Having passed the one month mark in Saigon, I felt it was time to reflect upon the lessons that I’ve learned since arriving.

#1 – Look Both Ways Before Crossing the Street

I have never seen traffic like this before.  It comes from all directions and very often appears on the sidewalks as well.  You are not safe anywhere.  There is also a lack of street lights which means that when you want to cross the road, it’s an “every man for himself”, jaywalking situation.  They do have a system here, though.  You start to slowly walk into the road and the vehicles go around you.  You take steady steps forward and the drivers swerve around you.  It’s terrifying at first, but you do get used to it.  My biggest near-misses have come when I’ve crossed a one-way street and thought myself safe after checking the direction the traffic SHOULD be coming from only to find a motorbike flying down the street the wrong way. It’s truly crazy and cannot be explained – you really have to experience it (and do your best to stay on your feet).

#2 – Use Your Horn Liberally

Drivers at home use the horn in a “fuck you, ya cut me off” kind of way. Drivers here use it as an essential communication tool for letting other motorists know where they are – if they’re passing on the outside or inside, coming up behind you, etc. People can be pretty unpredictable on the roads and there is an absence of turn signals so at any moment someone can swerve and take up that tiny space beside you. I learned this quickly and now ride my motorbike around town with my thumb permanently on the horn.

#3 – Don’t Tempt Fate

If memory serves me right, I recall that I was the one was said “I can’t believe no one has gotten sick yet!”  Famous last words. Everyone knows you can’t say stuff like that and get away with it. Lo and behold, not long after I was taken down pretty hard by a stomach bug (I will spare you the details). I was also the one who said “I can’t believe, with all this traffic, that we haven’t seen an accident yet!” Not one hour later we pass by an accident scene that consists of a dump truck, a motorcycle on its side behind it, two pairs of flipflops and a helmet on the ground, and a pool of blood that starts at the back tire of the truck and spreads behind for a metre or so. Maybe I’ll keep my mouth shut next time.

#4 –  Always Be Spontaneous

Some of the coolest things we’ve done or seen so far have come to us last minute, sometimes in a text or message that doesn’t contain much information, but simply says that we’ll have a good time if we go. My personal philosophy is to say yes to absolutely everything that comes my way. Doing this means I’ve shown up to things not knowing a single other person and at some points flirted with exhaustion for consistently going out at night and then teaching early classes the next morning. But it’s worth it and hell – there’s too much fun to be had to worry about money or sleep.

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.

I had read about traffic in Ho Chi Minh, but couldn’t have guessed how crazy it would be. Every road is busy. They burst with the exhaust and noise of a thousand scooters moving by some inscrutable logic to every corner of the city. Traffic lights are either non-existent, or well-hidden in dense thickets of wires that form the city’s electric backbone. A cryptic reason underpins both the tangled cables and the traffic, and that reason allows this huge city to exist without apparent regulation.

At intersections, banks of drivers will wait, watching the counterflow until a collective will stirs to shift the flow of traffic. At first, entrepreneurs venture out of the crowd, inserting their scooters into the maelstrom and using themselves to open the lane for others to follow. The transition is quick and efficient, and immediately after, drivers begin to accumulate in the transverse direction to repeat the process.

Crossing the street is an act of death defiance, because you can’t rely on any break in the traffic, but must create one yourself. To start, step into the busy street, slowly, confidently and with a deliberate course. Eye contact seems to be a good way to force drivers to acknowledge you, but can also be very unsettling. When you look into the eyes of the drivers you see that they have their own calculus— each one deciding to let you live, but momentarily considering that choice.

I look forward to adjusting to simple things, like crossing the street. I can already see that, though individual drivers seem reckless and dangerous, I can trust the gestalt of traffic here. It strikes me as an interesting counterpoint to Vietnam’s centrally planned economy that in a situation where each driver is entirely goal-seeking and self-interested, the outcome is both efficient and compassionate.