The Highway Code

After such a long time living somewhere, a lot of things tend to become routine. Other activities, however, never lose their capacity to surprise. Take taxi journeys, for example. Flagging one down, there's always a vague sense of apprehension; you never know who you'll get.
There's the miserable old boy who'll refuse point blank to take you (how does he make a living?), or the young chap just in from Burma who doesn't actually know where Bangkok is. Downtown, you'll get the chancer who sees White and offers a 200 baht fare, or surreptitiously suggests a ping-pong show. An abundance of Buddha statues doesn't necessarily make me feel safer, particularly if the driver can't actually see through his windscreen for all the trinkets. And there's that unnerving habit of removing both hands from the wheel to 'wai' at every passing shrine. But my favourite is always the crazed red-bull driver, who'll flout every convention of the road just to steal those vital few seconds.
We had a classic this week - returning home, we'd failed to notice he'd taken a wrong turn, and we were heading on to the motorway back into town. Unperturbed, and not fancying the 5-mile round trip to the next U-turn bridge, he simply span the taxi round and headed up the motorway on the wrong side. We covered a good couple of miles in this manner, switching lanes to avoid the oncoming traffic. And being Thailand, there wasn't a single horn sounded; just some quizzical looks and amused shoulder shrugs from the drivers swerving out of our way.