Vietnam has a Road Death Epidemic!

From the first moment we set foot in Bangkok, 2½ months ago, we’ve noticed that the rules of the road in South East Asia are understood differently from back home. What is reckless or illegal in Ireland/Estonia, is often the norm here. This includes....

• Multiple people on motorbikes. A family of 4 or 5 on a single bike is not unusual...normally with a baby in there aswell. Kadi even saw 6 once.

• Overtaking on blind mountainous corners. The more dangerous the better it seems!


• People sitting on the back or roof of vehicles. People are ferried around like cargo here. Whatever doesn’t fit in the back can often be seen sitting on the roof.

• Driving on the opposite side of the road (against the traffic) is acceptable, provided you don’t hit anyone. One day we saw a motorbike driving against a big flow of traffic – in fact the sole motorbike had the right of way!


• Driving in the dark with no lights on (we see this all the time)!


• Driving motorbikes with no helmets.
  
• Carrying the most unusual objects on the back/front of the motorbike. The list is endless but we’ve seen furniture (a big couch, a bed headboard, chairs), all sorts of animals (alive and dead), a person on a drip, ladders, big boxes of various stuff, big blocks of ice, children’s high chairs (with children sitting on them), etc.

• No mirrors. We’ve seen plenty of bikes where the only rear-view mirror has been twisted around so the driver can check their appearance while sitting in traffic (or maybe while driving too!)


• Children (age 10 or younger) driving motorbikes.


• Plenty of babies being carried on bikes (of course no helmets, because there are no baby motorbike helmets). Many are asleep in fact!

• The biggest vehicle has right of way. Pedestrians give way to motorbikes, motorbikes give way to tuktuks, tuktuks give way to cars, cars give way to busses, etc. It is not unusual to see a car/bus cut across a line of motorbikes, not necessarily waiting for a clear patch, but just driving out in front of them knowing that they will stop because they are smaller.


• The horn is used as a conversational instrument. Surprisingly, the motorists will not blow the horn in anger when someone drives against them or cuts out in front of them, but they will sound it whenever they are approaching or overtaking someone. It is like saying “hello, hello, I’m coming you better make room and watch out”.

But this all took on a whole new dimension when we reached Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi in particular have millions of people living in them and this means there is a constant flow of motorbikes on the road, moving around the city in some chaotic yet structured manner. They seem to flow like a big swarm of fish. Zebra crossings and pedestrian lights are ignored so crossing roads becomes the most extreme game of chicken we ever played. We’ve learned that the trick is to walk across with determination, and don’t step backwards. Check out the video below for a demonstration of Conor crossing the road in Hanoi.

The other law that they break here is one that the Fashion Police should be enforcing! The Vietnamese (and South East Asians in general) consider pale skin to be more pleasing to the eye than tanned skin. As such, they shade from the sun at every opportunity. So when they are driving their motorbikes, they are often seen wearing hats, sunglasses, face masks, hoodies, gloves, socks and shoes, and specially made jackets with flaps to cover the hands....all this despite the extreme heat here. You can’t see any of their exposed skin – we call them little Michael Jacksons!

Accidents do happen though and in fact, during one taxi ride, our driver managed to knock a middle-aged woman off her bicycle. Thankfully she was ok, but the driver didn’t seem to care as she apparently pulled out in front of him, and she was just a bicycle and he was a car afterall.

They are without a doubt the worst drivers in the world! In fact, there are apparently 12,300 road fatalities in Vietnam a year (population of 85 million). That’s 33 deaths a day!!

Despite all the craziness, this (surprisingly) is the first country where we see some people wearing helmets!

Postcard Competition

Ok - this is a bonus competition so everyone who gets the right answer will get a postcard :)

Question: We spent the first 3 months of our trip travelling from North America through to South America. List all of the countries that we visited during that time.

Email your answers and your postal address to competition closed

Deadline for entries is Friday 4th September.

Next stop: Hoi An

As we continued up the coast of Vietnam, our next stop was a beautiful town called Hoi An. What is different about this town is that the old town was not destroyed in the war and the old French colonial architecture is very well preserved. The old town itself is actually a UNESCO World Heritage site and you need to buy a ticket to get into it. However, as there are no boundaries, the ticketing system is completely unenforceable so naturally we didn’t buy any tickets.

It was once a quiet fishing village but the tourists have taken over and it is now home to over 200 tailor shops. Amazingly they all have enough business to survive. While Kadi spent a few days and a few dollars having dresses / coats / tops / etc made up, Conor decided he didn’t need suits (painful memories of work) and just strolled the streets during our time there. It is a very pretty town to be just lazing about: no litter, flowers and trees everywhere, nice architecture, cosy coffee shops, clean and tidy buildings and a river passing through the town as well. In the evening, many of the restaurants and shops switch on old style lanterns outside giving the streets a nice warm glow. All these made it very different from other Vietnamese towns we’ve been to so it’s no surprise that it’s a tourist hotspot.

There’s also a lovely beach nearby. One day we rented bikes and cycled out to it. As we got there, a guy stopped us and told us we must park our bikes in the designated bike park there, telling us we can’t take them any further. He wanted to charge us a parking fee of 5,000 dong (20c) but we started to give out, knowing that the fee should be just 2,000 dong (8c). Yes, we are talking about just a few cents but still he wanted to charge us more than double and we don’t like getting ripped off. 5,000 dong can buy a bottle of water here. After our repeated objections, he finally agreed on 2,000 dong, but he then moved our bikes out of the shade and into the sun. At this stage, we gave up, took our bikes and cycled down to the beach anyway where a restaurant let us park them free of charge. Typical Vietnamese experience of attempted overcharging! Sometimes we are smart enough to avoid it but for sure we get overcharged with loads of things, and probably more often than we realise.

We eventually left Hoi An on a long and painful 16 hour night bus up to the capital, Hanoi. It was probably one of our worst night busses, what with all the bumps and the driver constantly trying to overtake slow moving trucks in front of him, but we won’t start complaining now because it looks like it will have been the last overnight bus journey of our trip.

A Week in Nha Trang

We’ve just spent the last week having a mini “holiday” in the beach town of Nha Trang, Vietnam. As mentioned in our last post, we stayed with our friends Charlie and Pippa and it was nice to just hang out with them and their friends – having a break from organising sights to see, accommodation to stay, busses and transport, etc. We also took the opportunity to do some more diving and completed our Advanced Open Water course (tried to find Nemo but couldn’t see him anywhere). It was good to get back in the water and the activity was a welcome change from all the sightseeing we’d been doing recently. As well as scuba diving, we also managed to fit in fun session on the local waterpark. No rules here and on one occasion we managed to squeeze a train of ten people on five tubes into one of the slides, which resulted in a number of injuries - ouch! Aswell, we visited a nearby mudbath where we had the satisfying sensation of covering ourselves in filth and letting it all dry on in the hot sun :)

If you’ve been following our blog closely, you may have caught reference to our “project” that we are working on. Basically we have been recording videos of us doing a dance in various locations around the world (similar to Dancing Matt from YouTube for anyone who knows it). Where we meet friends, we get them to dance with us too :) Well Charlie and Pippa are actually out here teaching English and one day they managed to persuade their whole class to come down to the beach and dance with us. They told the class that it was to be used as a promotional video for encouraging English teachers to come to Vietnam! You’ll have to wait until we finish our trip before you can see the videos though.

One of the more memorable events of the week was being refused entry into a nightclub by a doorman who is about 3 feet tall and looks to be age 5 (honest!) We thought it was some kind of joke but the other doormen (who were proper adults) were carrying out his instructions....he was obviously the boss. We were very surprised to hear that he was actually 27! Judge for yourself from the photos below.

The other day we were talking about our further travel plans and came to the painful realisation that we only have one month left. This seems to have come from nowhere and the countdown is now on. We’re trying to decide how to spend this month given that our planned itinerary doesn’t fit with this timescale and we have to get to South Korea by September 18th for our flight to Sydney.

Oh yeah, and Conor bleached his hair in Nha Trang!

Up The Coast

From Ho Chi Minh we headed up the Vietnam coast to a small beach town called Mui Ne. We had heard that this was the Mecca of kite surfing in Vietnam so we were keen to get back into it again. However, the tourist prices were well and truly in force here: kite and board rental was 3-5 times the price we paid in Thailand which unfortunately put it outside our budget so we had to give it a miss until we get to Australia. We did take the opportunity to rent a scooter and take off to the nearby sand-dunes which were actually very impressive.

After a fun day on the scooter and a dose of sunburn, we left Mui Ne for the next city, Nha Trang. This will be our base for the next week or so as we have met up with our skydiving friends from Ireland, Charlie and Pippa! We are also doing some more scuba diving here. Nha Trang is much bigger than Mui Ne but the way they have built up the city has preserved the beach. It is very scenic. The weather recently has also been perfect which is great so we’re in no hurry to leave here just yet!

Special mention to regular blog reader Henry Jakobson who is getting married today :) Congratulations! Even though it is so nice here, we wish we could take a day off and go to the wedding in Estonia.

Good Morning Vietnam!

Throughout our travels, we had heard a number of negative things about Vietnam (especially the South) from fellow travellers....mainly the unwanted attention that tourists get from people trying to sell books, guesthouses, tuktuks, tours, etc. As such, we didn’t have high expectations from our first port of call, Ho Chi Minh City (previously called Saigon) but were pleasantly surprised by what we found. The city is very clean and tidy, with nice parks and gardens and apart from the chaotic traffic (we’ll get to that again) it is a lot more relaxed, organised and easier than we were expecting. It has a lot of nice architecture both in its old historic buildings as well as the modern buildings. We even took a taxi out to some random local market away from the backpacker/tourist area just to see the real Ho Chi Minh, and although it was a bit less polished, it was still a very nice place to stroll around.

By chance, we had bumped into two Irish girls (Emer and Noelle) that we previously met in Laos, and they made our stay even more fun. We spent our time hanging out with them and enjoying lots of margaritas :)

We visited the local War Remnants Museum which had a lot of interesting information about the Vietnam War (or as it’s known over here: The American War). The Vietnam version of events is very different from that portrayed in American movies and it was interesting to get their perspective. The museum is not for the faint hearted and shows plenty of gruesome images of the victims of the war and the effects of the chemical warfare used by the Americans (“Agent Orange” containing dioxin, the most poisonous chemical created by man).

One of the most popular sites around HCMC is Cu Chi tunnels. This is an underground tunnel network that once stretched out 200 km and is built in 3 levels going down to 10 m deep. Viet Cong (Vietnamese communists) were hiding here from Americans for almost 20 years. We got to go into the tunnels.... they were very, very small and dark and hot and claustrophobic... can’t imagine living there for 20 years. Can’t even imagine being there for 20 minutes. And this particular tunnel where we were was even enlarged for the tourists (cos Americans have big asses according to our guide).

The highlight of the trip to the Cu Chi tunnels was the opportunity to shoot an AK47. We had both fired guns before, but never a machine gun! The safety briefing consisted of “Who’s next? Ok, go!” and despite the extremely loud bang when the gun fired, the hearing protection consisted of a set of old Sony music headphones with the chord removed!! As much as we wanted to go crazy with the gun and spray bullets like in the war films, at €1 per bullet we decided not to get carried away.