While on vacation, I decided to risk life & limb & rent a motorcycle to tour around the island of Phuket, which is located in Southern Thailand.
Ok, I can honestly say that this is something that is not recommended while sipping a latte. (Although I did see several Thai woman do it while speaking on a cell phone) Here are some quotes that I feel accurately sum things up out of an article in this months Bike magazine.
“It is the most hostile biking environment on earth, where a motorcyclist dies every 40 minutes”.
“Drivers are known to go back and reverse over their victims to make sure they are dead. Without survivors, there’s no investigation”.
It cost me 200 baht a day to rent a Yamaha 115 cc automatic step through ($6.79 U.S. Dollars) it is the fleet vehicle of choice here. You can rent larger cc bikes such as the Honda Phantom and Harley’s in the larger centers, but I was warned that these places tend to scam the tourists. Larger displacement bikes are few & far between here and not really required due to the traffic & crazy driving conditions. I was only able to wind the Yamaha out on a couple of occasions. 80 kph is pretty much as fast as you can or want to go on Phuket. The average speed was more like 30 kph.
Riding was good on Phuket, from Phuket town south. The North part of the island gets very congested (I would compare riding here to lane splitting on a California freeway at 100 mph) The North part of the island is not all that scenic either.
You officially need an international driver’s license here, but the fellow at Butterfly I.T. rentals informed me that any driver’s license will be accepted by the police, as few read English. In fact, anything with a photo will work, and he tells me that a customer once produced a blockbuster video card that was accepted. The bikes come with no insurance, so if you break you buy. The good part is that a new one can be had for quite cheap ($1300.00 USD) I would highly recommend Butterfly I.T. as a good rental place. An ex pat Danish fellow runs the place with his brother in law. They are located right in Karon Beach.
The bike of choice here is the Honda Dream & Honda Wave. There are about 65 million Thai’s and from what I can tell, every one of them owns two Hondas. Honda has sold 7.5 million dreams & Waves in the past seven years in Thailand according to Bike magazine. So all you Honda fans don’t let those Honda sales numbers make your head swell. Honda is mostly selling underpowered crap motorcycles.
Phuket Slide show
Topic: Phuket Thailand by Motorcycle (Read 3368 times)