Driving part 2: Getting into accidents

Getting into accidents in a third world country is about as much fun as it sounds. About a million thoughts go through your head all at once, you get a huge rush of adrenaline and you don’t know what exactly happened after.

I have been in 6 motorbike accidents since I got here. The first two were what I call learning accidents, basically encountering something that I didn’t know about and handling it the wrong way, no one else were involved in these. The others were caused either by my doing something stupid or something getting in my way. I want to talk about two of them.

The first occurred on a main road like South Airport in Traverse, or Washtenaw in Ann Arbor. Since there are no traffic laws in this country if you want to turn left you inch your way through traffic or just gun it. As I was coming down this road some idiot was trying to do the latter. I laid on my horn down shifted and hit my breaks but I still t-boned the guy who quickly took off. As you can guess he was fine, me not so much. I flew off my bike, which was messed up and ripped my elbows up pretty bad. George came and helped get the bike to a shop. Fortunately the damages were under $5. we later had to go to his Mechanic to get the battery fixed which cost about $0.35.

The most recent accident occurred on another main road, but this time it was a dog that was to blame. The stupid little thing charged across probably five lanes of traffic and I didn’t see it until it was too late. Growing up the people I listened to about driving (i.e. not my Mother) told me if you have a choice between hitting a dog and potentially getting into an accident hit the dog. Well that may work out fine when you are driving a jeep but when you are driving a motorbike the dog messes up your steering and the bike falls on your knee, this was like a week ago and I still have a limp.

This was my knee after the accident.

It is great that motorbikes don’t cost much to repair. In total there might be $60 worth of damages that I have to pay. The costs for my injuries were even less. To be honest I am lucky not to have a lot worse. When George got into his last accident he screwed up his leg so bad he couldn’t walk for two weeks and had to go to the hospital.

To answer the question on everyone’s mind I don’t know what happened to the stupid dog, I also like that when I tell people (In America) that I hit a dog, they ask if the dog died instead of asking about me or my motorbike. Quite frankly I wish it had, because apparently it is good luck to eat dog meat after something bad has happened to you, and I can tell you right now I would have loved to fry that dog up and eat him.

P.S. The dog accident happened on Paczki day coming back from the bakery where I purchased a donut (the donut survived the crash). I guess getting into an accident was my way of celebrating my Polish heritage.

Tags: accident, Driving, traffic, traffic accidents in Vietnam, vietnam