Funny that – I was thinking the same thing when I read your post. But it could have been [/quote]
I have a feeling we might have been going with Brendan to his house in Xin Dian, and were just wandering down t’road 'til a taxi came past. But I can’t remember if Brendan was there or not (!)
Crikey ! But you’ll have to agree that what you felt then was nothing to the mortification experienced by a 19-year of Hexuan in front of Chungxiao Sogo as he pulled the front brake of his 50cc scooter and ate tarmac (actually steel plating) at 20kph while ogling schoolgirls waiting at the bus stop, who all creased themselves laughing.
Worst crash I was in. T-boned by another motorcycle in London, broke my leg and bent my Benelli in half. First quack wanted to cut the leg below the knee, and so did the second. Thankfully the third opinion was a bit more favorable and I still have two good legs.
Silliest crash I was in. My friend had crashed his CB750 into a wall when the throttle had stuck open and broken his arm. I took him on the back my bike (with his arm in cast and sling) to get parts to repair it. On the way back some silly bint put her Mini where I couldn’t miss it and we both went over the handlebars. I twisted around some in midair to see my buddy flying over the top of me, waving his one good arm around, knowing the landing was going to hurt like hell, but somewhat gratified it was going to be worse for him. I ended up boning the silly bint with the Mini.
Hit and run. Drunk in Jag hits pedestrian on dark country lane and leaves little but a very large red pool to mark the spot. I walked up just as the cop cars arrived to light the scene and thought it was a deer until I noticed some clothing fragments that weren’t quite soaked. They stopped the driver in the next county, with a hand still stuck in the radiator grill, denying everything.
Stunt-rider award. Ripping around Tai/chung with a bunch of drunken foreigners, through uncontrolled intersection (we had right of way). Frenchman in front of me plowed into car coming from left, cartwheeled right over the car and landed on his feet unscratched. We must have been going about 70. The driver got out and started getting all shirty with us, we were going to pay for this, he was going to call the cops, he was going to call his buddies to come sort us out… blah blah blah. Then the main group of about a dozen laowai came back looking for us and the Frenchman got paid off in a hurry and with a thousand paisays.
Most gruesome. Driver of little blue truck that drifted into the central divider, 10m or so in front of the truck, via a hole in the windshield, minus his head. Wife (I guess) and some other family members kneeling there wailing.
Second most gruesome. Old guy with 40 biendang hanging off each handlebar trying to sneak a right turn on red onto Shinyi near the WTC. Taxi nails him, bike disappears with taxi, rider gets catapulted about 10m straight up in air, lands on his head. Blood and grey stuff everywhere.
Also noteworthy. Drunk leaves KTV with one of the girls, crashes his Benz into a traffic light, which then catches fire. He flees and leaves the girl (probably unconcious) in the car. Next morning I ride past the burned out wreck and for some reason look in to see the burnt corpse of the KTV bunny still in the passenger seat.
Get it off me award. Old guy gets sideswiped by some largish car, but falls the wrong way and somehow gets his arm wedged up in the front wheel well of the car. Driver is oblivious to all this and carries on up the road at about 40 or 50, dragging the old guy with him. The old guy is trying to bang on the door with his good arm to attract the attention of the driver, but (I guess) being lower than the window the driver can’t see where the noise is coming from and just carries on regardless. Finally some other scooter pilots flag him over and explain what the funny thumping noises were all about.
Taxi driver drove past my car on an overpass here in Tainan (two lane road, one both way), gave me the finger for being stuck in traffic, then was promptly blown over the side of the overpass, in big and small bits and pieces, by an oncoming city bus. Bus stopped, we were stuck in traffic, so I got to see the bus driver give the trashed taxi, and dead driver, the finger over the side of the overpass while waiting for the police to arrive. Driving in Taiwan is NOT for the faint of heart!
worst: the Shinkong Mitsukoshi (formerly the tallest building in Taipei) and some fool in a big black benz (how the fcuk did he build up the speed to do this in the area by the train station?) lost control, jumped the curb and pinned (squeezed/cut in half) two male pedestrians. I arrived on the scene as the car was pulled away from the wall and the bodies were scraped off the wall and ground. freakin gruesome.
on a lighter side: a buddy from Canada, Sven, had just arrived in Taipei and test driving a scooter (for the first time) on YenPing North Rd. goes head on into an oncoming car. Miraculously, the fool flips over the car in Evil Kneivel(sp?) style and lands on his back untouched, His butt was a little bruised, but he walked it off. This was a guy who pulled a lot of chicks, always a lucky guy.
Had an interesting near death experience this weekend.
Driving (in my 4X4) back accross the Northern cross island highway from Ilan to Taipei (beautiful route by the way ).
I was on one of the many sections with a low wall on one side beyond which is a sheer drop to the river hundreds of feet below on the other side a deep drainage gully.
Passing a cement lorry coming at me at high speed ( I was also going a little too fast…) , I puuled over just too far & put a rear wheel in the gully as we passed each other. Loud bang as the axle hit the road. The momentum kept me going sufficiently to pull the wheel out of the gully but flicked the car sideways sending me straight towards the low wall.
Fortunately managed to turn it (in a slidy ,skiddy sort of way)back into the road & eventually after a couple more twists & turns regained control.
Felt fairly shaken by the exprience when thinking about the outcomes of either 1) putting the front wheel (rahter than the rear)into the gully , which would probably have turned the car over 2) not regaining control before hitting the low wall on theother side of the road…
needless to say my driving post this incident was somewhat more conservative.
Has anyone ever put a front wheel into one of those roadside ditchs ?
I managed to flip a go-kart last weekend at the KART place along the river in Xindian. As for motorcycle incidents, once I hit a taxi who turned in front of me at speed…ruined his front panel and mirror, flew right over him.
Driving back from Kenting to KaoHsuing one night this past July, I was on a stretch where all the coffee stands set up shop and there was a fire blazing to one of the trees on the ocean side of the road. As I drove by, the ambulance and police cars were were nearby attending to the fire. I sorta thought that a propane tank blew up or a coffee stand caught on fire because I saw something like a big cylinder burning. The next day, the newspaper described a car going to Kenting at high speed but couldn’t manage the high speed and flipped several times stopping next to the tree. What I should have seen is the underside of the car burning that night with two occupants inside.
I’ve seen too many awful accidents around here to even want to think about it.
But as for myself, when I was 17 years old, I had one of the oddest accidents ever. I literally got blown off my motorcycle by the wind. It was on the freeway, at 65 mph. The bike was totalled, but I was only mildly injured. No broken bones, but I’ve still got a crooked tooth in my mouth as a reminder. My helmet and faceshield were all battered and cracked. I really believe in helmets now.
The place where this accident happened is called “Devil’s Gorge” in California, on Interstate 8 where San Diego County meets Imperial County. I’ve have since been back, and now the freeway is lined with a “wind fence” on both sides. Apparently, there were a lot of such accidents there.
Long, long ago on the mountain road to Pai in Northern Thailand, I was riding a hire bike. It was around dusk, and I had to stop for gas at a 44 gallon drum roadside pump. Ecoing through the mountains behind me I could here a group of motorcycles. Shortly, they pulled up beside me. They were two Isralies and a Yank. The Yank asked if he could ride together with me as the Isralies were too skilled for him to safely keep up. This should have told me something about this guys bike skills.
We took off together and he eventually asked if he could ride in front of me so that he wouldn’t get left behind. It was when the cicadas started and he began looking around whimsically that his bike moved into the loose gravel that collects in the middle of the road. As the bike went from under him, I was left with having to pick the gap between his head and the bike. I hit him at about fifty miles an hour. I and my bike then took off over the edge of what was about a 50 meter drop to the switch back below. I didn’t fall the full 50 because of the folige. Remarkably, I was unhurt. When I struggled back to the road, the American lay lifeless on the tar mat. Running through my mind was the thought of simply pushing his body over the edge, but as I got closer I could see that in fact he wasn’t dead at all. He was playing chicken. I helped him to his feet. In his shock he couldn’t stop repeating what to me seemed pretty damn obvious, “You ran right over the top of me man. You ran right over the top of me.”
Since that time I’ve often wondered if it’s not some peculiar Americanism to state the bleeding obvious. Much the same as in those old Westerns during a shoot out. The loser could be often heard saying, “You’ve god damn gone and put a hole in my belly.”
I was in a car with a friend in Taichung. It was a big, four lane intersection (NOT a ‘STREET ENTRANCE’ … NOT a ‘STREET ENTRANCE’… it is called an ‘INTERSECTION’…)
We were on the inside lane about to take a left. The light was red, so we… stopped at the red light, just like the cars on the other side of the street that were patiently waiting for the light…
But this super-speeder race car mafia jerk comes speeding from behind us. He breezes past us and tries to make a left. His car skids, he loses control, gains control, loses control, no, there - yes, he’s got control again and smacks head on into the driver’s seat of the car that was waiting at the red light across from us…
We think the driver was dead…
I mean… it went right into the driver’s seat door and was buried into that car… all we saw coming from the driver’s seat was smoke…
There was this woman at a party who, as she left, got mowed down by this expensive sports car. Hit and Run. It was horrible. And I kept seeing it over and over again. In slow motion even. It was so real, it was like I could actually see inside her body and watch her bones break.
It turns out it was this real nasty bit of business who was killing the woman because she was going to blow the whistle on his brother for killing another woman in the erm…“heat” of passion. It made the news because it turns out, the brothers enjoyed diplomatic immunity and couldn’t be touched. The cops got one of them tho, when they went fishing in Internatonal waters. Scary huh?
Oh…wait…I think I was watching CSI and sitting a little too close to erm…my friend’s bingbong.
Hope no-one else apart from the asshole taxi driver was hurt.