photos from the back of a motorbike

It is hard to fully communicate the extent to which motorbikes play a role in Vietnam. At any given moment, the putt-putting of little engines (and high-pitched horns to match) outside the internet cafe where I sit is a cacophony. For every car owned in Vietnam, there must be at least 100 motorbikes. And the thing about a nation en-route on the motorbike, is that the rules of the road are different when everyone is not lumbering along 6 lane roads, encased in a bubble of steel which has the power to protect against quite a lot, but more likely can kill. The motorbike is more agile, and slower, and much less threatening. It is also driven by, as far as I can tell, everyone over the age of 15 who can borrow the family bike. There are no lanes, and if there are, they matter very little. You can drive the pace of a bicycle if you'd like, or you can try--probably unsuccessfully--to get all the way up to 50 km per hour (31 mph). So people just do whatever they want. Is there a swarming flow of bikes moving towards you, generally on the right side of the street? do you need to head the other direction down the road? Just go. They'll part for you. Really. Luckily, no one is very worried about going very fast and, unlike drivers in the States, they are hyper-sensitive to the possibility that a bicycle or motorbike might pull out in front of them at any moment.

Well, besides the seemingly insane courage (or simply insanity) that it takes to drive in cities, the motorbike's versatility is also remarkable. It is most people's only transportation, and in fact, since there are so many on the road, it is really frustrating to drive in a car. People carry crops to market, take their children to school, transport their elderly grandparents to the clinic, and rent out their services to carry those without bikes around town on mototaxis. Ryan and I have come to love them almost as much as the Vietnamese, if much more cautiously. Here are some photos taken from the back of one of our motorbikes.

p.s. don't worry, we stay out of the cities and drive very slowly, which, luckily, no one seems to mind.



Here I go. In Quy Nhon, on the central coast of Vietnam, the beach in town was a little dirty, due to the fisherman living and working there, but 20 km outside of town was a beautiful beach, Bai Bau, where we were the only swimmers in the water.






















Ryan has perfect confidence in my driving.
These are all taken outside of town, in the verdant hills surrounding the little port city.
The local gas station, perhaps there's a little mark-up, but it's so much more convenient and doesn't she look like a nice attendant?