50 to Zero in 3 Seconds!

Day: 466

My day started off pretty normal for a day on the road. Wake up early, ride my Powerpuff Girl scooter 30 kilometers to the Sememggoh Wildlife Center to check out the semi-wild Orang Utans (it’s more like a natural refuge for confiscated pets and abandoned Orang Utans), then head off on a uber-sweaty jungle walk for a couple hours on the trail to Mt. Satubong. Happily wandering the jungles of Borneo without a care in the world, taking pictures all the way.

Around 3pm I was exhausted from hiking and headed back to my scooter for my 30 kilometer ride back to Kuching. I fired up my bike and started chugging along the two lane, tree lined road for a pleasant ride back to the hostel for a shower and nap. It had been a wonderful day and I expected to make it home with no problem.

Then it happened.

I was cruising at around 50MPH when a Malay woman pulled up next to me and frantically pointed at the side of the moped – I instantly figured something must be wrong and I glanced down to the right side of the bike (remember, we are driving on the left side of the road here). Lo and behold, the plastic muffler cover was dangling off the side of the bike, but within a second of realizing that, I felt the entire bike bounce in a pothole, I over corrected my handlebars and then I was being launched at full speed to the left side of the road.

Somewhere mid-flight I remembered my wife telling me to “be safe“, I thought about my lack of health insurance, I remembered the time I was hit by a car while on a bicycle and wondered how this was going to compare to that, and finally – just a second before crashing down – I wonder what the damage to the moped would cost me… I had a shockingly long time to think.

AND….Contact! I landed on my left shoulder and left knee going probably 50mph and the wind was completely knocked out of me. Fortunately, both I and the bike landed on the roadside grass. I lay there for a second and then immediately took inventory of all my limbs and was surprised that everything still worked, even if the muscles in my shoulder were screaming in agony, nothing was out of place or broken – just some bruises, stiff joints/muscles and grass burns on my knee and elbow. Roughly equivalent to the pain of a really bad snowboarding accident.

Then I looked at the scooter, and all that was wrong with it was a few paint scuffs and a broken brake handle – I figure I just lost myself the RM$100 (US$35) deposit, but everything was still working and rideable. Finally it dawned on me that my camera was still in my backpack strapped on my back during this ordeal, and I pulled it out to see if it fared as well as the bike and I. Fortunately it had, only then did it dawn on me what had just happened and how close to serious injury I had just came.

I slumped to the ground and took it all in. I sat there, dazed, and watched traffic go by. I snapped a couple pictures of the road (the last one in this blog post), and recollected my thoughts. After 20 minutes or so I gathered myself together, stood up (realizing how stiff I REALLY was), and got ready to finish the ride back to town.

I rode a little slower the entire way back…