If you’ve ever have the desire to stand agog on a street corner, literally agog, come to Ho Chi Minh City and witness the motorbike traffic. For a sample, view: Bikes on Street Corner Then, venture across the street. The first time, you cross with the same faith and fear as with your first parachute jump. Newbies usually follow along behind a native, but after a while, you brave it on your own. The key is to walk slowly, making eye contact, so that the drivers know you see them and won’t make unexpected moves as they swerve around you…at speed. HCMC is a city of close to nine million (some say), and motorbike population is close to half that.
Three million motorbikes! Motorbikes everywhere! Endless swarms, hundreds upon hundreds of them, flow down the streets, like water currents in a mountain stream. Out of control? No. They actually work like a complex self-organizing system, obeying an inscrutable set of rules. U-turning, bumping up onto sidewalks, coming in eddies from all directions at once is part of it all. Trucks, buses, cars, push carts, bicycles, and various weird motorized delivery vehicles join in the flow. Oh, and the native pedestrians casually ford the busiest streams. At intersections without lights and round-abouts, great intermingling and transient flow disturbances occur, yet resolve.
There are the sidewalk riders, too, which is OK when you see them coming toward you. However, these days, motorbikes generally have four-cycle engines, not the popping two-cycle ones, and are well-muffled; so, they can purr up behind you on the sidewalk and pass without warning, scaring you out of your wits. Claude’s expression, “stealth mode,” comes to mind. You understand full well what would happen if you stepped in the way of a sidewalk stealth rider. Then, there are the counter-current gutter riders. They travel the gutters from the wrong direction. As you look toward the oncoming traffic, preparing to step out into the street, a gutter rider is suddenly upon you from the opposite direction. These kinds of unexpected riders scare me most.
You might assume there are thousands of collisions; yet the accidents are diminishing few percentage-wise. Fortunately, we have only been hit by a bicycle that was trying to run a light.
Judy and I compare the motorbike traffic to swarms of skiers on cat paths at Snowbird, gliding along across other paths and swooshing finally from every direction toward a lift. Like skiers, riders don’t want to hit you, and you don’t want to get hit, so it all works out. We have come to believe also that the motorbikes grow into personal extensions of Saigonese riders, comparable to how ice skates are to hockey players or skis to skiers. They ride, lurch, stop, and dodge in the traffic just as easily as we walk through crowds. Really, riding here is comparable to leaving a stadium on foot through a huge crowd after a big game. It’s that normal.
When it rains, as it did for the first six weeks, riders just slip on their ponchos, flip them back over the family or second rider and continue along the streets without much change in speed. In Hoi An, in the midst of biblical deluges, the riders glided along along flooded streets up to their flip-flops in water.. So, ponchos plastered against themselves, riders came at us through mist and rain, casting high sprays to either side of their bikes.
All of this melange is no big deal for those who were suckled on bikes as infants and grew up sandwiched between mom and pop. It’s natural to them; they have been on bikes their whole lives. Sometimes, four riders sit packed on a bike, if the children are small enough. We saw a great sight last week: a child, riding on on her mother’s lap, one elbow on the handle bar, looking as bored and world-weary as a model on a catwalk. Will we ever get home, Mom? Then, there was the tiny baby content with its bottle riding in mommie’s lap. Another sight? What about an infant seat that hangs between a parent’s legs? Or a child seat on bamboo legs that stand freely on the floor board? Or a rear-view mirror adjusted so that two girls can look at each other while talking as they ride along? Foreigner bikers, even experienced ones, don’t adapt rapidly or well. It’s not instinctual for them.
All said and done, though, the bike culture is very efficient space-wise. At five o’clock, most streets are packed with bikes, more than fifty per twenty yards at a red light, we estimate, and with the same numbers on the opposite side, while a dense cloud of other riders passes through the intersection. How far do you think that many of cars would string out! For many blocks, probably. And there is very little pollution: the air is pristine compared to BKK’s; yet most riders wear masks.
Head injuries are down 50% since the government mandated helmets last year. One neurosurgeon complained that his practice was falling off. Where helmets are obligatory but bland and featureless, some innate sense of fashion has given women’s helmets a flair. They use cloth (or maybe just large hats) to make helmets look like sun hats with imaginative color schemes, crinkly brims, and sometimes with matching jackets. They look pretty cool, these women with their long gloves and masks beneath these helmets. Men settle for baseball batter-cap-like ones, or ones painted in jungle green camouflage to match their cargo pants.
Remember, the old romance movies where couples spent evenings speeding around fountains in Rome on Italian scooters? Well, here in HCMC, you occasionally glimpse a babe, riding sidesaddle behind some dude, legs crossed, calf, short black skirt mid-thigh, high high-heels, black hair in the wind falling from beneath decorative helmet, cigarette at fingertips, insouciant to the max. You’ve got the picture.
Tags: Vietnam