Thailand — Driving out of Bangkok, Thailand

Time to hit the road — driving in Thailand

September 2015

After my first night in Bangkok, I decided I was not in the mood for ‘doing a city’, and I needed to get out of town — fast. So, I decided to rent a car and head to the country.

The Plan

The idea was to drive out of Bangkok up to the “Death Railway”, stay there for the night and explore the railway the next day.

From there, I planned to move to Hellfire Pass to look around that area.

I was also planning on visiting several Commonwealth War Cemeteries in the area.

Renting a car

Renting a car in Bangkok was tricky.

Attempting to rent a car online from most major rental companies returned "nothing available”. I guess it was because I was trying to rent a car for that day.

Even using search aggregator sites such as bookings.com, or Expedia, returned no results. I even tried some of the dedicated car hire companies’ apps and got no cars available.

The hotel kindly phoned several car hire firms and was told nothing was available. In the end, I went to a Sixt office down the road, asked if they had any cars and was able to hire one then and there.

As I waited for the car to be ready, I popped across the road to a McDonald’s for lunch (hence the photo at the start).

On the road

I was so pleased to have rented a car and be on the road.

I left Bangkok on the Sri Rat Expressway.

The Sri Rat Expressway is a toll road, and I passed through two toll booths. I couldn’t see why they called it an “Expressway” because, for 5 km, I had been stuck in a traffic jam.

For the first 90 minutes, the traffic was terrible.

After about 50 km, I finally left the suburbs of Bangkok.

The roads, in general, were not too bad, but the signposts were confusing, and some junctions could only be described as eccentric; I had never seen anything like them. My SatNav (Waze) coped surprisingly well.

After about 100 km, the traffic had thinned out, and I could crack along at 120 km/h. But, I had to watch out for random traffic lights that appeared out of nowhere on otherwise straight stretches of wide roads.

There were no central dividers on some of the dual carriageways, and cars would suddenly appear in front of me in the fast lane, having crossed the other two carriageways. Scary. Again, I had to keep my wits about me.

At 130 km from Bangkok, I finally could see some hills in the distance, and I started to move out of the wide flat plain that surrounded Bangkok.

I was unsure about the speed limit because I didn’t see any speed signs since leaving the toll roads. I passed a police checkpoint doing 100 km/h and wasn’t pulled over, and I tended to stick to 100 to 120 km/h.

I finally arrived at my destination after about 5 hours — ‎⁨Mueang Kanchanaburi⁩, ⁨Kanchanaburi⁩, ⁨Thailand⁩ — a journey that should have only taken about two and a half hours.