The Trouble With Tuk Tuks.

Tam and I will be taking off in two days for our tuk tuk adventure around Sri Lanka. The tuk tuk (who is officially named Enzo) had some other ideas.

As with any Ferrari vehicle, they tend to be finicky and a bit sensitive at best, and our Ferrari-Imposter is no different. On our way to dinner a few nightlights ago with one of the local boys and his girlfriend, Enzo decided to break down on us. It started innocently enough with some sputtering and difficulty starting over a week or so, and then when he felt he wasn’t getting enough attention, he decided to just quit then and there on the side of the road.

So, in the best Sri Lankan fashion, the guy selling corn on the street near where we broke down had a look and said his brother was a mechanic. His brother was called, spent ten minutes checking out Enzo’s insides, and said we needed to take it to his shop. He pushed us in our tuk tuk about a half of a kilometer with his fifty cc motorbike and his left foot. Once at the shop, he found that Enzo had a bad coil, and called the local auto parts shop which was closed. Not to be denied, he made several more rapid-fire calls, got in touch with the shop’s owner (a friend of his cousin’s sister I think), and ran to the shop to pick up a coil. The coil was replaced and Enzo started up, but not without difficulty. On our way out of the shop, after paying a total of about four US dollars for all of this, the mechanic said that he thought the valves were leaking.

Uh oh.

The next day we took Enzo in to his regular mechanic for a once-over (yes. We already have a regular mechanic). Here, we found the valves were leaking, the brake master cylinder was bad, a rear wheel bearing was bad, and the magneto was not charging the battery. After all that was fixed, Enzo would still not start without a fair amount of coaxing, so it came to light that we were leaking compression into the crankcase (bad piston rings most likely).

That is a really, really bad piston.

Two days later Enzo was ready to roll. Slowly. After replacing the cylinder head and bore, piston, and rings, we can now only drive our beloved little tuk tuk at forty kilometers per hour for the next one thousand kilometers of break-in period.

Sri Lanka is only four hundred and fifty kilometers long and two hundred and twenty-five kilometers wide, so basically the entire rest of our trip will be done at some very pedestrian paces. We will be seeing everything there is to see at about twenty-five miles per hour.

Our repair bill came to one hundred and twenty US dollars, of which five thousand rupees (about sixteen dollars) was the mechanics labor charge for two days worth of work. He is the kindest and friendliest man, and would not accept extra payment for any reason. I leave there feeling guilty every time.

Enzo starts really well now, and runs great!

He is back baby, and ready to roll. Let the tuk tuk travels around Sri Lanka commence…