On the one hand, there's the matter of location. Mototaxi drivers wear vests of a specific color and are, by a huge majority, dudes hanging out on the sidewalk and BSing between sporadic trips around town. They hang out in designated locations easily identified by the color of their vests, so it's probably some bureaucratic process of dynastic social significance, but I get the impression they choose the location based upon personality type. Here's a rundown:
-Tesco guys are way out in the boonies in front of the province's biggest mega-box store. They're the ones who like showing off English skills with, "I give you cheap--one seventy" while holding up five fingers. "Fifty?" I'll ask in Thai. "HUNDRED fifty." "No, not 150. It was 40 to get here, but I'll give you 50." They laugh and chatter and come back with, "No, no, is two hundred but I give you special, one-fifty." And I can't avoid them because they're at the main songtau stop, so I've just stopped going to Tesco.
-Ocean, front entrance guys are parked at the main entrance of the most popular mall in the province. They don't need to yell and hoot for marks, and if anything prove unduly hard to flag down. But they know the entire town and as a rule do not overcharge. The one guy who did said, "Fippy Baht" and gave the embarrassed student smile as I handed him the farang-appropriate 30 with a shake of the head and, in Thai, "No, thirty."
But these guys also tend to be the young bucks whose driving is more likely to be... memorable.
-Ocean, back entrance guys, in solid red, still quote me double-farang rates, and insist when I counter with the appropriate fare. I get a jolt of guilty happiness every time I ride past them on someone else's bike.
-Thawang drivers, who park on the busy corner of the busy market street, bring an element of Bangkok to town. They hoot and wave and shout at any potential mark, and they get especially exuberant with, "WHERE YOU GO?" whether the farang is right in front of them or across three lanes of pedestrian and five of vehicular traffic. I've studiously avoided eye contact.
-Carrefour (third-tier shopping but fairly extensive grocery offerings) drivers wear red vests with blue squares on the back. They know me as Farang Ka-rash after the bike wreck that was on their metaphoric doorstep. Something about the daily intake of diesel exhaust and those who aren't quite cool enough to hang out at the cooler malls makes this tremendously funny every single time I pass by. But they know where I live, and I have never had an adventurous ride. Initially, I was charged 30 B, but after a little while one guy gave me 5B change, and it's stayed 25 since.
-AMC drivers, who park across from the school, have lime and blue vests. They can spot me from 800 meters, wave, and upon my reciprocation, be idling in front of me within 45 seconds. One's about 85, drives a first gen Honda, comes up to my chin as long as he's wearing a helmet, and his shoulders are about as wide as my hips. Once, he stopped to point at an oncoming downpour, put on his poncho, and drove on. I hid as best I could and got there looking like a drowned rat (as opposed to waterlogged roadkill). "40 B" (double price). I didn't argue.
-Wat drivers, who park between Wat Cha Mao and Wat Yai, never wave, never grunt or shout. Usually there are two guys poised on the concrete bench--semi lotus sort of folded up posture--but there is occasionally a woman with them (more on her later). It can be a long walk to get to these folks, but they know all the back roads, all the ways to sidestep traffic, and they are some of the smoothest drivers I've found--I've never slid off the back of the bike or into the back in front of me, never felt a surprise turn catch me with my balance out of center, and they all have padded seats.
-Bordello drivers are, to my knowledge, the only ones in Thailand who smell of smoke or sweat. Otherwise, no matter how ratty and battered the vest, you can count on it smelling like clean laundry. But the guys who park at the head of Soi Bordello smell like tobacco.
I should explain, probably.
Carrefour is at the southern end of the sexy massage district. I do a lot of shopping at Carrefour (as much as I love the markets and would greatly prefer shopping there, Carrefour has the advantage of being open when I have time to shop, identifiably pronounceable from my farang voice, and is within a 10 B via songtau or 25 via mototaxi distance. Markets tend to run when I'm in school or way out yonder where my farang vocabulary doesn't reach and my cheeks get sore from riding on the well-worn back of a mototaxi.
At the northern end of the Carrefour block is a night-food stand. They make Larb (lime-chili ground meat), Som tam, and Gang Het--mushroom soup. Mushroom soup is one of the best things I've ever eaten: chantrelles, straws, enoki, wood ears, in a dark broth based on fermented leaf juice. It's expensive--50B--but I use some of the broth to make a soup for dinner and eat the rest for breakfast. And the som tam is pretty fantastic.
So after I pick up ingredients at Carrefour, I walk a block to get somtam and gang het. It just happens that the cart is at the head of Soi Bordello. And what the hell, right? If it's good enough to take those girls through the night, it'll be enough to get me to dinner and campus tomorrow.
Well, the mototaxis park right next to the cart.
Maybe one day it'll be a bragging point to say that the Soi Bordello taxis knew how to get me home.
One of the things I like about this town is that I've never seen, in action or in evidence, that the mototaxis take a mid-shift break for a few beers. They also, by and large, aren't out to gouge. In Bangkok, it's a given that any given Thai will try to take any given Farang for as many hundreds of Baht as possible. Here, instead of "Suh hunnut Baht," someone will hold up six fingers--sixty Baht.
Still, there have been moments.
The AMC driver pointing at the black cloud and associated downpour hazing out the road ahead, mirroring the mafioso looking at a storm brewing over the Alpi and saying, "Es no bueno."
I never request a helmet from a mototaxi driver, but I always wear one if offered. I figure that if some guy who's been living the rhythm and flow of Thai traffic from the time he was a mass of cells and has spent most every day of his adult life watching and negotiating local traffic gets hit while I'm on his bike, I'm just meant to go down that way. Otherwise, I'll just hang on and ride.
In Ayutthaya, I started arguing with a songtau driver, and he told his little brother to take me where I wanted to go. Funny thing is, I feel safer riding on the back of a bike driven by a 12 year old than driving one myself.
Think about it: most babies are carried in the left hand while Ma/Pa drives with the right, until the kid's old enough to sit on a special seat extension between the parent's legs, which is usually used as a standing platform, hands braced on the steering yolk.
Oncoming traffic told this kid that there was a helmet check, so we drove through the historic park.
Picture this: ancient, crumbling wats in a world heritage site historic park lined with trails and tracks, the occasional songtau parked in the shade or tourist snapping pics, and here's this kid driving a farang through the middle of it all.
Ayutthaya was also home to one of the two women I've ridden with (the other parks in front of the wat. They had amazingly similar styles. Neither drove especially fast, but neither slowed down. In Ayutthaya, the woman was at an elephant riding area where a crooked songtau driver dropped me. It was on the very far side of the industrio-commercial town across the river, which translated to maybe 2 klicks of a four-lane bypass road and 8 K of city streets. She got up to about 40, and she never changed her speed. Weaving in and out through traffic jams, red lights, elephant holdups, wrong way traffic, whatever, she just kept going. And there were none of the screech sort of moments I've come to associate with close calls, none of the fart-squeezing encounters--it was a diamond-making process. You squeeze farts because you're braking and came that close to hitting the other bike. You make diamonds because you never brake and watch the miraculous creation of a trail through a solid wall of onrushing death.
Same thing here in town: she got up to speed, and while it wasn't fast, she never altered it. We were leaned all the way over going through corners, honking and waving at right-of-way-traffic passing through our red light, zooming all over the oncoming lane, and she never slowed down.
Also had a memorable ride with one of her compatriots at the wat queue.
Gender relationships are much different in Thailand. I've gotten used to the boys climbing all over each other, sharing chairs, that type of stuff, but it still trips me out to see guys holding hands, fingers intertwined, while saying, "May I go to toilet please?" And in that vein, I'm just not that into straddling some mototaxi dude, even if it is the norm here.
And then I found myself in a knot of holiday traffic, riding with a driver uninterested in waiting with the rest of the traffic. We were going down the middle of the road, and he looked like he was rowing as he dipped the yolk back and forth to keep the mirrors from nicking sideview mirrors on the cars parked on either side. And then we met someone with the same idea but opposite momentum. I closed my eyes and prepared to become one with whatever object I flew into. There was much beeping.
When I opened my eyes, we were still swerving through traffic, and I saw a flared fender just in time to jerk my knee in; otherwise, I realized that my knees were within a couple cm of the cars on either side. And something about keeping my knees from crunching oncoming traffic overrode any compunction about straddling a mototaxi driver.
It's like not asking for a helmet: there's precious little I can do either way, so why bother fighting it? If that's his thrill--the feeling of a guy's knees on either side of him--good on 'im, I'll happily oblige. And if it gets us both there intact, everyone wins.
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