The Five Times I Almost Died In Thailand
But who’s counting?
Thailand has everything a man like me could ever want. Great food, fabulous people, and the occasional brush with death just to remind you what it feels like to be alive. I have been there dozens of times over the past sixteen years and each time I go something new happens to me that makes me stop and think…
Huh.
That could have gone badly.
As an Australian, the statistics are not on my side. According to the Consular State of Play released by smartraveller.gov.au every year, Thailand is the most likely place for an Australian to die abroad. The reasons for this are no doubt multifaceted. Thailand is a popular retirement destination for Australians and so it stands to reason that at least some of them might die there. But then it also tops the lists of places where Australians sustain injuries, succumb to illness, and is the fourth most likely country for us to end up in prison.
Typical, really.
To love something that has the potential to hurt you is pretty much all travel is when you think about it [don’t think about it]. I decided to test these statistics against my own experience, compiling a list of all the times I’ve [knowingly] almost died in Thailand. The result was this list, five times where if I had been standing a little to the left, someone else might be writing this story about me.
Like any list, it’s always good to start with the first cab off the rank.
The taxi in Bangkok
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gotten into the back of a taxi in Bangkok with the seatbelts having been willingly removed. In lieu of this basic safety precaution, a talisman of Buddha will be dangling from the rearview mirror, although how this talisman is supposed to help me in the event of a crash, I’m not sure. Presumably, it will give me better luck in the next life.
But it wasn’t the next life I was worried about as I got into a taxi with no seatbelts being driven by a man in a cowboy hat at the speed of sound, it was this one. The driver drifted between two lanes without looking, eliciting a blaring horn from the gigantic lorry truck he somehow didn’t notice in his blind spot, sending our tires screeching and the taxi lifting up onto two wheels. When the wheels [and my stomach] finally came back to earth, the driver took his eyes off the road, turned back to look at me and smiled.
The boat in the Andaman Sea
My buddy and I were on Koh Lanta when we thought it would be a good idea to ditch the snorkelling tour and get a fisherman to take us out instead. We found one that was willing to do it at a fraction of the cost and thought we were geniuses.
Geniuses!
Then we went out on the water and found that a significant amount of water was coming into the boat. In isolation, this was okay, but when the engine died and the panicked fisherman handed the two of us paddles, we quickly realised what creek we were paddling up. It wasn’t until we came across another fisherman that our boat was rescued and we were towed back to dry land.
The truck on Koh Phangan
Of course, no list of near-death experiences in Thailand would be complete without a Full Moon Party reference in here somewhere. This one comes from way back in 2010 when my group of friends paid for a local to drive us to the aforementioned party in the back of his truck. Little did we know that another group of friends, a Danish group of friends, had also done the same.
Rather than make two trips, our driver decided to put all thirteen of us in the back of his truck. This was long before the streets were lit and all the roads were paved and so we went speeding around dark corners, clinging onto each other in the hope that we were jammed in so tightly that none of us would fall out. As we rounded one corner, a songthaew came from the other direction, causing a shriek of tyres and a tightening of sphincters as the truck and the songthaew missed each other by inches.
The American with the gun
Americans and their guns, eh? Not content with keeping gun violence within their borders, they had to let it spread to Thailand, too, where I was sampling some of the local herbs at a bar. An American wanders in, orders a drink, and then starts asking if any of the bartenders wanted to do some Muay Thai sparring with him. All of the bartenders refused, at first. But when the American insisted, one of them relented, taking a gun out from behind his jeans and placing it on the bar.
The American then thought it would be a good idea to grab the gun which resulted in the other bartenders pulling out their guns and far too many guns being pointed in my general direction. The American was kicked out, of course, and while no bullets flew, the heart attack I almost experienced would have been more than enough to kill me.
The E. coli infection
Thai food is without a doubt my favourite cuisine on earth. I’m not talking about your Pad Thais and your cashew nut chickens, I’m talking about nam prick, larb, and basically anything served from a vat on the side of the road. It’s my love of Thai food that makes me an adventurous eater while I’m there, doing away with any notion of food safety in favour of the flavours of the streets.
As such, I’m not sure what gave me the E. coli infection. All I know is that what followed were some of the worst days of my life, seeing me chained to a dodgy toilet in a dilapidated guest house about a hundred kilometres from the nearest hospital. I sweated through sheets, struggled to keep down water, and hallucinated for three days until I had the strength to get the bus back to Bangkok. After a blood test and a mountain of antibiotics, a grinning doctor told me that I had an E. coli infection that could have killed me.
That’s the list, such as it is.
I have no doubt it will grow as I continue to fling myself into Thailand with reckless abandon. It’s a country that I’ve fallen in love with, for better or worse, enchanting me with the beauty of its culture and the hospitality of its people. Even though I know the stats and I’ve seen the risks firsthand, the only thing I’m certain of is this:
I can’t wait to go back.