Thousands of semingly uncontrolled tuk-tuks are one of the reasons you may want to hire a car & driver in Sri Lanka

(Also read our post on avoiding scams in Sri Lanka) As much as we love to drive ourselves in Asia, occasionally we here at WoWasis find it necessary to hire a car and driver. Sri Lanka was one such country that pretty much required it. Our GPS unit was virtually useless, as the roads aren’t linked up with the satellites yet. Road signs are rare, and neither trucks, buses, cars, pedestrians, nor dogs play by the rules. It’s easy to accidentally hurt or kill an animal or person, or get hurt of killed yourself. So we hired a diver, a good guy, but relatively inexperienced in dealing with westerners. Another time, we needed to hire a driver in Chiang Mai, Thailand, to take us out to the Mae Rim Valley, a bit of a disaster. 

Here are a few things we encountered with our drivers, and how we fixed them: 

1)      Our Chiang Mai driver arrived with a car that was completely filthy, with windows greatly smudged with accumulated dirt. Cranks were missing from the windows, and the air con wasn’t working all that well. We should have fired him on the spot, because it just got worse from that point on. Rule #1: If the driver doesn’t show up with a car that isn’t spotless, he isn’t taking the job — or the customer — seriously enough to be worth investing in him. Save yourself some grief by releasing him on the spot, before you drive more than a half-kilometer.

2)      At the beginning of the trip, each of our drivers always wanted us to go to someplace that specialized in taking tourists for a ride. These included overpriced elephant parks, snake and crocodile farms, gem “mines” that were really stores, craft shops, and spice gardens. In each of those places, he expected to get a commission for any money we paid for anything. So right away, first day, we told him we wouldn’t go too any of those places. For the first few days, he’d drop a hint, but we kept him on the straight and narrow. Rule #2: It’s your trip, and you’re paying the driver, so you get to be boss. Act like one.

3)      Our driver had a habit of determining what hotel we stayed in, and we discovered early on that each of these gave him a commission for our stay. In one case, he wanted us to stay at an expensive hotel 12 km off our route. We therefore began booking our rooms, using a guidebook and a mobile telephone, which cost us $25 USD, including the SIM card. Rule #3: Buy a mobile phone, and book your own hotels, that way you’ll get to pick where you stay.

4)      We got a complaint from the owner of a hotel we stayed at, because our driver tried to get a commission on our stay, as well as a tour we booked to a mangrove swamp. Our driver advised us never to book our own rooms and tours, as he could get us price breaks. Instead, he was shaking down management to give him a commission that he didn’t earn. Rule # 4: Book your own tours, too. You don’t the discomfort of having your driver to be hustling your tour operator for money.

5)      Drivers tend to think all westerners like the same things, so make assumptions on where to take people. We happen to like ancient temples and cities, and actually had to tell him why, namely because we don’t have places that old in our own countries. After a couple of days, we actually started planning our routes, and told him where we wanted to go on the morning of departure. This took a lot of work, and we even had to help with the roadmap. But it was worth it. Rule #5: Take control of your daily route, and insist that your driver follow it, or give you a good explanation why not.

Now that we’ve stated the challenges and fixes, we’ve gotta tell you that we ended up loving our Sri Lankan driver. Sure he was a slight bit of a scoundrel, but he was a poor man trying to feed his family. We couldn’t in good conscience call him dishonest, perhaps just a bit overly opportunistic. He worked hard for us with no complaint (one day he began driving at 6 am, and finally stopped at 10 pm). He was easy to work with, took direction well, finally got it when we told him for the 3^rd (and final) time, “no gem shop.” He was a wonderful guy, but our experience was good because we weren’t afraid to set the rules. If you do the same, you’ll have a great experience, too. So here are those rules again: 

Rule #1: If the driver show up with a filthy car, save yourself some grief by releasing him on the spot, before you drive more than a half-kilometer.
Rule #2: It’s your trip, and you’re paying the driver, so you get to be boss. Act like one.
Rule #3: Buy a mobile phone, and book your own hotels, that way you’ll get to pick where you stay.
Rule # 4: Book your own tours, too. You don’t the discomfort of having your driver to be hustling your tour operator for money.
Rule #5: Take control of your daily route, and insist that your driver follow it, or give you a good explanation why not. 

Follow those rules, and you’ll have a great time renting a car and driver in Asia.