Driving in other countries

[leadfoot]

I was looking at another thread on which drivers you hate the most & I started thinking about when I was living in Bangkok & the standard of driving there.Some of the things I had to put up with;-

The sheer volume of traffic on roads never really designed for cars in the first place.I was lucky in that I could walk to work,but if I had to go to see my solicitors I would have to allow in peak hour at least 1.5hrs to travel 12km.I even sat in a traffic jam once where nothing moved for 3 hours.

The standard of driving ranged from bad to appalling & it shows with a road toll of around 60,000 each year.They have more kids under 10yo die on the roads than we have here in total each year.A lot of it is due to drink driving & not wearing seatbelts or helmets,but in general they couldn't drive a nail into a watermelon.Ignoring red lights & driving on the wrong side of the road also seemed to be popular.

Then you have millions of motorbikes,tuk tuks,corrupt police,kids running in & out of the traffic trying to sell things to the drivers,motorbikes riding down the footpath,people pushing food carts down the road at night with no lights, f@%*ing elephants (yes in the middle of a city!).In general it was a near total lack of thought for the safety of anyone - including themselves

Having said that, they handle heavy traffic much better than we do,with nowhere near the aggression that you see here.It was hard adjusting to a non aggro type of driving where whoever was the biggest and whoever was in front wins, then having to adjust back again to a more law abiding type of driving when I returned back home.Things I would do over there would get me bashed or locked up here!

Anyway... I would be interested to know where others have driven & what they experienced ...good & bad!