At first glance, the photograph shows nothing more than a footpath. But look closely, and right at the bottom of the frame you’ll spot a small bulge in the asphalt — a speed bump. Making my way to my hotel in Bangkok along this very path, almost at midnight, I tripped over every single one of them. And no, they aren’t there to keep the local hospital’s plaster-cast ward in business — they serve their perfectly straightforward purpose of limiting traffic speed. You read that correctly: on a path too narrow for two people to pass comfortably, there are speed bumps, put there so drivers don’t tear along it — because there’s a ditch on either side, and at night, it would be all too easy to tumble in without meaning to.
I’d seen worse on Bali, but Bali is an island scattered with villages, whereas this was the capital, and I found myself wondering whether the hospital really had gone about strewing obstacles in the path of its future patients. It hadn’t. Come morning, a motorbike taxi driver was cheerfully carrying a passenger down that very road, bouncing over every last speed bump without a second thought.
And that, mind you, was still a wide road. Bali has narrow concrete tracks — particularly common through the rice paddies — barely wide enough for a single person, and yet motorbikes use them constantly. Even Google knows about them: select motorbike navigation on the maps, and there’s a good chance your route will be sent straight down one of these tracks, simply because it’s shorter and faster. They even have their own name for this kind of shortcut — jalan tikus, which translates literally as “rat road”. To give you some sense of the sheer terror of riding along one of these things: a ditch full of rice on the left, a ditch full of rice on the right. I was ready to faint every time I rode one. It’s marginally less frightening when the track runs between two fences instead. In the photograph below, you can judge the width for yourself — about five paving tiles across, the same size as the tiles typically used on pavements.
Riding along pavements, then, pales in comparison to tracks like these. Incidentally, while locals in Bali make very liberal use of pavements to dodge traffic jams or obstacles, in Thailand this only happens in the most extreme circumstances — usually when someone needs to cover fifty or a hundred metres against the flow of traffic, and turning around properly would mean going a long way round.
The Thais, however, have distinguished themselves in another way entirely. On major roads, drainage ditches often stand in for crash barriers, dividing the two directions of traffic. Enterprising, and rather lazy, locals have taken to using these ditches for U-turns — driving straight down into the ditch on one side, and simply popping back out on the other. It’s a genuinely comic sight: one moment the road is empty, and the next, a moped with a couple of grinning Thais has appeared out of nowhere.
Thais and Balinese alike are also remarkably fond of cutting corners on the wrong side of the road, turning and doing U-turns straight across double solid lines, and squeezing into any gap even slightly wider than a motorbike, so long as it shortens their route. And yet they manage all this with real precision, never getting in anyone’s way — and the local police never so much as bat an eyelid.
Why do they do it? Simply because they can. At times, it feels as though they were born on a motorbike.
