A beautiful sunny Vietnam morning greeted us as we left our room clad in jeans, boots and with our own motorbike helmets under our arms as we heading into town to have breakfast and hire bikes. With the desire to do a fair bit of biking on this trip, we decided to buy our own decent helmets that fit as most people around here drive like crazy and with little more than bicycle helmets on their heads. About 20kms out of town are some waterfalls and a temple that we wanted to see so we had our mission.
Having only spent one night here, my impression of this town was that it was something akin to Anglesea with some light traffic. Mistake #1. Little more than 15mins on our bikes and disaster struck. Motorbikes are not hard to ride but when you’re driving on the opposite side of the road to what you’re used to and there are really no road rules that anyone obeys, things can very easily go wrong. Flic was heading towards in intersection with her indicator on and I called out to keep going as we had a green light and I thought she was heading the wrong way. She paused in the intersection, changed direction and an old lady carrying a basket of noodles ran the red light. I watched with horror as in slow motion (it actually does appear this way) they collided in the intersection and Flic was thrown off. “SHIT!!!!!! SHIT! SHIT!”
I quickly made my way around and got my bike up onto the curb. I turned to see that Flic and the lady were both thankfully on their feet. Right. Make the scene safe. Flic was in tears, bleeding from her arm and wanting to know if the other lady was ok. Myself and another bystander got the bikes off the road and onto the footpath. Having ascertained that Flic’s injuries were only superficial it was then time to treat the wound while trying to make sense of the scene and convey to this woman that we would fix her bike, which had ruptured the fuel tank and that we would compensate her for the noodles which seemed her primary concern. By this point many kind folk had either walked over or got off their own bikes to help. Imagine the scene. One shell shocked Aussie with a severely grazed elbow, the other with adrenaline pumping flat chat, and a dozen Vietnamese talking loudly and quickly in their own language. The wonderfully helpful and friendly locals helped us to more than adequately compensate her for the noodles (around $ 2.50 AUS!!!) and negotiate with the mechanic across the road to fix her bike for around $70AUS. The locals were wonderful in A) treating Felicity (some guy just appeared with antiseptic) and B) making sure that we paid a fair price but weren’t ripped off ourselves. The old ladies were lovely in comforting Flic as she was quite upset at having disrupted this lady’s form of income.
I took both the bikes the 2 blocks back to our residence and we then walked home for further cleaning, a can of coke to sooth the nerves and to calm down a bit. I had thought that this would be the end of Felicity’s turn on a motorcycle, at least for today but after a while heroically she wanted to continue on with our day.
This post is too long now but this was not the end of our misadventures today, and nor was it the last motorbike accident.
To be continued.....
* For parents reading this, we are both fine. Really.
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