A weekly ode to the joys of moaning about your holiday, by Tim Roxborogh
"Any advice about Southeast Asia?" As a big fan and former resident of that neck of the woods I get asked this quite a lot. And every time, especially if it's a youngish guy doing the asking, I tell them the same thing: "Don't, whatever you do, hire a motorbike!"
After the first person I gave that warning to came back with grazes all over their arms, I've taken to expanding the motorbike line to also include gems like: "Remember my words when you're there; may they ring in your ears when you're thinking how cheap and fun it will be to hire one. Well, it won't be so much fun when you're all bloodied and can't go swimming and it's 35 degrees!"
Fatherly advice when you're not someone's father and you're roughly the same age doesn't, evidently, carry much weight. I'm not sure anyone I've told not to hire a motorbike while holidaying in Southeast Asia hasn't not hired one. Indeed, for some young Western men, it seems you can't have a Southeast Asian holiday without hiring a motorbike. It's like some sort of almightily misguided male-pride vacation rite of passage.
But here's the real point: not only is it far more dangerous to hire one than most tourists realise (approximately 80 road deaths per day in Thailand), it's also completely unnecessary in these lands of tuk-tuks and cheap cabs. The anecdotal stat when I was in Laos a few years back was that 30 per cent of all Western males who hired motorbikes were involved in some sort of accident. The situation got so dire that for a time most Westerners found they simply weren't allowed to hire them. Good.
