In the Southern Chinese city of Sanya, motorcycles are everywhere. I’d say it’s a 50/50 car to motorcycle ratio. I’m not talking about our usual biker gangs, either. These are cabbies – an army of cabbies on Honda’s with little side cars, zipping all over town, taking people to the market or making deliveries. Lucky for us, one came to our rescue.
In my last entry, I talked about our adventures in house-hunting. Today we went back to the first place we visited, Crabapple Bay. All was swell – we looked at the huge diorama in the sales office, walked around the beach, looked at some palm trees, and even filled pa bottle with sand from the beach. It’s not like the stuff we get back home. This stuff was so white and fine, you could sweeten your coffee with it.
After we looked around, Mother In Law haggled with the real estate agent (who looked like she was about 17 by the way) and we left. But when we returned to our sweet Toyota Minivan, the damn thing wouldn’t start! Somebody had the bright idea to try & bump-start it, so here I was behind the van, pushing it with our tour guide and the driver’s wife. We got it up to a good jogging pace, but no luck. We were indeed fucked.
Everybody had theories as to why it wouldn’t start. Because the engine wouldn’t fire remote keychain lock wouldn’t work, we concluded that it was the battery. Guess I shouldn’t have hooked p my Nintendo to the cigarette lighter outlet. But I was playing Zelda and I was just about to fight the giant Boar’s Head in Balrog’s castle! If I quit I’ll have to start over and go all the way through the dark woods. Screw that!
The groundskeeper came over to offer us a boost, but they only had golf carts in this part of town, and of course no jumper cables. So that idea fell faster than my experience points in Zelda. Then along came our savior on a motorcycle. I cal him Yeevol Kinevol on account of how fast he drives. This guy said he knows a mechanic, and for a price, he’ll go and get him. We told him what the general problem was, and he sped off. He returned about 30 minutes later with a guy he said was his landlord. The guy, who also looked like he was about 17, took one look at the engine, busted out his jumper cables and spare battery, and lo and behold, she started up. The funny thing is, once the van started up, the headlights came on.
“Ooops!” said the driver. He left them on the whole time we were walking around. He didn’t get frustrated or anything though. He paid the mechanic 50 Yuan and the driver 30. That’s 7 dollars and 4 dollars Canadian, respectively. What a deal! Yeevol actually tried to give us 10 Yuan back because he only wanted to charge the actual meter rate (what an honest guy) but our driver refused. So, we’re off and running, or actually driving again. Since we’re now headed back to Haikou, I’ll leave you with this:
The gang was stranded
A cabbie came to help them
Yeevol saved the day
I forgot if Haiku’s go 5-7-5 or 7-5-7 syllables, so I’ll do both, just to cover my ass.
We had a dead battery
We were out to dry
A boost from Yeevol saved us
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