Our last days in Vietnam - with a detailed instruction on how to "fix" a broken skateboard on the road

 

Hi folks

After the sudden end shortly before we reached our destination, this proved to be not to bad. As we were forced to take a bus out of the jungle into civilisation to avoid getting more water into the broken skateboard, we luckily escaped the rain (finally..!). Hoi An at the central Vietnamese coast proved not only to be dry, but also a lovely little town to stroll around, sit at the mooring or in a cafe and wait for all our stuff to dry. Although also here there were traces visible of the heavy rain in the last weeks, as with high tide, the water level in the river rose and flooded a small part of the town twice a day. We even finally managed to go to the beach for one day, although it was to cold for swimming, it was nice to see the sea and put our feet into the sand. 

On the repair side of things it doesn't look that good. I didn't find either a woodworking workshop, nor a do it yourself store or similar to provide me with the few tools, glue and paint that I would need. Also, it seems that the construction of the board proved to be unsuitable for long distance skateboarding, as the two different types of wood that made up my skateboard did not react to water in the same way, they did not expand equally what led to tension and the separation of the different layers. The biggest problem with this is now that the wood did not get smaller again with drying, but stayed two different sizes. Which makes it very difficult to compress the board in a way that the smaller diameter wood could be glued together again. Short: it's almost impossible to repair the board decent without having a workshop with the appropriate press. Well, with the help of a Swiss army knife, rubber mass with peppermint flavour and red nailpolish I did what I could. It should be at least waterproof again, but the riding character of tail and nose will be different now. Let's hope it will last for some more kilometers before it completely disintegrates.

On similar notice, Kyras board, which was built out of only one type of wood, bamboo, is fine and looks as fresh as on the first day (except of some scratches that the 'so-happy-to-ride-a-skateboard-once-in-a-lifetime'-Vietnamese left as souvenir). And my camera is fixed as well, just need to fill it with pictures now.

With this issues resolved, we are looking further so skate some more. For that we will leave wet Vietnam and change over to apparently sunny Laos. A mountain including some rain between us (in Hue) and Laos (Savannakhet) lets us take another bus. There we plan to roughly follow the Mekong river southwards to Cambodia. Let's hope for good roads!

Cheers

Robert