Claire Bear's Thoughts

We were traversing KM 1359 of Malungon road towards Sarangani Province on July 10, 2008 at around 8:30 AM, when suddenly, the Lancer's clutch, despite the persistent attempts of my boss, wouldn't engage. If he wouldn't step on the brakes, the car would move backwards and the situation was really panicky since we were at a steep hill at that time and was actually an accident prone area. And did I mention we were actually stuck on a winding road? OMG!

My boss immediately called his wife who owns the car and asked what could possibly be wrong with her car. She called some mechanic contacts and let them talk to my boss for the symptoms. My boss also tried calling Roadwatch but to his dismay, since out of Davao rescues aren't free, he was quoted a large Php 5,000.00 worth for towing only! Whew! The solution was his wife will be bringing some mechanics who bought the possible spare parts that'll be replaced. And so, we will have to wait for almost 2 hours for them.

Huge trucks ad buses were passing us every minute and regardless that it was a blind curve, it didn't seem to matter to the truck and bus drivers because they were still on high speed. There was this one bus who was in full speed and was stupidly trying to overtake another bus on that curve and it was actually headed towards us. I thought I'd die at that instant cause I was on the passenger seat and the bus was getting really close to our car. Luckily, I'm still writing this blog.

Apparently, the waiting took so long and Aileen and I were getting bored and hot. At last, Ma'am Emmy arrived with the mechanics but then again, according to them, it might take 4 hours to repair the car. We couldn't just leave Ma'am Emmy out there so we waited until the car gets fixed. The waiting was terrible! Just imagine we were amidst dusty bushes and trees (more like a dusty jungle) and nowhere to sit. We couldn't sit in the car cause it was intensely hot that time already. And worse, I was about to pee in my pants. So what I did was borrowed Aileen's sweaters, covered myself with it and peed at the bushes. ^_^ Another thing that contributed to our discomfort was there was this group of bees that kept on flying around us and irritatingly buzzing near my ears. And there were these black ants also who chose to attack the rock I was sitting on leaving me tiringly standing while waiting.

It was just morning and there were so much bad luck already...I wonder if Aileen's the jinx??? Peace Ai!

At around 2:30 PM, finally the car got fixed. Kudos to the mechanics who, with limited tools and exposure to the intense heat of the sun, disassembled the machine, replaced the clutch plate and assembled it back to a better condition.

Finally, we are again on our way to Sarangani Province. Luckily (at last), the client suggested that we take the rest of the day to relax so that we'd have clear heads the following day.