Crossing the Street

Crossing the street should make for a mundane blog topic. Then again, crossing the street in Vietnam is anything but mundane.

As opposed to the Western world, where there is an order to things, where everyone waits their turn, Vietnam drives headlong down the street and waits for no one. Pedestrians either pick their spots and go or wait forever on the curb.

Hanoi's Old Quarter was a baptism by chaos. Masses of bikes pouring down a street no more than ten to fifteen feet across would flow by with only the barest of seams evident between them. Where a crowd of vehicles had stopped at a street corner - there were traffic lights on certain streets - I always looked around me. It was possible that a bike would come flying through a left or right turn. Right of way didn't exist here.

Alright, uh, just go, I thought.

After several painstaking, stop-and-go trips across various streets in the capital I came to a conclusion: Vietnamese drivers expect pedestrians to walk into the middle of traffic - they don't wait, so why should people on foot? But in keeping with this logic, drivers also expect pedestrians to keep walking.

They don't expect walkers to scurry or dodge or shoot into gaps; that behaviour leads to accident and injury.

The trick was to walk normally. Pick a spot, step out and walk normally. I had to act like I owned the pavement that I walked on. I made eye contact with the driver bearing down on me, made him move around me.

Of course, there are caveats to the rule. I wouldn't walk in front of a car or bus. If I saw locals stopping at a curb, I wouldn't walk either (this rule applies to eating food as well). But I just walked. The traffic moved around me, fit itself into the space that I had left.

"I'd never think to cross like this at home," said an Australian I was with in Nha Trang. We had just walked into a roundabout with five streets feeding into it. We had no crosswalk, nothing.

"Oh yeah," I said, lifting my head and looking around me.

I hadn't thought about what I was doing. Stepping into a throng of motorbikes and cars had become a matter of course. It was second nature.

Just hold me back from certain death when I try to cross the street against traffic at home, okay?