Cycling? Bah!

Last Monday, I was driving home from school; this was a village school, past Lohan Village. There's one road in and out for the whole area, in which several hundred people live. There are some facilities - a couple of small shops, a few schools, two marketplaces - but for anything else, people drive to Ranau, about 20 minutes away, on the afore-mentioned one road.

So. One road in and out. Several hundred people, several hundred cars. Got it?

The road was closed.

As I came up to the junction with the main Kota Kinabalu-Sandakan road, I slowed to a halt behind about twenty other cars. I couldn't see any obstruction, but I patiently waited to see if we would move. I point out my patience, because I was the only one - everyone else seemed determined to be further forward than everyone else; of course, there's a fundamental flaw in this plan, and what actually happened was that eventually there was no more space between cars, and overtaking cars ended up stalled on the wrong side of the road. After about twenty minutes, I got out and started walking towards the junction. I saw two of my Guru Besars (literally big teacher, or headteachers) talking to each other and stopped to ask if they knew the problem. They did. The road was closed because the first ever Tour of Borneo, a cycling race mimicking the Tour de France, was today coming through Ranau. Apparently it was a surprise for everybody, including the police, who stood around at the junction guarding their yellow tape barrier shrugging their shoulders at angry drivers.

This was at 1:30pm.

At 3pm, we were still standing around.

At 3:30pm, some of us were allowed to drive down the empty road to a supermarket 100m away so that we could buy drinks or food. I stood with some friendly policemen-and-women.

We talked about race, religion, marital status, and age, plus a couple of other banned topics. Just a normal conversation in Malaysia, then. Occasionally we were passed by elderly men and women, traditional cloths wound around their heads and basketry on their backs. I wondered what they made of the wailing support vehicles and empty roads. By the looks on their faces, and their dogged walking, they generally didn't care very much.

At 4pm, the cyclists finally came through. Basically, the road had been closed for 3 hours, so that a hundred cyclists could spend twenty seconds riding down a completely empty road. And I do mean twenty seconds - those guys are fast. The ones towards the back were a little slower - they had after all ridden all the way from Sandakan, up the side of a mountain range - and I nearly caused an accident as one looked up and spotted what was probably the only orang putih he'd seen since Sandakan, swerving towards me. It caused a few chuckles among my policemen friends.

Finally, after four hours of shutting down Sabah's main road, we were allowed to get moving again. The following day being Worker's Day, of course, everybody was travelling somewhere, and so all the hundreds of cars that had been waiting at junctions and in supermarket carparks across the state suddenly flooded the road. My friendly policemen just up and left, with no intention of directing traffic. My usual two hour drive to KK turned into a three hour one, and as I passed some knackered looking cyclists sitting down to dinner in Kundasang, at a cafe overlooking the snarled-up traffic, I felt like shaking my fist and shouting "You did this! You!"

One good thing to come out of the day (apart from cheering on the cyclists with a bunch of bemused villagers, who'd never seen lycra before) was that on my foray into the supermarket I discovered these cleverly marketed crisps.

Really?

(PS. I do actually like cyclists, promise.)