Transportation in Thailand: buses

I'll be posting about Thailand for a few days as I settle into Cambridge for a few days. Here goes:

One of the most exciting parts of Thailand has definitely been the transportation. So far we have taken tuk-tuks, trains, silver and gold class buses, free buses, and rented motorbikes.

In Bangkok we mostly got around on foot or by taking the bus. Bangkok has legendarily bad traffic, so the buses are never on time. They also don't quite follow the routes that Google says they will follow. As far as we can tell each bus driver is given a set of stops and told to fight his way through the traffic to each stop. How he gets there is up to him.

Even if you are at the correct stop you still have to wave down the bus you want: they don't stop unless they need to. On our second day in Bangkok we had to catch a bus that was making a detour down a one-way street. We stood at a bus stop that didn't say which buses stopped there and jumped up and down to get the attention of the bus driver. As Golshan tells it:

"When he saw us his eyes widened, as if to say 'That's not a bus stop!' Then he relented: 'Oh, okay, it's a bus stop' and pulled over to be only one lane away from the curb."

The doors were on the other side of the bus and there was traffic everywhere, so we had to run and dodge across to the other side of the bus. The bus driver had decided that we were friends and spent that time swearing mightily at anybody who dared to honk at us.

Our next Bangkok bus was even better. When we got on we all noticed the speakers everywhere and the subwoofer at the back of the bus, but there was no music. We settled in for a ride and watched the antics of the guy who walked up and down the bus taking fares.

These antics included leaning out of the bus to direct traffic when people wouldn't let us merge, and even jumping out of the bus to go buy something, then running to catch up and get back on.

We all assumed that he had jumped out to get food, but it turned out that he had been buying batteries. As soon as he got back onto the bus he put batteries info the remote for the sound system and started blasting American music through the bus! We rode the party bus all the way home, and we were sad to have to leave.