Oi!

Sugarcane’s taller than you think. It’s taller than I thought. But then again, I never claimed to know anything about sugarcane. It was news to me that an extraordinary amount of sugarcane is grown here in Isaan. I also, until recently, had no idea there was a large sugar factory just outside of town, only 10 minutes from my house. That would explain all of trucks stacked with sugarcane that barrel through town with more regularity than the local buses.

One bribe and these illegally over-loaded trucks are street legal and they come through Buakhao from all directions, stacked taller and wider with cane than any falang would consider safe or even think possible. Barely held in place, canes fly off the entire way to the factory and thus, for miles, our main roads are littered with sugarcane.

It wasn’t until a couple days ago I finally saw what I had been expecting to see regularly: a truck pulled over, half of it’s payload toppled from the back, nearly blocking the entire road. I thought back to all of the times I had been driving directly behind one of these trucks, peeking around ready to make another treacherous pass on the two-lane Thai roads. The joke then, when looking to pass, just feet behind the back of an over-loaded sugarcane truck is, “Gin oi, mai?”, or “Wanna eat some sugarcane?” I don’t take the joke as lightly anymore, having seen that being buried in freshly cut cane isn’t so unlikely after all.