Witch Hunt and Police Raid

Samui. High Season Today my friend and I were fined 300 roubles for riding without helmets. It was the first police dragnet in the history of our moped-riding in Thailand. The helmet enforcement system works roughly like this: for a month, you ride calmly past every checkpoint and police station without a helmet, and then one day there is a mass crackdown. And the very same policemen who yesterday paid not the slightest attention to your bare head now wave their magic wands at you the moment they spot your cheerful face and hair streaming in the wind. This is how it happened A misty morning, a grey morning, as is usual in Thailand in winter. Cold, +28. The two of us are riding along on the bike. Every passing moped rider, and even the motorists, keeps stubbornly pointing at their head. After glancing in the rear-view mirror for form’s sake and tidying the stray curls that had escaped from our hairstyles, we rode on, fully convinced of our irresistibility. But the stream of road users pointing at their heads did not let up. So we decided there must be something wrong with our heads. Slightly upset, we went another 100 metres... It turned out there really was: we should have turned around ages ago and raced back as fast as we could. But we only moved forwards, like the valiant troops of the Red Army. We grasped the full enormity of our mistake when we stopped almost under a policeman’s nose. He stared intently at us through the bushes, delivering the glad tidings: “Pay for riding without a helmet immediately!” We were quick-witted: we dumped the bike by the roadside and legged it the other way, pretending not to see him. The poor fellow shouted and whistled at us, while we played dumb, hoping we’d get away with it. But the guy did not give up that easily: he took our moped by the reins and began wheeling it to the police station... That was when we suddenly heard his voice... “OH!!! AAAH!” we exclaimed in astonishment at the top of our lungs. “Was that you whistling at us?! What’s the matter?!” The guardian of law and order gave us a stern look and wrote out a ticket in the purest Thai... In response to the bewildered stares of two blondes, the policeman imperiously waved towards the station. Its doors were besieged by a queue of about 40 people every bit as quick-witted as us (though no one but us had thought of running away from the police). After standing in line for about an hour and parting with three hundred, we concluded that our own coppers have a very long way to go! With their efficient approach, the Thai police rake in about 50,000 in fines at a single spot in half an hour. Payment on the spot, with none of the unnecessary paperwork or the subsequent laborious hunt for non-payers. As we were leaving, the policeman taking the fines broke into a broad grin when we suggested that, in exchange for the 300 baht he had relieved us of, we should take their handsome police helmet with the crest. He refused. “See you tomorrow,” he consoled us in our grief. “Heh-heh-heh. Not a chance,” we replied, and proudly withdrew to a shop to buy a helmet... P.S.: Once we had bought the helmet and set off home with it, it occurred to my friend that helmets are actually handed out free of charge at every bike rental place. We had to return the helmet to Big C, explaining that it would not fit our husband’s head. Blondes are a force to be reckoned with....