Chapter 6

The Motorbike:

Khun Steve and khun John are respectively South African and Australian or English depending on the state of the latest test match. Most mornings they breakfast together at the Sunshine Coffee bar, drinking coffees, smoothies and the occasional beer.

Now beer in this ex-pat community has the same status as it had in Prague when I was there some years ago. It is not considered to be alcoholic. This means that by lunch time the number of Changs, Singhas, Tigers or even Heinekens consumed can be quite impressive.

Steve is the classic entrepreneur, into website design, import/export and anything else where he perceives a gap in the market. John, who is rather older, approaching his sixties, I guess, has acquired interests in local properties and again will always look for the chance to safeguard his modest life style.

Now our story started the other morning when Steve and John were at the coffee bar seeking methods of augmenting the capital required to complete their latest venture. The venture looks good to me. It consists of erecting some bamboo huts on John's land near the coffee bar, to be rented out to tourists with a wish to achieve a more ethnic feel to their holidays than that supplied by the local hotel chains. The idea looks good but capital is needed to complete it in time for the high season. John decided to sell his car. "How will you get home then?" Steve asks. "I'll buy a motorbike" says John. At this point we were all listening.

Now the motorbike is an institution in Thailand, the like of which I have never before encountered. Though, I gather, many other far east countries have a similar scene.

The typical local motorbike here is what we would call a 'step through' bike in England - a sort of cross between a scooter and a full on motorbike. It has an engine of about 100 to 150cc and being very light can have a quite impressive performance. It is almost exclusively of Japanese design with Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki and Suzuki competing for sales. The bikes themselves are mostly automatic, easy to drive and ubiquitous.

I have never seen so many bikes in my life. I am told that one has to have a licence to ride them but there are special dispensations, for example, to children to ride them to get to school. Anyway the fact is that outside every bar, shop, cafe, hotel and market there are serried ranks of japanese ironmongery.

In Thailand if you drive a car then the good thing , if you are English, is that they drive on the left. It seems however that motorcyclists do not subscribe to this idea. I remember driving down a dual carriageway after dark when I saw lights coming towards me - to my left. I slowed down. "Why are you slowing down?" my companion asked. "Because of those lights aiming at us" I replied. "Oh don't be silly they are only motorbikes" was her retort.

Be that as it may, I have learned that when driving a car here one must never change lanes because inevitably the gap you are aiming at will be pounced on by the streams of motorbikes which pour past on both sides. Motor cycles are gap fillers. Whenever a gap appears on the road then motor bikes rush to fill it. To be safe(ish) one has to spend most of one's time looking in one's mirrors with just a cursory glance to the front now and then.

Now I have driven motorbikes all my life, riding bikes of all shapes and sizes - well I remember that Triumph Tiger 110 with a dustbin fairing and the shaft drive Yamaha XS750 triple as well as the NSU 50cc Quickly (a misnomer if ever there was) and the Fanny Barnett 250 single and..... well you get the picture.

And yes I've fallen off a few times, escaping with the usual cuts, bruises and my fair share of gravel rash.

But here in Phuket it is mayhem. Young boys career around, hell bent on shortening their life spans. Families of four, five and even more cruise sedately along on the family motorbike. Of course helmets are mandatory but only one per bike and the police are more likely to fine you in a car for not wearing your safety belt than to stop a helmetless motorcyclist. There is a local joke - at least I think it's a joke - that locals leave their helmet straps undone so that if they have an accident then they can eject it to protect it from the crash. And finally, farangs of various ages, and often with little or no experience of riding motorbikes, regularly fill the hospitals and mortuaries as they attempt, usually in the early hours of the morning, to stumble their drunken ways home.

It's carnage.

My children on hearing of my forthcoming trip to Phuket had several apposite comments to make but perhaps the most important was unanimous. "Dad don't rent a bike". So I didn't though I would admit to being very tempted.

To return to my story. We all attempted to dissuade khun John from his proposed course of action and tried to persuade him to buy a cheap car, or at least to move nearer his usual watering hole and perhaps sleep in one of his new bamboo bungalows. He pointed out that he had been a motorcyclist for many years and had a police certificate to demonstrate his proficiency. He bought a new motorbike.

The next day I arrived at the sunshine coffee bar at lunchtime to be confronted by what appeared to be Boris Karloff in his celebrated mummy role. It was, of course, John who had just spent five hours being patched up in the local hospital.

"F---ing hell John, please tell me that the other guy was bigger than you, or something like that, but don't tell me you had a motorbike crash!'

John had hit a pothole at eight o'clock that morning, lost control and finally used his face as a brake. He was festooned with bandages and had stitches in his nose, cheek, forehead and chin. And "No" he hadn't been on his way home after a heavy night - he had been on his way to the coffee house after having a good breakfast and didn't even have a hangover.

Well what can I say? John is one of the good guys and though it saddens me to see his plight I'm sure he'll make a speedy recovery. I shall still try to persuade him to buy a small car, which he will no doubt sleep in rather than driving home in a state.