Tom Bentley’s overseas travels have seen him experience every driving calamity imaginable. The good news is, he’s endured the bumps and the crab massacres so you don’t have to.
Driving: you’ve done it for a while, likely on winding back roads and at flying freeway speeds, and in the city and the country. Easy, right?
Well.
Getting away from your everyday driving life — thousands of miles away — presents roads (and cars, and signs, and speeds and treacheries) not travelled. My girlfriend and I have house-sat or lived in many places in the world, and driven there too, sometimes even with our eyes open. I’m glad to report most of my limbs still work — though my heart sometimes stopped.
In the mid-2000s, we spent a year on a tiny island in Micronesia. While they drove on the right side of the road like in the US, where we’re from, our car had the steering wheel on the right, which led to my continuous struggle with the phantom wheel on my left. Sharp curves felt like piloting torqued geometry puzzles.
There being only one main island road meant that essentially, the island’s whole population — adults, children, dogs — at various times would be crossing the road, standing on the side of the road, pulling loads across the road, languishing on the road. You never knew when a cadre of pigs or chickens might join them.
Though, pigs or chickens were easy compared to the crabs. When it was mating time, thousands of crabs would cross the main road from the mangrove swamps to the ocean. When I drove home on a crossing night, I’d try to swerve from the line of crabs in the road, which would often turn and raise up their claws, fighters to the end.
But it was impossible to avoid them, and closing my eyes didn’t close my ears to the horrible crunching. Many would be smashed by other island drivers, so the roadways were a horrifying wash of bloodied hell the next morning.
We also stayed a couple of months in the Bahamas, fortunate in that our host’s car had its wheel on the left. Less fortunate were we that the Bahamians drive on the opposite side of the road than drivers in the US, so when I’d pull onto the main highway, I’d see a car in the distance coming toward me on my side of the road and think, ‘What in the blazes is that guy doing, driving on the wrong side of the road!’ Of course, that was the same thing my opposing drivers were thinking — and of the two of us, they were right.
It was of little help that our car was actually a giant airport van — a 10-seater — the interior of which looked like it was purchased during WWII. It had survived the bombings, mostly, but its clattering suspension, bent frame, stuck windows, whispering air conditioning and bald tires made it the sad clown of the highway. And some of the narrow, enormously rutted roads to outlier island attractions heartily laughed at our clown: we once marooned it on a muddy half-road where we left a gallon or two of sweat while trying to dig it out in the sizzling Bahamian sun.
I never felt safe in that van, but safety didn’t even seem a possibility driving on the streets of Panama City. Vast swathes of vehicles would converge into spaces where cyclists might be fearful to squeeze, honking, inching forward, jockeying for position. The astonishing thing was that big trucks and passenger buses would leap forward into these narrow canyons of cars. Driving around in that city always seemed the deepest leap of faith, though we always emerged unscathed.
Until, driving our host’s car on a quiet Panamanian back road, I was forced by an unforgiving truck on to the high-grass side of the road. But the grass concealed a concrete abutment, which destroyed the right-side tires and suspension. That took some explaining, the owner being 3000 miles away.
Bequia, a Caribbean island with high hills and ribbon-narrow roads, tested my driving skills with driving thrills. Navigating on the “wrong” side of the pavement with a wrong-side steering wheel on those skinny paths led to numerous close (or screaming) calls. We often had to dead-stop to avoid collisions, turning every sight-seeing adventure into a suspense thriller.
We were glad we didn’t have a car for our two months in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, because the narrow, serpentine roads that intersect at odd places seemed like open channels of carnage for the manic bustle of cars. Yet, San Miguel was an example of courtesy defying chance: drivers waited to pass, paused at blind intersections and moved slowly on. And Bali, a chaos of motorbikes, sometimes carrying astonishingly large loads — or entire families. Yet, miraculously, the buzzing hive of bikes thrived without any visible carnage.
But I mostly closed my eyes when being driven in booming Yangon, Myanmar, with the manic streets also filled with walking or cycling vendors, intersections that didn’t intersect, and traffic signals that seem to encourage colliding rivers of cars. And driving anywhere in Malta, with much smaller cities but the tightest of high-walled curving streets, seemed to be entertaining oncoming death. On Malta’s bigger roads, even the bus drivers astonished us with how breezily they’d throw their huge rides over the street lines and into traffic, often inspiring the curses of other drivers.
Our most recent stay was in Portugal, where the streets have multiples of multi-exit roundabouts, so that while driving in these unfamiliar places, with GPS voice directions lagging seconds behind, we frequently took the wrong exit. And then another trying to return. I was not calm.
But I can’t wait to drive in New Zealand; I come forewarned about all the hobbits and wizards on the road. I’ll be ready.