Gimhae! It's different!

hej all and sundry. bike stories are few and far between. There have been few rides going on, on account of all the study happening, TESOL style. I have however changed the rego of the bike from Gangneung to Gimhae rego plates and that wasn’t without incident, as so few things here are. Apart from the fuck up with the licence plate number, where the original rego joint had gotten 1 number wrong when entering the plate into the computer, and then they couldn’t change it because the original plate number didn’t actually exist and so on and so on.

The dude in the rego office was great. Super professional, super humanitarian in the respect that he realised it was somebody else’s shag up and stayed overtime (20 minutes or so) to get it sorted. Then came the real issue of the plate holes not being correctly positioned to bolt it onto my bike’s plate holder.

Having re-read this story I realise that it is as boring as bat shit. But it was a gigantic thing at the time, and it just got worse and worse. But before I go any further let me say, if you haven’t read this blog before, go and read some earlier stories before you read this one, then you will come to understand the kind of treatment that I, and most people, usually have in this country, anywhere else apart from the brackwater swamp of a tight-arsed-alligator infested wannabe city-cum-piss-ant-petri-dish full of blood sucking amoeba posing as motorcycle mechanics, known as Gimhae. Treatment is usually embarrassingly excellent, especially from people who love their job, such as the emerging crew of big-engine motorcycle mechanics, or for that matter any motorcycle mechanics, or………….


Hold the bus, ‘black water fever’ from a band called ‘black water’ from the sunshine coast, also ‘devil riding shotgun’ from a band called ‘wild turkey’. The both just came over a podcast of jordie kilby’s “roots an’ all” which I am listening to now. ‘devil riding shotgun’ was a bit johnnie cash gone rock-but-also-a-bit-gay (also more alive than what he has recently recorded) but nonetheless a big fun tune, but I was very impressed with blackwater fever. It reminded me of the overland corner hotel, and the rockabilly blues that you once heard there on an auld Lang’s tide, that reminded me of Finchy (I’m not even sure if I’ve ever been to the overland corner hotel with Finchy, but I’m bloody sure if we haven’t been then we at least should have). Linda, I know you read this from time to time, please search the web for me, and if you find “blackwater fever”, get it for Finchy and pretend it was from me. If he doesn’t like it, lie to me, tell me he did. I won’t know the difference, the slack bastard never writes me anyway. (love to Finchy, if you are reading this)

I’ve just decided to shag the rest of my story with a big black stick, it was just going to be a bitch-fest anyway. That done, only the headlines remain, one ‘mechanic’ offers to sticky-tape it on for $12, we leave. Another takes the plate from my bike whilst I am grabbing his hands pulling them away from my bike and repeatedly telling him ‘just tell me what you are going to do and how much it will cost’. Repeatedly ignoring my request to leave it alone and outline the impending procedure, proceeds to fuck me off and ignore me, resulting in me saying “Babe, please deal with this fuckwit, I’m going to buy some cigarettes”. I returned to see my wife steaming, roiled, livid, incensed and bloody apoplectic with sheer rage. She frightened me with her silence, and that is not something she has ever made a habit of. In fact, she refused to tell me what had upset her, only that when it was finished we should leave and never return, ever. This got me a little keen to discover what the wanker was on about, but also interested that he had taken our licence plate off of the bike so we couldn’t leave, and merrily continued to keep working on other bikes in his workshop.

I thought ‘two can play at this game, puss-bucket’ and merrily marched into his workshop, re-took my plate and appendages, jumped on the bike with my lovely wife, and merrily fucked-off!

It was a good five minutes or more before Parky could even begin to tell me that when I went out for cigarettes, Mr Shithead started on with the “where’s that barstard from?” routine. When she said ‘Australia’ his response was ‘Well, you know, Australians and New Zealanders, they are all the same. They come here and spend too much money on prostitutes and girly bars and then leave without paying their bill’. This didn’t upset Parky as much as, having thence stated that her husband didn’t do such things, “well, you married the Australian…..blah blah blah” and the reference to her presumed employment history.

My wife, she knows her shit. And she knows what my reaction would have been to this conversation, and she chose to tell me half way across town, when it just wouldn’t do to go back (riding a bike with no licence plate, at night, by now). And she says, “well, fuck him, I just wanted to leave”. You should have seen the look on her face. I believe she used me as an excuse. I believe she was fully prepared to tear his eyes out and eat them raw. I was wild, she was barely-concealed-half-insane, but I must admit, without taking any of the earnestness away from this current topic, because it is serious, I found her to be quite sexy in that state of agitation. But I’m a horn-bag, and borderline institutional, borderline comatose, or anywhere in between, there is always an element of sexy in there somewhere with wifey-o, and I like it that way. Proof is in the pudding as far as I am concerned, and here is a photo of her in long-johns with a red bucket on her head. And if that doesn’t float your boat, well, I guess it’s been obvious all along, you aren’t me after all.

(the story ends well, but thats for another day. I’m going to bed)

Gyeonsangnamdo (dickheads without helmets)

hej all and sundry. I’m going to start today with a wombat blog. Check out www.bonzotheweiguk.blogspot.com if you want anything about wacky and wonderful Corea that doesn’t refer to motorcycles. There’s not much to report at the moment actually. I had this kooky idea of coming down to Gimhae on my too-cool-for-school motorcycle and immediately finding myself in the presence of like-minded motorcycle enthusiasts and forming a club of community minded blokes who have a love of the wind in their helmets (not hair, I know I’m in the minority here, but I think helmets are excellent and I bloody-well wear one, not like the many dipshits out there that think that compulsory helmet laws are a top-down form of curtailment of the free will of the proletariat, or the others who are simply too lazy to put one on) but it just hasn’t happened that way at all. Maybe when spring warms up a bit they will pop out of the woodwork.



My main point was to be waxing lyrical about the pleasures of riding in Gyeongsangnamdo. But now I’m just annoyed with all of the twats here that ride without helmets. I’m amazed at the amount of wankers out there that believe that not wearing a helmet is cool. I’d love to get hold of these idiots and drag them back here and to make them look at the chunks that have disappeared from the back of my HJC that occurred as a result of a swan dive I performed after the big-arsed-taxi-T-bone experiment. I rode my busted arsed motorcycle home (with a fractured collarbone) after an accident that could have taken the back of my head off.

(mally's new bike, vrf 1000 looks great, sounds even better (hard to believe, i know). Wish Pookey would send me a pickie of his triumph, maybe (just maybe) the cream of the wombat crop, then I could post that too.
Corea is pretty average as far as traffic goes. Actually it’s not even average, it is factually the sphincter of the universe as far as road deaths per head of population goes, more so even than the ignominious South African or Turkish road fatality statistics go. There is, on average, 12 000 road deaths per year here, including pedestrian and all, from a base population of only 44 million. Let’s compare this with Australia which has a population of about half of Corea, and has a road fatality rate of (2004) 1598 people. So our 1598 to their 6000, or what could be our 3196 to their 12 000. Either way you look at it, Corea has a road fatality rate three and a half times higher than Australia, the highest on the planet, in fact, without exception.

You have to remember that South Corea is a newly wealthy country. It was only in the 1990’s that owning a family car started to become the norm here. Many of the older people have only been driving regularly for less than 20 years, and many of the young people don’t get their licence (or at least their own car) until they are in their late 20’s or 30’s. Combine those facts with lack of enforcement of any traffic law and you are left with the statistics you have just read. And to be honest, motorcycles make up for a reasonable proportion of those stats. But the worst of the bunch are the wankers that are bussing about the cities delivering food on their scooters wearing beanies. They are the reason that I can’t insure my person or cycle within this otherwise wonderful country. I have never met a devout wombat-style-cruising-motorcycle-devotee who wasn’t wearing a helmet.

I wonder if you divided the statistics on motorcycle death in this country into two groups -125cc and under and 126cc and up- if you wouldn’t see an explosion of the old myth that more powerful bikes are more dangerous. It is plain common sense that a more powerful bike is more dangerous if you are a dickhead, but it is my firm belief that the far greater percentage of dickheads ride the scooters and the 125cc aprillia look-alikes. I would bet my hat that the people who own the more powerful motorcycles in this country 1) Have a much better idea of how to ride a bike from the get-go 2) Have a lot more respect for the power harnessed between their legs (that sounds a bit rude, doesn’t it) 3) Spend most of their time riding up in the mountains, and not impressing their mates by weaving in and out of traffic 4) Always wear a bloody helmet and finally 5) Probably wouldn’t get out of single digits on a % headcount of people who get an early intro to the great big bike club in the sky from this country.

I am just irate at the fact that some people go out of their way to thoughtlessly get their heads caved in, die, bleeding from a head wound and in doing so make it impossible for the rest of us to get insurance. But of course they don’t need insurance, because the chances of them living through even a relatively minor bingle are small enough for them to have very little chance of ever being able to claim on it. I’m sure you will agree with me when I say that they are thoughtless, selfish dickheads.

This
is
not
a
wombat!