After an overnight bus from Bangkok to Krabi, I find myself on a boat to the island of Koh Lanta. It’s a beautiful trip across the Andaman Sea with the sun blazing overhead and several islands dotting the horizon. This would later lead to some rather crispy shoulders, the faint smell of sea-salted pork, and strange looks from the local Muslims.
Upon landing at the local port, I’m whisked away in the back of a flatbed truck along with a guy from Prague named Dave. Our mutual failure at making conversation in the wind-whipped bed of that truck brings us closer together than we ever would have been otherwise. Mercifully, we reach our destination: Green Garden Resort.
After settling into my bungalow, I hit the internet cafe for some friendly updates. I’m pleasantly surprised to find that a friend I met in Bangkok has arrived in Koh Lanta just a day ahead of me. As it happens, we’ve independently settled not only on the same beach, but our resorts are a mere fifty yards down the road from one another. A happy coincidence, I thought. Little did I know that it may lead directly to my doom.
The calm before the storm
Julie is a sweet girl from Geneva who has an unhealthy preoccupation with tuk-tuks. Upon meeting me at my bungalow bar, she informs me that she has rented one to drive around the island. Dave and I exchange looks. (Dave turns out to be a nice guy once you can understand what he’s saying.)
The rental of motorbikes (scooters, really) is widely available on the island. The actual rental of a full-on tuk-tuk is unusual, if not completely unheard of, but Julie managed to convince someone at her resort to actually rent her their personal tuk-tuk. It was probably her adorable French accent.
So, after some initial trepidation, the three of us get into this rickety thing and start inland towards a mangrove park. In my previous post, I described the mild insanity of a tuk-tuk ride. Replace “mild” with “terrifying” and you have Julie’s driving style.
Eeeeeeeee!
The first thing one must remember on the roads of Thailand is that you drive on the left side of the road. Julie’s occasional memory lapses, particularly after turns, led to some surprised cursing in a strange mingling of Czech, French and English. After several near collisions, I began to wonder what it would sound like if you gathered one person for every language on Earth and had them yell “Shit!” at the same time. Oddly melodious, I’d imagine.
Tearing through the inland roads of Koh Lanta at what could be described as warp speed, I see we are fast approaching a large grey mass lumbering down the road. It’s an elephant.
As we barrel towards the creature’s buttocks, I see Julie is making no noticeable move to avoid it. The various images of death by tuk-tuk quite suddenly shift to the likelihood of surviving a goosed elephant. At the very last moment before collision, we manage to avoid the beast’s nether regions by inches.
Warning: Objects in picture are closer than they appear.
By some miracle, Julie gets us to the mangroves and back in one piece. Having failed to kill me the first time, I decided to take pity on the poor girl and give her another chance. This time I’d make it easier by riding with her at night. We never did see Dave again.
Replacing Dave is Julie’s friend J.P. He had wisely turned down the original tuk-tuk adventure, but this time succumbed to the unearthly pull of island nightlife.
If any of you have seen the introductory credits for the David Lynch film Lost Highway, you can easily imagine what this night drive was like. All I could see was a single, dim headlight barely illuminating the road ahead of us as it flew by at a mile a minute.
The evening went by without incident and I breathed a sigh of relief as we turned into the dirt drive of Julie’s resort. Ah, safe at last. How quickly things change. The sigh caught in my lungs as we found ourselves staring directly into the oncoming headlights of a motorbike barreling towards us.
The face of a killer.
Jerking the tuk-tuk left, Julie then proceeds to not hit the brakes, but gas the thing. We speed into a ditch, up the opposite embankment and slam into a large sign post, nearly killing a stray dog in the process. After being jostled around and partially thrown from the vehicle, we all climb out and survey the damage. No one is the worse for wear, even the tuk-tuk.
Julie, with a look of mild disappointment at my uninjured state, laughs it off and asks if I want a ride home. You all know the saying, “Third time’s the charm.” Well, so do I. I never got back in a tuk-tuk with her again.
Recent Reading
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
