this heat?" he questions in angry disbelief. Second, while I'm hanging up our laundry on the verandah, I notice that the inner tube, which several hours ago we put out to dry after its submersion in the bath, has wilted somewhat. Closer inspection revealed that in the intense heat outside, one of the patches has lifted. QED - Jeff's theory proven we feel!

Alaska Highway News
I also get chatting to the roadhouse's owner as she cleans our room. News travels fast along the Alaska Highway and she advises we are lucky to be safe in this place. Apparently there have been at least four deaths in the Whitehorse area, three yesterday, one this morning. A young motorcyclist is killed in a head-on collision with a lorry as he overtakes another vehicle by Marsh Lake. A young guy kills his mother who is a passenger in the car he's driving as he too overtakes and is involved in a head-on collision, while dad and the rest of the family look on from the vehicle he's driving behind. (How head-on collisions can happen on these empty roads is a mystery - tiredness combined with extreme bad luck is the only possible explanation.) Then a taxi driver is stabbed when he picks up a fare at the local golf club. And a young girl drowns when her kayak overturns in the bay area of the Yukon near Whitehorse.

Then dinner in the cafe here where the choice is extremely limited and where we eat off expanded polystyrene plates with plastic forks. Pizza and coleslaw, washed down with Molson Canadian Lager. Apparently they can get BBC World here so we spend the rest of the evening getting some proper news about what's going on in the world.

In between I nipped down to the river in a failed attempt to capture a picture of the lovely bridge crossing the Teslin River. I am pursued by thousands of ravenous mosquitoes and I run back bleeding from many of the wounds they have inflicted.

Jeff 21.06.04