Playing chicken on the roads of Hanoi (and not on purpose).

Dung, our tour guide for the day, feels quite at home on the chaotic streets.

In a word, Hanoi  is chaotic. Every time Nick and I step out of our hotel room our senses are working on overtime. The footpath is cluttered with street vendors with their customers sprawled out on miniature plastic furniture. Surrounding them are masses of parked scooters forcing us out to brave the road as we navigate the city populated by 6 million. Scooters by far out number any other mode of transport but throw into the mix the taxis, buses, bicycles and every other vehicle imaginable and walking down the street becomes a high stress activity with the possibility of death never straying to far from mind. Road rules are more like guidelines here and it seems like there is no such thing as a red light or a one way street.

At an intersection there are white stripes painted across the road. In New Zealand we would call this a zebra crossing - where vehicles stop while pedestrians walk safely across. Here, no one stops, they dodge and toot while maintaining the same speed. The safest way to cross the road seems to be a slow shuffle, preferable in a pack of pedestrians (safety in numbers). In no circumstances should one make jerky unpredictable movements or run (I still need to learn this). The slow shuffle seems to give the scooters enough of an opportunity to maneuver to the left or the right and the cars to adjust their speed to avoid you - most of the time they speed up.

Red - a good hi-vis colour! 

Nick rather likes the Russian roulette of it all. He finds it exciting and exhilarating while I’m still getting used  to it and I end up clinging on to him for sweet life. One of the most scariest sights is a scooter coming full bore at you while its driver is text messaging paying little to no attention. At a glance the chaos seems ordered. It seems to work, and no one gets hurt. However a wikipedia search reveals that Vietnam has a high number of traffic related fatalities compared to the developed world.

We  experienced an accident first hand. It was at a red light. We saw a local walking across from the other side so we also thought it was safe to cross. Nick stepped out, looked left, and saw a scooter coming intending to run the red light. The driver slammed on the brakes, and must’ve turned slightly causing her to tip over scraping the scooter and her leg along the asphalt. Nick ended up stepping to the side as the carnage came to a stop.  Nick and a Vitnamese man helped her up and being conscious that the light would turn green at any moment we all got out of harms way. When we relayed the story to the receptionist at the hotel who has now become our friend she said she sees something similar almost everyday.

When we find enough space to walk on the footpath, sometimes for a moment, I let my guard down. Then a man throws his coffee into the gutter with little regard of who gets in the way. Or hawkers try and entice us to buy tasty treats or useless crap. What feels like raindrops fall on us but it’s actually silt from god knows where. Once we step back into our hotel room I breath a sigh of relief and wipe the sweat from my brow - finally we are safe.