On to Vietnam, Kids and Scooters

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A change of plans. Yesterday we reverted to our original plan and decided to travel to Vietnam. This meant a visit to a photo studio and the Vietnamese Consulate here. We did this ourselves because an agency told us that it would cost 400 Chinese dollars and we thought that was too much. We ended up paying the consulate 450 Chinese dollars and, though Jinyi mentioned this to the clerk, there was no explanation offered—at least as far as I could tell. It was fun walking about in warm weather here in Nanning. Today we climb a famous hill or mountain, not sure which. Our visas will take three days for processing. There are no agents selling tickets for trains to Vietnam, so we will have to travel to the railway station once we know our visas are ready. Buses are faster, cheaper and more unpleasant.



I’m attaching the usual five photos. Today they are of kids in the kindergarten in Jinyi’s upscale condo development. They are a source of controversy here because of the noise they bring to this part of the complex. I’m impressed by their screams of joy and by the sometimes chaotic and always energetic movement of these kidsa round the compound. As I write this, a truly frenetic audio track is playing as an underlay to the yelling and screaming. The kids are truly having a great time here. Other photos document the killer-scooters of the note that follows. My favourite one features the two pedestrians calmly negotiating a swarm of killer-scooters. It is important never to appear to look at an antagonist when negotiating a killer-scooter, so my faithful readers will note that neither pedestrian looks left or right: they appear to feel their way through the attacking swarm.



Killer Scooters



What strikes a foreigner after his first near-death encounter with a battery-driven killer scooter is how silently it attacks you. There is no noise beyond the hum of tires on pavement. There is, of course, a deadly randomness in routing, style and tactics for each encounter with time and space that the mostly young drivers—all of them unlicensed, almost all of them unhelmeted (one of the few I’ve seen with a helmet on had his chinstrap unbuckled)—achieve each moment of the driving day.



Killer scooters can attack you from anywhere. On the sidewalk is a favourite location, as are alleyway exits, from which they dart with no apparent eye-contact with anything but the pavement directly in front of them. Direction of traffic flow is no deterrent either because killer scooters frequently appear to drive against the flow of traffic that fills what appears to be once-upon-a-time bicycle lanes that they often inherit.



Cell-phone use is of course encouraged among killer scooter drivers. In a fear-laden survey yesterday as I tried to cross a vast intersection, I counted seven killer scooter drivers busily chatting on their cell-phones as they swerved casually among their fellow combatants. I also witnessed one gentle crash as a young man heading the wrong way, against the traffic, bumped front wheels with a petite young woman who looked about fourteen years old. Each driver avoided eye contact, moved their scooters slightly to one side of each other, and then proceeded. In the young man’s case, this meant proceeding on the same route, against the flow of the right-turning masses of scooter drivers at a major intersection.





In terms of records, five on a single scooter, parents and three kids (front, between, and behind parents) is the best scooter load award so far. For packages, a man with a scooter full of huge boxes with UPS-like labels tied down to a carrier device behind the driver, complemented by an assortment of untied boxes climbing skyward between the driver’s legs, wins the highest volume for a professional courier award so far. I will keep my thousands of readers posted regularly with updates and new citations for all categories of my Extreme Scooter designations.

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