Flying in to Ho Chi Minh City, in the dark, around the edge of a typhoon, I watched the roads down below. I just wanted to figure out on which side of the road the traffic drove, but what I noticed were the singular headlights. Every light down there seemed to be alone. Either every car in this country has a headlight out, I thought, or there are a whole lot of motorbikes in this city.
We marveled, on the ground, at the sheer quantity of motorbikes. It was 1 am, and the streets were still full of them. "There are ten million people in this city," our taxi driver told us, "and five million motorbikes."
By day, when we woke to the noise and bustle of, for me, a whole new continent, we just stared. There really are five million motorbikes in HCMC, and I think we saw all of them. The guide books say just to pick your moment and start walking across the street at a steady pace, and it's really all you can do. You step out into traffic and hope that none of the hundreds of motorbikes rushing through that intersection at that moment runs into you. They flow around you like water. Oddly, there are very few cars, maybe 5 for every 200 motorbikes. The bikes go on and on as far as you can see, each carrying no more than two adults, each adult wearing a little round helmet but the kids, squeezed between them, are usually helmetless. "Maybe," I said, after we found out that there is a law requiring helmets in Vietnam but not in Cambodia, "maybe they give out the tickets to the person not wearing the helmet, and they can't give them to little kids."
In Phnom Penh, in Cambodia, the motorbikes are more crowded. Sometimes there are three or four adults on a bike. To cross the street in Phnom Penh, you wade through the motorbikes, start-stop-start as you see a little gap, instead of the motorbikes flowing around you.
Motorbikes were a bit of a theme of our trip to Vietnam and Cambodia.
We marveled, on the ground, at the sheer quantity of motorbikes. It was 1 am, and the streets were still full of them. "There are ten million people in this city," our taxi driver told us, "and five million motorbikes."
By day, when we woke to the noise and bustle of, for me, a whole new continent, we just stared. There really are five million motorbikes in HCMC, and I think we saw all of them. The guide books say just to pick your moment and start walking across the street at a steady pace, and it's really all you can do. You step out into traffic and hope that none of the hundreds of motorbikes rushing through that intersection at that moment runs into you. They flow around you like water. Oddly, there are very few cars, maybe 5 for every 200 motorbikes. The bikes go on and on as far as you can see, each carrying no more than two adults, each adult wearing a little round helmet but the kids, squeezed between them, are usually helmetless. "Maybe," I said, after we found out that there is a law requiring helmets in Vietnam but not in Cambodia, "maybe they give out the tickets to the person not wearing the helmet, and they can't give them to little kids."
In Phnom Penh, in Cambodia, the motorbikes are more crowded. Sometimes there are three or four adults on a bike. To cross the street in Phnom Penh, you wade through the motorbikes, start-stop-start as you see a little gap, instead of the motorbikes flowing around you.
Motorbikes were a bit of a theme of our trip to Vietnam and Cambodia.
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