Once we had convinced the uber driver at the airport to carry our surfboards on the roof of his car we were off through the traffic.  And what traffic!  The roads were the first thing that made me realise that this is a very different place to the ones we had visited so far.  With 6 lanes of traffic and then 2 dusty unmade mini-lanes on each side for motorbikes, bicycles, pedestrians and animals, mainly cows, it appears mayhem.  When our driver wanted to get to the LPG sation on the other side of the “dual carriageway” he waited for a gap in the central reservation, about 500m from the station and then drove up the wrong side of the road, literally dodging oncoming traffic as we weaved our way to get gas.  It was the same when we left the fuel station, again driving up the outside lane on the wrong side of the road for probably about a kilometer at about up to 100 kph before threading back through a gap in the central reservation onto the right side of the road.  Imagine doing that to access Sedgemore Services!

As we neared our hotel we were commenting on how amazing it is that no one seems to come in contact with anyone else on the road.  With that, our taxi swerved to avoid a moped coming towards us and dented the drivers side front door against a wooden cart that a man was pushing up the edge of the street.  Our driver didn’t stop.

The volume of traffic is also overwhelming and none of it hangs around.  Add this to the volume of passengers on, in , on top of each vehicle and there are a lot of people on the road.   It is not unusual to see 5 people on a moped, including new born babies and children. and we counted 11 people in a normal car.   At crossroads, everything continues to go in whatever direction it wants and vehicles, people and animals seem to weave in and out of each other and carry on regardless.  If you base your thinking on what you know of western traffic and road rules then it doesn’t make sense.  There should be loads of accidents.  In fact,  in the 4 days we were in and around Saigon we only saw one motorcyclist knocked off and our little scrape with a barrow pusher.  It got me thinking that there must be more to it and the longer I spent in Saigon I think I started to get it.

In the west, we are preoccupied by rights.  And always my rights.  My right to health care, my right to education, my right to free speech, my right to highspeed broadband and my rights on the road.  We’ve codified it so everyone knows their rights in the highway code and we use it to defend our position and maintain our rights.  I remember years ago, when I was driving up a street in Barnstaple, a parked car pulled out into my path and caused me to hit it.  I can still feel the outrage.  It was my right of way.  And the insurance companies took the same view.

Partnered with our rights are the rules to ensure others rights.  So we Give Way, when we are instructed, we go clockwise around roundabouts,  we stop when we see a red light.  But here it is different.  People are not driven by rights.  In fact I think a lot of Vietnamese would find the concept a difficult one to explain.  They don’t have rights to free education, or a health service, or justice, or fresh air, or free speech and they don’t emphasise their right of way on the road.  What they do is ensure that while they get to their destination quickly that they are safe and that everyone else around them is also safe.  So if a car pulls out infront of you then you slow down or even stop to avoid a crash.  If a tuk tuk drives the wrong way up your road towards you pull across in front of other traffic knowing that they will adjust their position to keep the road moving.  Very occasionally it doesn’t work and the moped rider on the edge of the action has nowhere to go and takes a fall, as we saw, but it is incredibly rare, considering.

It was interesting for me to see how road etiquette, or lack of it, illuminated the cultural differences that if I hadn’t seen the traffic, I may not have realised.  It’s fascinating watching westerners trying to cope with it.  Even crossing the road is an act of submission to a new way of thinking.  You just have to step out and go.  Keep walking at a steady pace and don’t make any sudden movements and people will avoid you, just!  In the UK a pedestrian in the road has no rights, unless on a crossing.  Here, it appears that the walker is seen as part of the community of road users and should also be kept safe and enabled to travel.

The last day in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh as it is officially called but very few people here seem to know that or care, I had the fortune of needing to get across town quickly in search of a bank where I could change Yeng into dollars for our onward journey.  It was the day before Tet, a big Chinese New Year celebration in Vietnam and everything was closed, including the banks.  Google told me that there was a money exchange open about 3 miles away, situated in a jewelers.

The traffic was on a new level this morning.  Everyone was making their final preparations for the celebrations that would start later that day and go on for the next 4 or 5 days.  All the families gold and shrine pieces were being carted into the city to be polished.  People were buying watermelons like they were going out of fashion, ready for the ceremonial cutting on New Years eve where a red centred watermelon means good luck for the family for the following year whereas a white or green centred fruit brings the atmosphere down as it means “trouble ahead”.  Fruit sellers on the side of the road had helpfully sliced an exhibit watermelon up to show its red interior, inferring that the pile beneath were dead certs.  And people who weren’t polishing or meloning or buying flowers or food or already socialising were on their way home.  There is a mass migration from Saigon and other Vietnamese towns and cities because everyone goes back to their family for New Year, and for most that is the countryside.

I realised that a taxi or tuk tuk would be hopeless in my expedition and walking was also not going to get me back in time to get our booked coach to the border and onto Phnom Penh.  So I opted for a moped taxi.  To be honest, I’m not sure if the guy was actually a taxi.  I just hailed down a passing moped and showed him a bit of paper with the name of the jewelers on it and asked him to take me there.  He was happy to oblige and I hung on to the wobbly panniers while we shot across the the city, weaving in and out of the traffic.  At one point he slammed on his breaks as a cart of watermelons fell across the road infront of us and took out the bicycle next to us.  The canny cyclist managed to crash gracefully into a street store and was soon back on their way.

The journey was successful and incredibly exhilarating.  Once you forgot all you know of how roads work and fail then it was liberating, speeding through packed streets with a stranger who may or may not be a taxi driver.  I am finding its a lot like that in many ways.  If you cling to what you know or think you know you are at best a tourist, dipping your toes in a culture that you don’t and can’t begin to understand.  But occasionally you start to see things through Vietnamese eyes and life here make much more sense. The traffic starts to look like a well conducted orchestra or a shoal of fish swimming gracefully in the sea.  Everything flows.  And rather than being a scared, outraged, rights driven tourist, you learn something new and learning journey continues.

James