Euan Harvey teaches freshman composition and linguistics at Mahidol University in Thailand. When not bashing his head against his doctoral thesis, he writes. You can find his website at: www.euanharvey.com. If you like this story, let him know. He’d be really happy (he’s kind of weak that way).

The first reason cabs in Bangkok are dangerous is that cab-drivers in Bangkok have no fear, and after you've been in a cab doing 120 kmh approximately three inches from the tires of a semi doing 80, well, then you appreciate a nervous driver.

The second reason is that cab-drivers take amphetamines to stay awake. This allows them to make more money, but unfortunately, it also drives them slowly insane. Every so often one of them snaps. The results are not pretty. Machetes, guns, that kind of thing.

But fearless drivers and amphetamine-crazed lunatics are part and parcel of life in Bangkok, and if they were the only dangers, then I'd still take them.

But I don't. Ever.

I first saw Junction Number 247 when I began using the elevated highways regularly for the first time, just after my job had moved to the center of the city. The elevated highways in Bangkok are six-lane roads supported on massive pillars one hundred feet high. These immense ribbons of concrete soar above the gridlock of Bangkok, weaving in between the skyscrapers.

Using the elevated highways can get you from the outskirts of Bangkok to the center in twenty minutes or so, compared to several hours in the choking gridlock below. But even so, they see little traffic. I used to think the tolls scared people off. I know something different now.

The junctions on the highway are numbered following a Thai sequence, which is to say no sequence at all. Thus, Junction Number 23 for Din Daeng is followed by Junction Number 1 for Klong Toey, which is then followed by Junction Number 786 for Pattaya and the Eastern Seaboard. A huge green sign looms over each junction, with the junction number at the top, and the destination underneath.

I first saw the sign for Junction Number 247 just after I had started driving in Bangkok. My car was still shiny, and had that new-leather-and-plastic smell inside. My new job in the city had funded the car purchase, and I was commuting in every day, doing my bit for global warming. On the second day, I saw the sign. I could read the junction number easily, but I couldn't quite make out the destination name underneath. I got closer, read the first few letters of the Thai script, then the sign flashed past.

All the rest of the way into work, I had that feeling you get when you've forgotten something, but you can't remember what it is. Something nagged at me about the sign, but it wasn't until lunch that I realized what it was.

All the major signs on Thai roads state their destinations in both Thai and Roman script. But the sign for Junction Number 247 had only Thai.

The next day, I saw it again. Like the day before, I could only read the first few letters of the Thai script before the sign flashed past my car. The first few letters sounded out 'Kru'.

For the rest of the week, I made a point of focusing on the next few letters, and then repeating them to myself until I arrived at work and I could write them down. At the end of the week, I had the whole of the destination name: Krunguhn.

Krung I knew meant 'city', and uhn, I thought meant 'toad'.

Toad City. I smiled to myself, put down the pad of paper, and forgot about it. Or mostly forgot about it anyway. Something about the name lodged in my unconscious, and there it fermented.

As the weeks passed, my curiosity about the junction mounted. Although I drove past it every day, I never saw any cars except cabs take it.

At first, I told myself it was just coincidence. But weeks rolled past, and still I did not see any cars other than cabs turning into the junction. Or turning out from it either. The exit ramp was a little further on. I took to staring in my rear-view mirror as I passed the off-ramp from the junction, where it merged into my highway. But I never saw anything except cabs coming from that direction.

I began to talk to myself as I approached the junction on the highway: today, you'll see a Toyota turn into the junction. But I never did. It bugged me. So, I bought a map, to find out where the junction led. Only there was one major problem.

Krunguhn was not in the Roman index. So I looked in the Thai index. Still nothing. According to my map, Krunguhn did not exist.

I traced my route on the map. I followed the highway from the on-ramp I used, along the long curve where it entered the city, then along to where I left it. No Junction Number 247.

I told myself that I had traced the wrong route. The next day, I noted the junction numbers as I drive past them: on-ramp, 56, 3, 12, 247, 98, off ramp. Then when I got home, I checked the junction numbers against the map.

On-ramp--check.

Junction Number 56: Phran Nok--check.

Junction Number 3: Sukhumwit--check.

Junction Number 12: Ramkhamheang--check.

Junction Number 98: Mor Chit--what the hell?

I bent my head close to the map and peered at it, but there was no Junction Number 247. I saw the rest of my route--a thick blue line cutting through the center of the city--but of Junction 247? Nothing.

I checked the date of the map, wondering if I had been sold an older copy. But no. The map was new.

The next day, I drove very slowly along my route. I held the map against the steering wheel with one hand as I drove, and I checked off the junction numbers. When I reached Junction 247, I slowed the car down to twenty kilometers an hour, and peered down the highway that led away from the junction. It looked like all the other highways: two three-lane bands of asphalt, separated by a ten foot gap between them, each three-lane band bounded by four-foot concrete retaining walls.

As I watched, a cab turned into the junction. As the junction fell behind me, I watched the cab in my rear view mirror until it disappeared round the gentle curve in the highway.

A week passed. Every time I drove past the junction, I slowed the car down to a crawl and stared at the concrete disappearing into the smog and haze which covers Bangkok. And every day, I saw nothing except an ordinary looking highway.

I could think of nothing else. I'd be working in the garden, or watching TV, when suddenly I'd realize that I'd been thinking about the Junction for the past twenty minutes. I couldn't let go of it. It lodged in my subconscious like a splinter.

One Sunday morning, I went upstairs to finish the work I had to get done over the weekend. I fired up my computer, only to find I had left the document I needed back on the office computer. I decided to go in and finish working on the file at the office.

I showered, dressed, and began driving to work. Traffic is light on a Sunday, and I made good time. Ten minutes after leaving the house, I was approaching Junction Number 247.

Inspiration struck me as I saw the sign marking the Junction. I had plenty of time today, and the file was almost finished anyway. I could turn into the Junction and see where it led. Even if I got lost--certainly possible in the maze of highways--then I'd have plenty of time to find my way and get back to the office.

I steered my car into the lane that exited at Junction 247. The sign flashed past me, then I swept round the gentle curve that led away from the highway I used every day.

I kept my speed low, around seventy kilometers per hour. Ahead of me, the highway vanished into the haze. In my rear-view mirror, the main highway shrank, then faded into the featureless gray haze. The skyscrapers of central Bangkok rose around me, their glass flashing in the sun. I could see the cluster of the Siam Plaza--a group of five immense skyscrapers--about half a kilometer to the left. They looked like fingers, as if a giant made of green glass had thrust his hand up from under the ground.

I felt immensely pleased with myself, as if I had solved some great conundrum.

That feeling slowly ebbed as the minutes passed. The Siam Plaza fell behind me. Other skyscrapers whished past. The car's tires hummed on the asphalt.

The highway stretched in front of me, dead straight--like an exercise in perspective. I saw no sign of any other junctions, and no sign of any cars. Apart from me, the highway was deserted. I found this a little odd, but then again, Sundays were quiet.

After a while, I didn't recognize any of the buildings looking down on the highway from either side. They had the same blank glass stare as any skyscrapers, but there was something peculiar about them. It took me a moment to figure out what.

These skyscrapers were not squared-off glass boxes like most office buildings. Instead, their walls met at acute or obtuse angles. The reflections in the glass made it difficult to see the building's true shape. Sometimes an acute angle would reveal itself to be obtuse as I drove past, and vice versa. The effect was strange, but not ugly.

The buildings absorbed my attention almost completely, and when I looked at the clock, I saw half an hour had passed.

Which was impossible.

I stared at the clock, then glanced at my watch. No, the dashboard clock told the right time. Indeed, I had been driving in a straight line for more than half an hour--at least fifty kilometers--but I was still surrounded by the skyscrapers of downtown Bangkok. I realized I hadn't seen another car since turning into the junction. Traffic was light on a Sunday, but not this light.

I didn't actually stop the car until I saw the first pylon.

I saw the glitter first, the flash of sunlight on metal or glass. Then a few minutes later, the pylon swam out of the haze. It was an immense cylinder of metal rising up a couple of kilometers away from the highway. Up it rose, up and up and up. I had never seen anything so high--it must have been a kilometer in height, at least.

My jaw dropped open and I stopped the car. I stared at the pylon in absolute shock. Its appearance had wiped me clean of everything. All I could do was gape. I told myself I was hallucinating, and shut my eyes.

But when I opened my eyes again, the sunlight still glinted off the pylon. There was a kilometer-high cylinder of shiny metal standing about two kilometers from me. It was there. Real.

I heard a welcome noise break through the silence--the hum of tires on asphalt and the dull mutter of a car engine. I looked in my rear-view mirror and I saw the sunlight flash from a windshield.

A few minutes later, the car--a cab--sped past me without stopping. The noise of its engine dopplered into a deeper grumble, and then it was past me. I caught a single glimpse of the inside of the cab as it rushed past, but enough for me to recognize there were passengers in it--two people sitting in the back.

I stared after it for a long while, until it had vanished in the steel-gray haze and the sound of its passage had dwindled to a faint whispering.

I sat gripping the steering wheel. I wanted to leave, to turn around and just drive away. But the force of habit that life in cities ingrains into people is very strong, and I drove forward, looking for a turn-off that would take me back onto the other lanes of the highway to my right. The thought of driving against the traffic on a highway seemed somehow more alien than the pylon. And after all, cabs were driving past me. How weird could it be?

The minutes rolled past. Another cab zipped past me, overtaking in a rush of air and a sullen mutter of engine. I saw the heads of two people sitting in the back of the cab, and one of them turned to face me as the cab powered forward ahead of me. I saw a brown face with its mouth open in an 'O' of surprise. Then the cab drew too far forward and the sun glared off the back window, obscuring the inside of the cab from me.

Another pylon loomed up out of the haze, then another and another. Huge cylinders of blank metal--glaring in the sunlight--rose up all around me. Then the last of the skyscrapers fell behind, leaving nothing but the pylons. The highway ran dead straight between them.

For perhaps twenty minutes, I gripped the steering wheel in a kind of self-hypnosis, looking for a U-turn. Even in the middle of all this, I still clung to habit and order. Or maybe it was because of all the strangeness that I clung to them. Finding a U-turn and driving back would at least allow me some normality, but to drive the wrong way down a highway would be to admit that the situation was real, as if by ignoring it, I could make it go away.

Then the city appeared. It swam out of the haze piece by shining piece. Like the pylons, it appeared made totally of metal, and it glared and shone in the sunlight. It was like a cliff of gleaming metal, rising up in front of me. Immense towers--topped with ovoids and cubes and rings of metal--thrust upward from behind the steel walls. Glass domes and geodesic shapes shimmered in the light. Huge buttresses jutted from the walls, then plunged downward out of my sight. It was huge beyond imagining, built to a scale that dwarfed even the pylons. And the highway ran ruler-straight toward it.

The sight of the city broke the half-trance I was in. I stamped on the brake, pulled over as close to concrete barrier at the side of the highway as I could, and got out of the car. I stood there staring at the city for long minutes. The city was alien, and yet it was beautiful.

After what must have been several minutes, I walked to the edge of the highway, put my hands on the concrete guardrail and leaned forward.

I got an even bigger shock than the city. I looked down, and vertigo yawned within me. My knees wobbled, then gave way and I slumped to the hot asphalt of the highway with my back to the concrete guard wall.

There was no ground underneath me. The shining metal of the pylon next to the road dropped down, but where there should have been a maze of smaller roads jammed with traffic, there was nothing. The metal sides of the pylon just kept going down and down and down, until they vanished in a gray haze like the smog that enveloped Bangkok. In that single glance, I saw the support pillar for the highway--a thick buttress of poured concrete that went down and down and down before the smog swallowed it and it vanished into the blue-gray haze. If the smog was as thick as it normally was in Bangkok, I could see for about five kilometers, maybe more. Five kilometers, straight down.

I could see none of this from where I sat on the asphalt, but I could feel the drop tugging at me. I pressed my back against the warm concrete and closed my eyes.

I would probably have stayed like that for hours if I hadn't heard a car engine from the other side of the highway.

I stood up, lifted my hand to shade my eyes and squinted down the highway. A cab appeared and grew rapidly as it powered toward me. This was the first car I had seen driving on the other side of the highway, the side that led back from the city.

As it whooshed past, I got a clear look at the inside of the cab. There was no one in it except the driver. I stared after it until it disappeared into the haze.

It had just been an ordinary cab, but something about the emptiness of the back seat disturbed me. I turned to look back at the city. It was still beautiful, but there was a sharpness to it now that I hadn’t noticed before.

No passengers. I thought back to the cabs that had passed me on the highway. I thought of the face I had seen--an 'O' of surprise in the back window of the cab. I thought about the other emotions that could make a face look like that.

I waited. About ten minutes later, I saw another cab approaching from the direction of the city. As it passed, I looked inside. No passengers.

Still I waited. The city seemed to be watching me, and the skin on the back of my neck crawled. A couple of minutes later, I heard another engine from my right. When I looked down the highway, the sun glinted from the windshield of an approaching car. The vehicle drew closer, then rushed past in a whirl of hot air. I stared at the cab as it passed, shading my eyes with my hand.

I caught a single glimpse of the inside. All I could see of the driver was a dark shape slumped behind the wheel. He looked somehow boneless. The passenger in the back seat stared at me as the cab whooshed past. His hand was pressed hard against the glass of the window. His mouth was open, and he might have been shouting.

I got in my car and pulled a three-point turn in the middle of the highway. Flicking my hazards on, I drove along the hard shoulder away from the city, with my driver-side mirror inches from the concrete wall on the edge of the highway.

On the way back, seven cabs--I counted--passed me. All of them had passengers--I checked. All of the cabs flashed their headlights and blared their horns as they passed me. But I knew this for what it was now, just a disguise, a way for them to blend into the traffic in Bangkok. I didn't know if whatever sat behind the wheels of those cabs could even feel anger. Somehow, I doubted they felt anything except hunger.

A policeman caught me as I drove the wrong way out of Junction Number 247 and onto the main highway. I have never been so pleased about getting a traffic ticket in my life. The policeman made me take a breathalyzer test--I don't think he was used to drivers who got a ticket thanking him and clutching his arm.

What the city was, or the pylons, I have no idea. I do know what they're called, though. The week after this happened, I stopped my car on the highway and copied down the Thai script on the sign for the junction. I got another ticket from a policeman, but it was worth it. When I showed it to one of my colleagues, he translated the sign for me, and it didn't say 'Toad City.' The word for toad in Thai is ung. Uhn means 'Other'.

Krunguhn: 'The Other City.'

So that's the third reason why cabs in Bangkok are dangerous and why I don't take them anymore. I don’t use the elevated highways much, either. If I go into town now, I either sit in traffic, or I take the skytrain.

The skytrain's got its own problems, of course: the usual things like late trains, crowds during rush hour and pickpockets. And then there are the less usual, like the station that appears twice and the line that leads to yesterday--but those are only minor irritations after all.