Insanity. by Robert

Albert Einstein is famously quoted as saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.   If old Albert would have traveled to Saigon and witnessed rush hour traffic from a scooter he may have formulated another definition of insanity.  Melville and Hemingway put together would have trouble portraying the madness of such an event.  This is one thing that truly must be witnessed firsthand.  There are 7.4 million people in Saigon and I swear every one of them is on the road at the same time.  It is not just the mass of people that is overwhelming; it is also the way that they interact.  Imagine a thousand people on scooters and a light turns red.  Once everyone has piled in as tight as they can then the people in the back start using the sidewalks and the left lanes to get to the front of the line.  Before the light turns green there is a sea of scooter waiting to explode once the light turns.  When the light does turn green people go in all directions.  People going left go through people going straight without stopping.  There is no such thing as a left turn arrow or yielding to oncoming traffic.  People coming off the sidewalk will go straight through the intersection as people who stopped in the street go right.  The people who moved all the way over into the left lanes when the light turned red, now are going straight into oncoming traffic until they can merge to the right to go with the flow of traffic.  That is just the way they interact at traffic lights.  You would not believe the roundabouts.  Double WOW!

Being immersed in this chaos mounted on a scooter is truly an experience.  Let’s say you are on a side street with no lights and you want to turn left across a never ending stream of scooters.  In the United States we would sit there for a few minutes hoping for an opening and if one did not materialize we would turn right and drive until we could make a u-turn or another maneuver that would enable us to get the direction we wanted to go.  Not here.  An endless stream of traffic?  No problem.  Just drive right into the middle and make your turn.  It is unbelievable.  I am left nonplus by how so many people can fit on a road elbow to elbow and very rarely make any contact.   Let’s say you wanted to go left at a light but you are in the right lane.  This is also not a problem.  Just do it.  You drive past your turn.  Just drive on the sidewalk and go back.  There seem to be very little rules and it seems to work.  How it works?  I don’t know.  In the United States people would be yelling at each other, flipping people off, getting into fights or at least wagging their finger at you, not here.  People just keep their eyes pointed straight ahead, their feet on the brakes and their demeanor at an even keel. 

Today Keith and Scott took me you the war remnants museum.  They had been there before so I went in and walked around while they went off exploring for an hour.  While they had been there before they had a lot of trouble finding the place.  We drove around in circles stopping to ask for direction multiple times until we finally found the correct street.  On the way there I got a little bored and decided to get Keith back for a trick he played on me earlier in the week.  Early on in our trip we would joke with each other by riding along side of the other person and hitting their kill switch which is mounted right next to the throttle.  Keith, one day while I was doing forty miles an hour, leaned over, turned off my bike and pulled the key out of the ignition and drove off with my key.  With my engine turned off I pulled in my clutch lever and coasted until I caught up with Keith who slowed down to let me catch up.  I took the key from him and put it back in the bike without stopping.  Payback is a bitch.  While Keith was driving through traffic I turned off his scooter and removed the key.  Instead of being nice and returning his key in the manner he had done earlier in the week.  I turned back to see him slowing coming to a halt and I threw his key up in the air as I sped away.  Leaving him to park his bike in the middle of traffic and then retrieve his key.  Maybe you just had to be there, but we all laugh our ass off.  Score one for the newbie. 

One other cool thing we did on scooters today.  We drove right through a narrow market place today. Right past the fruits and vegetables. Right past the lady with the un-refrigerated meat of a table. We only stopped when a headless skinned frog landed at Scott's feet after it jumped away from the live flopping fish that were also on the table from which it took its leap. The funny thing is that no one even looked at us funny for driving through a narrow crowded market place. 

The fun you can have with scooters and they are only costing us $7.50 a day.

 

Posted by Robert.  The one swimming is the sea of insanity and loving it.