Mopeds

All across SE Asia I've seen hundreds of thousands of mopeds and the further north from Singapore I get the more there are. I thought Bangkok was bad until I got to Phnom Penh. I thought that was bad until I got to Ho Chi Minh city. Hanoi blows them all away as there is no comparison. The sidewalks are actually parking lots for them as there are just too many. As there is no room to actually walk on the sidewalk, the thousands of mopeds that constantly flow by honking, do so within inches, sometimes bumping their handlbars into you. We arrived by all night train this morning and couldn't believe the choking streets. This is the first place so far that I'm glad I don't have my bike. The intensity of the traffic here is too much. The constant stream of noice and horns and stimulation is agitating and tiring and aggrivating. I'd be road kill in minutes. Our train was a 19 hour festival of noise and the stench of urine as our berth happened to be next to the "toilet". I use that word generously as it was more of a hole in the floor, surrounded by pee puddles, than an actual toilet. The puddle of urine that sloshed toward my birkenstocks every time the train rounded a bend threatened to soak my socks. They somehow remained dry, but all the same I tracked in a smelly, wet trail of pee from the bathroom to our room. The sheets were the color of storm clouds but not as fresh. Mine were covered in footprints which led me to wondering if the person using my linens had previously been to the bathroom. The berth had 4 beds (2 up and 2 down) and we 3 shared it with a Viet Namese woman who had a frequent and very moist cough. You know that smokers-cough-early-in-the-morning-hacking-up-a piece-of-lung-tissue sound? It was that, except more often and a little wetter. It was on this leg of our journey that I learned the true depth of my sisters fear of germs. Not quite the Howard Hughes level of paralyzing fear (I didn't see her lining the floor with Kleenex tissues...not while travelling anyway) but way up there in my dads league. Our conversations of germs and lice and cockroaches and bedbugs dominated the train ride and made the 19 hour journey fly by in no time. The luster of budget travel was wearing off rapidly for her as I happily wrapped up in a dishwater grey blanket and buried my head in a matching pillow case. That night Samantha slept with a hoodie on zipped all the way to the neck. I'll give her some slack though (even if she did have Elliott checking her roots for lice tonight) as it is getting colder the further north we go. But everyone has had long horrible train rides in Asia and it isn't really what I wanted to write about, at all.
Yesterday we were in Hoi An which is a beautiful small town in the central coast of Viet Nam. Old Chinese buildings line a small river and the back alleyways and narrow streets are lined with tailors and shops selling brightly colored cloth lamps. At night the place lights up beautifully with thousands of hanging balls and shades swinging in the evening breeze. Another thing that makes this downtown area special is the lack of cars. Several streets are car free zones that are meant to be pedestrian areas. While I generally applaud the removal of cars from all roads, interstates included, I haven't noticed much of a change in the decibel level of these walking streets. Mostly because the mopeds have more than filled the noise gap. Nature abhors a vaccuum as noise abhors a silence (as is demonstrated by the constant jibber-jabber inside my head) and the Viet Namese abhor driving without constantly honking their horns. I think it's all about power (isn't everything?) as the lowly moped is the bottom feeder of the traffic stream...the lower rung on the ladder. So the horn is a kind of "beeeeep, back off you pedestrian, or cyclist, I've got 75cc's of hell under my ass and if you don't back down you're gonna get hurt!" "OK, maybe not very badly, but back off!! That's the thing with bullies with big horns... all bluster. Because in the end the moped driver knows (as none wear helmets...loud horns save lives man) he will end up on the wrong side of the E.R. if he goes up against a truck or car, or pedestrian, or dog...hell even a curb! So, with all that pent up rage boiling inside and no one to take it out on (safely) the only pressure relief valve comes in the form of a cute little trumpet button under his left thumb. But maye, as a cyclist, I'm just projecting my powerlessness onto all these moped drivers who are just tooting their nasally horns defensively, in a gesture to keep themselves (and in many cases their entire family-5 people on one moped is the record so far) upright and alive. I'm considering a pedal powered air horn myself as my bell sounds kind of ...gay. When I hit my bell people don't generally scatter out of my way as much as stop and smile. No, on second thought I'm not projecting...at least here in Viet Nam. I have proof. Of all the multitudes of mopeds I've seen there are only a handfull of differing brands. They mostly have innocuous names that have been market researched and sanitized to offend no one. The ubiquitous wave and its offspring the wave 2 are good examples. When the pack of hundreds of waves line up at an intersection and the signal changes green, a veritable tsunami is unleashed...ba da boom! Add to the waves names like the future, the dream, the viva, the boss, and my personal favorite the spacey and you'll get the idea of generic sounding marketing. But in Viet Nam I've come across a different moped. Sure it looks similar, but how could you drive the ATTILA without wanting to kick some ass? Or at least want to honk your horn all the time! No, Viet Nam plays by different rules and (again with the bad decisions of the U.S. leaders) any country that names a mode of transportation after a hun is not to be messed with!