Thread by @kunley_drukpa

Driving in the Third World 🧵

Driving in the Third World often feels like playing a real life version of Mario Kart - the roads are narrow potholed obstacle courses full of comedy characters driving comedy vehicles who swerve around as if driving on ice or avoiding banana peels. Third World roads are frequently unpleasant death traps because of certain systemic problems that they seem to have in common, you’d can’t just drive down them like a regular highway and mentally switch to autopilot - you have to be constantly attuned to your environment around you to avoid accidents

Some Common Features of Third Word Roads:

• The roads are single lane, (probably because it’s too expensive to build more lanes but there might be other reasons,) which means the major highway between a Country’s two major cities will be filled vehicles packed up right next to each other with very little room for overtaking - mostly endless caravans of trucks driving very slowly for hundreds of miles

• People drive at either 20mph or 90mph, there’s very little inbetween. You’ll either be overtaken by cars speeding past you like they’re racing the Monaco Grand Prix or you’ll be stuck behind a truck that you could probably cycle quicker than. There is often officially a speed limit but it might as well not exist unless Police are nearby in which case it only sometimes exists if they feel like shaking you down or trying to get you to you appear in court unless you give them some money to buy lunch

• Because of the large distances involved in much of the Third World, if you don’t overtake these trucks you will be stuck driving behind them at 20mph for hours and hours upon end. This turns driving into a real life Mario Kart minigame where you’re constantly overtaking the endless caravan of trucks on the road. The process goes like this - get stuck behind a truck on the one lane highway, drive at 20mph for 5 minutes waiting for the truck traffic on the other side of the road to clear, speed past the truck, immediately get stuck behind another truck driving at 20mph, repeat process ad infinitum for hours on end

• A lot of drivers are very bad drivers and seem to have little to no spatial awareness. This is a problem enough with the bikes that will slalom right up close between vehicles but it can become genuinely fatal when the giant death trucks start swerving around the road. Huge death monsters that will block the road or drive 1/3 of the way in on your side of the road when driving in the opposite direction to you, approaching you. You can either get frustrated by this or you can move out of the way. If you don’t move out of the way the problem is that because these drivers don’t have any spatial awareness they won’t move out of the way either - so they will just indifferently speed into you. Driving becomes a process of giving way to retards on pain of them otherwise scraping your car, which you see happening to others. Quite often too you will have to stop in the middle of the road because a car is speeding towards you in the opposite direction trying to overtake another car - if you don’t stop it’s not impossible it will just drive into you. You can blame the other drivers for being retards for sure but you’re the one driving on these roads of your own volition

• In many Third World countries there are no street lights at night so when it turns about 7pm anywhere outside of a city is going to be pitch black. The only light comes from car headlines which creates a very intense glare which makes the very difficult to drive in the daytime roads even more difficult to drive on. And because a lot of the drivers on the road don’t seem to be cognisant of the existence of other drivers, many will have their headlines on the full beam. Imagine an endless stream of death trap trucks hurtling towards you driving 1/3 of the way into your side of the with their headlights on full blast. Really hellish. If you do this for several hours on end you will enter into a kind of spiritual trance where you are trapped in a kind of mental superposition, your mind halfway in the real world and halfway ensnared in the shadow realm

• The roads are often very potholed or patchy, large holes will occasionally just randomly appear in the road without warning. Because you can’t really predict where the holes are going to be, occasionally you’ll be driving at a relatively fast speed and have to suddenly swerve to avoid a crevice in the road that’s come rushing towards you. If you don’t, your car can take a battering. I have acquired flat tires and punctures this way. On some roads, the paved road might even just fall away without warning and you’ll drop off a small ridge onto a gravel road - which might damage your car or even cause it skid. Regardless of how well you drive, drive these roads for long enough and your car is going to acquire lots of minor damages. If you are renting a car especially, these can really add up

• Another recurring feature is random Police stops. Depending on the country, there may be more or less of these. The Police will set up along a nondescript part of the road and stop vehicles at random which functionally brings the traffic on the road to a halt. Nominally this is to stop criminals and smugglers or in some places ‘bandits’, but often since the police are retards from the local village dressed up in uniform and vested with more authority than they should probably have and sometimes massive AK-47s it ends up being an excuse to harass people for money or food or even just to pass the time. (Lots of authority figures in these countries mill around in this way, putting a badge on and harassing people to waste time because they don’t have anything else to do.) They might pretend you have the wrong documents or your car is damaged or you have some kind of traffic violation and demand you pay a fine or else they’ll send you to court. Even if they’re not corrupt they might just stop you and tell you to sit around for a while while they ‘inspect’ your vehicle, which evidences how nonchalant people frequently are about wasting your time

How it feels to drive on Third World Toad Turnpike Roads

Multiplayer Online Real Life Mario Kart VS Mode