Driving in Thailand

I have done it before and will do it again: driving in Thailand. I have hired a locally built Toyota Vios for the week as I came to Surin, about 450 km north east of Bangkok.

Getting out of Bangkok was not difficult but it takes a long time and the SatNav kept trying to send us to Bang Na ... even when we were 300 km away from the place!

Driving in Bangkok is no different to driving anywhere and don't let anyone say any different! With a slight exception, that is: the usual capital city extra 10% assertiveness is called for or you would get trapped at every junction and overtaking opportunity.

The road to Surin beyond Bangkok is motorway and there are two things to beware of: cars here are right hand drive but keeping left is a mystery to the locals.

Expect to be overtaken, undertaken and wovertaken. Wovertaken is where a driver weaves in and out of traffic, left and right, across all lanes, to get past you.

On the smaller dual carriageways, keeping RIGHT is so rigidly applied that they effectively become left hand drive roads: lesson learned and away you go.

On these smaller roads, overtaking opportunities come in waves as lorries are the limiting factor to steady progress: as they come along from time to time, cars are stuck behind then. Then the lorries go and whoosh, off we go again!

It took 9.5 hours to do the journey including two stops. Nakhon Ratchasima is a bottleneck as are the dual carriageways. Otherwise lessons learned, easy driving!!

DW