Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon (and still called that in some places), is a vibrant bustling city of 8m people, most of whom own motorbikes and most of whom seem to be on the road at the same time.
It’s far from the dour communist city that one might expect it to be. The shopping is good and cheap, and the people are very friendly and happy, in fact they call themselves the Happy Communists.
HCMC is a very colourful but crowded place which assaults the senses with commotion, aromas (good and bad) and sights, but it’s the traffic which first hits you, if you’ll excuse the pun.
The roads are clogged day and night by thousands of motor cycles carrying all manner of things, entire families and goods of all descriptions, but their road rules are few and far between. It seems to be if you are in front, you have right of way and every other vehicle will give way to you, and bad accidents are a rarity since it’s hard to do more than 25kph anywhere.
There are very few private cars or trucks of any kind and everything seems to be transported by motorcycle. But whether it’s a motorbike, taxi, bus, or a pedestrian, the traffic just flows smoothly around everything, like liquids merging, criss-crossing each other’s paths with surprising skill and bravery, and with no road rage or accidents.
In fact he only prangs we saw were a couple of minor rear end collisions at traffic lights on the highway, and one guy whose motorbike just fell over in the middle of a huge busy intersection. He picked it up, remounted and carried on, as all the other traffic just went around him completely unperturbed.
It’s as easy as falling off a motorbike:
Watch a video of the traffic here or further down this page. Exactly how all this traffic flow actually happens is a bit of a mystery but it works, and if there was nothing else to see in HCMC, just watching the traffic flow provides endless entertainment.
This was our first experience of HCMC, the colourful new year carnival lights from the taxi on the road in from the airport:
Pavements are for parking your motorbike on, not for walking on:
The usual motorbike throng. The secret to crossing the street is to just to grit your teeth and walk out into the traffic which miraculously parts to allow you through, but it was extremely scary the first few times:
A successful first street crossing at one of the few working pedestrian crossing points:
Now watch a video of the HCMC traffic at night:
8 million people, all with motorbikes and all on the road at the same time. Scary stuff, but the system just works, no accidents, no road rage, we could learn a lot...
As I said, everything is transported by motorcycle or bicycle:
A “school mom” waiting to pick up her child from school:
The nearest we saw to a real 4WD in Vietnam:
No comments:
Post a Comment