With our holidays the last few weeks being water-based, we have had plenty of chances to watch what was going on out to sea. The most common occurrence in Thai water is a longtail, those are the boats shown in the two pictures below. They are used for everything, transport, working, fishing, family vehicle, taxi, tourist day trips ... you name it. Why do I comment? Well, for two reasons. First of all, they have a very strange outboard - a propeller-on-a-stick. It swings around 360 degrees and makes very versatile boats, but also incredibly dangerous to swim with. Second, their engines are unmuffled modified car engines and are incredibly noisy. You can hear them for miles. Very interesting when 20 long-tails are arriving on a beach when I am trying to sleep. One morning, I actually got woken up but what I thought was a lawn-mower ...
There is of course a slightly quieter form of sea-transport, this guy and his friends had ditched their longtails and went fishing in little small row-boats. Interestingly enough, they sit forward when rowing and have their oars crossed over.
Try this on for a rental car! It had a working engine, more or less working brakes, and working air conditioning but not much else. We went around the Island of Phuket in this thing on our last day, quite interesting ... I am glad I was not driving ...
... because of these. Motorcycles are known to be ubiquitous in many Asian countries, but I did not quite expect them to go on the wrong side of the road. They legally have bi-directional motorbike highways on both sides of the main highway through Phuket. Turning on and off that road is always a bit of a lottery - particularly if you don't know where you are going.
Finally, we had to learn (again) how to properly cross roads from the older generation. That was a bit surprising given that my 30th birthday is now quite some time ago. It all happened near a roundabout in Chalong, when we had to go to the supermarket. C's mom informed both of us that we had to cross the road and promptly (and without warning) walked out into four lanes of busy traffic. Great stuff. As it turned out, however, the 'gap' she had spotted was just about the largest timeout you could have had for miles. We had to take our chances when it was a bit busier much to C's dismay ...
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