Bike Heaven or Hell?

"Bike, moped, motorbike, scooter, motorcycle, whatever.
If it has tires, engine and a horn, it's road ready."

You can’t imagine the traffic in metropolitan and ruralpolitan Saigon if you picture anything you’ve ever seen in the USA. Downtown Manhattan is calm in comparison. The entire Midwest is absolute zero, where molecules stop moving, where temperature and traffic are about the same.

Clear your head, rev yourself up with five cups of strong coffee and find a huge anthill. Stomp up and down on it until there are several million bugs swarming all over the ground and themselves. Imagine you’re their size or they’re your size, depending on your personality. Now give 75% of them bikes, in the compact 125cc range. Add a blaring horn on each one, which honks automatically if the rider speeds up, slows down or breathes. Visualize the remaining 25% as anything with wheels, skids, sleds, bicycles, three-wheeled cyclos, pushcarts, pullcarts, motor cars, trucks, buses, feet, paws or hooves: dogs, cats, rats, cattle, chickens, kids screaming, grannies meandering, dads carrying whole kits, kaboodles and assorted flotsam or jetsam, moms schlepping bamboo scales of justice filled with white, brown, raw, dried, fried, steamed or sticky rice, cooked mystery meat, and fruits, vegetables or tubers from Mars.

Save a few beautiful boulevards bordered by high rises, ornate French churches, generic GI concrete structures and architechural leftovers from all the other countries that have occupied Vietnam, surround them by a million paved, semi-paved, or deeply depraved roads, lined liberally with fresh trash, ancient garbage, excrement, bricks, boards, nails, rocks, gravel, used coconuts, unidentified dying objects: dogs, cats, rats, chickens, bicycles, etcetera, let your mind wander aimlessly. Eliminate all speed limit signs. If there are traffic cops in your imagination, remove them. Add random stop lights here and there, hidden behind palm trees, blinking from green to off to red to off to green to off, or maybe just terminally off. Lines down the center of the road? Why bother? No one’s looking down. Everything’s looking up. There’s energy in the air. Communism is relaxing. Commercialism is emerging.

Tonight from my hotel balcony in Rach Gia, I count two hundred bikes scooting by per minute, give or take a hundred or two. (Make that five hundred in Saigon.) Somehow it works. Asia is a teeming mass of humanity and somehow the humans work as a team, as a mass of teams playing in cooperation, not competition, constantly giving and taking. Natural communism. They weave in and out of each others space like schools of fish in the sea, merging from all directions, passing through each other, every fish wary, watchful, not touching, flitting aside at the last second. This would not happen in the USA. After all the yelling, shouting and space invading, our highways would be littered with scrap metal and body parts. Saving grace? Top scooter speed is about 60 kilometers per hour. Mean speed in town is a pretty nice 15 to 20.

The concept of actually riding one was incomprehensible. At first I could barely cross the street on foot. I would visibly age while waiting for a break in the traffic. After watching countless kids, bent old ladies and normal foreigners like me float through the rushing river of bikes, I got it. Just do it. Pray to Buddha, pretend you’re Jesus walking on water and enter the street slowly but confidently, eyes on their eyes, becoming one with the sea, just another fish in the ocean. I became addicted to crossing impossibly busy roads, especially at night, with a magic force field protecting me. I’d be dead doing it in the USA but I am very alive in the middle of the Asian sea of humanity, playing in traffic against my mother’s orders. [ Next page ]