taxi

I’m stuck at TianHe airport in Wuhan waiting for my flight to Beijing.  Usually I’m stuck in Beijing waiting for a flight back to Wuhan so it makes for a refreshing change.

With the sole exception of when I showed up for my interview and they sent a car for me, the only cars I’ve used in Wuhan in have been taxis.  Wuhan taxis aren’t like the ones in Beijing, Shanghai or Shenzhen, they look more like something out of Flight of the Phoenix, defying all odds.  Held together by a makeshift assembly of nylon thread, cable ties and duct tape they somehow keep going.  The wiring is so fucked up that the reversing lights come on when the driver brakes, and the radio momentarily blinks on when they use their horn to warn an errant cyclist of their approach.  There are never any functioning seat belts in Wuhan taxis, the only time I tried to use one, I gave the belt a brief tug and 10ft of seat strap landed in my lap.  The driver wagged his finger at me and said “not necessary.”   He was right of course, because if you sit in the front the dashboard will stop you going through the windscreen, and if you sit in the back then a metal gate separating you from the drive will arrest your forward motion in an equally dramatic manner.

But if the wiring is jury rigged and the seat belts busted, then the one saving grace is the suspension is shot, the gearbox is shredded and the engine totally shagged.  Consequently it is difficult for the driver to get the car above 50mph.  One of the reasons I use the same taxi is because she is a surprisingly cautious driver, always looking for trouble ahead and slowing at the first sign of danger.

Therefore, I was a little surprised this afternoon to find a sporty 4 door Mazda pull up to the front gate.  The car can’t have been more than a couple of years off the production line.  All power options, natty sound system, fur seat covers and a Hello Kitty emblem hanging from the rear view mirror.  The driver was the sister of the usual driver.  It was her day off so she gave big sis a bell to ensure I wouldn’t suffer the inconvenience of fighting everyone else on the street for an empty cab.

She was wearing more jewelry than a rap star and since she was speaking the local dialect she might as well have been rapping for all the sense I could make of what she was saying.  My non-committal grunts ensured the conversation rapidly died out and we were soon left to our own thoughts.

One of the less obvious advantages of having shocks that have the compression properties of a pot of yoghurt is that the chassis becomes your suspension and every bump and pothole is magnified tenfold as the bodywork twists and rebounds to absorb energy.  It brings you into a spiritual communion with the highway.

Not so when you are hammering along in a Mazda with tinted windows, plush leather seats and air conditioning to soften the hard edged reality of what’s going on outside.  If the Wuhan taxis are in deplorable condition then the roads bring it down one more level.  It’s understandable with the older roads but even highways that were constructed as recently as a couple of years back are already showing some character as they yield to the excesses of overloaded goods vehicles and large chunks of roadway are torn up by high velocity dump trucks hurtling towards their latest construction site.  People have also taken to nicking the drain covers to sell for scrap metal.

All of this doesn’t matter if you are pottering along in a pooped out taxi, but at 70mph your available reaction time is cut by a significant factor.  One moment we bottomed out the suspension on a raised drain cover, and then balanced it out by dropping the wheel into a pothole so deep it scraped the bottom of the bodywork.

If the driver noticed this, she didn’t’ give any indication.  I think it was less to do with her calm demeanour than the fact she was trying to send text messages as she drove.

And then we turned on to the back roads.

This line of thinking is something along the lines of penny-wise pound-foolish.  People will quite happily drive a $30,000 luxury car up a torn up farm road to save $1 on the toll charge.  It’s a common attitude and the windy road which runs parallel to the airport highway is choked with drivers thinking along similar lines.  As a consequence of the increased traffic the road has gradually disintegrated into a disconnected collection of chunks of concrete.  But this didn’t stop the driver hurtling through the centre of the village, at one point managing to reach 70mph.  The whole time I was expecting a small child to suddenly dart out in the gathering gloom (I forgot to mention the sun had gone down some 30minutes earlier and although the night was closing around us she still hadn’t turned on the headlights.

Once we had ‘safely’ negotiated the village she could put her foot down and as we blasted along a road across a large lake I looked at reflection of the night sky on the water.  It reminded me of a trip I had taken in Thailand on a night bus some years before, except this time we had airbags.  I began to wonder if they would serve a secondary function as flotation devices should she drive over the place where a drain cover should have been and we rolled down the slope into the water.

Author: cyanide bunny

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