Tuk-Tuk to the Road
Tuk Tuk to the Road
two girls, three wheels, 12,500 miles
Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent and Jo Huxster
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Prologue
Planned route
Chapter 1 Countdown
Chapter 2 Lift Off
Chapter 3 The Dragon’s Den
Chapter 4 Ladaland
Chapter 5 The Final Furlong
Chapter 6 Touch Down
Two months later
Frequently asked questions
A tukking quick guide to fundraising
A bit about Mind
Useful sources
Equipment list
Index
Acknowledgements
A note from the authors
Copyright
About the Publisher
In memory of Rose and Livs, our guardian angels
Introduction
People often ask us where the inspiration to drive a tuk tuk from Bangkok to Brighton came from. The answer is simple—five years ago Jo went to Bangkok, fell in love with tuk tuks and decided that one day she would drive one back to England. Four years later we turned Ting Tong out of the gates of the British embassy in Bangkok and headed for home. Two continents, 12 countries, 14 weeks and the odd snapped accelerator cable later, we made it to our final destination—Brighton, England.
Anyone who has spent even five minutes in a tuk tuk might question why on earth we would consider undertaking such a gruelling journey in one of these noisy three-wheelers. Why not a nice comfortable Land Rover? Well, quite frankly, that would have been dull. The primary motivation for this trip was to take part in a challenging and novel experience, to explore the world in a vehicle that most people would consider travelling in for only a few miles. Plus, as we were going to be doing the trip in aid of the mental health charity Mind, then what better way to attract attention and sponsorship than a bright-pink tuk tuk?
Having ideas is one thing, but making them happen quite another. Turning our dream into the reality of a 12,500-mile tukking- extravaganza took determination, tears, stress, excitement and an unwavering desire to succeed. Last January we dived head-first into the unknown, spending the next four months working full time to organise everything: technology, insurance, medical training, finding sponsors, raising money for Mind, learning Russian and much more. It was often difficult to comprehend the enormity of what we were actually doing; instead of feeling scared, we felt like we were planning the trip for someone else. At other times, it felt like galloping flat out towards a vast brick wall with no idea what was on the other side.
But all the hard work paid off in the end, as the trip was a unique and amazing experience. After being back for six months, we are still digesting and reliving those 14 weeks on the road. It was the best thing we have ever done and, although it may sound like a horrible cliché, this past year has taught us that if you are determined enough, anything is possible.
Jo, Ants and Ting Tong
March 2007
Prologue
It was a typical May day in Bangkok. The streets were the usual gridlock of tuk tuks, taxis and kamikaze bikers, the air stiflingly hot. In the Khao San Road dreadlocked travellers rubbed shoulders with immaculately dressed ladyboys and women hawked their wares to passers-by. There was nothing to suggest that today was anything but ordinary. But for Jo and I this was D-Day, the day when we would embark on a dream born years before. In the cloying, pre-monsoon heat we loaded up our tuk tuk for the first time and wove through the traffic towards the British embassy. Neither of us could get our heads round the enormity of the task that lay ahead—that finally, after months of planning and preparation, we were about to take the first tuk on the long road home. Was a tuk tuk really going to be able to make it all the way to Brighton? It was too late now for such questions. It was time for Lift Off.
Our journey had really begun 15 years earlier when Jo and I found ourselves in the same classroom in the autumn of 1991. Despite our different upbringings—Jo’s in Surrey’s leafy commuter belt, mine in the North Norfolk countryside—we were soon inseparable, our friendship forged on a love of sport, animals and subverting discipline. Winter weekends would be spent careering around the lacrosse pitch, thrashing other schools and gorging ourselves on match teas. In summer we would while away the evenings with long competitive hours on the tennis court, evenly matched and determined to beat each other. The holidays would see us frequenting the National Express between Norwich and London to stay at each other’s houses. It’s easy to look back on the past through a rose-tinted prism, but these early teenage years were a lot of fun, both in and out of school.
I often wonder whether the signs were there during those carefree years. At what point did the cracks begin to show? Jo was always extreme, non-conformist, a rebel—you could say anti-establishment. At an age when peer pressure was at its most potent, she was someone who dared to be different. It wasn’t that she was an attention-seeker; it was just that she seemed to lack the self-consciousness that so commonly afflicts teenagers. While we thought we were at the cutting edge of fashion with our latest purchases from Kensington Market, Jo would go one step further, appearing at school in massive army boots, tie-dye, eye-poppingly short skirts and an undercut, a hairstyle synonymous with dog-on-string ketamine-heads, not public school girls. This, combined with her ridiculous sense of humour, was perhaps what I loved most about her. But was this necessarily an indication of what would happen a few years later? Did fate already have Jo in its clutch?
At the end of GCSEs, Jo left our school to do her A-Levels at Lancing College. It was then that things started to go wrong. She was miserable at Lancing from the outset, and my diary entries from her first term there speak of her unhappiness and desire to leave. On my part, I missed her terribly. But it wasn’t until the following summer that I realised quite how unhappy she was. We were walking along the street in Thames Ditton one afternoon when I noticed some marks on her arms. I had never seen self-harm before, never heard of it even, but I knew those marks were self-inflicted. Nowadays self-harm is a recognised condition and rivals anorexia for newspaper column inches. A 2006 survey shockingly revealed that 25 000 teenagers are treated in British hospitals every year for self-inflicted wounds, but ten years ago it wasn’t something you ever heard about.‘What are those marks on your arm, Ferret?’ I ventured. She looked sheepish and smiled that nervous smile you do when you know you have done something wrong. Then she admitted she had done them to herself. They were tiny scars at that point—barely visible—and she assured me that she wouldn’t do it again.
These assurances were soon forgotten. My diary from October 1996 records: ‘I went to stay with Jo last weekend…I don’t know what to do about her at the moment…she’s cutting herself regularly…who the hell do I turn to for advice?’ I felt helpless, out of my depth. We met up a few times during that term to go clubbing in London, and Jo covered up her arms with bandages and lied to anyone who asked. In November we celebrated our eighteenth birthdays dancing the night away at the SW1 club in Victoria with a load of friends, going home long after the sun had come up. In spite of the cutting, she was still the old Jo, full of laughter, energy and mischief. I could never have foreseen what lurked in the shadows of the immediate future.
A week later she was taken to a psychiatric hospital near Tunbridge Wells.
And that’s when we lost Jo.
It all happened so quickly. One minute she was there—unhappy yes, but still Jo, still able to come out and have a laugh and celebrate turning 18. The next minute she’d gone, enveloped by the dark cloak of depression. Four weeks after she had been admitted, I went to visit her in hospital with her father and brother. The first shock was the hospital itself. Just before we arrived, one of Jo’s fellow patients had cut themselves in the bathroom and there was blood everywhere. Someone else had kicked a door in. The whole place reeked of unhappiness and disquiet. Then there was the shock of seeing my friend. The Jo I knew and loved was vibrant, hyperactive and quick to laugh. The Jo I saw that day in hospital was a mere shell, hardly able to speak, her limbs a morass of self-inflicted wounds. She was also under constant one-on-one supervision in case she tried to harm herself. How on earth had it come to this?
Jo spent the next four years in and out of various psychiatric institutions in the south of England. She should have been doing her A-levels and then a degree, out there having fun. Instead she was on a cocktail of antidepressants and locked into a spiralling addiction to self-harm. As the months and years ticked by, I began to lose hope of Jo ever being able to escape from the abyss into which she had fallen. She took overdoses and cut herself so badly that she frequently had to be stitched up—with 128 stitches on one occasion. At one stage, voices in her head urged her to cut herself and to kill herself and others; thank goodness she had the strength to resist. It was heartbreaking to see her so unhappy and to see such a beautiful girl destroying her body like she was, knowing she would be scarred for life. I can’t begin to imagine how her family must have felt.
While Jo was battling depression, I was leading a very different existence as a student at Edinburgh University. It was extraordinary to think how much our lives had diverged in such a short space of time. We had gone from seeing and speaking to each other daily to barely having any contact at all. My letters went unanswered, my calls were unreturned and when I did make the journey south to see her she was usually uncommunicative and numbed by drugs. Because I had never experienced depression and couldn’t relate to her condition, I became frustrated with what I saw as an increasingly one-sided friendship; Jo didn’t seem to care at all. It was naive of me to think that the normal rules of friendship still applied, to expect anything from someone who was so ill, but I didn’t understand that when you feel like Jo did you become socially disabled and unable to communicate even with those closest to you. It was only when my own life crumbled during my second year of university, in 1998, that I understood what this felt like.
In a single week, my father lost his business, we lost our family home and my parents split up after 26 years of marriage. It was a massive shock and before long I was experiencing severe panic attacks, which lasted for the next three years. I now knew what it was like to not want to speak to people, to feel like you have fallen down a black hole from which there is no perceivable escape. Depression can make you very selfish; you’re so caught up in your own problems and paranoia that you become disconnected from the world outside your own head. Jo had always been a compassionate, thoughtful, loving person, but she was so ill at times during these four years that it was as if she was locked in a glass prison, able to see and exist within the outside world but unable to communicate with it.
Looking back on it now, I see the fact that Jo recovered as little short of miraculous. She plumbed the very depths of depression and yet made it out the other side. Pinpointing the reasons why someone suddenly overcomes such an affliction is almost as hard as comprehending why and how they succumbed to it originally. In Jo’s case it was a combination of factors, namely the right medication and the love and support of her family, friends and…ferrets. Above all, though, I put it down to her extraordinary strength of character. Many people who suffer from depression give up hope of ever seeing light at the end of the tunnel. The darkness is so consuming that they can’t believe it isn’t terminal. But even at her lowest points, Jo held on to that vital shred of hope that she wouldn’t feel like that for ever. Her recovery should be an inspiration to all.
In the summer of 2002 Jo went to Thailand with her friends Hannah and Niki. It was a seminal moment. When she went on that holiday I knew she’d made it, that we’d got Jo back again. Little did I know that a small incident on that holiday would have such major ramifications, for it was here that she first encountered a tuk tuk, the ubiquitous three-wheelers that crowd the streets of South East Asia. It was love at first rev, and at that moment Jo dreamt up the notion of one day driving a tuk tuk from Bangkok back to England. Since Jo has never been the most conventional person, it was with only a slightly raised eyebrow that I greeted the news of her plan upon her return, although I’m not sure I ever truly believed the scheme would come to fruition. My doubts were coloured by my own experiences of hair-raising tuk tuk rides in Bangkok, which had always left me slightly deafened and vowing to take a taxi next time. Plus, I doubted one would make it as far as the city’s airport, let alone England.
I should have known better. Jo is the most determined person I know, and this little plan of hers was here to stay. For the next four years, while Jo did a psychology degree in Brighton and I clambered up the ladder in the world of television production in London, the dream simmered. She would occasionally mention it in passing, but I didn’t really think she meant business. Meanwhile, Jo was quietly gathering information and maps and beginning to show a very unladylike interest in mechanics. In September 2005, Jo and two of our other great friends from school, Anna and Lisa, came to stay with me for the weekend in Norfolk. At supper one night in the local pub, Jo piped up,‘Right, guys, I need your advice. I’ve got a year off before I start medical school next autumn, and I’m wondering whether to take the plunge and do this tuk tuk trip. Either that or I go and do a master’s degree.’ Fuelled by wine and lots of laughter, our vote was unanimous: the tuk tuk it was. None of us gave a moment’s consideration to how she would do it or who she would go with, but we all thought it was a wonderful idea and celebrated with several more glasses of wine.
The following week Jo called me: ‘Ferret, will you do the tuk tuk trip with me?’ she asked, her voice filled with excitement. My immediate reaction was to say yes—how could I resist the temptation of such an adventure? This was the chance to go travelling together, the chance for which we had been waiting since a hilarious caravanning holiday nine years earlier. I put down the phone with a smile and went to bed that night dreaming of the open road and exotic places with unpronounceable names. Over the next few weeks, however, I was gripped by uncertainty and nagging doubts about the wisdom of my decision. If I gave up my job at ITV to go gallivanting around the world on three wheels, where would it leave me? Would I be throwing away all that I had achieved on a flighty whim? Was I striving for excitement when really I should just be sensible and get a bit of stability in my life? Put simply, I was afraid—afraid of stepping outside the box and doing something a bit different and afraid of losing my place on that overcrowded TV ladder. After weeks of sleepless nights and dreams of never being able to find a job again, I rang Jo in late October and told her that I had changed my mind, apologising profusely and feeling incredibly guilty about letting her down. She was far too magnanimous to point out that by pulling out I was probably putting an end to her dream, but I knew that was the case. It was far too big and dangerous an undertaking for Jo to do solo.
A few weeks after that, on 16 November, I was filming at the Eden Project in Cornwall when my mobile rang. It was my friend Rose’s brother, Humphrey.‘She’s done it,’ he said.‘Rose killed herself yesterday morning.’ My beautiful, sweet, vivacious friend Rose. Gone. Just like that. I knew she had been extremely depressed and when we had gone to the cinema a few weeks earlier she had confided in me that she had contemplated suicide. But there is a vast gulf between contemplation and action, and the fact that she had actually done it left me numb with incomprehension. That night I went for a moonlit walk and thought about Rose, the fragility of life and how you never know what’s round the next corner. Her sudden death made me realise more than ever that you only live once and that opportunities like this trip should be grasped with both hands, not recoiled from. A few days later I called Jo and told her I had changed my mind—I wanted to do the trip with her after all. And this time I was sure.
So at the beginning of January, having waved goodbye to ITV, Jo and I found ourselves sitting at her parents’ house in Surrey, crisp new notebooks in hand, wondering where on earth to begin. Since Jo was due to start medical school in September, we had only eight months to organise and complete the journey. It was going to be a huge challenge. Neither of us had ever driven a tuk tuk before, knew where to get one, or had any idea about how to plan such a massive project. We’d both done a lot of independent travel, but organising a backpacking trip round India and planning a 12,500-mile, two-continent tukathon are quite different matters. If we were going to be back by September and avoid the Asian monsoons, we would have to leave in April, May at the latest, which gave us four months to do everything. Not that we had any idea what ‘everything’ entailed at that point.
With four months until Lift Off, the only things we were sure of were our intended route and the fact that we were going to do the journey in aid of Mind, the mental health charity. Jo’s four years of studying maps and trawling the Internet had made her determined to tackle ‘the northern route’ via China, Central Asia and Russia. Not only was this ‘the road less travelled’ but also it meant that we would be overland all the way, our wheels leaving terra firma only to hop across the Channel on the Eurotunnel. The alternative was to take the old hippy trail through India, Iran, Pakistan and Turkey, but the major drawback here was having to ship our vehicle across the Indian Ocean from Singapore to India. Not only would this dilute the overland experience but also, in the current political climate, the idea of travelling through Iran wasn’t overly appealing. Labelled as ‘the axis of evil’ by George W. Bush in 2002, Iran’s leaders’ nuclear ambitions and threats against Israel had led to further threats of ballistic missile attacks from the Pentagon if Tehran didn’t toe the line. Dodging US missiles was something we would rather avoid.
Our first major obstacle was China, country number three on our intended route. While flicking through the Rough Guide in January, Jo was horrified to read that it is illegal for foreigners to drive in China. If this was the case, then we would be forced to divert to the southern route, or take option number three—ship the tuk tuk to Japan and from there to Vladivostok on Russia’s far eastern seaboard. It would be a toss-up between facing the dangers of Iran or taking on roads that had nearly spelt the end of Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s The Long Way Round expedition two years previously. Fortunately, neither situation ever arose, as, after extensive research, Jo discovered that it wasn’t in fact illegal, just extremely complicated and expensive to arrange. First we would have to find a specialist Chinese travel agent to arrange our passage through the Dragon’s Den. This agent would have to obtain special permission from the army, the police and the government, and we would have to follow a set itinerary and be chaperoned at all times by a Chinese guide. Plus we would have to get special Chinese driving licences, and our tuk tuk would have to be fitted with Chinese plates at the border. All this for the bargain price of £6530. It was going to be a huge chunk out of our budget, but Jo was determined. China it was, then.
With the Chinese issue under control, it was down to the organisational nitty-gritty. How and where were we going to find a tuk tuk? What visas and documentation did we need? What equipment should we take? How were we going to find financial sponsors for the trip? Which roads were too dangerous or too mountainous to tuk? Then in early February Jo dropped a bombshell: since a tuk tuk classifies as a motorbike on the International Driving Permit (IDP), we were going to have to get full motorbike licences. Quickly. The Chinese agent needed our IDPs within a month in order to process all our permits in time, so there was no room for error.
I’d barely even sat on a motorbike before, let alone attempted hill starts, U-turns or straddling a throbbing 500-cc bike dressed in full leathers. And Norfolk in February was not the ideal place to start. The next month saw me glued, freezing, to the back of a bike, exhaustively practising all the manoeuvres in the back streets of Norwich. My instructor, Paul, a grizzled 40-something with a broad Norfolk accent, encouragingly told me one day that I wasn’t ‘the most natural biker’. On more than one occasion, having broken yet another indicator and failed another U-turn, I wondered whether we’d ever make it out of the country, let alone back here. Test day came on 9 March and, quaking with fear despite having downed a bottle of Rescue Remedy, I mounted the bike. By some amazing stroke of luck, I passed, with only three minor faults. Much to her chagrin, Jo passed second time around, a week later.
With China and our motorbike tests under our belts, our mission was now in full swing. It was now that the countdown really begun.
It is very difficult to put into words what it feels like to suffer from depression. I think that to truly understand you have to have suffered it yourself, and I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone. I think an apt description would be cancer of the soul or malignant sadness. When you are depressed, the world is a very dark place, totally devoid of anything positive. Sometimes when I was really down, I would just hide in bed and cry and feel absolutely terrified. Other times I couldn’t cry and just felt like a corpse with a pulse. I remember feeling really scared because I knew that I loved my family and friends, but I couldn’t feel love for them. I felt imprisoned in my own mind and I had no idea how to escape.
I don’t know what caused me to become mentally ill. My upbringing was loving and secure, and there seemed to be no trigger for my depression. A possible contribution might have been genetic: I am adopted, and my natural mother suffered many mental health problems throughout her adult life, eventually succumbing to her demons and committing suicide.
Ants and I first met when we were 12 at Wycombe Abbey. We quickly became best friends. We had a close-knit group of friends at school and, whether we were playing sport, rolling down hills or going for sneaky cigarettes in the woods, it was a good experience. At Wycombe we may have been thought of as a bit rebellious, but the worst we ever did was smoke and occasionally sneak into High Wycombe to go shopping—hardly deviant behaviour. In such an academic pressure cooker, it was important to conform and it was sometimes fun to act the clown and do the opposite of what was expected. I recall a £3 dare to wear my nightie to classes on a Saturday morning. I probably could have passed it off as an ethnic trend, but unfortunately the nightie was totally see-through and Ants’ housemistress posed the question ‘Why is Jo Huxster wearing her nightie?’ After my GCSEs I went to a new school, Lancing College. It was then that my problems began.