Chips Revisited

Late one Saturday night an accomplice of mine called yours truly up. To say he is a petrolhead is a tad of an understatement and he had been pining (yes I said it, PINING) for a road trip of epic proportions (not really, but it sounds better and is more of an interesting read).

So with little planning or preparation (and wifey unknowing of what she was really agreeing to when dear 'I' ask..is it ok......) and VERY early in the morning for me (ie. the sun had been up for a little over 2 hours) off the duo race on their AWESOME 125cc *cough* scooters *cough* to a beach getaway about 2hours to the south.

At first I had visions of riding all the way along a coastal road, not much traffic, sweeping corners and a smoothly paved road. It's funny how all our dreams are cruelly shattered by some sado-masochist entity (SME).

Part one was to navigate our way out of the city...not so simple as we hit every red light imaginable...(SME?) Finally we get up onto a causeway, where we can really open the throttle of our beasty road hogs, all the way to a whining engine SCREAMING ~100km/hr. Side by side we hurtled over the straight bridge upon which I basically throw up in my helmet as the image of Chips comes to mind. While my partner in crime...let's call him Toka is riding with one arm raised in like a victory salute after winning the King's royal jousting tourney (at 100km/hr...fast horse?).

We quickly weave and pass on the inside of all the slow poke traffic where we hit our first stop...breakfast. Nothing special other than the fact I'm kinda surprised my scooter started after it's screaming fit not 20min before. (in fact the scooter would run perfectly all day...the following week however is another @#$@#$ing story! -.-)

The ducking and diving of traffic continues until we stop again, this time next to a rocky beach for coffee. Well, Toka had a coffee....and a toke and I had a glass of ice since I had previously purloined a coke which had now warmed up a bit...and everybody hates warm coke aye? Toka whips out the camera and proceeds to photo the scooters...many times. In fact in later conversations Toka's wife said "You're sick. You took more photos of the damn bikes than of me/him/countryside/etc" I'll refer you to the comment of petrolhead.

After the coffee/toke/coke pit stop and our machines of war had cooled down a bit, off we proceed yet again to put on our game faces in testing the manufacturing capabilities of our respective motorcycling companies (err...they were the same actually....meh).

Toka is a bit of a fanboy. If he's getting computer peripherals they have to be Logitech. So of course when it came to mp3 players, it HAD to be an iPod (yes, I'm now having to scrub my fingers clean after tying that insidious word, kinda like Microsoft and Bill Gates...ARRGGGHHH, now I'll have to cut off my pinky).

Anyway, we're plummeting down the inside of cars (and some fricken Civic was on the inside shooting pine needles up into my Conan styled chest...) and suddenly Toka piles on the brakes and moves to the grassy curbside. His iPod had stopped working, so he had no Celine Dion or some other pansy crap to listen to. I sat there gloating over his misfortune since we had previously had a mp3 "which one is better" verbal war, of which he believed he had soundly won. But alas...after a bit of a cool down and a reset, his tunes were back in action and then so was our epic road trip.

Next stop was gas...not because our huge scooter engines drank gas like a baleen whale but because the gas tanks are the size of tennis ball. Again photo time, this time of the boys and their toys. Toka is loathe to give someone his camera to take a photo. Not because he's fearful of them dropping or taking off with the camera but because they always take crappy photos...or don't know how to use the camera. (like...where is the take photo button?...looking at the camera like a caveman, "umm, it on the top right" like on EVERY OTHER CAMERA). So Toka props up the camera on a pink towel. I'm rolling my eyes like a frisbee (pink towel...don't get me started). Sure enough, later...the awesome photo has a pink bottom. No comment.

Next stop was a secret beach that everybody knows about...oxymoron anybody. Nice beach, no bikinis, disappointing. Then we cruised past the beach that everybody knows about (and at a later date I almost drowned at, yikes) and continued to the best place for surfers which....had no surfers. Again it was take a bike photo shoot time.

Toka being very familiar with the area showed moi a palm tree. He was shoving his fingers into the scaly sort of bark it had whilst commenting to me in a very matter of fact tone, "you know, they say scorpions live in here" (where his fingers were now probing). I swear to God, I wish I had my video camera rolling as I had visions of the greatest youtube video ever made. "they say scorpions live in here" "really?" "yeah. ARGGGGGGGGHHH"

Alas...it didn't happen. #$@#. At this point we turned our road hogs around and headed for home...until I getting way to cocky and took a turn too fast. Off I go, pretending my scooter is now an x-cross bike. Fortunately I was able to break enough on the road to slow down to a manageable speed and simply did a sideways skid to stop. No harm no foul. The worse part was seeing the car I'd just flown past...go past. Can just imagine the smug look on the drivers face. :(. (don't worry, I passed him again, haha.) But poor Toka. Around the corners we go (he's trying his hardest to emulate Rossi), and suddenly no scooter lights from me....He stops, waits. Visions of dragging my battered corpse back to my wife flash in his mind, causing his pacemaker to leap into overtime. Seemed like my off-road excursion worried him more than me. What a caring guy.

Home we go, and we make another stop...this one for Toka...to toke of course, and I practice doing wheelies. I stopped before I broke the front end OFF (or ripped the handle bars off...you know, scooters are built SOLID...of balsa wood).

Anyway, since we left the city red lights mean nothing. (to cars yes, to us, no). So we had been happily blasting through every set of red lights (up yours SME!). My machine has ABS and I've never fully tested them, so I thought why not now. Up comes the red light, (I'm in the lead at this point as Toka's machine has far superior acceleration but mine has a higher top end) at full speed...kinda, Toka close behind and I SLAM on the breaks. "Wow, not bad" Toka however is more like, "what the fk are you doing?", passes and burns though the red light....with the POLICE on the other side now flagging him down.

BUSTED (did I mention that Toka still had contraband on his person?)

Anyway, being a cool cat, he gives the cop his license and rego, which I think really surprised the cop (most foreigners here don't bother with all that legal stuff :s). So...Toka gets let off with just a warning (all the speeding tickets however will be in the mail). A few k's down the road, I need a pit stop and Toka decides now is a good time to hide the rest of the contraband (from on his person to IN his person)

We finally hit home...with incredibly red arms. Being no stranger to sunburn and know this is gonna hurt tomorrow, I comment to Toka. "Put some Aloe Vera on it" He looks at me and starts laughing his guts out, like I'm some wuss. "Na, I'll be fine, had worse" And shakes his head at the Aloe comment. Next day..."Arrgggh, my arms are burning. Damn, don't touch me" Of course I'm laughing like a jackel. "Want Aloe?" "Shut the #$# UP!"

And that dear readers is the Chip roadtrip, next up, who knows. Yesterday I remembered how I could get Mum to race back from the cowshed early.

Fun Games

Having no siblings and growing up in the middle of nowhere, t'was very easy for boredom to set in and the imagination to...wander. In any child food and sleep run secondary to amusement. Ahh, the quest to amuse ourselves. Running around the house naked didn't work, nobody would start shrieking which of course, GIVES the amusement. The only onlookers are of the bovine breed and they were probably mooing "Oh my God, I've gone blind".

Jumping off the roof, putting ramjet bullets (used in quickly killing cattle) in the vice and squeezing until BANG (or throwing a whole bunch into the incinerator...) were just some of the things one could do to amuse oneself on boring weekends.

The real fun occurred when my best mate would be around for the weekend.

Mother would use what we called spider fences to fence off various parts of the farm. Like a normal fence there were wires (all hot which gave a nice kick, NB: DO NOT PISS ON A HOT FENCE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Try to imagine getting kicked...repeatedly in the testicles by a donkey!) normally 3 wires, the unique thing is the posts. Not made of posts (saving the environment), but of fibreglass (not saving the environment...). So putting up a fence was much quicker and easier since putting the fibreglass rods in the ground was much simpler than digging a huge hole to China and back to put in the traditional fence post.

Fibreglass rods have a couple of unique properties. First and foremost is that if you don't wear 15 layers of gloves your hands will be itching like a really itching thing for the rest of your natural born life. Secondly and most importantly for our amusement is that they are strong yet....flexible with a tendency to snap back...

Dawson and myself first used these new space age technology to make swords, and then we'd try and kill each other with them. (I think the only thing we did kill was a rooster, chased it for ages, got it in the cowshed, Dawson went one way I went the other, came around the corner and all swordplay when out my head and I just swung like a baseball player, BLAT, Dawson and co. 1, Roosters 0).

The thing with using these rods as swords was...no guard. With this in mind I'd regularly slide my 'sword' down his and splat, right into his hands, haha, what a bastard. It happened once, sorry. Twice, sorry. Third....Dawson: "Oh #$%# this" and in a fit of rage threw his 'sword' into the ground. I start laughing like a chimpanzee, and even more when (remember fibreglass rods are flexible) his sword rebounded from the ground and flew straight back up into his head! WHACK. Oh crap that was funny. Dawson hits the ground in a wail of pain (there was even a little bit of blood), I think to this day he's still fearful of throwing stuff when he's pissed off.

Well that was toy one with fibreglass rods. Bearing in mind they are flexible we felt we weren't using them to their full potential. After watching Robin Hood, (light bulb...ON, ding!) BOWS!

We made bows from them with a bit of bailing twine. Brought a few real arrows from the friendly local corner hunting shop. New game! Fire arrow straight up into the air. When it comes down stick your foot out. Whoever can get their foot closest to the arrow (without impaling your foot to the ground wins.) Oh, the hours of amusement...not really. Amusement stopped when Dawson loaded an arrow, pulled back (arrow in the down position) and slipped. Arrow goes flying at point blank into my FOOT!

Dawson of course is pissing himself laughing, and the only thing I can say in a dumbfounded dazed phrase was "Dude...you shot me...in the foot" with of course, the arrow sticking out of my boot and foot.

After writing this I now wonder...did he slip or was it revenge for the sliding sword trick?