This is the section nobody reads until they need it, which is exactly the wrong time. Ten minutes now is worth a great deal at a roadside in the dark with a bent scooter and a crowd forming.
Start with what to do after a crash, in the order to do it — and the counter-intuitive part, which is that you generally wait for the police rather than settling and driving off. How fault gets decided here is not how it is decided at home, and the insurance surveyor who turns up at the scene is a Thai institution with no real equivalent elsewhere. Keep the one-page action plan on your phone.
The second half is about not needing the first half. Night driving is where a disproportionate share of visitor casualties happen, and the reasons are specific and avoidable: unlit vehicles, dogs, surfaces you cannot read, and a windscreen tinted so dark it takes half your vision. Add the rainy season and you have most of the risk in one place.
And the gear. The helmet the rental shop hands over is legal cover, not head protection — the difference is the single cheapest safety upgrade available to anyone reading this.
