My international driving permit had expired eight months earlier without me even noticing. A car hit me at a junction in Phuket, and that one piece of paperwork ate up every bit of my savings.
In short
Derek, a 47-year-old Briton, has a motorbike accident in Phuket without realising his international driving permit had expired months earlier. The insurer refuses to cover anything, and his partner Ice helps him navigate the weeks that follow.
I'm British, 47, and had lived in Phuket for three years with Ice, my 36-year-old partner, always using my international driving permit for the bike, something I knew technically only covered short stays but had been doing for so long without issue that I'd stopped thinking about it entirely.
What I didn't know, because I never checked it carefully, is that my international permit had expired eight months before the accident. It renews from the UK, through a process I'd done once, years earlier, and I'd just assumed without checking that it stayed valid indefinitely.
The accident itself was relatively minor: a car ran a give-way sign at a junction near Chalong and hit me side-on, knocking me off the bike. I came away with a broken leg and several stitches, nothing life-threatening, but several weeks of hospital and rehab ahead of me.
The problem came when the bike insurance, and then the health insurance I did have, asked for my driving licence to process the claim. Ice was the one who noticed, going through the paperwork with me from the hospital bed, that the expiry date had passed months earlier.
The bike insurer refused to cover a single baht of the damages, citing exactly what we expected: that driving without a valid licence voided the policy completely. The health insurance, thankfully, did cover the hospital care, since that contract didn't hinge on the driving licence, though I had to fight several weeks of paperwork to make that clear.
The other driver's bike damage, which police ruled partly my responsibility for not carrying a valid licence despite him having run the give-way sign, I had to pay myself, in cash, which ate up a good chunk of that year's savings.
Ice came with me to every appointment, every meeting with the lawyer, every frustrating call to the insurer, without a single word of reproach through the whole process, though I'm fairly sure I'd earned one. I got a proper Thai licence the moment I could walk without crutches again, passing the test, this time, on the first try.
I still have the scar on my leg. What stuck with me most from the whole experience, though, wasn't the physical pain — it was how foolish I felt discovering that one simple piece of paperwork I'd ignored for months had come this close to costing me everything.
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