“I’d clocked that there was nowhere to go to my right, and I just thought, ‘Okay, I’m dead here’.”
The car which flipped and hit Arrowsmith.
In a split-second thought, Arrowsmith decided to jump as the car was barrelling towards him; he cleared the vehicle with his body, but it struck his legs, the impact throwing him “through the air”.
After landing a few metres away, Arrowsmith was lying on his back in shock that he had survived.
“I mentally did a quick check. I started wiggling my feet and my toes and my fingers just to make sure that I wasn’t paralysed.”
The trio of experienced motorcycle riders, who took annual bike tours together, were close to arriving at their organised off-road trip around northern Vietnam.
No ambulance would come to their location, so Arrowsmith was taken to an X-Ray centre in the back of a local’s car, with his tour guide.
After having scans done, local police arrived to test him for drugs and alcohol.
A sober but in pain Arrowsmith was then put into a taxi, which he thought would take him to hospital. Instead it took him to a police station.
After several hours of questioning, where a local teacher had to translate the words of “pretty annoyed” officers, it was only after his brother and friend arrived and threatened embassy action that he was able to leave.
Mark Arrowsmith travelling back to New Zealand after the accident.
Throughout the questioning, officers were asking Arrowsmith to sign paperwork, which he refused to do as it was all in Vietnamese.
“I could see that my leg was just ballooning up, you know, huge. And I kept saying to them I need medical aid and they were just going ‘No we don’t do that’.”
The first time Arrowsmith received pain relief was when he was admitted to hospital in Hanoi, eight hours after the crash.
As a police officer for 31 years, Arrowsmith had seen hundreds of crashes and said best practice was to give medical attention as soon as possible.
“It had been left for so long, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to lose the leg. But the doctor said, ‘No, no, any longer than it might have been a problem, but we can save it’.”
Arrowsmith, who moved to New Zealand from England 21 years ago, broke his left tibia, fibula and kneecap, tore his shoulder and his hip, and severely bruised his ribs.
The impact was so great that he still has paint from the car on his bike protection gear.
After 12 days in hospital and an operation on his leg, Arrowsmith was allowed to leave and returned home with his wife, who had flown over.
Pins were put into Mark Arrowsmith’s knee as part of the surgery he got in Hanoi.
Specialists in Auckland told him the surgery on his leg went well, and he later got an operation on his damaged shoulder in March this year.
He is hoping to be cleared to return to work as a passenger train driver in Auckland in a couple of months, nearly a year on from the accident.
“My knee and hip will never quite be the same. I can walk around, I can take the dog for a walk, but it aches after that. And then if I get in and out of the car, it seizes up.
“It has hindered me quite a lot. But it’s just one of those things, you know, everything can be far worse … I was relieved to be alive and then I was relieved not to be paralysed.”
The ordeal cost Arrowsmith $38,000, which was all covered by insurance.
He contacted both the New Zealand and British embassies in Vietnam to request a police apology for his treatment.
Arrowsmith says he will not be participating in any large bike tours in the future but would commute to work on his motorbike.