One of the things that has always fascinated me about Thailand is the often bizarre ways in which people like to decorate their buses, trucks and taxis. It's something that you just don't see where I come from in Australia. For fairly obvious reasons, covering up 75 percent of the front windscreen and 100 percent of the back window of a vehicle with wild decorations just isn't allowed for safety reasons.
In Thailand, however, these imaginative additions to the exterior and interior of taxis and buses can make for an interesting ride — as long as you don't start thinking too much about things like safety.
Just the other day I boarded a taxi on my way to work and suddenly found myself in a mini jungle. Every spare space in the cab was crammed with plants of every description, with a few stuffed monkeys here and there to complete the effect. The only thing missing was a fruit tree so that customers could munch on a peach while waiting several hours for the lights to turn green.
Other taxis, as I'm sure most people here have experienced at one time or another, come adorned with banknotes and coins from around the world, packets of snacks hanging from the roof, vast collections of stuffed toys and plastic figurines, or a colourful selection of flashing lights that wouldn't be out of place in an RCA disco.
Then there are the buses, which often resemble vast nightclubs on wheels, with big banks of flashing lights, deafening music and atrocious karaoke singing. What's always amazed me the most are the front windscreens of buses that are almost completely covered with Michelin Man dolls, stickers, stuffed toys and more random rows of lights. How the drivers can even see out is a mystery that probably doesn't bear too much scrutiny. I've also always admired the way that buses are painted with surreal murals of everything from superheroes to rock stars to psychedelic collages of anything and everything. I'd never seen buses like that until I came to the Land of Smiles, and have often thought that they would make a good subject for a photographic book published by Taschen, who specialise in the weird and wonderful.
Finally, there are the trucks seen barreling down the roads and highways throughout the country, some of which look like they date from around the time of World War II. In addition to the lights and stickers that they have in common with local buses, Thai trucks have an additional famous feature — mudflaps with pictures of the movie heroes Serpico (played by Al Pacino), Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) and Che Guevara (who incidentally was a communist revolutionary, not a movie star). Occasionally other tough guy movie stars like Clint Eastwood, Franco Nero and Arnold Schwarzenegger are also used to decorate truck wheels.
Over the years, I must have asked about 50 different people what the fascination is with Serpico and Rambo for truck drivers, and I must have received about 50 different replies, none of which sound very convincing. I've read articles on the subject, which again always offer different and unlikely explanations. If any of our readers know, feel free to write in and enlighten me. Otherwise, I'm happy for it to remain one of those strange mysteries that makes Thailand such an interesting place.
Ben Edwards
Editor
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