My Motorbike Accident

I have been living in Vietnam for 1.75 years now and driving for most of that time. I drive a used moped that I got for $220 USD. It's a Korean brand, has a 100cc motor, aged at about 5 years old, and weighs more than most people would like. The thing I like about my bike is that it runs quite reliably, and I don't worry too much about it getting stolen or scratched. The fantastic thing about driving such a vehicle, is that my gas expenses are under $4 USD per week. That's for daily city driving to work and running around doing various things.

I consider myself a mild-to-moderately aggressive driver. I usually yield to other motorbikes when they make an effort to cut me off, but I do push the gas throttle quite a bit.

During a routine sunny Sunday morning, I was driving with a passenger on the back, on the way to the taylor shop. I was making a left hand turn off of a busy street. The oncoming traffic was full of motorbikes, but due to the truck in front of me, I didn't readily see all of the motorbikes in the oncoming traffic, that I would have to navigate through to make my left hand turn. As I turned left, away from the truck that was in front of me, I saw at the last few seconds a police officer driving quite fast towards me. He started swerving left and right on his bike, as if he was unsure whether to speed in front of me or behind me as I made my left hand turn; but it seemed he did not have any intentions of slowing down--which seems like the most logical thing to do! I think I must have hesitated too, cause I didn't know what the cop was gonna do on his motorbike, so I just kind of slowly kept on moving in the direction I was going. Sure enough, our motormikes collided. It was a low impact collision, and everyone remained standing on their motorbikes. It happened quite quickly however, and my body did momentarily lift forward over my handlebars--and my head rammed into the police officer's head. Luckily for the both of us, we were both wearing helmets! I was in a bit of a daze when both of our bikes had stopped from the low-impact. A second police officer on another motorbike quickly pulled up, and said "bad driving"! I don't know if he was referring to me or the cop that I crashed into. The cops told me to pull over. As I tried to navigate out of the traffic to pull over, the cops drove off and disappeared!

I ended up with a slight pain on my right wrist, a slightly bent foot rest on my motorbike, and a ruffled up helmet. No other major problems from the accident. Although my confidence in navigating Vietnamese traffic had just plummeted.