Our bicycles have arrived!

One of the most important and difficult decisions, I guess, is to chose your bicycle... After all this will be your trusted friend (...) for a while that will get you around (or not). I found a lot of information online with many good options to look into, and then we also visited some bike shops in Belgium and Malaysia. In Belgium it was incredibly surprising: every shop seemed to offer tour bikes. In Malaysia however we found... none! These tour bikes range from 100's of EUR to several 1000's - if you like you can spend up to 10.000 for a titanium bike with Rohloff gears and so on. So how to chose, and how to even decide what budget?

Our bicycles back in the shop, to prepare for packing

On the budget side, we did not want to go top budget. Yes we plan 8 months so we need decent material, but we don't plan years of cycling - at least, not yet. So good is good enough, no need for creme de la creme. Also, I prefer to keep it simple: derailleur, rim brakes, ... I've worked enough on bicycles before to take care of the normal maintenance, and also prefer to use equipment that you find around the world for spare parts and service. So a budget of around 2000 EUR per bicycle seemed enough to have very good bikes.

At Brussels Airport. Drop-off was not possible (we were brought with a small truck, thanks to Cadans)

Hmmm... Can't pass through this one...

The list of options became shorter quickly: Koga, Santos, Surly. Surly seemed available in Malaysia, however after some visits and calls we still did not find any. We did find Soma via Pro Bike, Boon Foo's shop but then again, he did not have any stock nor most of the specific touring accessories that we needed. Once I realised that we could bring bicycles to Malaysia from Belgium and thereby subtract 21% VAT thanks to export, and on top of that I found out that the "standard" Travelmaster from Santos was within budget, the decision was made very quickly. We bought our bicycles at Cadans, a great bike shop in Leuven specialised in this kind of bicycles. These guys are really great, they understand what you are up to, they are passionate bikers themselves, take time to help and give good advice. Strongly recommended!

Are you sure???

We then took the bicycles with us back to Malaysia after our summer holiday in Belgium last July. Of course, we needed to pack our new bikes properly to check them in, and get them to and from the airport - not as easy as it sounds... Luckily British Airways takes bicycles as check in baggage without surcharge, so at least that was a breeze.

First test ride near Leuven 

Same test ride, still near Leuven 

We first did some short trips in Belgium too, mostly to make sure the bikes were OK, and also so they did not look new anymore when bringing into Malaysia.

Boxes with bikes - in the car at KLIA

Boxes with bikes - at home!

Once we arrived with bikes here in Malaysia, I only needed to spend a little time re-assembling them, and some days later started to go to work with... My new Santos.

And then: our first trip in Malaysia was a short one - but that is for a next post.