Mini Cabs From HellWe've all taken a dodgy cab in our time. One guy asked me to give him a back-rub in exchange for letting me off the fare. I was like, "here's the cash mate." Another chappy claimed to be Paddy Patel - a child actor from UK TV series Tuckers Luck - he drove like a speed freak and regaled me with stories that "playing a black Irish boy. England wasn't ready for it." So go on - tell us your worst and we'll tell the world.
[edit: for those confused by the term mini-cab, London has two sorts of taxis: highly regulated, licensed and salt-of-the-earth black cabs that you see in films and a whole bunch of unlicensed, uninsured, random cars driven by nutters who aren't supposed to pick up from the street (you have to phone for them). They are universally rubbish]
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rob, Wed 26 May 2004, 21:44)
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The only cab I've gotten that was worse than the turkish experience I had once(we made the mistake of telling the driver we were in a hurry to get to Istanbul airport, and ended up in an Outrun-style speed race through the city and motorways to get there early, shaken and bruised...)
...was a cab in Lima. In Peru, to become a taxi driver, you need a little yellow sticker marked "TAXI", and - for preference - a car.
They all use yellow cars, so to attempt to regulate this, the government stencilled numbers on the side of official cabs. So of course the rest of them just painted numbers on!
Anyway, the long and short of it - having bounced hard off a barrier on the high coastal road, I told the drunken driver I'd like to see more of the city on the way, in a desperate attempt to get him off the cliff road.
He decided to nip north then, burning through the grid of dirt roads in the barrios.This coinsisted of accelerating constantly, blessing himself before holding the horn as we flew threw junctions - narrowly missing the blur of other blaring cabs crossing our path...
I guess it's cheaper than a rollercoaster if nothing else...
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WhoElse I'm what Willis was talking about, Thu 27 May 2004, 12:22,
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