Post 3: First Things First

What’s the first thing you should do when visiting South-East Asia? Different people will tell you different things, depends on who you ask. It usually boils down to ‘how to say something’ in the native tongue - “Fuck off!” if you’re American, and “Sorry” if you’re Canadian...

Just kidding. And excuse my language.

But before you learn the “Hello’s” and “Thank you’s”, and “Where’s the washroom”, what I think is the most important first-lesson is how to cross the road. You are bound to have to cross a road at some point during your travels, and this isn’t so straight forward in South-East Asia. There are two “unconventional” problems. First, not all roads have traffic lights with a little green dude that lights up and tell you when to cross. Second, even if the lights are in place, not all drivers follow those signals. Avoid getting killed is probably everyone’s top priority.

Crossing a road is more complex than it appears; I think of it as in terms of game theory and amateur psychology. The game is played many times per second throughout the walk. It only ends in the top-right quadrant when the person crossing the road walks and the driver stops. Of course, both players need to co-operate to win!

The most interesting outcome lies in the top-left quadrant, which is a high-risk situation where both the driver and the walker stop. The game then becomes a signalling game based on amateur psychology. The person crossing the road needs to analyze whether the driver will slow down or stop, and the driver needs to decide whether the person will move or not. They make their decisions based on the signals they observed. Since the foreign traveler and the driver are both unfamiliar with interpreting the other’s signal, they may be stuck in this outcome. As we all experienced before, indecision in the middle of the road is a dangerous business...

So to cross a road safely, it starts with observation – watch how the locals do it, study their body language or any other signal they may send. If there’s no one around, then create signals of your own that are obvious to the human race, such making eye contact with the driver and pointing in the direction you’re going before you move.

Stepping off the Bangkok Sky-train yesterday, I crossed my first 6-lane Thai road in under 8 minutes. It’s all part of the journey.

Pedestrian bridge near Pantip Plaza - Bangkok, Thailand