Tips and Tricks for Surviving Saigon City Traffic on a Motorcycle

I'm an expatriate. I live in Saigon - or Ho Chi Minh City, depending on whom you talk to. I've lived here for a month and am still working the kinks out of my system. You'll find me at work and struggling with the multi-tonal language, on the street at lunch sampling the local fare, in a restroom because of that very street food, or motoring about in the city's thickly congested streets, depending on when you come calling. It's actually on that last point that I'm writing this article now: the nuanced world of the Saigon motorcyclist. For, of everything you'll do in this city, driving the streets on a motorcycle is bound to be one of the most memorably exhilarating, rewarding, frustrating, and dangerous things to do here - no "depending."

I've had close calls with freight trucks and road hazards, seen countless accidents. I've driven the streets in the worst imaginable traffic and I've driven them late, late at night with no one on the road. With a month of motoring experience, like any writer worth his Mont Blanc knockoff, I'm here to share with you what I've seen.