Tuk-Tuk to the Road

In a single week, my father lost his business, we lost our family home and my parents split up after 26 years of marriage. It was a massive shock and before long I was experiencing severe panic attacks, which lasted for the next three years. I now knew what it was like to not want to speak to people, to feel like you have fallen down a black hole from which there is no perceivable escape. Depression can make you very selfish; you’re so caught up in your own problems and paranoia that you become disconnected from the world outside your own head. Jo had always been a compassionate, thoughtful, loving person, but she was so ill at times during these four years that it was as if she was locked in a glass prison, able to see and exist within the outside world but unable to communicate with it.

Looking back on it now, I see the fact that Jo recovered as little short of miraculous. She plumbed the very depths of depression and yet made it out the other side. Pinpointing the reasons why someone suddenly overcomes such an affliction is almost as hard as comprehending why and how they succumbed to it originally. In Jo’s case it was a combination of factors, namely the right medication and the love and support of her family, friends and…ferrets. Above all, though, I put it down to her extraordinary strength of character. Many people who suffer from depression give up hope of ever seeing light at the end of the tunnel. The darkness is so consuming that they can’t believe it isn’t terminal. But even at her lowest points, Jo held on to that vital shred of hope that she wouldn’t feel like that for ever. Her recovery should be an inspiration to all.

In the summer of 2002 Jo went to Thailand with her friends Hannah and Niki. It was a seminal moment. When she went on that holiday I knew she’d made it, that we’d got Jo back again. Little did I know that a small incident on that holiday would have such major ramifications, for it was here that she first encountered a tuk tuk, the ubiquitous three-wheelers that crowd the streets of South East Asia. It was love at first rev, and at that moment Jo dreamt up the notion of one day driving a tuk tuk from Bangkok back to England. Since Jo has never been the most conventional person, it was with only a slightly raised eyebrow that I greeted the news of her plan upon her return, although I’m not sure I ever truly believed the scheme would come to fruition. My doubts were coloured by my own experiences of hair-raising tuk tuk rides in Bangkok, which had always left me slightly deafened and vowing to take a taxi next time. Plus, I doubted one would make it as far as the city’s airport, let alone England.

I should have known better. Jo is the most determined person I know, and this little plan of hers was here to stay. For the next four years, while Jo did a psychology degree in Brighton and I clambered up the ladder in the world of television production in London, the dream simmered. She would occasionally mention it in passing, but I didn’t really think she meant business. Meanwhile, Jo was quietly gathering information and maps and beginning to show a very unladylike interest in mechanics. In September 2005, Jo and two of our other great friends from school, Anna and Lisa, came to stay with me for the weekend in Norfolk. At supper one night in the local pub, Jo piped up,‘Right, guys, I need your advice. I’ve got a year off before I start medical school next autumn, and I’m wondering whether to take the plunge and do this tuk tuk trip. Either that or I go and do a master’s degree.’ Fuelled by wine and lots of laughter, our vote was unanimous: the tuk tuk it was. None of us gave a moment’s consideration to how she would do it or who she would go with, but we all thought it was a wonderful idea and celebrated with several more glasses of wine.

The following week Jo called me: ‘Ferret, will you do the tuk tuk trip with me?’ she asked, her voice filled with excitement. My immediate reaction was to say yes—how could I resist the temptation of such an adventure? This was the chance to go travelling together, the chance for which we had been waiting since a hilarious caravanning holiday nine years earlier. I put down the phone with a smile and went to bed that night dreaming of the open road and exotic places with unpronounceable names. Over the next few weeks, however, I was gripped by uncertainty and nagging doubts about the wisdom of my decision. If I gave up my job at ITV to go gallivanting around the world on three wheels, where would it leave me? Would I be throwing away all that I had achieved on a flighty whim? Was I striving for excitement when really I should just be sensible and get a bit of stability in my life? Put simply, I was afraid—afraid of stepping outside the box and doing something a bit different and afraid of losing my place on that overcrowded TV ladder. After weeks of sleepless nights and dreams of never being able to find a job again, I rang Jo in late October and told her that I had changed my mind, apologising profusely and feeling incredibly guilty about letting her down. She was far too magnanimous to point out that by pulling out I was probably putting an end to her dream, but I knew that was the case. It was far too big and dangerous an undertaking for Jo to do solo.

A few weeks after that, on 16 November, I was filming at the Eden Project in Cornwall when my mobile rang. It was my friend Rose’s brother, Humphrey.‘She’s done it,’ he said.‘Rose killed herself yesterday morning.’ My beautiful, sweet, vivacious friend Rose. Gone. Just like that. I knew she had been extremely depressed and when we had gone to the cinema a few weeks earlier she had confided in me that she had contemplated suicide. But there is a vast gulf between contemplation and action, and the fact that she had actually done it left me numb with incomprehension. That night I went for a moonlit walk and thought about Rose, the fragility of life and how you never know what’s round the next corner. Her sudden death made me realise more than ever that you only live once and that opportunities like this trip should be grasped with both hands, not recoiled from. A few days later I called Jo and told her I had changed my mind—I wanted to do the trip with her after all. And this time I was sure.

So at the beginning of January, having waved goodbye to ITV, Jo and I found ourselves sitting at her parents’ house in Surrey, crisp new notebooks in hand, wondering where on earth to begin. Since Jo was due to start medical school in September, we had only eight months to organise and complete the journey. It was going to be a huge challenge. Neither of us had ever driven a tuk tuk before, knew where to get one, or had any idea about how to plan such a massive project. We’d both done a lot of independent travel, but organising a backpacking trip round India and planning a 12,500-mile, two-continent tukathon are quite different matters. If we were going to be back by September and avoid the Asian monsoons, we would have to leave in April, May at the latest, which gave us four months to do everything. Not that we had any idea what ‘everything’ entailed at that point.

With four months until Lift Off, the only things we were sure of were our intended route and the fact that we were going to do the journey in aid of Mind, the mental health charity. Jo’s four years of studying maps and trawling the Internet had made her determined to tackle ‘the northern route’ via China, Central Asia and Russia. Not only was this ‘the road less travelled’ but also it meant that we would be overland all the way, our wheels leaving terra firma only to hop across the Channel on the Eurotunnel. The alternative was to take the old hippy trail through India, Iran, Pakistan and Turkey, but the major drawback here was having to ship our vehicle across the Indian Ocean from Singapore to India. Not only would this dilute the overland experience but also, in the current political climate, the idea of travelling through Iran wasn’t overly appealing. Labelled as ‘the axis of evil’ by George W. Bush in 2002, Iran’s leaders’ nuclear ambitions and threats against Israel had led to further threats of ballistic missile attacks from the Pentagon if Tehran didn’t toe the line. Dodging US missiles was something we would rather avoid.

Our first major obstacle was China, country number three on our intended route. While flicking through the Rough Guide in January, Jo was horrified to read that it is illegal for foreigners to drive in China. If this was the case, then we would be forced to divert to the southern route, or take option number three—ship the tuk tuk to Japan and from there to Vladivostok on Russia’s far eastern seaboard. It would be a toss-up between facing the dangers of Iran or taking on roads that had nearly spelt the end of Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s The Long Way Round expedition two years previously. Fortunately, neither situation ever arose, as, after extensive research, Jo discovered that it wasn’t in fact illegal, just extremely complicated and expensive to arrange. First we would have to find a specialist Chinese travel agent to arrange our passage through the Dragon’s Den. This agent would have to obtain special permission from the army, the police and the government, and we would have to follow a set itinerary and be chaperoned at all times by a Chinese guide. Plus we would have to get special Chinese driving licences, and our tuk tuk would have to be fitted with Chinese plates at the border. All this for the bargain price of £6530. It was going to be a huge chunk out of our budget, but Jo was determined. China it was, then.

With the Chinese issue under control, it was down to the organisational nitty-gritty. How and where were we going to find a tuk tuk? What visas and documentation did we need? What equipment should we take? How were we going to find financial sponsors for the trip? Which roads were too dangerous or too mountainous to tuk? Then in early February Jo dropped a bombshell: since a tuk tuk classifies as a motorbike on the International Driving Permit (IDP), we were going to have to get full motorbike licences. Quickly. The Chinese agent needed our IDPs within a month in order to process all our permits in time, so there was no room for error.

I’d barely even sat on a motorbike before, let alone attempted hill starts, U-turns or straddling a throbbing 500-cc bike dressed in full leathers. And Norfolk in February was not the ideal place to start. The next month saw me glued, freezing, to the back of a bike, exhaustively practising all the manoeuvres in the back streets of Norwich. My instructor, Paul, a grizzled 40-something with a broad Norfolk accent, encouragingly told me one day that I wasn’t ‘the most natural biker’. On more than one occasion, having broken yet another indicator and failed another U-turn, I wondered whether we’d ever make it out of the country, let alone back here. Test day came on 9 March and, quaking with fear despite having downed a bottle of Rescue Remedy, I mounted the bike. By some amazing stroke of luck, I passed, with only three minor faults. Much to her chagrin, Jo passed second time around, a week later.

With China and our motorbike tests under our belts, our mission was now in full swing. It was now that the countdown really begun.

Life before tukking—Jo

It is very difficult to put into words what it feels like to suffer from depression. I think that to truly understand you have to have suffered it yourself, and I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone. I think an apt description would be cancer of the soul or malignant sadness. When you are depressed, the world is a very dark place, totally devoid of anything positive. Sometimes when I was really down, I would just hide in bed and cry and feel absolutely terrified. Other times I couldn’t cry and just felt like a corpse with a pulse. I remember feeling really scared because I knew that I loved my family and friends, but I couldn’t feel love for them. I felt imprisoned in my own mind and I had no idea how to escape.

I don’t know what caused me to become mentally ill. My upbringing was loving and secure, and there seemed to be no trigger for my depression. A possible contribution might have been genetic: I am adopted, and my natural mother suffered many mental health problems throughout her adult life, eventually succumbing to her demons and committing suicide.

Ants and I first met when we were 12 at Wycombe Abbey. We quickly became best friends. We had a close-knit group of friends at school and, whether we were playing sport, rolling down hills or going for sneaky cigarettes in the woods, it was a good experience. At Wycombe we may have been thought of as a bit rebellious, but the worst we ever did was smoke and occasionally sneak into High Wycombe to go shopping—hardly deviant behaviour. In such an academic pressure cooker, it was important to conform and it was sometimes fun to act the clown and do the opposite of what was expected. I recall a £3 dare to wear my nightie to classes on a Saturday morning. I probably could have passed it off as an ethnic trend, but unfortunately the nightie was totally see-through and Ants’ housemistress posed the question ‘Why is Jo Huxster wearing her nightie?’ After my GCSEs I went to a new school, Lancing College. It was then that my problems began.

I vividly remember Mum and Dad dropping me off at Lancing on the first day of term. Instead of feeling excited, I felt a sense of dread and was really struggling to hold back the tears as I hugged them goodbye. However, I made friends quickly and spent more time socialising than concentrating on my studies. From the outside everything appeared to be going well, but inside I struggled to feel happy and I would frequently cry in my bedroom, although I had no idea what the problem was. Another student told me that I would feel better if I cut myself, and so I did, carving the name of an ex-boyfriend on my forearm.

Some people are horrified and scared of self-harm, and I can understand why. It seems like such a destructive and horrible thing to do to yourself. Self-harming made me feel better because it distracted me from feeling down. Seeing my own blood was such a release from the negative thoughts in my head. I continued to self-harm intermittently during my first term at Lancing, but then my mood improved and the next two terms were better.

Ants and I spoke regularly during my time at Lancing, and she was very supportive. Sometimes I would just be in tears on the phone and she always did her best to cheer me up. I really missed my friends at Wycombe and wondered whether leaving had been the right choice, but Ants assured me that I wasn’t missing out on anything.

Things started to go really wrong during the first term of my second year at Lancing. The feelings of sadness that had plagued me the previous year returned with a vengeance. I couldn’t concentrate on my work and life felt utterly pointless. I spent a lot of time crying and began to cut myself frequently. My housemistress became concerned about my behaviour, and I was sent to see the school’s GP, who referred me to a psychiatrist.

I had no idea what depression was or why I felt miserable and cut myself. I didn’t know anyone who had visited a psychiatrist and thought only seriously mentally ill people did this. I think my comment at the time was ‘I’m not crazy’. I recall being told that I had a depressive illness, and I asked what it was called. I knew nothing about mental illnesses and assumed that there were lots of different types of depressive illness, just like there are many viruses. Mental health was not in the news so much a decade ago—the recent increase in media coverage has raised awareness, which is surely a good thing.

At the end of the winter term I was really struggling to cope with my depression and was admitted to psychiatric hospital for the first time. I naively thought that I would be there for five days, take some pills and then be back to normal. Unfortunately, the pills I was taking didn’t make me feel any better and three weeks later I still felt the same. I was discharged from hospital over Christmas, but then I returned in the new year. I think the five days of my second admission formed one of the lowest points of my whole life. For some reason I got it into my head that I couldn’t wee, and so I stopped drinking properly. This made the problem worse because I became totally dehydrated. I remember lying on the floor feeling terrified that I was going to die.

Over the next four years, I was in and out of different psychiatric hospitals like a yo-yo, spending over two years as an inpatient. I tried every type of medication they gave me, various forms of talking therapy and even a course of ECT (electroconvulsive therapy, whereby the patient is given a short general anaesthetic and an electric current is passed through their brain). The ECT didn’t work, but I enjoyed the general anaesthetic, because it meant a few moments of respite from the depression. Most of the time I felt like absolute shit, but a couple of things kept me going through these years: first, my ferrets, and, second, something that my first psychiatrist had said to me when I was 18: ‘Jo, I promise you won’t feel like this forever.’ This comment may sound quite insignificant, but when you are in the depths of depression you cannot see a way out and without this small glimmer of hope I might not be here today.

I got my first ferret when I was 19. It was all Ants’ fault. We had always called each other ‘Ferret’ at school, and Ants suggested I get a pet ferret to cheer me up. Little did she know that this was to be the start of a total obsession with the smelly little creatures. I named my first ferret Ants in her honour, which I’m not sure if she saw as much of a compliment, because Ants was a smelly little white thing with red eyes that bit anyone who wasn’t me. They say that a pet is good therapy, and Ants certainly kept me company when I felt low. My second ferret was called Zed, an amazing animal who wouldn’t leave me alone when I was really depressed. If I cried, Zed would lick away my tears; when I was too down to do anything other than lie on the sofa, Zed slept down my T-shirt. Mum and Dad would bring Zed to visit me in hospital and she pottered up and down the corridor on her lead, providing some light entertainment and face-washing for the other patients.

I wasn’t severely depressed for the whole four years that I was in and out of hospital, but I always felt low. I used self-harm to distract me from my feelings and it became an addiction of sorts, although when I was challenged about this I denied it. Even though I hated the scars that I got from cutting myself, I also felt that I deserved them. I was so frustrated with myself for not getting better and feeling like such a useless person.

My admissions to hospital usually happened after my behaviour became unmanageable at home. One time I had gone for a late-night walk and decided to take an overdose of diazepam to try and get some sleep. The next night my parents locked me in the house to keep me safe. I had other ideas and tried to climb out of my bedroom window, still half drugged from all the diazepam I had taken the previous night. As I tried to lower myself from the first-floor window, I fell on to the concrete and was found wandering the streets half a mile away with a broken wrist. This time they wouldn’t discharge me and I was taken to the local psychiatric hospital. I never tried to kill myself, despite the fact that my behaviour sometimes seemed to indicate otherwise. However, I did think about death frequently and would often wish that I could just fall asleep and never wake up. Even when I took overdoses, it was to get some uninterrupted sleep rather than to die.

I don’t know how I survived those four years, but I am not sure I would have survived if my family and friends hadn’t been so amazingly supportive. Friends would phone and visit me in hospital. My family almost had their lives taken over by my illness. They provided such unconditional love and support and frequently visited me in hospital. One thing that I will always feel guilty about is that the people I love had to deal with me when I was depressed. When you are depressed, you don’t care about yourself, let alone anyone else. During my illness, I feel I was a crap daughter, sister and friend. I can’t even begin to imagine what it was like for the people who loved me to see me ill. If I try and put myself in their shoes, then I think it must have been awful and they probably felt so helpless, because I didn’t respond to any treatment. I think Ants sometimes got frustrated with me, because she always phoned me and I would rarely get in touch with her. I felt that I had absolutely nothing to say for myself and couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone.

However, I don’t regret being depressed, because living with regrets is not the best way to live your life. It is important to try and learn from past events and then move on with the knowledge and wisdom that you have discovered. Furthermore, suffering from depression has helped to shape the person that I am today and provided me with opportunities to meet some truly inspirational people. Who knows how my life would have panned out if I had never suffered from depression?

I often wondered whether I would ever truly feel better, but after trying nearly every antidepressant available my doctor finally found one that worked. This was such a shock and relief, because although I always dreamt of feeling better I often wondered whether I was going to feel depressed for the rest of my life. The medication lifted the dark cloud sufficiently for me to feel more stable and human, and the need to self-harm disappeared. I had always thought that the opposite of depression was happiness, even though my mum insisted that people who aren’t depressed do not feel happy all the time. As an adult, all I had experienced was feeling low and I had forgotten what ‘normality’ felt like. I discovered that Mum was right and that life is not a continuously joyous experience—merely the day-to-day living, punctuated by some very happy moments and times when you feel a bit down. Not feeling depressed was like having the shackles of mental torment removed properly for the first time in my adult life. At last, I now felt able to start planning for the future.

During the following five years, I threw myself into studying, first passing an A-level and then going on to study for a degree in psychology. After my first year at university I went to Thailand with two friends, Hannah and Niki. Thailand was a turning point for me in many ways. It was the first time I had done something that felt really independent of my parents, because when I was depressed I had been too scared to ever stray far from home. It was also a time that I began to get used to my self-harm scars and come to terms with showing them in general public. In England I always wore long-sleeved tops, even in the summer, because I felt paranoid about people looking at me. It was so hot and humid in Thailand that I couldn’t bear long-sleeved tops and so I wore T-shirts. I realised that people didn’t stare as much as I thought they would, and I became much less self-conscious.

It was on this trip to Thailand that I first encountered a tuk tuk. Tuk tuks are to Bangkok what black cabs are to London, and they are definitely the most exciting way to explore the city. We had hired a tuk tuk for the day and gone whizzing around the sites of central Bangkok. At the end of the day the driver let me sit in the front seat and pose for a photo with my friends in the back. It was as we walked down the Khao San Road later that evening that I decided I would one day drive a tuk tuk back to England. Simple as that.

During the next few years while I was at university, the tuk tuk idea never left my imagination. I purchased an old motorbike to try and learn some mechanics and printed out hundreds of pages of information off the Internet about the different countries through which I wanted to drive. It was a dream that I was determined to make a reality, but the problem was finding a large enough period of time in which to organise everything and actually do it.

I couldn’t think of anyone I wanted to do the trip with other than Ants. We had always planned to go on a gap year together, but because of my problems it had not been possible. I was thrilled when she eventually agreed, because at last we would fulfil our dreams of travelling together.

In January 2006, Ants and I started planning for the trip full time. We were sitting in my parents’ front room and just thought ‘Where the hell do we start?’ Although I had first thought of driving back to England in a tuk tuk nearly four years ago, the logistics of an adventure like this were mind-boggling. We had so much to organise, and it was hard to know where to begin. Although we were both seasoned independent travellers, we had absolutely no experience of planning a huge overland trip. The next few months turned out to be an incredibly steep learning curve.

We knew that we wanted to do the trip for charity and, after much discussion, we decided to support Mind, the leading mental health charity in England and Wales. It wasn’t too difficult a choice as we both had obvious personal reasons for supporting it. During one of my hospital admissions a representative from Mind gave me a leaflet on depression, which really helped me. It was before the Internet was widely available, and I didn’t know much about depression. Reading the leaflet gave me more of an understanding about my illness and provided me with hope and inspiration that one day I would get better.

Our first experience of driving a tuk tuk was on a freezing day in a field in North Norfolk. We had tracked down a company in Thailand called Expertise, which was prepared to build us a tuk tuk for our adventure. Expertise also had previous experience of producing tuk tuks that could survive long overland journeys. By a strange coincidence, the guy that imported tuk tuks from Expertise to the UK, Scott, lived just a few miles away from Ants in Norfolk. Scott very kindly let us do a photo shoot with his tuk tuk and take it for a spin. Although we were in a huge field, Ants nearly managed to drive the tuk tuk into a ditch at the edge of the field. We worried that if we couldn’t drive a tuk tuk around a field safely, how on earth were we going to drive one back from Thailand?

Ting Tong

In January 2006 Ting Tong wasn’t even a glint in her daddy’s eye, and yet only eight months later she had successfully traversed a small handful of continents and sped into the record books. In the 14 weeks it took to drive from Bangkok to Brighton, she overcame terrains that would make even the most hardened 4×4 turn a funny shade of green: man-sized potholes, quagmires, desert, steep mountains—you name it, she conquered it. She may be pink, she may be a girl, but don’t be fooled—this is one tough tuk tuk.

Ting Tong was born at the Expertise factory in Bangboo, a small village 20 miles from the centre of Bangkok. It’s here that her lord and creator Anuwat Yuteeraprapa, the scion of an eminent tukking dynasty, has been building tuk tuks for four years. Anuwat’s family has been in the tukking business for the past 40 years, and today he is Bangkok’s undisputed three-wheeler king. Anuwat’s tuk tuks are no ordinary tuk tuks. Not for them the polluted streets of Bangkok and a lifetime ferrying tourists between the Grand Palace and the Khao San Road. Each model is lovingly hand-built and the majority are exported to discerning customers in America, Japan and Europe. These are the crème de la crème.

Jo made contact with Anuwat for the first time in January 2006. She’d heard of his mastery via the Internet and knew that he was the man for the job. Whether he would agree to get involved was another matter. First, we were total strangers calling from the other side of the word—were we timewasters or the real deal? Second, building a tuk tuk for such a long journey meant a lot more work for him and his mechanics. He should know: only the year before, Expertise had built a tuk tuk for a German couple, Daniel and Susi. They had driven their tuk tuk 23 000 miles back to Germany, via Japan, Mongolia and Libya. Even though Anuwat’s tuk tuks were already a cut above the rest, the experience had taught him that for one to make it this far it had to be custom-built to supersonic perfection. It would need to have a stronger chassis, raised suspension, a special long-range fuel tank, roll-bars, extra lights and special wiring and fuses. He already had a full quota of orders for the year; saying yes to Jo would put a lot of pressure on his factory. But Anuwat is never one to turn down a challenge, and at the beginning of February work began on what would become the most perfect tuk tuk the world has ever seen.

Meanwhile we pondered over a name for our chariot. Barbarella was mooted, but rejected by Jo on the grounds that she had no idea who Barbarella was. Then, inspired by watching too many episodes of Little Britain, I hit upon Ting Tong, the Thai bride played by Matt Lucas. It was perfect. Not only did it have the right ethnic origins, but also Ting Tong and tuk tuk share the same initials. Ting Tong it was.

Over the next three and a half months, six experts would work on bringing Ting Tong to life—Anuwat, his wife Dow, and mechanics Thart, Thung, Doung and Karm. The fact that it would be two girls driving this tuk tuk back to England spurred them on to even greater perfection. The steel chassis was reinforced, a 550-cc Daihatsu engine flown in from Japan, the suspension raised by 15 cm to give it extra clearance and roll-bars added at the sides. As Ting Tong began to take shape, her creators turned their attention to the details. More lights were added for increased visibility, special seats were ordered and, most crucially, her body parts were painted a perfect shade of pink. There was no chance this tuk tuk was going to get lost in the crowd.

Ting Tong’s creation went (almost) seamlessly, and on Thursday 25 May 2006 Jo tuk to the wheel and drove her out of the Expertise factory for the first time. The pinkest, sleekest, hottest three-wheeler in history was ready to be unveiled to the world.

Ting Tong’s vital statistics

Engine: four-stroke, water-cooled 550-cc Daihatsu

Fuel: unleaded petrol

Fuel tank: 50-litre capacity

Gears: five forward, one reverse

Cylinders: three

Wheels: three, with 12-inch rubber tyres