Our car: christened Robbie the Red Rocket

Robbie the Red Rocket

This is our vehicle for now.  The kids love it !  Every morning Annabelle decorates the dashboard with flowers from the garden.

It serves 4 of us well, with Annabelle and Matthew now very adept at climbing in and out using the wheel as a stepping stone.  It wasn't quite so ideal for Mum and Dad as at least one of them always had to climb into the back - but they suffered it with good grace (apologies and thanks Mum and Dad!).

It is quite battered, the hand-brake is completely ineffective, only one window works and it harbours a few mosquitoes each morning, but it is fully contributing to our sense of adventure and having a different experience.  We have learned from various rentals in the last few weeks, that the wind as you drive can be more effective at keeping you cool than the often underperforming aircon - so open air is perfect.  It also means we can pull up outside our favorite roadside fruit shake stall after school and order without anyone getting out !  

Roadside fruit shakes on the way home from school (20B = 80 NZ cents).
- a far cry from a $7 after school milkshake in Remuera!

The main roads on Koh Phangan are sealed and reasonably good, albeit with the occasional spine-jarring bump, however the side road to our house is more like a pot-holed sand & rock track.  So we take it easy on the worst bits as Robbie's suspension isn't what you might hope for on that sort of terrain.  Similarly, the side road to school requires a bit of navigational skill to avoid the areas where it has been washed out by some previous heavy rain.  (Today as we were driving along this road Annabelle spotted a monkey riding on the back of a motorbike!  They are trained for collecting the coconuts from the top of the palms, which must have been happening in the plantation by the school, as I later saw 2 more monkeys coming in on the back of a ute.)  I feel quite intrepid driving it on these tracks.

The track to school is worse than it looks here !

A couple of weekends ago we decided to go exploring to a beach on the North-East Coast of the island and assumed the roads would be similar to the sealed ones we had already travelled on the West coast.  We were quite wrong.   I was glad Mike was the one negotiating the very steep, corrugated, pot-holed, dirt track.  On the way in we did wonder if we would ever get out.  Especially as every time he switched into 4 wheel drive it popped out again at the first obstacle.

A smoother part of our access road.

It is costing us 10,000B a month, or about $13 a day, so we live happily with the inconveniences.  To get to and from school, and out for groceries or dining at a minimum, would cost us in excess of this each day via sorng taaows, with a fair bit of walking as well.  We managed to coerce the rental woman into not taking our passports as security.  This seems to be common practice here, but seems to me to give the agent far too much leverage if there is an accident.  

One issue I can foresee is that if the rainy season ever actually starts here, it will become wet and unpleasant in the car very quickly.  Because when it rains, it REALLY rains.  It's meant to be raining this month, but hasn't - we have had a few evenings when it has clouded over and blown up like it is about to rain - and we have often seen rain and lightening over on Samui.  But so far it has not eventuated over here on Phangan, apart from one night about a month ago.  (It sounds like there is a drought to me.  Our neighbour says the island will soon run out of water....The school director says the snakes are starting to come down into the villages as they are running out of water in the jungle....And the waterfall we went to see while we were exploring in Robbie didn't just have no waterfall, but had no water at all....)  The good news is that when it does rain, we know the windscreen wipers work because they got accidentally turned on the other day and it took us 2 days to figure out how to get them off (thanks Mum).  Not the usual stick on the steering wheel column which did exist and we did lots of fiddling with, but there was an extra knob half hidden under the dash.

Wind kicking up on the beach in front of us - but the promise of rain never eventuated...

Driving here is not too bad, few drivers are super crazy, most are fairly safe - and perhaps not quite trusting their fellow driver, occasionally toot to warn you that they are passing.  I haven't a clue what the speed limit is, some cars do travel scarily fast for the size of the road.  However our speedo doesn't work anyway, so knowing wouldn't help me much.  A favorite of all the scooters seems to be to undercut the turn into a side road in front of you as you are coming out.  Bigger intersections seem to be a bit of a free-for-all - apart from at the one set of traffic lights on the island.

There doesn't seem to be an enforced limit as to how many people can travel in one vehicle (or on one bike either actually), so with Mum and Dad here, 6 of us seemed perfectly acceptable  Neither do any of the cars (this one included) seem to have seat belts in the back seats.

Many families do travel around on a motorbike, often with young children and babies, and frequently with no helmets.  The preferred method of drop-off at Si-Panya school appears to be motorbike.  We decided against, in the interests of safety.  I had a bit of a motor-scooter accident in Thailand about 20 years ago, from which I still have a scar or two, so I know how quickly it can go wrong, even through no fault of your own.  The kids have been promised a scooter ride before we go though !

Robbie has certainly served us well over the last week or so of Mum and Dad's visit as we have been a couple of times to the North of the island, to the fishing village Chalokum and the nearby beach Haad Salad with its gorgeous crystal clear water.  We have ventured into many different restaurants and found our new favorite and somewhat special place - the Beachlounge in Thong Sala.  We have shopped in the markets for our daily supply of divine fruits and even done a cooking course too (more later on this).  The numbers in the car have fluctuated as we have variously been knocked out with stomach upsets and migraines.  We even stopped in at a quintessential English pub !  So lovely to have Mum and Dad visiting us here, with nothing more pressing to do than chat, as we do all these things.

Every week or so I drop by the rental agent and they fix up the latest problem, check the oil and water and then off we go again....

How much more fun can your car be, without windows?