Braving the Chiang Mai Traffic
30th August, Chiang Mai, Thailand
Driving in Thailand shouldn't be so difficult for us, in theory. They drive on the left hand side here, so that's a bonus, and generally speaking people obey traffic lights and traffic cops. On the other hand, once you are out on the road, there is still a bit of a 'each-man-for-himself' kind of attitude. Despite this, I decided to try a moped out today. It was ridiculously cheap - just 360 baht for two days' hire (or £4 for two days), and this was a higher powered moped (a 150cc, if I can believe the sales pitch!).
The first thing to do was familiarise myself with the controls - I didn't want to take up too much of the lady's time (who rented the bike), because while she ran through the various switches my passport was just sat there on a table by the street. The sooner she got through the instructions, the sooner she could get back to storing my passport somewhere safely (they keep this as security that you'll bring back the bike)! Moments later, I pulled out onto Chiang Mai's streets and quickly became at one with the throng of other moped riders, rickshaws, mobile vendors, tuk-tuks and taxis. It really wasn't all that bad. Once I realised that anyone else could move across any lane at any time, and possibly without warning, that was it - drive (or ride) defensively, don't hang about and when passing one of the various Buddhist shrines, offer up a prayer to the god of fool-hardy tourists.
Chiang Mai traffic - not all that bad, surprisingly!
I took the opportunity of finding an AppleCentre - yes, there is actually one here! I'm not looking to get anything, but the Powerbook (laptop) has started doing something really strange. Certain keys, such as the caps lock, the right arrow key and a few other punctuation keys have gone a bit mad, and are triggering off a number of strange characters instead of one. For example, hitting the right key produces '8jkf' or something like that, hitting the up key runs Exposé (it's a Mac thing, dear non-techy readers ... ie most of you!) and other weird things. So, I may need to get this repaired fairly soon, otherwise diary updates will become very tricky. And we can't have that now, can we?
Anyway, so I continued to ride around Chiang Mai with no discernible mission other than getting a feel for the place, locating landmarks and so on. On the way I spotted a few VW Kombis, something that I can't seem to switch myself off from these days! They were not in the greatest state of repairs, it has to be said. They probably ran about as well as the rancid-looking, three-legged dog that I spotted sprawled out in front of Wat Chiang Man!
Rusting old VW Kombi
Later on, once I was confident with the moped and also with the general 'flow' of traffic, I took Manda out for a spin. This is not the first time she had braved riding pillion with me (we had done this before in Crete and had a great time), but the traffic was a little more daunting for the person on the back! Within 5 minutes we had to turn around and come back. The aim had been to head out of the city towards a temple up in the hills, but those hills were blanketed in clouds. Rain clouds. And they were heading our way. We made our way back to the hotel, passing many street-side vendors who had quickly pulled out their selection of rain ponchos, as the skies opened and continued to for several hours after. Welcome to Thailand's wet season!