Meet Aya! My future home and transportation, in my downsizing journey to make a difference in my life and hopefully a few others. After almost two years of cooking up various harebrained schemes, the craziest one arrived in the form of a little secondhand ice-cream tuk-tuk. With only 10km on the clock, she was a good find, despite having been stationary for almost three years. Four frustrating months later, waiting for the transfer of ownership to be processed by the traffic department, the day finally arrived to get this project off the ground.
Upon picking the tuk-tuk up from the lot, some harsh realities started to dawn on me. Although I owned a smart car before, whilst towering at 1.9m, a tuk-tuk is extremely small. Inside the cockpit, I can barely move; both my knees and head becoming a near structural part of the vehicle. And with the added complexities of: multi-levered controls, very stiff steering and some may-god-be-with-me blind spots, frankly, I was shitting myself!
By the time we had loaded her on the trailer, put a few backs out, and dealt with insurance, I was somewhat calmer and started looking at her in a more positive light. The slow ride from Midrand to Greenside also gave me enough time to think of the adventures and possibilities that lay ahead.
My momentary state of relief, or be it resignation, soon vanished with our maiden voyage up my driveway. A couple of misfires, lurches and engine cuts later; concluded in the spine-chilling moment where the front wheel suddenly reared up. A bad combination of my inclined driveway, an extremely poor weight distribution and almost 400cc of wild untamed power; forced me to throw my weight forward and drop that feisty front wheel back down to sweet mother Earth. The reality of what I was doing again hit me, as she touched down and the engine died with a spluttering halt.
I wanted to run for the hills, find my receipt and send it back! Acknowledge my lapse of sanity and slide back behind the comforting veil of normality…
I might possibly need training wheels.
Be sure to check out the rest of the site to get a glimpse of what's happening.
