Travel horror stories: Permanently disfigured by a bus crash

This is not my own story but rather a story of someone that I was quite good friends with and met while I was traveling around South East Asia. The roads in countries like Cambodia, Laos, and probably most importantly Thailand, are extremely dangerous for people traveling by any means and likely especially on a bus or minivan.

These vehicles regularly drive like lunatics and regularly crash and kill or mangle the passengers. These countries, despite their horrific track-record as far as road safety is concerned, doesn't have a "culture" of wearing seat belts either. It is alarming to me that this is the case but it hit (literally) very hard for my two friends one awful day when a proper bus / coach collided with a bridge and the end result was them being horrifically injured and one of them is permanently disfigured because of it.

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This is not the bus in question but there are so many pictures of bus crashes in an image search for SE Asia that you can just presume that the crash they were involved in was just as bad. The above picture 20 people were injured and 5 died. I think the numbers were about the same on the bus my friends were involved in.

They were sitting near the front of the bus, which are the more popular seats for people to book because you normally will have a big window in front of you looking out onto the road and scenery in front of the bus. This is also the most dangerous place to sit on the bus because most of the time the buses don't even have seatbelts and I don't know how they get away with this.

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A bus is big enough that it can crash into almost anything and be fine compared to the other vehicle that it strikes, but there is something about crashing into a giant post made of cement and rebar, the bridge is always going to win. When this happened my friends were asleep as this was a night bus to Bangkok, unfortunately for them the bus driver was also asleep and this is why they crashed.

One of them was thrown clear through the window and onto the street in front after luckily not hitting the bridge. The other unfortunately face-planted into the steel and glass of the front of the bus and bounced back inside. Both were rendered unconscious when this happened.

They both had to go through months of hospitalization and one of my friends had to have reconstructive surgery on his face. The costs were immense. To make matters worse, the bus company responsible did everything in their power to not pay for the medical expenses attempting to go to court to delay the process again and again I guess in the hopes that the victims would just give up. Eventually they did get their settlement but some of the surgeries were deemed "elective" and the company didn't have to pay.

My one friend now has a kind of messed up face because of this because there is only so much that plastic surgeons can do for a person when their skull is nearly destroyed in something like this. His wife (the other friend) has a limp that she is going to have for the rest of her life most likely because one of her legs was shattered and broken in so many places that they were not able to put her back together so to speak.

This is a horrible situation to have happen to anyone and it is entirely the fault of the bus driver as well as the near complete lack of safety regulations that exist in Thailand. I have been in minivans and buses all around the world where the driver was fueling himself with loads of Red Bull and other amphetamines in order to work as long as possible. They also drive like lunatics to get to where they are going as fast as possible and probably turn right around and do the return journey straight away. The near complete lack of speed limits in these countries only makes the problem worse.

Unfortunately, when you are traveling in this and many other countries around the world, there really aren't a lot of other options as far as public transport is concerned but there are a few things that you can do to try to protect yourself.

one is to get a seat in the back of a bus. There is almost nothing that could possibly happen on one of these buses what would result in the destruction of these seats all the way back there. Also, if a bus does have seatbelts, use them. It might seem more uncomfortable at first, but it isn't nearly as uncomfortable as being on life-support in a hospital for many months.

In the absence of government regulation you kind of have to take some aspects of travel into your own hands and one thing you should never do, is try to sit in the front seats. Had my friends been sitting almost anywhere else they would have still been injured, but the chance for them to bounce off the seat directly in front of them instead of flying across the "room" would have been a lot greater.

A tragic story indeed, and not a common one. In all likelihood your terrifying bus trip in any country is going to result in you getting to where you are going without incident and I am not trying to scare anyone out of traveling. Travel has made my life what it is today after all. Just remember that most countries around the world do not have strict safety rules nor are you going to be taken care of by insurance should something go horribly wrong.