Getting around by any means

Traffic in Bangkok is so bad it's the stuff of legend. We used every available conveyance to get in and around it.

None was so harrowing as the taxi ride in from the airport on the first day. Mikey had warned us not to listen to anyone offering us rides and to only take a vehicle with a meter, but somehow we found ourselves in a car with a sleepy old man (see in photo) who never drove above a crawl or in fewer than two lanes of traffic. Trucks would zoom up behind and beside us honking. Other drivers yelled out their window. We could not bear to look out the windows and only son Cisco's running funny commentary on the danger we were in kept us from leaping out the doors in fear. "I always thought those white lines in the road were stupid anyway," he said. "Taxi rides in New York city are worse, but that's because there we'd actually be going over 30 miles per hour there."