Now, for our first adventure of 2011. A couple of weekends ago, we decided to head out to Pulau Ubin, which is an island off the shore of Singapore. It's only a 10 minute boat ride from the east shore of Singapore and is a semi-inhabited island with lots of nature trails and some old Malay village style houses - Kampong houses.
So, after a 2 hour trek, we finally got onto the island and decided to rent a tandem bicycle to explore the island. We tried the bike out first, Andy was not too thrilled with the idea as it's kind of hard to steer a tandem bike. But, I have always wanted to ride one so I got Andy to go along with it.
Bad idea.
Reason #1 - tandem bikes may be great for flat, smooth boardwalks, but not so great for gravel roads with lots of hills.
Reason #2 - when you ride a tandem, the person in front gets the brunt of the work...so even though Andy is in pretty good shape, he was hurting by the end....especially due to all the hills.
Reason #3 - of course I picked an older bike because it was less than half the price of the new ones....there's a reason it's cheaper, the seats are miniscule and rock hard.
After a two hour ride, we were two really grumpy people with two bruised and sore bottoms. I think it took me 3 days to recover!
In between, we did get to enjoy the island a bit and checked out the Chek Jawa wetlands. (This portion was foot traffic only).
Andy and the giant palm fronds
Me standing at the top of the viewing tower
Walking around in the mangrove swamp
Here we are posing on our bike - do not be deceived, the only reason we are smiling is because this is at the end of the ride and we are both overjoyed to be getting rid of the bike.
Needless to say, I have been cured of my desire to ever ride a tandem bicycle again.
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