I really enjoy Bangkok, but I want to see a little more of the country while I am here. This past weekend, I took care of a little bit of that with a road trip to Kanchanaburi, about three hours west of Bangkok.
Although the name itself isn’t familiar to most people outside the country, the place it is associated with is known worldwide: it is the site of the Bridge on the River Kwai, made famous through Pierre Boulle’s book and later the David Lean Movie starring Alec Guinness and William Holden.
Also nearby is the gorgeous Erawan National Park, a forested, hilly area with a gorgeous waterfall complex, numerous trails, and limestone caves.
I’ll cover both of the destinations in later posts but the process of getting there and back gave me a long, rolling look at the Thai countryside and smaller towns that I hadn’t experienced before, not to mention the Mad Max carnival ride that is the Thai road system.
Kanchanaburi is too close to fly to, really, and the train takes all day to get there so I had planned to taken one of the many dedicated tourist passenger vans that run between there and Bangkok before Monica realized that she had a three-day weekend coming up (the Buddhist holiday of Magha Puja) and could come along.
It turns out it’s probably best that I didn’t; as we were driving past one of the vans out on the road, she mentioned conversationally that they were unregulated death traps and that a major crash last month had the country up in arms about them.
When I sat down to write this post, I decided to look up news about the crash she was talking about and it turns out to be pretty much impossible: there are so many stories about fatal van crashes it’s hard to pick out any single one that seems particularly more horrific than the rest. Here’s one example, though.
Anyway, I have to admit I wasn’t feeling that much more secure going in Monica’s little Toyota Avanza. She’d been hit by a motorcycle the night before. No one was hurt and the damage to her car was mostly cosmetic but, she admitted, it might have been her fault.
I couldn’t see how fault could possibly be established in the chaos of Bangkok traffic, but I hoped that outside the city might be a little more sedate.
First we had to get outside the city, though. The first hour or so was mostly spent in stop and go Bangkok traffic.
It cleared so gradually I couldn’t tell exactly when it happened. Like American cities, Bangkok sort of just thins out at the edges, suburbs becoming indistinguishable from small towns blending into farmland becoming unpopulated scrubland.
I’d post pictures, but at the speeds we were traveling, it was really all just a blur.
As the road opened up, so did the throttle. We seemed to go about 75 mph as long as traffic allowed, regardless of the surroundings: small town main street or open road, there was no difference. I kept looking around for speed limit signs and kept track of how many I saw on the entire 400 kilometer trip.
Speed Limit Signs: 6
Drivers Paying Attention To Them: 0
Many of the roads are physically divided, which is all that prevents even more astounding road fatality rates. The lanes are all too narrow by American standards, but that’s all right since no one pays any attention to lane markers anyway.
There’s no such thing as following distance. Everyone is about three feet off the bumper of the vehicle ahead of them, regardless of speed.
Drivers seem to take their mind off this stressful state of affairs by spending a lot of time talking on the phone or texting as they drive.
I had an enormous number of questions I thought of to ask as we made our way out into the countryside but I sat as quietly as possible so as to avoid taking even the slenderest portion of Monica’s attention off the road. She apologized several times for various near misses, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. It’s just the culture.
The Lonely Planet guidebook I brought with me explains all this as an outgrowth of the Buddhist conception of predestiny. Conventional aspects of road safety are all but irrelevant in the face of your karmic debt load. If your number is up, it’s up.
This is a world away from the defensive driving techniques taught in the U.S. What it most reminds me of, in fact, are some of the tactical driving techniques that police are taught. Aggressively establishing position, last-minute braking, rapid but controlled swerving… it’s the only way there aren’t constant pile-ups here.
Well, there are constant pile-ups here, actually. But it’s astonishing that there aren’t more. Their techniques work, as long as everyone is on the ball, just like on a racetrack. It’s not so much that it’s all fantastically reckless as that there is simply no margin for misunderstanding or error.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, this makes Thai drivers excellent signalers. You can’t count on the guy next to you to let you in, so you had better let him know you are coming and brazen it out. And you’d better be flashing your brake lights or tapping your horn if you don’t want to eat the grill of the guy behind you when you’re slowing down. I have only heard a handful of honks made in anger–mostly it’s just light blips, a “hey, I don’t think you see me, but I’m coming through that gap at 80 miles an hour, so back off!”
It takes a great deal of energy as the driver but as a passenger it’s just plain nerve-wracking.
I was relieved when we stopped for lunch about 3/4 of the way there.
You’ll never starve in Thailand. There are restaurants every 15 feet or so along any given stretch of Thai roadway, few with any apparent signage or clear differentiation from one another. Thai cuisine has a solid reputation among travelers–“the food” was consistently one of the top reasons I heard for visiting when I was talking to people in the States about it–but I was a little curious how the locals went about choosing the best places. Was it just whatever was closest, or was there some signal I was missing?
I asked Monica about it when we had come to a safe and complete halt.
“I’m starving,” she said by way of explanation.
So, whatever was closest.
The place she picked was, like the rest, just an open-sided hut with a few tables scattered around. There are no menus–you just wander over to the pots and point at what looks good.
None of the pots were being kept heated and so none of them looked particularly good to me but I picked out a couple of stew-like pork dishes with rice and we sat down to eat looking out over a muddy pond and open fields.
The dishes seemed to consist mostly of highly spiced bones and gristle and I pretty much just stuck with the rice. Monica’s choice didn’t seem much better (it’s worth noting at this point that Thais typically eat family style; whatever is ordered is considered community property, so you either pick together or share what you chose).
As we left, we passed the proprietor chopping up beef on a bloody, fly-covered chunk of wood.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a great choice,” Monica said.
Back on the road, I enjoyed the unusual variety of vehicles that we were sweeping past at high rates of speed.
Like much of Asia, Thai truck drivers are given to decorating their rigs in bright and kitschy color schemes, often with glittery bits glued on for emphasis. I don’t know the purpose of this, if not simple pride of ownership, but a positive side effect is that it increases visibility.
Some bus companies take it to a whole new extreme though.
Not only are the colorful murals eye-catching, but there are all manner of loudspeakers and lights, flashing like fire engines and blasting rock music out the sides at all hours. And, for whatever reason (perhaps because his rotund physique bears passing resemblance to that of certain Buddha figures?) most are adorned with small, inflatable Michelin Man figures. This photo is a rather sedate example. One truck we passed had so many of them tied across the front that the driver could barely see out the windshield.
Apparently these are simply regular old charter buses–I thought the anime influence might mean they catered primarily to Japanese tour groups but Monica shook her head.
“Japanese,” she said, “too conservative.”
I wondered, then, what they must make of the local driving conditions?
But we arrived intact–and, to alleviate any concerns at home, made it back to Bangkok in one piece afterward as well.