Trucks and Buses Showing their Colors

Trucks and Buses Showing their Colors

This post is about some of the wildly colorful trucks and buses that I see every day. Of course, not all of these vehicles have flashy paint jobs; in fact, most are plain white, tan, or silver – which only makes the colorful ones stand out more.

Trucks

Quite a few people in this village and in neighboring villages work as truck drivers, so trucks are always rolling through. There are several homes and businesses nearby where trucks park over night. I ride past them on my bike every day. Most of the brightly painted trucks are Isuzu, which seems to have the lion's share of the market for the medium-large trucks that haul rice, sugar cane, other crops, and sometimes animals -- chickens or pigs.  Nissan and other Japanese trucks are also very common.

Here are a few examples of the more beautiful trucks I've seen.

 Of course, they also get dirty, driving on all these dusty roads:

Here is a well-adorned truck parked behind a plain white one, making it harder to take the pictures.

The tailgates are rarely this clean!

As you can see, some of the designs are very symmetrical, with repeating shapes that suggest leaves or other images from nature, while others are more fanciful.

The truck in the pictures below was parked next to the temple one morning, just waiting for me to take its picture as I passed it on my way to school. This is one of the most elaborately painted trucks I’ve seen.

I don’t know what to make of the Indian in a war bonnet on one side and the eagle on the other.  Not sure how the driver can see out of those windows either, or the windshield, for that matter -- but let's not think about that too hard. I haven’t seen the Indian and eagle images on Thai trucks very often, but have seen them here in other contexts, such as costumes worn at parades or marathons (no pictures of that, sorry).

From seeing the above pictures, you might conclude that pink, red, and blue are the most popular colors for truck-decoration – and you might be right. However, I’ve also seen a lot of green, purple, and yellow. Here is one with more green than blue, parked next to the temple on a different day.

Here are two more trucks that live nearby, just for fun.

Many Thai people who can afford to own a vehicle have a pickup truck instead of or in addition to a car. Toyota and Honda seem to be the most popular pickup trucks, which are usually plain colors -- black, silver, tan, white, etc.  I’ve never seen a pickup decorated with any of the designs seen on the trucks pictured in this post. These elaborate decorations seem to be specialized for trucks that haul stuff.  People who can't afford a car or truck ride motorcycles -- called "motocy" in spoken Thai. Maybe I can do a separate post on them at some point.

Buses

Most buses are pretty much monochrome -- yellow, tan, gray, etc. Hundreds of buses head out of Thai bus stations in major cities in all directions at every hour of the day and night. In general, most buses that travel standard routes, transporting people from one place to another, don't have colorful paint jobs. Tour buses and charter buses, on the other hand, can be quite gaudy, and there are a lot of them -- tourism is very important to the Thai economy. Here are just a couple of pictures of buses to wind up this post.

Both these buses happen to be blue, but bright red, yellow, and pink are also very popular.  The bus in the picture on the right is one that our school rented to take students on a field trip in early October. It has a dragon or "naga"motif, but flowers, people dancing, jungle scenes, and many other images are also used. 

The colorful designs on trucks and buses make my day brighter and so I pass them on to you.