I guess we've all heard the story about Eugene Christophe having to fix his broken fork during the 1913 Tour de France. I've never been to Eastern Europe but I recall driving thru Mexico & was amazed how many houses had home workshops...lots of people that do cast-iron work for instance. So I guess the chances of getting a steel frame fixed on the road is undoubtedly better than alu or other materials. But I'm wondering if an emergency repair would later need to be fixed to put the frame back to top-notch condition (ie replacing a frame tube)? An LHT frame only costs about $500, seems like after returning home it might be cheaper just to buy a new frame than to pay for expert frame repair. & if the damaged frame was really nice (ie custom) then I guess a repair would be worth the price. I don't have experience with a damaged frame on tour but it seems to me the easiest (if not cheapest) thing to do would be to get a new frame express-shipped.

I dunno, to me it seems like the frame-material-for-touring debate is, er, framed by the rather limited choices for reasonably-priced touring frames. Most touring folk use steel, it offers the widest choice of models & is cheapest, hard to argue with that. OTOH I've wrecked a couple of steel frames in accidents, once the fork & top-tube & down-tube were all bent. Seems like that sort of damage would be unrepairable on tour. The other time the fork was bent on both sides. Hard to imagine that getting fixed either short of installing a new fork.

If I had the $$ I'd get a custom titanium touring frame. Sure, no chance of on-tour repairs. But I'm thinking that the chance of bike theft is 100X the chance of being stuck in the boonies with a busted frame. Even in "civilized" Western Europe & North America theft in some areas is a huge problem, even for cheap bikes let alone fancy tourers with panniers full of goodies.