WINE DINE AND TRAVEL SUMMER 2020 -- SOUTH AFRICA

Postcards from Vietnam
By John Muncie & Jody Jaffe
Dear Ron,
Traffic in Vietnam is famous.
Maybe not tourist-attraction
famous, but definitely a
phenomenon.
We’re talking about motorbike traffic. Motorbikes
swarm Vietnam like monster bees. Buzzing,
roaring, put-putting down every street, along every
alley, across every sidewalk, squeezing through
the aisles of outdoor
markets. There are 90
million people in Vietnam
and 45 million motorbikes.
Cars? Maybe a
couple million.
Traffic lights are a big
deal, too. There aren’t
any. OK, a few. But we’ve
seen more traffic lights
along Broadway than we
saw in all of Ho Chi Minh
City.
We faced the motorbike
phenomenon on our
first day in HCMC. There
we were, innocent
tourists, poised to visit
Ba Chieu Market, a wonderful, chaotic place where
you can buy everything from exotic fruit, to crazy
shirts, to great street food.
It was right across the street -- a multi-lane
street flooded with an endless tsunami of motorbikes.
We looked at our son, Ben
Shepard, and his boyfriend,
Job Zheng, for help. They’d
been in HCMC for weeks
and were old traffic pros.
“What do we do?”
“Just start walking.”
“WHAT?”
This is how Ben explained
it: “Wait until only
motorbikes are bearing
down -- no trucks or cars
– then step out. Walk,
don’t run. Not too fast,
not too slow. Steady. Everybody will swerve
around you. It’ll be fine. We promise.”
What to do? On the one hand we didn’t want to
die, on the other, Ben and Job were OK.
We held hands and stepped out. Thelma and
Louise pedestrian style.
It was a kind of miracle.
The Red Sea parting. The
motorbike horde slipped
around us, one side or the
other. Nobody slammed on
brakes, nobody yelled. Nobody
seemed to pay us any
attention at all except to
navigate around us as if we
were traffic cones.
“See,” said Ben when we
reached the opposite curb
unscathed, “that’s how it
works in Vietnam.”
That’s the way it worked
for our entire three-week
Vietnam trip. In HCMC, Dalat, Hanoi, Hoi An and
in Phu Quoc, an island off the southern coast.
The first step was always trepidatious but we
eventually got used to motorbikes zooming all
around us. Motorbikes are the ocean and pedestrians
are the fish. You just start swimming. And
146
WINE DINE & TRAVEL MAGAZINE 2020