Super Scooters
Out of any country in Southeast Asia, scooter-mania is biggest in Vietnam. Scooters are everywhere you go, in all directions. There’s a practical reason: there’s a lot of people in Vietnam, and cars are prohibitively expensive in Vietnam compared to scooters. A fun fact we learned while watching the Top Gear Vietnam episode. Like the locals, the guys had to buy scooters for their challenge to stay on budget. Cars haven’t been around that long, meaning there’s no used car supply. As they put it on Top Gear, cars haven’t had the time to get cheap. So the scooter takes over. They are the taxis, the family sedans, the pick-up trucks, the moving trucks, and the freight trucks all in one.
We tried to capture as many crazy scooter sightings as we could, but because they usually are whizzing by before we had time to whip the camera out, we missed some of our favorites. Like the guy carrying an enormous sheet of glass in front of his body, making us – and him, I’m sure – pray he didn’t have to stop suddenly, lest the glass shatter all around him and anyone in his path. Here’s some of the other ones we caught on camera, making our wondering at how we’d fit on a moto-taxi with a driver and our bags seem ridiculous. (By the way, all but the first one is from Hanoi, a city where we pretty much just walked around with our camera out at all times to capture all of the craziness surrounding us!)
My favorite is the one with the presumably unattached freezer. Judging from the foot, it appears to be driven by a female. I cringe to think what is going to happen when she drives over that bump in the road!