Think you're safe?

Without fail, visitors to Cambodia comment on the crazy traffic.

Drivers use rear view mirrors only for personal primping. Stop lights are optional and lane markings only suggestions. Large, shiny 4WDs flash their lights while careening towards you in “your” lane. Dodge them along with the motorbikes, bicycles, carts, pedestrians, police, potholes and piles of rubbish and you may reach your goal safely.

The lady I saw on Friday lying unconscious in the centre of a main road didn’t make it.

She had been riding a motorbike taxi when her necklace was ripped from her neck by thieves on motorbikes. She fell, hitting her bare head on the bitumen of the busy main road. Her motorbike taxi driver took off while a crowd of men collected around her, their curiosity protecting her from being run over by the midday traffic. A Good Samaritan with some knowledge of first aid laid her in the lateral position and phoned the ambulance.

Road accidents are horribly common here. I’ve seen more bleeding, twisted bodies than I want to remember.

The Road Safety Committee here in Cambodia reports that road accidents seriously wounded 32 people and killed 4.5 on an average day. This is an annual rate of 11.5 deaths and 82.25 serious injuries per 100,000 people. This is in a country where helmet wearing was only recently made law (however the US$2.50 ice-cream bucket impersonators used by most are colloquially called “helmets that protect from police” rather than “safety helmets”).

For interest sake, I decided to google Australia’s stats (yeah, insomnia again) and found some interesting results. In comparison, the most recently available data shows that 4.42 people die and 138 are injured on Australia’s roads each day. This is an annual rate of 7.7 deaths and 248 hospital admissions per 100,000 people.

On the surface (not accounting for under-reporting), it would seem that more bravery is needed to venture onto the roads in Australia.

Happy Easter!