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We wanted to celebrate our 10 year anniversary with a holiday we'd never forget - we reckon 6 months of travelling the world (from trekking on the Inca Trail and through the Amazon to riding an elephant in Thailand) should just about cover it!

Saturday 17 January 2009

Tuk-Tuk..BANG!!

Earlier that day we'd been marvelling at how the road users were so adept at coping with the chaos of the streets without the benefit of traffic lights, taking every unexpected manouvre in their stride and making quick life-saving decisions every few minutes.
We were soon eating our words however, as our tuk-tuk driver almost killed us in a road accident. The words of the travel operator in London resounded in my head, "the biggest cause of death or injury for a traveller is a road accident."
Our young driver had taken his eye off the ball for a moment,long enough that he didn't notice that the Toyota Hilux pickup in front of us had braked pretty sharply. It was a main road, jam-packed with traffic coming from all angles, so the driver had little choice but to plough into the back of it. On my side of the tuk-tuk was a coach full of tourists, which we also hit. The side of the tuk-tuk buckled and the bumper of the coach caved in with that horrible crunching sound of metal on metal. I instinctively brought my hands up to my face, narrowly missing getting my arm crushed between both vehicles. Miraculously we all escaped unscathed, but that was the end of our sightseeing tour, and as our driver was dealing with the police crowds gathered and everyone piled off of the coach to survey the damage.When the drama was finally over we returned to our hostel a little shaken. The next morning that same driver showed up beaming away as if nothing had happened, the damage to the tuk-tuk patched up sufficiently to be almost unnoticable. Gluttons for punishment, we climbed aboard and continued with the tour...

1 comment:

01Lou said...

That is so funny Snakey, that you continued on with matey after the crash. What are you like?!!!xx