On the backseat of a motorbike and in a Deux Chevaux trough France

Mostly when I drive by motorbike in and around Patong Kik drives or takes care that some Thai friend of him, or staff of our bar, drives me where I want to go. Sometimes he let me drive myself but then shows allways a lot of care and worry and asks/pleads with me to be safe, to drive safe and make sure I arive back unharmed.

Now, nothing to be scared about, specially when driving myself, because indeed I am carefull, because motorbike drivers here are like wasps, musquito's or flies, however you want to describe them, haha
Motordrivers are like the mentioned musquito's, they are irritating, generally irrseponsible drivers and often think they can do anything and are invincible or indistructable.... often when I drive the bike here, or sit in the back seat I hum or even sing the song "suicide is painless".. so one can gues how I feel when I have to take part in the traffic that way!

But its also a lot of fun driving a bike here... the wind trough onces hair, because in the backseat one doesn't ned to wear a helmet, another strange rule of the Thai law, you also see more, and its generally cooler, meaning more wind that keeps you from getting too warm..and thats maybe the mainreason why so many 'farang', like me, enjoy these contraptions so much, specially at night!

Alcohol controls they never heard of here and Thai and farang a like just get on a bike with every amount of drinks in their bosy, as easily as they could step in a car or walk on the street. So when I leave the bar at night and drive home I am allways carefull to keep my distance from the other bikes, to take extra care looking to what tarffic comes from where and in general one can say I truly try to anticipate as much as is possible.... and sofar so good, touch wood!!

Bikes also come in all different sizes, mainly the amount of cc thhhat drives them forward. And tonight I sat on the back of Pongs motorbike, a guy, who is a dancer at Simon Cabaret and works in our bar after 11 pm till closing time.
First of all, my legs had to be placed allmost next of him and second when we came to the road that leads up to Kiks and my house, the bike really had a hard time getting us up... and that made me think of my brother and sister and me in the back of my mothers Deux Chevaux (Citroen) while she drove us to a destination in the south of France and she needed to climb a hill, with us and the car totally filled up with campingmaterial, foodsupplies, cloaths etc. One can these days hardly imagine how she did all that, stuff everything in the little car and managed to get us in there and then drive 1000 km or more to our destination, but okay she did. But when we were most wondeirng if we would ever arrive was when the car needed to get uphill, which happend a lot on our way trough France. At times we even got out of the car and sometimes even had to push. Well those days are over for those driving our modern cars.....
BUt today I got a deja vu when sitting on Pongs motorbike..... halfway up our little hill he needed to use his feet to keep us going up the hill... and happy to say, I arrived safe and sound at the top and hence I am able now to write this little entry again. Happy, safe at my table in my home here in patong!
And also happy that last year I bought a strong motorbike for Kik, so we never experience that situation, haha

But it brought back some memories, which, over the time past, are now only nostalgic, good memories... but at the time I know we sometimes had big urges to curse and most likely one or al of did at times, even knowing that our mother did her best to give us a holiday we would not easily forget..... adn in that she succeded most of the time!