Originally Posted by
spinnaker
"Shipped out"? Fine if you are on an extended tour with a flexible schedule. If you are on a one or two week tour, your tour is over.
Sure a lot of crap can go wrong on a conventional touring bike but it can be fixed at the next town with a bike shop. Worse case I rely on the kindness of strangers and get a lift to the next town where I can get repairs.
True enough. Of course if you don't have time to wait, it takes little time to replace the Rohloff wheel with one with standard gearing. I would never encourage anyone to use a hub gear if they didn't see the value in it. But every time it comes up, this idea that a hub gear will end your tour comes up, and I've yet to read any accounts where that has happened. It probably has happened. Tacoed wheels have likely happened. Broken frames have likely happened. But at some point you weigh your own gear preference against the likelihood of a failure. I've been riding hub gears almost exclusively for the last 10 years or so, not just when traveling, but pretty much everywhere I need to go. I suspect the people worried about being stranded are speaking hypothetically, not from experience, because my experience says it's pretty unlikely.