I stopped off at the good ol' neighorhood scooter market to go hunting for a simple pump device that everyone talks about, but have yet to see it. It's this gadget that enables you to siphon gasoline from one motorcycle to another. The idea is that many of my friends drive scooters within downtown Shanghai, and I recently purchased a small scooter for that purpose also. The scooter cost pennies, well 2500 RMB to be exact, and a friend gave me a severe discount on it. The scooter is far better for cruising around downtown than a motorcycle for various reasons.
The motorcycle is better suited for long-distance trips or city-to-city runs. It is the perfect vehicle to do the Shanghai-Luxu run, for example. Every time I've done that run on a motorcycle, it has saved me 300 RMB in taxi fare one-way!! It has also saved about 2 hours of time each way. Eventually I'm going to sell my current Yamaha 125cc bike in June, and then upgrade to a 250cc bike with legal drivers license and legal plates around October or so. The scooter I'll keep for zipping around the city in the interim and not bother with registering it.
However, recent posts have indicated that Shanghai is cracking down on these kind of scooters by refusing fuel-ups at the gas stations. This is where the fuel pumping device comes in handy. The idea is that you fill up a larger motorcycle with gas and then siphon it off to the scooters downtown. It is economical to make a trip out to Jiangsu province with a motorcycle, for example, in order to get a guaranteed full tank of gas out there. But it doesn't make sense to do this with a scooter, as it would use up 1/4 of the gas tank just to make the trip.
When I went to the scooter shop to inquire about such a device, they first asked me how much fuel I wanted to purchase to fill up the motorcyle. Not quite what I meant, but I had to laugh. Clearly there is a thriving underground market for fuel already, but I wasn't buying --- just wanted the device, thanks. The shop owner figured it out, showed me the pump and I'm like, yep, that's it, I'll take it for 15 RMB. She also offered a small jerry can for 45 RMB and I bargained for 50 RMB to get both of them together.
The fuel device is incredibly simple, yet incredibly brilliant. It is just two plastic nozzles connected to a hand-pumping mechanism, not unlike the things used to grease a turkey. You either siphon from a motorcycle or car's gas tank into a jerry-can, or you siphon directly from one motorcyle to another. At any rate, I'm gonna give it a whirl tomorrow.
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