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The Myway Code

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H.P. Saucecraft on Driving For Your Life In Rural Thailand

The Thais are not the worst drivers in the world, although they seem keen to give that impression.

They’re not even the worst in South East Asia; the feeling that Vietnamese road users are out to kill you is not without foundation, and the Cambodian understanding of the rules of the road is even sketchier than the Thai – going offroad through a jungle carpeted with landmines can sometimes seem the safer option in a country where road users on the wrong side of the road have precedence. Lao PDR only has one road, but abundance of good luck and an almost supernatural attentiveness is required to get from one end to the other. Or even across.

Thai drivers have a 360 degree blind spot. They will cheerfully drift across lanes, pull out, reverse, overtake and slew to a halt with zero awareness of other road users. Mirrors (in cars or on bikes) are used exclusively as personal grooming aids, allowing minute inspection of complexion flaws while parked in front of the Seven or speeding across an intersection. Why on earth would you want to look where you’ve been? What’s the point of that? The interiors of Thai cars and trucks are festooned with good luck talismans which work hard to compensate for the lethally obscured view. The really careful Thai driver never neglects to lift his hands from the wheel in a respectful ‘wai’ whenever he passes a temple – a friend of mine did this regularly, and heart-stoppingly, on a curved section of raised expressway in Bangkok. But the barely-suppressed urban road rage which infects some drivers in the capital is mostly absent out here in the sticks. Near misses result more often than not in exchanged smiles – that was lucky! – than punch-ups. But the white painted outlines of crashed vehicles on the streets of my home town are frequent reminders that you can’t be too careful.

The rule of staying alive on Thai roads is simple – the answer is yes. Is that clapped-out pick-up truck really going to slew across the road and force me into a crowd of schoolchildren waiting to cross? Yes. Is that cute girl really going to walk her scooter backwards into the traffic without so much as a glance? Yes. Is a nine-year old barefoot boy on a stripped Honda really going to shoot airborne across the main road from a farm track? Yes. Will that government officer flashing his Hilux headlights really smash into me headlong unless I drive into the ditch? Yes. Is that tuk-tuk really going to try to edge between me and the foodstand? Yes. Always allow for the worst possible scenario as the best and drive accordingly.

Rural Thais use motosai to carry anything that can be persuaded – even momentarily – to stay on. Trussed pigs and caged chickens, long bundles of pipework or bamboo, furniture, sacks of rice and cement, and of course the extended family. And some dogs standing upfront, preferably wearing T-shirts and sunglasses. Although six-up is much rarer here than in Cambodia, the sight of three girls nested on a Honda busily occupied with phone calls, iced coffees, and checking their make-up while swerving through what passes for rush-hour traffic is one of the routine pleasures of streetlife. If you’re at a safe distance. The business at hand – transportation – occupies the least part of their attention, if at all.

Thais have a vampire-like terror of sunlight, and will do anything short of wearing a hat to prevent it hitting their faces while riding a motorbike. Usually, holding a hand over their eyes is enough. In the absence of a pretty parasol, they will improvise protection using an electricity bill, school books (there are no other kind of books in Isaan), kitchenware, or clothing pulled right over the head. The risk of catapulting off because you can’t see where you’re going is rated a distant second to the unflattering effect of the sun’s rays on the skin, and this one-handed technique presents the farang driver with a whole new level of driving survival challenges.

Even empty roads (and they’re not exactly rare out here) aren’t an occasion to relax. To suggest that ninety-nine per cent of road construction funding disappears into local government officers’ and construction company bosses’ (usually the two are related, if not identical) trouser pockets would be the vilest insult and possibly something of an exaggeration, but the impression that Isaan roads are made by coolie-hatted labourers flattening a red dirt track with their bare feet before giving it a fine misting of black paint is hard to shift. In a landscape where water is always present, with roads necessarily raised on levées above the rice fields, the concept of drainage seems completely alien to the Thai mind. Thai “plumbers” have a touching faith in the ability of water to run uphill (it comes out of taps, right?). So the water moves, as water will, under the roadway, sucking great pot-holes out of it. Eventually someone may come along with a bucket of dirt, but the potholes’ continuous reappearance is seen as a baffling natural phenomenon about which nothing can be done. The occasional stretch of properly-built road (where the funding actually reached the works due to some administrative oversight) is cruelly deceiving, changing suddenly and without warning into a meteor-scarred lunar surface that will snap your shock absorbers like drinking straws, or, if you are crazed enough to be on a motorcycling holiday, separate you from your ride, possibly permanently.

Other features offer relief from the boredom of long cross-country drives. In addition to sink-holes of disaster movie proportions, Isaan roads boast knife-edge ridges of tarmac, where the roadway has melted and set into tyre-shredding waves. And then there’s the livestock – will that cow amble across the road right in front of you? Yes. And probably dragging a tether that will get caught in your suspension. Cows and buffalo, unlike Thai drivers, are very aware of your presence but do not give a damn. They have the divine right to go where they want and stand where they like, and they are quite solid enough to fold up the front of your truck like origami, so you do not want to hit one, not even for fun.

The gendarmes of my home town have a relaxed approach to motorcyclists not wearing helmets, in spite of the fading 100% HELMET posters on every other lamp-post. Basically we don’t have to, so we don’t. Twice a week the boys in brown set up roadblocks on the main road to make a few beer tokens from motorcyclists who have – incredibly – forgotten this regularly-observed ritual. The workaround which avoids this rigorous police initiative takes a continuous stream of bareheaded motorcyclists – as paperless as a Microsoft workspace – directly past two official buildings: the driving licence centre and the main police station.

I love this country.

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Comments

  5. Welcome back Mr. B.
    In 1986, I had the pleasure of hanging out at the Hofsbrau House in Munich for an afternoon. Our table was full of visitors from Poland and Italy. Both went on at great length about how badly the citizens of the other nation operated their motor vehicles, in happy sustained derision. However, at some point two gentlemen sat down and announced that they were from Yugoslavia. The Poles, the Italians, and a few Bavarian locals immediately began to loudly proclaim in unison that nobody in Europe drove worse than the Yugoslavs!
    Not one bad word said about Swedish drivers, KFD.

  9. Welcome back Sir. Your new username is a better fit (IMHO). Any chance you might let Faux Geordie, Brookster, Chimney etc out of your dungeon, or at least give them an ipad so we can hear their thoughts again?

  16. Thank ‘ee. Want to win a luxury weekend for two in exotic Woolaboolalongaloola? Mikethep has kindly (if as yet unknowingly) offered to put up the lucky winner of this grand competition in his own luxury duplex condo sheep-dip – an all-expenses-paid trip of a lifetime! Simply identify the face in my avatar and pm me the answer together with your credit card details (Mike will need to flush your account with cash)! The lucky winner will be chosen by random algorithm and informed of their good fortune here! Good luck!

    (Archie Valparaiso is currently helping Knacker of the Yard with his enquiries into the Hatton Jewel Heist, and so is unable to re-enter into the swing of things here. In a private email, he confesses that “it was probably a mistake taking the drill back to claim the deposit”. Brookster is attending a Holistic Wellness residential course in Big Sur, where he’s learning Advanced Levitational Dowsing techniques. He sends his “love vibes” – his words – through the etheric media to you all. Faux Geordie is currently undergoing treatment for Compulsive Nudging Syndrome , and I’m sure we all wish him well. CNS is a widely-misunderstood and crippling affliction that affects 0.00000000000003% of the population.)

  17. I’m confused. What kind of list is this? I’ve scrolled all the way through it and all I can see is words. Is it a list of words? Is it the Words We Know thread?

    This bloke turns up here, doing all writing an’ stuff, like it’s an essay or something, and we just let him? It’s the thin end of the slippery slope. Next thing you know there’ll be a political discussion without the words ‘they hate you and want to kill you’ in it. It’s exactly this kind of Musing on the Byways of Popular Culture that gives this place a bad name.

    Bob and Burt both back, brilliant.

    • Ladies (hem hem) may call me “Saucy” if it pleases them, the rascals. For the rest of you, please refer to me respectfully as either “Mr Saucecraft” or “HPS” , in the manner Scientologists refer to L Ron Hubbard as LRH, or worse, Liberal Democrats to Ian Duncan Smith as whatever it is they to refer to him as.

      Burt, alas, never survived his sojourn in the Outback and his bleached skull now adorns the gateway to Mike’s vast Boomoolumborawoolagumboil estate.

  25. Welcome back BK.
    They certainly have a relaxed attitude to all things related to cars in Thailand. My one and only time there my wife and I wanted to hire a jeep. The car hire place had a tiny office and no compound. It certainly wasn’t Hertz. Customer services said to me ‘You have a driving licence?’. ‘Yes I do, do you want to see it?’. No need was the reply. We took out insurance yet there was no certificate. We were told ‘ if the office is closed when you return the vehicle park it across the road and leave the key on the front tyre’.
    Thankfully there were no accidents during our rental period despite the best attempts of the locals. Would hate to have got embroiled in a claim.

    • A few years back I decided to go legit and change my hopelessly obsolete International Permit (issued in France, with my fake rubber stamps extending the date, reduced to a sheaf of creased pages) for a Thai licence. This involved showing them the international permit (which nobody understood a word of) and passing a rigorous test. I had to stand a measured distance away from a miniature traffic light and call out the colours it changed to. The man pressing the button soon realised he couldn’t understand what I was saying (in English) and so ticked that box for me. Next I had to sit in a kind of toy car and press the brake pedal when a tiny red bulb glowed on the dashboard. My reaction time was deemed exceptional, and I was issued with a card on the spot. Everything, including getting my photograph taken by yet another most gorgeous girl on the planet, took under an hour, and cost around four quid.

    • Oops, sorry, I got my John’s mixed up. The pic. is John Brockman, but he didn’t write The End Of Science. That was John Horgan. I know people who’ve met Brockman and I’m kind of shocked that he was the head for Head. Cool. But I’ll forfeit the prize if that’s ok.

    • Yes, it’s John Brockman. Early publicity for the Head movie was a picture of his head. Just the front side of it, carrying his face. They really did everything possible to alienate both their fanbase and potential “mature” audience with a baffling and unattractive promo campaign including a video of his head, and the repeated word “head”.

      Mr Hairnet gets the prize, and as soon as I get your card details (don’t forget the security code on the back, Martin – we can’t be too secure on this internet of ours) Mike will metaphorically back the Brinks truck up to your front door. Don’t forget the 110% sunblock and BON VOYAGE as they don’t say in the outback!

  30. As someone who has been to Thailand and Cambodia several times I can affirm that none of the original post is at all imagined. I too have been petrified by the “respectful wai” given to a blur of a temple as we go screaming by at 1000 miles per hour. The driver takes both hands off the wheel and clasps them together under their chin in prayer mode, and this is the really frightening bit, as they do it they turn their entire body towards the temple and bow! Any old shrine will do, it doesn’t have to be anything fancy.

    My favourite, only in Thailand road sighting, is the immaculately dressed young woman texting on her phone as she sits side-saddle on a the back of a motor cycle taxi as it zigzags crazily through some of the heaviest traffic imaginable. In the big cities you see it several times a day.

  31. My worst experience on on a motorcycle taxi in Bangkok (I’ve had several, really) was being driven by a very short woman driver speeding along a very narrow gap between two very long lanes of stationary traffic on the Sukhumvit Road. The problem was the rear-view mirrors mounted on trucks and buses, which presented no hazard to her, but as I was a good head taller (and helmet-less) I was forever having to duck and whiplash from side to side to avoid snapping one off with my face. Yes, I was screaming at her to stop. No, she didn’t, not until we reached a redlight, where I fell off and ran away.

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