You might be thinking why don't you just fix the puncture yourself ? Very good question, my dad taught me to fix punctures along with a whole heap of other useful handyman skills when I was a kid, but it's just not the way it's done around here. Khmer's don't carry tools because you can find a mobile repair shop on every street corner where a few locals eke out a living fixing up bikes, scooters, motorbikes and tuk-tuks with a portable compressed air tank, puncture repair kit, bucket of water and the essential hammer. The bikes here are very basic, so it works well with this kind of system. I'm sure if you rocked up with some fancy western racing bike or suspended mountain bike with Shimano group-set it would cause quite a stir but pretty quickly they would work out what needed to be done (although they might use a hammer to do it).
So I point to my flat rear tyre and frown. Seems to do the trick on the communication front. My man sticks some air in, puts a blob of saliva on the valve and watches. Fiddles a bit, repeats the exercise. Seems to come to the conclusion that the valve is duff (i'm not so sure but hey, what do I know). So, surely i'll be getting a new inner tube right ? Oh no, my inner tube looks pristine compared to most of the tubes in service on bikes here which consist more of patches than rubber, and they're not going to throw it away for the sake of a valve. So, out comes the hack-saw blade. Starting to get a little bit sceptical but hey i'll go with it. He saws off the valve (at the rubber). I now have an inner tube with a gaping hole in it. All my western mechanical instincts are screaming at me to say something, but I wait with baited breath to see what happens next. Out comes a modified valve with a hand-made stopper of thick rubber...goes in the hole, glue on the tube around the new valve. OK, still not sure about this... Next, a hole is punched in a regular repair patch with a hammer (yay, the hammer). Patch goes on around valve. Hmmm, i'm trying to work out how they are going to stop the air leaking. Ah I see, a nut goes over the whole lot and gets cranked tight. Then it's back into the tyre, retaining nut over the top, air goes in and jobs a good'un.
These kind of methods apply to cars & motorbikes too. The back street mechanics workshops look like something from the Industrial Revolution in Britain. There isn't a car or bike in Cambodia which has ever had a manufacturers service (which makes buying a vehicle here a bit hazardous). The concept of manufacturers parts or even the right part for the job doesn't
really exist. The Russian Market which is popular with tourists, has around a quarter of it's stalls devoted to second hand scooter parts. If you were savvy enough you could go shopping for parts and build a scooter from the ground up. I was thinking the other day, if you took a random sample of say 100 people from the streets of London or Melbourne and let them loose in the Russian Market, how many could make a functioning vehicle ? I reckon you'd be lucky to get 2. Our knowledge and service economy, niche job specialisms and lives spent sitting in front of computers in glass towers have made us forget how to get by. It reminds me of the Golgafrincham storyline in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. In Cambodia, my guess is 20 or maybe more could put together a scooter in the space of a day. These guys have mad skills, born of necessity and experience I guess. Not in a "Western, well trained, follow the manual, do everything right kind of way" but in a "get it back on the road using anything to hand, ingenious, it doesn't count if you don't use a hammer kind of way".Oh, and the puncture repair is holding up well so far...
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