Earlier this year, the Vietnamese government announced an ambitious, what some might characterize as Sisyphean, initiative to try to control Vietnam’s out-of-control traffic, including a new draconian traffic fine regime.
The Newspaper of Record, in its reporting, accurately described the Vietnamese motorways as the country’s “coliseum.”
Via The New York Times, January 2025 (emphasis added):
Vietnam’s motorbike drivers have always tended to treat red lights as suggestions, more slow down than stop. At rush hour, they’ve brought the same indifference to other rules, like: Yield to pedestrians; or, stay off sidewalks; or, do not drive against the flow of traffic.
Some found it charming, the ballet of many wheels dancing around pedestrians. But Vietnam’s road fatality rates have long been among the highest in Asia. And after cracking down on drunken driving, the country’s leaders are now going after everything else.
Under a new law, traffic fines have risen tenfold, with the biggest tickets exceeding $1,500. The average citation tops a month’s salary for many, and that’s more than enough to change behavior. Intersections have become both calmer and more congested by an outbreak of caution. Faulty green lights have even led scared drivers to walk motorbikes across streets the police might be watching…
Making Vietnam more “civilized” (“van minh” in Vietnamese) appears to be the goal. It’s a word the government has often deployed for public order campaigns, signaling what this lower-middle-income country often sees as its north star: the wealth and order of a Singapore, South Korea or Japan…
The streets are Vietnam’s coliseum. Especially in cities, they are the forum where society’s biggest conflicts — between government control and personal freedom, between the elites seeking harmony and strivers seeking income — have long played out.
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Vietnamese traffic, particularly but not limited to the major cities Saigon and Hanoi, is, in fact, a cacophonous dance with the Grim Reaper.
This is particularly true if you find yourself on a rented or purchased-for-a-reasonable-price motorbike (“motorbike” rather than “motorcycle” being the universally used term in Southeast Asia for whatever reason).
The key, I have learned, to not dying an ignominious death on some godforsaken Indochinese street is to keep an open awareness of one’s range of vision, much as a monk does during certain forms of meditation, rather than focusing on any single object in the field.
This way, you stay alert to incoming kamikaze motorbikes — or trucks, or cars, or bicycles, or lorries — from all sides.
One does not get distracted by pretty signs or pretty Oriental women or anything at all or else one dies.
One must also ardently avoid distraction by the trucks blaring advertisements from loudspeakers mounted on the cab selling watermelons or whatever out of the back, as this is common practice in the absence of any “noise pollution” ordinance.
The exception to the no-distractions rule of Zen, though, is checking the rearview when necessary, as that necessarily averts your gaze to focus on a particular thing (the mirror), leaving you exposed to the entropy of the Thunderdome.
This rearview mirror check, though critical in lane change situations, is the most perilous moment of the journey; as soon as you avert your gaze, a Vietnamese motorbike kamikaze is liable to pop up from the ground, seemingly out of some underground tunnel, and ambush you like a Viet Cong (apologies for the mixed Far East war metaphors).
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Roundabouts, which are everywhere in lieu of traffic lights to control intersections, are total free-for-alls, where the majority of fatal accidents occur.
For illustrative purposes, I had my dear wife record traffic flow from the back of the motorbike and then splice a few clips together in my inaugural Armageddon Safari news reel.
It’s not the wildest depiction of the things I’ve seen, but it’ll give you an idea of how things flow.
VIDEO
For other traffic-related and non-traffic-related tidbits of hard-earned wisdom on surviving the Far East as a Westerner, please see my exhaustive expat anti-travel memoir, now available in paperback.
Related: My Gold-Standard Expat Memoir: Back and Better Than Ever With the Second Edition
All that to say: if you love yourself and find yourself in the Orient, maybe think twice about that motorbike rental, no matter how tempting it might be at $5/day.
