How not to die in South-East Asia

There are a lot of posts here about "safety". I'm never sure exactly what the posters are worried about, but when I say safety what I mean is "I don't want to die, but I think I might."

Let me be clear on this: SEA is harsh. If you don't come home banged up, bandaged, sun-poisoned, and insect-chewed, well, I'm not sure why you even went. You obviously didn't enjoy yourself.

But you do in fact want to come home. I'm going to discuss the easy ways to die and the almost as easy ways to avoid dying.

First, traffic. If you are from some normal place like Cleveland or Stuttgart, you have no idea what the traffic in some parts of South-East Asia is like. Vietnam especially, but also Thailand, watching traffic puts me in mind of angry hornets: the noise, the furious and apparently random motion, the imminent danger. It's not as bad as it looks -- it looks un-survivable -- because most of the drivers are professionals: truck drivers, cab drivers, and such who spend their lives behind the wheel. Still, it's bad.

So learn the local customs. Bangkok, crazed though the traffic is, has good lights and the traffic laws are reasonably well-enforced. Think of the walk/don't walk signs as die/don't die signs and make your decisions accordingly.

Vietnam, by contrast, has no traffic laws, so far as I can tell. Traffic moves by the principle that guides schools of fish and flocks of birds: keep moving and don't ram the guy next to you. If you're trying to cross the street, you can grow a beard waiting for a break in the traffic. It just doesn't work that way. Just step out into traffic, maintain a slow steady gait and trust everyone will drive around you. It works, I swear, but if you stop or make any sudden change in speed, you'll get honked at and probably run over. The whole thing is a truly terrifying experience. I just keep my eyes closed.

The rest of SEA, there are rarely enough vehicles to create traffic. Still, tourists manage to get themselves killed every single day. How? Three little words: "drinking and driving". All these tourists earnestly worry about near-impossibilities like Japanese encephalitis and airplane crashes, then when they arrive get so excited by 45¢ beers that they pound eight of them and jump on a scooter for the first time in their lives and head-on a mango truck.

There are two ways avoiding drinking and driving: either don't drink or don't drive. For extra safety, do both.

Second, just dropping dead. It's hot in SEA. You're walking a lot, carrying a heavy pack, eating weird food, going from 11,000 feet in the air to 100 feet under water over the course of a day. It's tough on your heart, especially if you're old.

So take care of yourself. Drink plenty of water -- bottled water! Get a big hat. SEA has the best big hats in the world, but if you feel self-conscious wearing a nón lá, get a boonie hat or at least a ball cap and don't wear it backwards like an idiot. Go easy on the alcohol and skip the drugs (it's funny: kids in LA who would never do meth when it's called "meth" suddenly find themselves open-minded when they're offer yaa-baa at an FMP).

Things to not worry about:

Crime -- violent crime is almost nonexistent in SEA by Western standards. For one thing, you are a lot bigger than the average South-East Asian. More than that, it just doesn't seem to be the way SEA criminal think. You talk your victim out of his valuables. If necessary, you grab the valuables and run off. Actually knocking him down and taking stuff would be bad karma or something.

There's tons of economic crime, of course. Many SEAsian are only about twice as honest as you would be if you were the one pulling down $50 a month shagging Mai Tais for tourists and one of them left his $1200 camera on his towel while he went to go annoy sea life.

Malaria, dengue, Japanese encephalitis -- these are mosquito-borne diseases and it's possible to contract them in SEA, and they're nasty, though treatable. So wear lots of DEET, and long sleeves if you're going to spend time in wet low-lying areas, especially in the evening when the malarial Anopheles are on the hunt.

But don't worry about them. The odds of contracting one of these diseases, let alone dying from them, are astronomically low if you take the precautions you would take just against the regular itchy mosquitoes.

Typhoid -- the worst thing about typhoid is knowledge that you contracted it by ingesting infected fecal matter. The next worse thing is that it might kill you. The good thing is that the ordinary precautions against curry-in-a-hurry -- never ever ever drinking anything that you didn't see come out of a factory-sealed bottle or can, and preferring disposable tableware to anything that might have been washed in tap water or (urk) river water -- will also largely protect you against typhoid.

Yellow fever -- yellow fever doesn't occur in Asia, which is where South-east Asia is located. We're talking about the microbiological yellow fever here. The other kind of yellow fever can be very dangerous in SEA, but that's the subject for another post.