No wonder so many Thai’s are rubbish drivers!

The other week my significant other decide she wanted to get her car licence. So she rang up a car driving school and signed up for 10 hours of lessons. This school (perhaps they all do) also included the chance to complete the drivers test also.

The first question she was asked by her driving teacher was “do you want to do the test or just pay?” !!!Now I’m no newbie to Thailand and its system of bribes – but that just appears a little bit too systematic to me rather than a few (well very many) people making a little extra on the side whenever they can!

A week or so later she announces that she is doing her test WTF ? – that’s fast! She got it to, so now my g/f is able to drive a car through-out Thailand. Now I’m not saying she’s stoopid – far from it – she’s a smart gal – but in farang land ( I know I know TIT ! ) but in da west – one generally needs to complete something like 10 times that number of hours learning how to drive – just to gain confidence, read traffic, road rules? Ability to respond to different driving conditions (ie rain, fog, night) (all her lessons were the middle of the afternoon.) ability to calmly respond to emergency situations that may arise.

Most of which can only be leaned through experience and TIME spent driving!She decided she only wanted to get her automatic licence – tho I convinced her to at least get some lessons in a manual ( turns out she had a total of 10 minutes – before the instructors car broke !? and only managed to use 1st, 2nd and 3rd gears!)

Apparently she never learnt how to reverse ( and by implication reverse park!) Anyway I own a manual 4WD – u guessed it she wants to drive it now, ok ok I’ll sit with you – show me how well you can drive. Feck me – she accelerates hard straight at a brick well in our apartment carpark – I slam on the hand brake and have a wee chat with her which consisted of you don’t need to go fast in the carpark – and her saying I wasn’t going fast.

OK – its Sunday morning – should be light traffic – overshoots the driveway exit leaving the nose of the car in the middle of the road – lucky no traffic was coming past, overcorrects the corner so we end up on the wrong side of the road.Couldn’t stay in the white lines down sukhumvit road – generally accelerated towards cars that where already braking despite me asking her to repeatedly to “Chaa Chaa!” (which means go slow go slow!)

We arrived safely – I promised some more lessons at a later date, – while filing a mental note to check my insurance cover! If this in any indication of the general population - its no wonder they all drive like feckn maniacs!

optional road rules

forget how come the thai's drive ... they are fckn orderly to the point of being British compared to the Javanese....

anyway, i read in the paper today, sorry no link since the jakarta post website barely resemebles the paper it produces each day...

anways - i read in the paper that the Police chief has decided enough is enough and do something about the 5.2 million motorcycles clogging the traffic with their mental driving in the Big Durian.

1. Motorcyclists need to turn on their headlights during the day....

2. Motorcyclists should keep the to left lane only on about a dozen major roads...


sounds good you say ! - he then went on to say that these new laws would be 'optional'

WTF ?? optional traffic laws?

only in asia !

A day at the Zoo

Lonely Planet guide book describes Ragunan zoo as "a nice place to spend a few hours'

they forgot to mention not to go on a national holiday, particularly the end of Ramadan because every good muslim is supposed to spend time with their family and since just about everything is closed the only 2 places in the entire country to go with the family are the zoo and Taman mini (another post and another day!)

though since I ignored a friends warning not to go I dont think I would have listened to the LP either....

traffic was diverted a little to get to the zoo...

this was about 3 kms along and the hawkers selling shit were walking faster than the car....

after a fair bit of travel we arrived, first we saw this happy smilie white tiger...

did i mention there was a lot of people there ??

then the missus got hungry, well we had walked for 15 minutes or so and seen 2 or 3 animals so we stopped at a little kitchen that did Bakso and Mie Ayam.....

here's the crocodile cages.... theres a couple of animals in each pen.... this guy is a big bugger, but clearly unimpressed with the rubbish throwing...

I think the sign above says "dont throw rubbish at the animals you stupid gits" - but as you can see the indonesian's reading skills are not much better than mine!