Coming out of the heat haze, a lumbering lorry veered towards our side of the road; the amphetamine charged driver only resolute in avoiding the ruined parts of the surface. Chicken time! I opened the throttle all the way, aimed dead centre for the lorry. Closing fast, we both hit the horn at the same moment. A blur of speed, noise and wind pressure, with a potential impact velocity of 350km/h!

At the last moment I twitched the bike with all my remaining strength, a whole body shuffle that jerked the Yamaha to the left and at precisely the same moment the lorry driver twirled to the right – neither of us thus losing any face!

Sleighy shuffled about on the back like a nodding toy dog in the rear window of a speeding car. I was nearly thrown off the bike by the slipstream as we snaked past the tail end of the lorry, the heavily decorated and chromed side blurring into a flash of red reflected sunlight.

Our new trajectory slammed us into the track on the side of the road at about 150km/h. The sheer weight and velocity of the bike bit deep into the gravel, finding firm ground underneath but spraying up a machine gun’s splatter of stones that ripped into our skin and almost closed down the forward view.

More by pure gut instinct than any skill, I tillered the Yam back on to firm tarmac, the whole wreck shaking wickedly as the suspension tried to sort itself out. I suddenly had to pull over to throw up, or rather dry-heave the last remnants of the narcotics out of my system. Sleighy went into a rant…

‘You mad bastard, you almost impaled us on the front of that truck. These Thai drivers don’t give way to anything unless it’s bigger than them. You should know that! We should have gone on the expressway, there’s nothing coming in the other direction that way! I don’t know why I bother trying to help you if all you want to do is kill us. You need some maximum military discipline…’

I got back on the Vee-Max, revving the engine into the red, making Sleighy do a running jump on to the back, otherwise he’d be stranded in the middle of the countryside. The Yamaha burbled along at 100km/h, barely ticking over in top gear but letting loose a relaxing wail out of the exhaust.