Near misses, pavement kisses
Glass shifted under my hip, crunching against the pavement. My jaw throbbed and my breath paused, locked in my chest. All here? Intact? panicked messages raced around my brain. The ringing in my ears throbbed against the numb sensation in head from the impact. I felt a stain of blood oozing in my jeans. In the distance a dark figure steadied itself and rose slowly. He's alright...but why is he so far away? I'm ok..breath..slowly..get up slowly..So this is what a motorbike accident feels like?
Ask anyone who has visited to Hanoi, they will talk about the traffic. It's essential therapy. Here, traffic is a rabid stampede of the worst kind of herd. Here, lanes are optional, honking essential and accidents, carnivale. But actually, it's not even the number of accidents you see that is frightening, it's the sheer abandon with which Vietnamese drive. And, of course, you will also see many accidents.
In my first week in Hanoi, during a conversation someone casually mentioned the worst kind is when a scooter is hit by anything larger. The conversation became a show and tell of scars, horror stories of twisted metal and twisted people scattered along on messy roadsides and generally painful tales of traffic in Hanoi. Inevitably, accidents become a story and a parade. Vietnamese traffic slows almost to a standstill viewing the chaos. I find gawking at accidents disgusting and normally I purposely avert my eyes from the personal tragedy of another.
But the worst ones are unavoidable. The first accident I saw left me haunted. A motorbike and a four wheel drive collided like a screeching metal pinata on a busy highway, the dyke road, a main artery leading to my home in Westlake to the tourist centre, the Old Quarter. A double 'lane' paved highway, an impossible street on a Sunday, during peak hour it becomes pure blurred motion. Cars, trucks and motorbikes all racing to outdo each other in an impromptu exercise of speed, close calls and near misses.
Ahead of us a motorbike in a frozen second was absorbed, chewed up and spat out into various, unrecognisable metallic pieces barely four cars in front of us. Instantaneous moments drawn into a long tunnel of sound and fear, fractured metal, flying bodies and sounds I'll never forget. And the bodies of the driver and passenger as we passed...a dark river of blood flowing to a gutter..I barely avoided throwing up and avoided the street for many weeks after.
So when I first considered driving in Hanoi, my first thoughts were laced with a tangible fear. And how can one do anything properly if fear is the first response. In Vietnam, the first and only piece of advice is to be fearless. Be a road warrior, to leave the others for dead in the life or death race to the supermarket, to work or to pick up your children. To believe that others will help those who have fallen as you rush to your all important goal at a breakneck speed. Honestly, this is my advice. Be fearless.
The taxi had come speeding through a quiet corner in the wrong lane. My friend swerved the handlebars but not in time and the taxi clipped our back wheel. We were knocked sideways and hit the gutter squarely. I was thrown many metres over the front and my angelic flight through the air narrowly missed a concrete bench and I landed on the other side of the road.
We were both fine, no injuries, only small scrapes, bruises and cuts and a ruined shirt. The taxi never stopped. I still don't look at accidents.
And I don't drive in Hanoi.
