TK

After riding a couple of hundred kilometers to Doi Inthanon from Chiang Mai and back and more than five hundred from Chiang Mai to Mae Sai and back, here are the impressions of this westerner riding in Thailand.

First, riding around the city is fun. Especially in Chiang Mai where everything’s close, but there’re a lot of turns and obstacles to keep your attention. Once you gain a sense of direction and some basic experience with the bike you can enjoy the rush of the traffic. You learn to deal with all the various species that share the roadway: fellow motorized two-wheelers which flow around the larger vehicles, the slower bicycles, the aggressive Song Theaw and minibuses. Traffic in Chiang Mai is never too awful and it’s the prerogative of the scooter and motorcycle class to worm its way through the traffic to get to the next light faster. It becomes a fun game of route finding rather than a frustrating stew in exhaust fumes.

Not that a red light is always a stop. Some traffic lights have countdowns, and the swarm of bikes are off before it hits 0. Sometimes long before: it’s not uncommon, especially at night, to see the bikes wait for the cross traffic to finish and then just take off, their light still red.

All this loosely-structured traffic makes the experience of riding both freer and require more focus than it does in the west. Vehicles can and do come at you from everywhere. And conversely, it seems more important to just do something sensible rather than look for hard laws to guide your movement.

On the highway this sense of anarchy is heightened. Scooters and motorcycles are required to keep left. Left doesn’t mean the leftmost lane, it means the hard shoulder. In the U.S. this is often called the breakdown lane. In Thailand I suppose it’s used for breakdowns too, but it’s also used for parking, scooter and motorcycle travel (in both directions in the same lane), bicycle travel (also both directions), car and truck travel (at any speed). And of course, this lane is also how you move you mobile food stand from place to place, and often where you set up shop when the entrepreneurial spirit moves you.

So when you travel long distances on two wheels in Thailand, you’re constantly adapting to all these contingencies. But the system supports it: cars will let you back into the ‘real’ lanes if there’s a blockage or if you just need to overtake. There’s no punishment of bikes that try to get ahead during blockages, like I’ve seen in the West, with cars going out of their way to stop a bike from making headway.

In Thailand car horns are warnings and not the only outlet of impotent road rage.

All this looseness promotes a feeling of being focused and in the moment. Bikes demand more from their riders than cars do from their drivers, and Thailand’s roads demand more attention than the lawful highways of hypnosis in the west.

Once you get used to it, it’s great fun. Instead of being angry that there’s an oncoming Song Theaw in your lane, you realize it’s just someone getting where they’re going, just like you. And they’re making your trip more interesting at the same time.

Coda

Of course, I wrote all this with looking at the road death statistics all this looseness produces. Better not to know.