A friend of mine had a motorbike accident today and it wasn't a horrible one and wasn't his fault. The fact that it wasn't his fault doesn't make his road rash any less painful or dislocated shoulder any less dislocated though. The only vehicle that I operate here in Da Nang is my bicycle and even that could result in disaster for me one day because it isn't just me that I have to worry about over here, people drive differently in South East Asia and while I am pretty well-versed in the chaos, it is still immensely dangerous. I owned several vehicles in Thailand and many scooters but the urban sprawl that I live in now doesn't encourage me to drive at all especially since a taxi going just about anywhere in the city will cost you between 1-2 dollars.
I always tell people that I don't see the point in driving here when public transport is so cheap but many of my friends still do it and well, one of them paid the price just a few hours ago. It got me thinking about several times in my life that I was nearly involved in horrible accidents yet managed to somehow cheat death or barring me dying, I would have been severely injured had things gone differently than they did.
The first time I can remember a close encounter with death was when I had just entered college. I was only 17 at the time and was far from the grasp of my parents to rescue me should something go wrong. I had my own car and a lot of freedom but still, I only had a driving license for a year at that point and anyone that is a driving teen is a hazard on the road. Well, I don't know if I was changing the CD or what the hell was going on but I decided to pass a car on a two lane road and somehow didn't see the car coming in the opposite direction. This wasn't a super-fast highway or anything but it is a really lucky thing that the other guy had reflexes of steel because I just froze and he went around me at the last second. I would imagine that both of us were probably traveling at 40 miles and hour and this was well before the airbag days, especially in my piece of crap Ford Escort.
My heart was pounding in my chest and I drove home shaking after that and had to sit in the car for a while to calm down. That was really the first time in my life that I was in such a horribly dangerous situation like that.
I managed to remain almost accident-free for many years and I'm not counting the time that someone else ran a red light and ran into my car. That happened so quickly that I didn't have time to notice it and didn't even know I was going to get hit until I did get hit.
Fast forward about 6 years or so and I was working in a traveling job up in Michigan and all the roads I traveled on were rather unfamiliar to me. My next brush with near death was on a 4 lane highway where the speed limit was likely 65 or 55. I don't remember.
It was something like the above. My girlfriend was visiting me and I guess I was distracted but I crossed over the double yellow to pass a car not realizing that it was a double yellow or even the wrong side of the road but once again, I was driving straight into oncoming traffic. At that speed with a head on collision, that would have been almost certain death for me, my girlfriend, as well as the passengers in the other car. Once again, thankfully the other driver was able to dodge me before we all died.
The thing about all of this is that I am a very cautious driver. I do not drink and drive, nor am I what you would consider a "scatterbrain." It was just really dumb decisions when I was a very young driver. I don't think my girlfriend in the passenger seat even noticed that anything had happened but that is something I can still see in my head today.
I'm definitely not trying to make excuses but it was raining, it was a rental car that I was unfamiliar with, the wipers were not in good shape, and my gf was talking my head off. None of that matters. At the end of the day you are responsible for keeping your damn car in the correct lane and I failed on two occasions.
Now the next story takes place many years later in a faraway land called Thailand.... and I was on a motorbike.
Thailand is NOT a safe place to drive anything, let alone a 125 CC scooter that has no safety features and is made primarily of plastic. In this instance it was a two lane road with traffic going in opposite directions and it was nighttime. People frequently pass on these roads without much consideration for people on motorbikes and this is especially true of the rather insane minibus drivers who drive like maniacs. Well I found myself face-to-face with a minivan heading right for me as I was puttering along and I had to swerve in order to not get killed, which I almost certainly would have been at those speeds and the fact that a minivan weighs a LOT. I flew into a ditch on the side of the road and by sheer luck i happened to go down a slope, then hit another slope leading up a small hill that was a driveway and briefly got airborne but then landed on another nicely inclined slope on the other side. Had I flew into this drainage ditch at almost any other location I would have completely wiped out. Instead I was just sat on the side of the road with my heart in my throat imagining how if things had been just slightly different I would have died.
I took it a lot more slowly down that road the rest of that night and every other night in the future. People regularly meet their untimely deaths on the roads in Thailand and it deserves its ranking at number 1 or 2 each year as far as global road fatalities are concerned.
Perhaps it was Karma for me putting those 2 people in the past in precisely the same situation that I found myself in that night.
I did end up having 3 motorbike crashes while I lived in Thailand but all of them were just scrapes and a bit of lost skin, nothing major. All of these were the fault of other people or me not remembering that there are no real rules of the road here in SE Asia.
But I think about these things any time that I am considering getting a scooter or car over here. I don't know man. It just doesn't seem like it is worth it to me and it seems like every week I am getting news from yet another friend who has been in an accident. I would imagine that owning your own transport is slightly less expensive in the long run than it is to take taxis... but I think I'll just leave the driving up to other people.
Ever had a near brush with death on a road before? I'd like to hear about it especially if it took place in this part of the world.