Motorworld

motorcycle. Outside Japan, they have the highest two-wheeler ownership levels in the world, and we’re not talking about miserable little mopeds either.

The streets are chock-full of chopped-down, beefed-up Harley-Davidsons and Yamaha V-Maxes, all of which are far too noisy to be legal. And yet this is deemed acceptable.

There is also the Ecomobile, a motorbike with an enclosed cabin and quadraphonic sound, that looks like a cross between a helicopter and an egg. It’s a pretty groovy device this, with little stabiliser wheels that drop down when you stop, but it costs ?50,000 which is a bit off-putting. Swiss labour rates are blamed and it’s a shame because I rather liked it, in the same way that I find Kate Moss attractive. She isn’t… but you know what I mean.

I will say though that there was something desperately clinical about it. It was a bike, but it wasn’t, somehow. It was too high-tech, too clean and too functional for that. And it wasn’t a car, either, because it didn’t have enough wheels. It was neither here nor there.

And the same went for the Love Ride we encountered. This was a Sunday morning meet where a couple of thousand Hell’s Angels tore around the countryside on their Harleys with Peter Fonda at the head of the column… raising money for charity.

There was something very unthreatening about the whole show. I spoke with a guy who hadn’t washed his hair for twelve years, or cut it for six. He hadn’t shaved in a month or bathed in a year and he was bedecked in leathers and filthy denims.

But he wasn’t scary because on the back of his jacket it said, Hell’s Angels — Swiss Chapter, and there is something very comfy, reassuring even, about anything with the word ‘Swiss’ in it. It’s like beating someone to death with the Mail on Sunday.

Plus, instead of the goat’s blood I expected to find in his glass, there was orange juice. Had he ever murdered a virgin or kicked someone’s teeth in, I asked. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but I have a fantastic collection of milk-carton tops. Would you like to see them?’

Mad, but what do you expect from a country that has declared war on the car, even though it failed to declare war on Hitler; a country that finds the AK47 acceptable but has outlawed the TVR Griffith.

This is not a place visitors can fathom easily. I suggest you don’t even bother trying.

Vietnam

When we were choosing which countries to feature in Motorworld, there were important considerations. Would we get a suntan? Were the girls good-looking? How much was beer? If we were satisfied on these fronts, we’d ask whether there were enough motoring-related stories within the country, and whether each would back a central proposition.

In Italy, all the stories would be about passion. In Detroit, we had a social tale to tell. In India, we wanted to know why so many people were killed on the roads.

The tricky bit was making sure that the story each week was different. Having done four-wheel drive to death in Iceland other countries with lots of rugged terrain went out of the window.

The BBC executives understood this and nodded sagely whenever we discussed it. But why, they kept on asking, are you going to Vietnam? There aren’t any cars there. It’s communist. What if they think you’re American? How the hell will you get there? What about visas? And, from the accounts department, ‘How much is it going to cost?’

Frankly, my answers were rubbish. I put on my serious face and talked in long sentences, using the words ‘whom’ and ‘synergy’ a lot, but the real reason I wanted to go was much simpler.

A year earlier, while very drunk in a Wandsworth pasta restaurant, a friend who had emigrated to Saigon told me what happened in the city centre on a Sunday evening.

He explained that a thousand or more teenagers climbed onto their mopeds and rode round a preordained route. And he said they were all dolled up with no place to go because they don’t have enough money. They had to ride past bars full of entrepreneurial big-nosed businessmen but they couldn’t afford to stop for a beer.

They’re poor beyond the ken of Western man and yet, he said, they all have mopeds.

It didn’t make sense but I could see the visual impact of a thousand or more Vietnamese kids on mopeds cruising the sultry streets of Saigon all night long.

And coupled to the fact that Vietnam had just become the 49th country in the world to have a car industry, it was enough. Vietnam was going to be a Motorworld country.

Looking back, I would say that this was the second-best decision I ever made; the first being to take up smoking.

Before I went there, I’d always thought of Vietnam as somewhere that existed only to line the pockets of Hollywood fat cats. Vietnam was an excuse for Sylvester Stallone to cover his ample frame in mud. Vietnam was a war; not a country.

My only experience of Vietnamese people was either at a restaurant in Fulham or as a lot of scuttling midgets in straw hats throwing hand grenades into Huey helicopters.

In fact, this lot weren’t really people at all, just a collection of Oriental extras on the big screen who got blown up for a living.

I didn’t even know that ‘Viet Cong’ meant ‘Communist Vietnamese’ or that ‘Charlie’ was a nickname derived from the latter half of the VC radio call sign — Victor Charlie. The Americans had told me, endlessly, that they were simply a bunch of barbarians who made people play Russian roulette. And that, given half a chance, every six- year-old would put a land mine in my underpants.

The trouble is, of course, that since that last American helicopter heaved itself off the roof of the embassy there, we’ve heard an awful lot about ’Nam from the Yanks, but almost nothing at all from the country itself.

And this is hardly surprising. Here was a nation that had fought off the French, only to find that Sylvester Stallone was on his way. They’d beaten him too and that was it. They shut the doors on what they saw as a stupid, interfering world. And got on with their version of communism.

It was pretty tough by all accounts. Escaping boat people talked of a regime where coloured clothes were not allowed and motor vehicles were strictly outlawed. It made Moscow circa 1963 look like Surrey.

However, running a dictatorship is hard work and people usually tire of the effort, so after fifteen years the Government began to relax. Today, they’re all on a day bed, sipping Pimms and having their feet massaged by half- naked Fijians. Vietnam is the most laid-back place on earth.

Sure, you can’t set up in business there without a Vietnamese partner and every film crew has to be accompanied by two government minders, but these are not the sort of people who wear jackboots in bed and gaze longingly at your fingernails. We had a couple who looked like schoolteachers from Somerset.

The Americans have restored full diplomatic relations, the French are back, half the bars have exactly the same clientele as the White Horse in Fulham and the Koreans are building sixteen hotels a day.

In a few years’ time, Saigon will look like a cross between Singapore and Bangkok. It will be horrid beyond words. But in 1994, it was heaven.

As a general rule, you should never judge a city, or especially a country, by the run from the airport to your downtown hotel. If you did that going from Heathrow to London, you’d think all England looked like Hounslow.

But in Vietnam, go right ahead, because our trip from the plane to the hotel was fabulous. There was an almost Mediterranean balminess to the place and the simple low-wattage streetlights only illuminated the nocturnal insect life in their immediate vicinity, so it was unusually dark too.

The daily thunderstorm had just finished erupting and the air was clear and still. The houses, for the most part, were in darkness too and only a few mopeds were out and about.

At this point, we’d been on the go for a while. We’d filmed for two weeks in Detroit, then flown for fourteen hours to Japan where we’d worked for another two weeks. It had been a brutal month, without a single day off, when we flew from Tokyo to Hong Kong, and then, after a four-hour stopover, on to Saigon.

Actually, it’s called Ho Chi Minh City these days, but I was too tired for that sort of nonsense.

However, our driver kept us awake with a fantastic series of improbable manoeuvres that can only be