March 12 - Australia: Brisbane, Queensland
Jon woke up and went for a run this morning, despite the fact that he's starting to feel poorly again. We think that his cold has turned into an infection. But asking him not to run is like asking him not to breathe.
The weather here is lovely. It's not humid at all, although we're told that this is a relatively new development in the area. But it was a nice day to go to the car mechanic.
Michelle and Darren recommended someone to us last night. So called this morning, and Bruce said that we should drop by this afternoon. After lunch, we followed his directions and went to Kelvin Grove Road to see Bruce Richards at Kelvin Grove Parts and Service.
Kelvin Grove Parts and Service
Kelvin Grove is pretty small place, but it specializes in Land Rovers and Range Rovers so we were happy with that. Bruce was really quite nice, and told us he'd take about an hour to look at the truck and see what's up. So Jon and I walked a block or two away and sat in a nearby park for an hour or so. I had the latest issue of "She" magazine, so I read him bits and pieces of any articles I thought he might find interesting. For example, he didn't really care about the cover story "Meg Ryan and Her New Aussie Man", but he perked up at the juicy parts of "Seven Days to Better Sex". Figures. Then he lay down on the park bench and chilled out for a while.
After an hour, we went back to see Bruce and get the bad news. Here's Jon's take on what Bruce had to say:
Mechanic-speak as interpreted by Jon So we walked back to the garage to see what Bruce had to say about the truck. The first bad sign was that the truck was still in one of the garage bays and not back around front yet - this is never a good sign because it tends to mean that the vehicle in question is usually so far gone that all of the mechanics had to be called over for a consultation. Bruce tells us that they put the truck up on the rack and shifted into 4WD, and sure enough, the truck was making some "God-awful noise". We liked Bruce right away because he was able to speak our language! Bruce said that they had narrowed down the likely culprits from being either the transfer case, one of the differentials, or maybe an axle, to being almost certainly the transfer case. He explained how he arrived at this decision, but I was already ahead of him thinking, Great, where do we get a new transfer case for our gray market Toyota 4Runner (really called a Surf in Japan). Yeah, did we mention when we bought the car back in December that Toyota dealers don't want anything to do with? The Surfs that are imported directly from Japan, since they aren't sold by Toyota of Australia, aren't serviced by Toyota dealers and they refuse to stock parts for them. On the upside the Surfs tend to be in better shape and because they are predominantly city cars they haven't been driven as hard as Aussie 4Runners, but parts can be difficult to get.
So Bruce did some calling around for parts for our truck. He called a friend of a friend down somewhere south in Victoria - this guy told Bruce he had a transfer case and gearbox that he could part with for $1,500. I don' t know much about cars but this sounded steep to me and I think Bruce knew this wasn't the best deal he could get. I'm not kidding when I tell you that Bruce spent the next 45 minutes on the phone calling from Brizzy (that's what Aussies call Brisbane) all the way out to Perth for parts. Eventually he found a bloke in town that he knew that works on Surfs and such and found the same combo, transfer case and gearbox, for $550. I was glad that Bruce had done some shopping around and Bruce even said that the friend of a friend down in Victoria obviously isn't much of a friend. Yeah, no kidding! Asking 3 times what the part goes for here in Brizzy...I guess that's capitalism for you though.
OK, so the story is finally starting to end. Bruce told us to bring the car back tomorrow morning and he'll get the transfer case off after lunch and see if he can just fix it. Likely answer being no, he'll get the transfer case/gearbox from his mate and install the new transfer case, assuming that the transfer case and the gearbox can be separated. The theory being, why replace the current gearbox that is known to work with one that is only supposed to work? Besides, the labor involved in putting in a new gearbox would mean way more money and would probably take them several more hours. So that's the story on the truck. We'll drop it off tomorrow and hold our breath from there!
Dinner With Darren and Michelle
We went into Chinatown, which is a small pedestrian mall in New Farm. Darren told us to meet them at "New Hunan" at 8:00, so we did. It was great to see them again, and they even brought their photo album from our trip to China. They took some lovely pictures and had some great memorabilia from the trip. And now they're planning on going back there next year. Michelle said that they're going to spend a year teaching English there. That's so incredibly cool, and something I know they'll be good at. The interesting thing is that their trip to China in September was their first time out of Australia. And not only did they not suffer from culture shock, but they loved it so much that they want to go back for this extended period of time. I find that very admirable.
Me in Chinatown
For dinner, we ate Chinese-style and ordered four dishes for all of us to share. We laughed at the differences between China and Western Chinese restaurants, in that we didn't have to nag them to bring us the rice immediately. I'm not sure if I ever mentioned that in the China journals, but in China the rice is served after the main meal. It's a post-meal filler and not something they eat with the meal. So we used to have to nag them to death to get the rice during the meal. But not so in western countries.
After dinner, we made plans to hang out later in the week and said our good-byes. Then we went home to watch Australia's version of "Temptation Island", which is a REALLY sad show. But it's smack in between CSI and West Wing, so what choice do we have?