Binks and Buses

 
Thailand in general and Bangkok in particular have extensive bus systems and we soon learned that buses could take us almost anywhere we wanted to go. Wanting to be intrepid urban dwellers, we made valiant efforts to master, or at least utilize Bangkok city buses but it seems I’m not made for it.

Look close inside the bus and it can be
seen it is standing room only

It was pre-internet and pre-computer days but paper maps were available showing bus routes so we felt fairly comfortable knowing which buses we needed to ride and where to get on. It was also fairly easy figuring out where we would need to get off. So, with a little homework and a firm plan in mind, we set off on an inner-city bus journey.

An earlier post mentioned that people at Bangkok bus stops don’t wait in lines. Usually, there is kind of a mass surge where whoever is waiting tries to get on the bus simultaneously. We were prepared for it though, and got into our passive/assertive mode and pushed our way on to the bus without a lot of issues. Once on the bus though, problems arose.

Even a casual observer would say Bangkok buses are perpetually full and certainly, every city bus we tried to board was full to the brim. Even as a missionary, there wasn’t a prayer of getting a seat so we were limited to vertical sardine standing room. That would have been fine except I am tall. I could sort of stand, but the ceiling was low enough that my head was forced to be bent down at a steep angle. I could only look down and my head would bounce into the ceiling with every bump in the road. I could turn my neck enough to look through the bodies of my fellow riders and get a fleeting glimpse out the window. Alas, I only saw flashes of a few people walking on the sidewalks from the waist down. Street signs of course, are at a much higher level than waist high so we could not see them at all. Marcia, being shorter than me could hold her head up but had only similar glimpses of the world outside the bus. With no street signs visible we really couldn’t track just where we were along the route and had no idea when to get off.

Aggravating the issue for me was motion sickness. Those bothered by motion sickness will know there is nothing worse than being in a semi-closed, moving vehicle with no air, packed in, unable to move, 95 degrees and 200 percent humidity and only a slim band of unrecognizable daylight zipping by in psychedelic strobe like flashes. Since we couldn’t tell where we were and with queasiness building, we decided the only thing we could do was ride for a while, hop off, find a street sign to see where we were and hope it wasn’t too far to walk. But it was always too far to walk.

Some buses would have 4 or more people hanging
 out of each door but only one on this bus!

We made a few forays into the world of Bangkok buses but it turned out the same each time. Before long, we decided to forgo the city bus rides for taxis or drove ourselves which worked much better.  Of course, taxis were more expensive than the buses and it meant we weren’t completely participating in the local life. No one though, would have been impressed if we were persistently lost, late, and motion sick.

Cross country buses were a whole other story and not bad to ride. Within Bangkok, the Skytrain opened in 1999 which was a nice option for downtown transport but had limited range. The Skytrain’s range is expanding as time goes on but in the 1980s, city buses were the transport of choice for most and remain so today, at least for those that aren’t very tall.