(Version française plus bas)
Except for sleeping, many Vietnamese do everything on the street.
They squat eating on the sidewalk. They nap on their motorbikes. And, at almost every street corner, there’s someone to fix flat tires and fill up empty tanks with gasoline.
Sitting on the street.
Back at home in Victoria, BC, I had heard whisperings of this website called www.couchsurfing.org. People told me it was a site where you could backpack to different cities and sleep on people’s couches for the night, or if you weren’t traveling at the moment, you could host travellers on your couch. “Cool idea”, I thought. But I didn’t follow up as I was renting a room in the condo were I was living so I wasn’t really comfortable inviting strangers over to crash on our couch. And the last thing I needed was another “membership” to a social networking site.
Fast forward to Turkey. The rest of the Jet Set Zero cast are active members on the couchsurfing site, using it both to find places to stay and hosting other travellers. Still, I resist. Finally, I’m sucked in because of the great information on local parties and events that it provides – namely, the party that we ourselves are throwing to celebrate Hallowe’en and our Istanbul departure.
What do I find when I join? A well-organized site dedicated to helping travellers find a safe place to crash for the night. There is also the all-important social networking, too – you can arrange (or be invited) to grab a coffee with someone in order to meet new people or get information on something you need to know about. My joining was reluctant but it seemed like time.
Now we’re in Saigon. The couchsurfing network here is awesome, tons of people use it and there are daily posts about getting groups together to go see stuff or questions about how something works in the city (ex. sights, areas to stay, etc.). I liken it to a very social, specific model of Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree, of which I’m a huge fan.
And what has it done for me? Well, when I look back on things, it’s actually done a great deal for me here in the city:
1.) It helped me get my job. I had just started to send out emails to schools looking for work, when I realized that the task of finding a job here was a little more daunting than I had originally realized. So, I put a post on couchsurfing titled “I NEED A JOB!” Immediately, people responded with different ideas. One of those was from a teacher at Cleverlearn Language Centre (where I am now employed), who gave me the name of the HR person to send my resume to directly and also to say that I was a friend of his. That was my foot in the door which got me the interview (which obviously got me the job).
2.) It helped me find my motorbike. I had scoured the tourist strip looking for a motorbike to rent but I knew I could do better price-wise. So, I put up a post about wanting to rent one and a fellow couchsurfer responded that he knew a woman that was renting a brand new one for cheap, and they’d make any minor repairs or adjustments that were needed along the way for free. Met up with this gentleman and now I have my sweet ride for cheap!
3.) It’s helped me widen my social circle. I check out the Saigon group posts fairly regularly, and there is always something going on. I am quite okay with inviting myself along to a potluck dinner or party of someone I’ve never met, in order to meet new people. It’s especially important if you are new to a city and need a way to get started socially.
So thank you, Couchsurfing. You provided me with fellow couchsurfers who were able to hook me up with a job, wheels and friends. Now, it’s up to me to keep the Couchsurfing karma going by providing advice and assistance to others!
We speak of it often, and for good reason. I’ve seen some crazy-ass traffic around the world, but everything else pales in comparison with the chaos found in Saigon.
There’s one rule in Saigon in regards to driving: anything goes. Once you accept this, you’re fine. There are few streetlights and few rules. Five people to a motorcycle is commonplace. Need to answer your cell phone while maneuvering through hoardes of other riders? No problem. Do whatever you like because no one even notices.
I’ve had countless near-misses and have become so comfortable with the whole thing that I’ve adopted the local habit of riding with flip flops, hitting the sidewalks when the traffic gets heavy, and zipping into the oncoming lane to make the next light.
I created a video for your viewing pleasure of some of the rides we’ve taken:
On Friday night Jen, Kris, and I decided to head to a bar Vascos with our new friend Alex. We’d hoped since there were four of us, we could hop in a taxi and just head on over. The worst possible time to ever think you can hail a cab comes around soccer celebration time. We attempted to hail about 20 cabs in the street, only to be completely ignored. Then we actually managed to hop into three more cabs, only to be refused because “motorbike too crazy”. When we decided to say “screw it” and walk instead, even walking became an extremely tedious task.
So, as a courtesy note to any tourist in Ho Chi Minh City, never, and I mean never, make plans on soccer night that extend beyond a 30 ft radius. If you do, plan for arrival an hour and a half later.
Jet Set Zero is back in Saigon!
So, we had $1036 all together, but Rob, Dan, and I finally got our payment for September teaching…all $601 of it. Our teaching schedules hadn’t yet matured, so while this could help stave off poverty for a bit, it’s certainly not a sustainable income and it doesn’t offer much comfort as we careen our way through October, anxiously awaiting Dan’s coming paycheck and our end-of-the-month paycheck.
Expenses:
$430: New housing in our new neighborhood, away from the frenetic Pham Ngu Lao area. Excellent! Unfortunately, this did require 2-weeks rent up front, though, so not being homeless took about 70% of our paychecks.
$100: 2 slick new bikes joined Bonus Hog, each at $50/month. They’re light, fast, and sexy, and they don’t plague us with engine problems or sear us with their blazing hot tailpipes. Rob’s in love with Bonus Hog, so the other bikes are shared by Brian, Dan, and I. One curious note about these bikes – the rental “company” (I think just a family that owns a bunch of motorbikes) required only our driver’s licenses as collateral…not an effective security measure, in my humble opinion…
Younger, sexier, sleeker than Bonus Hog
$25: Transit costs are going down, but some of us still take Xe-Oms to those classes requiring a brutal 1-hour battle through rush-hour traffic. We’ll brave those when we have more experience on the bikes.
$110: Our food budget plummeted, partly because we left the foreigner area, partly because new stable wifi doesn’t drive us to internet cafes, partly because I yell at everyone for spending too much.
$70: Cheap cell phones for Rob and I, plus sim cards for all four of us. Brian and Dan brought their own phones, so they didn’t need to wade through all the options to find that budget Nokia cell phone for $30. Man have I missed that classic cell phone game Snake…
I could knock a driver off a motorbike with this...
$40: Miscellaneous items, including a bunch of software from the totally legit software store. Using a totally legit commercial service called Bittorrent, they download totally legit software, burn it to CD’s, package it up nicely, and cell it for anywhere between $1.50 and $10. Dan got MacOSX Leopard, Brian got Bioshock, and we all high-fived for supporting the local pirate economy. Note: Jet Set Zero endorses totally legit software and supporting local economies.
So…$862. DAMMIT! Dan should get paid next week, but Brian, Rob, and I will huddle down for the long October winter until we get paid again…
There is no contest in what I consider to be the greatest accomplishment of my time here in Saigon. Driving a motorbike, day after day in the traffic here.
I've never seen traffic jams like this
When we arrived here we were totally amazed by the chaos embodied by the traffic. Motorbikes, cars, and buses swirled around each other and over every part of the city that was remotely level. To live here is to constant keep your vision moving, looking for the next screaming motorbike, bus or wall of traffic and figuring out if it is going to require swift reactive action on your part. The flow never stops, so even crossing the street is an exercise in slowly putting one foot in front of the other and trying to make eye contact with whatever insane driver is on a trajectory mostly likely to intersect with your own. This absolute madness was something we boldly boasted about walking through, but never imagined we would take part in.
We seem to do a good job of challenging ourselves, and as such it wasn’t long before we found ourselves learning how to ride a bike out in the industrial district under the brave guidance of one of our Vietnamese friends. After that we promptly rented bikes and built up a tolerance for traffic levels.
As much as the traffic here is pure anarchy and lacks compete regard for laws or common sense, there is a sort of system. A system I think of as blockers and flows. Flows move in a single direction, along streets, down sidewalks, and are more or less as safe as it gets. You bounce along through them and try and keep a bubble from the other crazy drivers. The challenge comes when you need to switch to a flow moving a different direction or when two flows intersect. At this point its just a big fucked up game of chicken with no right of way between one and a few hundred drivers competing for the same slice of road you need. This is where the blockers come in. No matter how many lanes of fast moving traffic there are, there is always someone with less to lose than the rest that inches out. As they block the oncoming flow everyone else falls into the traffic shadow they create until the balance tips and your flow takes the road. Simple right?
Needless to say no matter what happens to me, for the rest of my life I will never forget the experience of driving in Saigon. Never has been getting to where you’re going been so insane or exciting.
Crossing the flow
After my corporate English class last night, I invited the students to get coffee– a thank you for such a great class. Of course, this being Saigon and them being investment bankers, each student took their own shiny, functional motorcycle to the coffee shop, and I took Bonushog. Travelling as a pack (there were about 12 of us), was interesting and I found myself ducking in and out of a few dicey situations to keep with the group. Apparently, even Vietnamese drivers think it’s crazy to cut off a bus. I can’t imagine why.
Well, when we arrive I got a somewhat stern lecture from one of my students. “Mr. Rob, I think the way you drive, you can compete with many young men in the city.” (Just like back home, the worst drivers here are teenage men with a short attention span and something to prove.) Well, after that we launched into a terrible round of horror stories about accidents. One of my students told me she had broken her leg twice, and spent 3 months in the hospital both times because of it. She said she was lucky she didn’t have a limp, because often a broken leg here will leave you with one.
After coffee, with all of my students around me, I found my bike, pulled out the kick-start and gave it a strong shove. Nothing. I gave it another. A little sputtering, then silence. I continued to do this in the Saigon heat for 30 minutes, gradually sweating more and more, while my students looked on masking their amusement with concern. They told me to go to the mechanic, which meant pushing this 300-lb. monster 2 blocks with a small contingent of my class trailing close behind.
The hour passes by very slowly while the mechanic works. My students can’t leave me now because he doesn’t speak English, even though it’s almost 10:30. If I had a tape recorder on me, I might’ve been able to learn every swear word in Vietnamese– the mechanic circled the bike shouting, occasionally pointing at some random piece of hardware and saying “everything is broken”. Great. Here I am at 10:30 at night, far from home, sitting on a tiny plastic stool, drenched in sweat, while half of my corporate students watch a mechanic swear at my motorcycle.
When the bike finally started (170.000 VND and an hour’s humiliation later), my students were reluctant to leave. I don’t think they expected me to get home actually. I took off for home scolded about my driving, terrified of long-term injuries, and humiliated by my own motorcycle. How could it be worse? Never ask.
Just before I turned into our neighborhood, as I focused on crossing the intersection, I hear a woman scream just over my left shoulder, a crash and silence. Glancing back, I see the two motorcycles locked like a knot of twisted metal, smoke, and a single person walking amidst the wreckage. I remember the scrambling police bikes shooting through the alley as I passed.
The message, as I see it: Drive more carefully, you may get seriously hurt. You can’t rely on your motorcycle to function, and even when you can, you can’t rely on anyone else on the road.
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