It was inevitable that, at one point or another, we were going to experience a mishap on this trip. It was also inevitable that we would get involved with local law enforcement in some way or another. What follows is the story of Pouyan's bad day in Vietnam.
On Thursday morning we had a very early (6am) flight from Hanoi to Phu Quoc, a small resort island in southwest Vietnam. This flight was not a pleasant one. Although Pouyan and I sat on opposite ends of the same airplane row, we both managed to have screaming children directly behind us who spent the majority of the trip crying and kicking our seats. This did not mix well with our early wakeup and general grogginess. Evidently, children on airplanes are a pain in the ass across all cultures.
Unfortunately, in our haste to get as far away from the brats as possible, Pouyan and I booked it out of there so urgently that we left his package on the airplane. It was his recently acquired prized possession, an enormous painting of Ha Long Bay that was purchased in Hanoi. I've never seen him so excited about a material possession in our entire friendship, so losing this was a big deal. A huge friggin bummer, actually. The lost and found people weren't very helpful so we departed from the airport grumpily and groggily.
A short taxi ride later and we were at our hostel. It was a small encampment of fifteen or twenty guest houses just a few yards from the beach, mostly occupied by westerners (Aussies and Russians primarily). After settling in we had the entire rest of the day to ourselves... So I suggested we rent motorbikes and cruise around the island.
Some things to keep in mind before I proceed with the story: I have never ridden a motorbike before. Pouyan's bike experience is limited to a previous attempt lasting twenty frustrated minutes. Despite my total enthusiasm (and Pouyan's complete lack of enthusiasm) for hopping on these bikes, renting bikes to us is a pretty negligent act as far as the safety of the local population is concerned. Still, 7 bucks to rent a bike for a whole day? Deal, man. That's a lot of money for the Vietnamese and approximately one Chipotle burrito value for us (assuming that you don't spring for guacamole, which we all know is an upcharge of $1.75 aka 35,000 dong). So we strapped on our helmets, recklessly pealed away from hostel -- nearly crashing as the tires struggled to grip several inches of loose sand -- and cruised onto the expressway.
Turns out that driving a motorbike in a land with no traffic laws is totally fucking awesome.
We spent about five hours zipping along clay backwoods roads, four lane expressways, rocky village alleys bursting with Vietnamese pedestrians, and kilometer-length boardwalks jutting out into the Gulf of Thailand. Pretty much anything goes here... You can drive down the highways backwards at 80km/hr, park anywhere you like, and honk whenever the heck you feel like it. Everyone around us seemed completely indifferent to our presence.
At around 5:30pm, with the Sun starting to sag, we remembered our previous pledge to get off the road before dark and turned back north onto the road leading to our hostel. When we arrived into town, Pouyan was in the lead and I had settled into a nice pace a few yards behind him. I'm now going to describe the next scene in as much detail as I can, because (as the rear cyclist) I had a front row seat to the disaster as it unfolded.
The alley into our hostel connected to the main thoroughfare of the village on our particular side of the island, so when we arrived at the intersection prepared to turn left and get off the road, there was a lot of traffic going both directions. Pouyan drew to a near stop in the left side of the lane as he waited for a truck to pass us, fumbling slightly with his turn signal (not that anybody on this island actually used their turn signal). The trouble here was that he made his move like an American -- patiently deferring to oncoming traffic and idling until there was a clear opening. A Vietnamese person would have accelerated to shoot the gap a few feet ahead of the truck's nose. Therefore, to the rest of the road, Pouyan's conservative move wasn't suggestive of a left turn attempt. That's why, when he finally cut, a motorbike just to his rear left slammed into his back fender and sent both bikes and drivers toppling into the street.
Pouyan's descent was rather undramatic. The bike tipped, Pouyan rolled casually onto the ground, and that was that. The other bike's riders weren't so lucky. The fifty-something grandmother rolled sideways and semi-cartwheeled onto the asphalt. The twenty-something girl fell backwards and made contact with her elbow first. And the one year old toddler squirted into the atmosphere in a slow, cruel parabola, landing backwards on the pavement with a smack.
You read that right. There were three people on a motorbike, none wearing helmets, including a one year old boy -- and they all ate shit. From my perspective, the whole event seemed to occur in slow motion. My first reaction was, "oh my god, we killed a Vietnamese baby."
All of the sudden things sped up really quickly. The baby crying. The young girl wailing. The grandmother screaming expletives. Pouyan looking panicked and bewildered. Every other vehicle on the road stopping. Dozens of locals leaping up from their seats. Me parking and briskly running over to remove the bikes from the road (pointless, in retrospect) and then trying to put some space in between Pouyan and everybody else in case things got out of hand. We both tried to help up the other three participants, but they were erect and fully encircled by the other Vietnamese before we even had a chance.
The next few minutes are a little blurry. Both the grandmother and the toddler were actually unhurt, though the older woman was cursing up a storm and gesticulating wildly and accusatorially in our direction. The twenty-something girl clutched her left elbow and squinted from behind her cloth facemask. Once Pouyan and I determined that nobody was going to physically harm us, we started trying to figure out what to do next. Nobody tells you how to handle this kind of situation. Would we be arrested? Do we wait for an ambulance? Should I have written down the phone number for the U.S. embassy somewhere? Eventually some halted taxi drivers angrily informed us that we would have to go to the hospital and pay for the girl's medical care -- and we should get in their cab and go immediately.
The two of us looked at each other doubtfully... That idea wasn't very appealing. We were outnumbered and at a severe disadvantage in this situation, with the local sentiment harshly against us. Before we could make a decision, a rogue Vietnamese dude with a mustache jumped off his bike apparently in an effort to defend us. He spent a few minutes yelling back at the taxi driver brigade and nodding understandingly while we explained the situation to him. This went on for a while... Taxi drivers pointing their fingers in our direction while the grandma shrieked and the one mustached guy tried to broker an armistice.
We eventually decided to bring the bikes back to the hostel and ask them how we should handle this. After explaining this course of action to the mustache guy and apparently watching him relate this to the crowd and other accident participants, we hopped back on the bikes and scooted down the dirt road to the hostel. The mustached man followed. Waiting at the front desk was Binh, the guy who had rented them to us in the first place.
While Pouyan explained the situation to Binh, I turned to the mustached man and asked him what he thought we should do. All he could do in response was shake his head and say "no English, no English". Well, fuck. That meant that earlier he wasn't defending us... He was tailing us! This became obvious when he and Binh started conversing in Vietnamese and the mustached man began pointing and screaming at us hysterically. Binh shrugged and told us that we would probably have to go to the hospital and pay the Vietnamese peoples' medical bills, regardless of who caused the accident.
Shortly thereafter we arrived back at the accident scene, where the hysterics had heightened significantly. The taxi drivers and the mustached man stood in unison behind the bike riders, glowering at us mercilessly, while the twenty-something girl continued to hold her elbow and silently weep. The little boy had mysteriously disappeared. When Binh started speaking to the crowd in Vietnamese, the grandmother and mustached man continued to scream again. Binh translated: Why did you turn left the way you did? Why didn't you help them up from the ground? Why did you run away from the accident? I began to realize how craven we had seemed while taking the motorbikes back to the hostel. Pouyan and I made some attempts to defend ourselves, which Binh passed on to everybody else in Vietnamese, but it seemed to have no effect.
It was eventually decided that we would all go to the hospital to determine if the girl's elbow was broken, and then the police would decide how to proceed. That sounded like a pretty shitty idea (given what we had heard about police departments in non-first world nations), but Binh insisted. At this point I was just glad not to be Pouyan.
The hospital part of this story was pretty uneventful, so I won't go into details on this blog post. The short story is that the doctor wasn't in, so we would have to meet at the police station the next morning to figure out next steps. Really the only interesting thing that happened there was seeing the little boy pee himself on the hospital steps with a big goofy grin on his face. That was pretty funny. Meanwhile his father (the girl's husband) had arrived for the sole purpose of chain-smoking and throwing us looks of death.
I should mention that the girl with the supposedly broken elbow spent a whole lot of time wincing, crying out in pain, and just being wholeheartedly dramatic about the whole thing despite the fact that there was no bruising whatsoever on her arm. One curious thing that did happen was when her little boy reached over to grab her injured arm, rather than move it defensively out of the reach of his grasp, she kept it dead still and watched him wraps his hand around her forearm before screaming loudly when he touched her. Not exactly what I would have done if the flailing arms of a reckless toddler were headed in the direction of my broken elbow.
Anyway, we showed up at the police station early the next morning. A table was prepared for me, Pouyan, Binh, the grandmother, and the girl (still holding her arm exactly like the previous day). I was giddy at the opportunity to glimpse behind the curtain and see how the de facto Vietnamese judicial system would play out for us. Pouyan was in a state of general agitation. It was hot and sticky enough that we were already sweating before 9am.
The police captain joined us at the table. What followed was entirely in Vietnamese and only periodically explained to us by Binh, but the gist of the conversation was as follows: Pouyan was entirely at fault because he is a foreigner and that's just how things work around here. However, x-rays confirmed that the girl's arm was not broken (she gripped her elbow tighter and grimaced at this news, as if she could will her bones into snapping), so the only thing Pouyan had to do was pay her 500,000 dong (twenty-five bucks) for the trouble caused by her striking him with her bike. Once he paid, we could all just forget this whole thing.
Pouyan pulled out the money and slid it across the table to the police chief, who handed it to the girl along with a piece of paper that she had to sign to close out the interaction. What happened next was pretty humorous... She took the money with the hand of her supposedly broken arm, then signed the paper using that same arm -- no tears or scowls this time -- and then, when she accidentally dropped the pen on the floor, she bent over and actually used her heretofore broken limb to lift herself up onto her feet again. Magically good as new! A miracle had occurred!
So that was Pouyan's bad day... A prized painting lost, lots of angry people screaming at us, and a modest fine levied on dubious circumstances. We later heard that the median income of the island's inhabitants was $30 per month; a mind-boggingly low number. If that's true, they'll certainly put that money to better use than we would have. The next night we spent a similar amount on spring rolls, pizza, and mixed drinks on a beach with a dozen skinny-dipping British tourists.
Fin.
