Manage-for-Oneself-Land

Around here repairs tend to be of the make-do variety. Instead of pouring new pavement, you parquet the broken concrete pieces jigsaw style. Rather than rewire, you figure out which of the many old strands might still have some life left in them. If you can imagine yet another use for the perforated, preformatted steel planking known as Marston Mat, then you can be sure your supply will never run out here.

The ultimate example of this jury-rigging and MacGyvering took place on the way home from a bike race last weekend. Seven of us had told our friends and families to expect our return from Sagaing Region, north of Mandalay, by dinner time Sunday evening. Then, two setbacks.

First was that Ben won the race. Of course everyone was pleased by this result. But it did mean we couldn’t slip away until after the award ceremony.

Second was that the truck radiator burst. I’m talking about torn asunder. A serious schism. No bubble gum, black pepper, or eggwhite fixes for this badboy. We tried pouring in water, only to watch it gush right out the bottom.

No highway patrolman was going to rock up and ask how he could help. And there’s no such thing here as a roadside assistance organization like AAA. This is Myanmar, otherwise known as Manage-for-Oneself-Land. 

We had no duct tape, no matches, none of the things MacGyver would have pulled out of his bag. Only a truck full of bicycles, a knife or two, and some inner tube patch kits...

..."Hey, wait a sec," we said. If we have patch kits, that means we have inner tubes. And if we have inner tubes...

We set to work stripping the bikes of their tubes, slicing each one along its equator, and fashioning rubber bandages. After wrapping the radiator in bike-tube band-aids, we limped off down the road at 30 miles per hour. Home was about 225 miles away.

Topping up the radiator at the rate of about a gallon per half hour, we arrived in time for breakfast.