Reaching the other side of the world, and the other side of the road

Getting sick, lost, pickpocketed – I came here worried about all the risks I assume are present in most developing countries. But getting run over by a motorbike seems uniquely more probable in Vietnam and, if I can mean this without over-dramatizing a legitimate concern, it was one of my more persistent fears.

Fittingly, among the first sights I encountered was the ordered chaos of the streets. Without lines to distinguish between lanes, motorists seem to feel their way through the streets, the deft weaving deliberately between other vehicles, the rest bottle-necking at popular intersections. Now the question is, how did the chicken cross the road?

I received mixed advice about this beforehand, but the best has been: just go. On the wider, busier streets, pedestrians can certainly wait at traffic lights, which motorists heed almost without fail. But that’s not an option on the smaller roads, and locals don’t make much use of crosswalks, anyway. Luckily, pedestrians have a couple of advantages: first, the motorbikes rarely exceed 20 miles an hour, so you can get pretty close before they’ll actually hit you; second, the motorbikes approach in jagged clusters, and because they’re small, you can pass one or two at a time until you get to the other side.

In general, the vehicles will slow down for you, but I don’t depend on that because accidents are a real danger. As if to confirm that, two motorbikes collided next to my hotel within a few days of my arrival. I turned around just in time to see people collecting around the scene and to notice the chair flung from the sidewalk into the street. Everyone was fine, but when we got home, a news report on TV announced how many people had been killed in car accidents that day, and my cousin said yes, that’s normal.

All of this probably isn’t doing much to dampen the stereotype of Asian drivers. But the truth is, it wasn’t long before I came to value the ability required to operate a vehicle in this environment. I thought I could never drive in a place like Los Angeles or New York (still true), but Vietnam is a whole other ballgame. The locals didn’t invent the system, they just adapt to it. There are few places to make U-turns, so you do it where you can, and other cars fall in line. Street signs are scarce and obscure, so people rely on the lettering above shops, almost all of which include full addresses. The roads are overcrowded, paved unpredictably, and fraught with endless construction, and to maneuver them so naturally takes, I think, appreciable skill.