How A Cheese And Ham Toastie And A Policeman Spoilt My Loy Krathong.
My alarm goes off at 5am, and it’s Loy Krathong here in Thailand, and rather than celebrate with loved ones, I am heading off to the border of Myanmar to do my mate a favour for his visa run. So with power banks packed (yup my phone battery is worse than crap ) and an early morning coffee down my neck, off I head to pick him up at our rendezvous point at 6am. For the first time in 4 years that I have known him he’s surprisingly on time.
My mate has had no sleep. He’s been out drinking in Nana and having woman problems, but he’s in fine form and makes good company for a road trip to the back end of nowhere (things you do for mates eh?). The morning passes by without incident.We stop off for a McDonalds and a smoke and make it to the border early for a change. He heads off over the border (Yes, I said a little prayer that they wouldn’t let him back in) and an hour later he’s back on the Thai side with a stamp and a “Let’s head back to Bangkok.”
So an hour into our journey back home and I’m got the munchies and I’m aware the traffic will be dire once we hit Bangkok so it’s a quick toastie for me and 3 in 1 coffee. (They can’t mess that up can they?).
So as in the photo, this is how my toastie turned out, okay for 25 baht I don’t expect much but F**K me, it’s cold and white (yeah like me), it looks like she has decided to mash it with her hands and give it to me in the hope that when I open it I am halfway to Bangers. This puts me in a right mood for some reason so off we go.
A couple of hours later we hit Bangkok, and the area of Central world is rammed full of traffic, now Mr Mango here takes a wrong turn and we are sat reading Google maps that’s telling us straight ahead, as we wait at traffic lights the boys in brown spot me and decides to head over and ask me for my licence (He’s gutted I have one.) He then informs me it’s a bus lane I’m about to drive through so can “I pull over on the left” which I duly oblige as I respect the Thai police.
He starts to write me a ticket, and I think okay I didn’t drive through the bus lane but was about to, he then asks me the golden line, yeah you guessed it he wants tea money, so out he spits “you pay me 1,000 baht and you no go police station pay 500”, WTF I have to pay more for no ticket than a ticket, wallet closed and off I drive with a ticket and a 500 baht fine, hand on heart we all know if I was a Thai he would have asked for 200 baht and on your way.
To cap it off, I drop my mate off at 4.30 pm and thinking to myself that was an okay day, little did I know I would be stuck in Bangkok traffic for another 2 hours and only 9km to go.
That’s how a cheese and ham toastie and a policeman spoilt my Loy Krathong.