I had cycled to the Deck Bar and had a chat with Pamela there and a soft drink. When I went to leave I noticed the back tyre was flat. I hadn’t yet identified a repair place since I got the bike but I was advised to push it to the end of Chole road where the buses turn around.
It wasn’t far and when I got there I asked for a ‘fundi’ and the person I asked turned out to be him! Lucky. He and a Masai setup trying to fix my puncture but it was very close to the valve and I could see that it was just a deterioration of the rubber.
But they persisted, they got an old car inner tube, the Masai got his macheteout and cut a piece off it and then scraped it with the machete to make it thinner. Then the two of them tried to glue it onto the old inner tube. They did try hard but it was useless, every time they pumped it up, it went straight down again.
At one stage the Masai took the bike for a road test and I was worried that he would get hi robes entangled in the spokes and come off.
I paid the fundi a small amount for his trouble and disassembled by bike and put it in a bajaj. With the help of a man to come with me and show me the way we went to Msasani to a bicycle repair shop where I got the tyre changed in super fast time and for only 15,000 (£5).
Perhaps he charged me more than locals – who knows – but I was happy to have it fixed.
I thought back to China where I was a regular at the bicycle fixer on Nanchang Lu. There the man had all the equipment in a metal box, and could fix anything with one of his many very old very dirty tools. Here the man had only a couple of tools, had to use recycled inner tubes for fixing and was unsuccessful.
There are certainly a lot less bicycles here than in China but there are many more motorbikes and no e-bikes whatsoever. It’s not a very safe means of transport here. At least in China there are plenty of bikes lanes – here you have to take your life in your hands. I use the sides of the road but they are often deep in sand and littered with plastic bottles and broken glass.