Scooters, Scooters Everywhere! (video)

Saigon is really an amazing city. Where else can 4 million motorbikes clog the streets going every direction without traffic lights and almost never get in a wreck. (Please click on arrow button to play video I took above) I say "almost" because I managed to be in one of the few wrecks with a motorbike. Luckily I was in the taxi and not on the motorbike! I had caught a taxi downtown to go back to the hotel to catch up with Rick and the boys. As usual, I just held my breath as the taxi driver headed upstream into a river of motorbikes and buses headed straight at us. I have become accustomed to this and it didn't worry me as much as it did at first. This time, though, I saw us heading right for a bus and the taxi swerved to the right and BAM! headon into a motorbike. The rider flew onto the hood of the taxi. The bike was pinned between the bus and the taxi. So the guy riding it gets of the hood and starts to limp over to pick up his bike. The bizarre part started there. Suddenly everyone gets off the bus right there into this huge intersection between what would be two 4-lane streets (if they had lanes) and they all start pointing and yelling different things in Vietnamese. Apparently they were holding court here. All of the bus passengers were discussing who was going to be at fault and apparently they were going to award punitive damages to the motorbike driver. The taxi driver, apparently at fault, was going to have to fork over some bucks right there to the motorbike driver. At this point, I decided that Jim had better get out of here before they decided I had some sort of contributory negligence! So I slipped out the other side of the taxi (in the middle of thousands of cars all driving around us) and slipped into another taxi that was sitting right there stuck in traffic.