Crossings and survival

Question: What defies all logic and survival instincts?

Answer: Crossing the road in Vietnam

You stand on one side of the road and see a streaming mass of hundreds of motorbikes and the occasional car flowing down the road that you need to cross. You are not even safe on the pavement because the motorbikes also consider this to be a road too. You can't see a gap in the traffic, but you hold your breath, pray that your health insurance covers mad motorbikes and step directly into the mass of oncoming speeding metal.

And somehow I still have all my limbs.

The trick is to keep moving at a slow and steady pace into the traffic and the motorbikes simply speed round you like Moses parting the red sea. You can't bottle it and pause or stop in the road though because the drivers don't expect that to happen. They predict your journey as if you are a moving object and not a stationary obstacle. On the couple of times I have stopped in the road I have caused a bit of rage.

If crossing the road was as an experience then climbing onto the back of a motorbike taxi to get through town proved to be a near death one.

You know those Hollywood movies when they are speeding up to an intersection of traffic and the lights go red, traffic crosses into the path of the vehicle but the driver plows through anyway? That is exactly what happened to me today. This wave of traffic cut in front of us and somehow my maniac driver managed to just squeeze through before we were wiped out.

Another moment came on my return motorbike journey. I jumped on the back of the bike and we shot off into oncoming traffic! The driver weaved and sped through the honking oncoming vehicles because it was easier than going round the one way system. Easier for him maybe but not for my nerves.

I think this is something I'm going to get used to.

bx

PS. Currently in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon).