At a junction, you know you’re on a collision course with someone coming at you from the left but a little flick of his eyes lets you know exactly which way he intends to pass.
I guess I was a bit of a menace really, swerving to avoid manhole covers and making unexpected left turns, but as everyone in Vietnam was born on a bicycle and has been on two wheels ever since, they seem to have an innate, inbred sense of balance that would shame Barry Sheene. One day, there will be a Vietnamese world bike champion.
The best thing about Vietnam’s love affair with the moped is that the traffic moves. There is no such thing as a traffic jam, even when two or three million people are trying to get into the city centre at seven o’clock every morning. This is a transport system without bus lanes, without a one-way system, without traffic-calming measures and it works.
There are buses though, which, like the trucks in Vietnam, are made out of old bedsprings and wood-burning stoves. And they’re powered by the engines from old vacuum cleaners.
But you can’t use them to commute. They’re mostly for long-distance travel and are full, outside and in, of peasant farmers and all their year’s produce. It takes two days to get from Saigon in the south to Hanoi in the north and you are expected to cook your own food on the move.
We’d been warned not to use internal air transport in Vietnam but, when we saw the alternative, we flung caution to the wind and flew everywhere. Mind you, when the pilot took three attempts to hit the runway at Hue, we began to wonder if two days on the bus wouldn’t have been such a bad idea.
I mean, what’s a bout of cholera between friends? You’ve never lived if you’ve never had a bit of heat exhaustion. And hey, it would have been a laugh being a human indicator for a while.
Yes, in Vietnam you can be an official, government-appointed human trafficator and it is your job to hang off the side of the bus, yelling at people. You don’t actually indicate what the bus is going to do, of course, because you don’t really know. You’re just there to advertise its presence; that is, if you can make yourself heard above the drone of its 1950s vacuum-cleaner engine.
The other alternative to the moped is the taxi. But this, really, is not an alternative at all because it will break down.
The taxis in Vietnam all started out in life many, many years ago as Chevrolets or Citroen Traction Avants. They had a hard life in the tropics and then, after the war, were squirreled away in hidey-holes for fifteen years.
Needless to say, they were not in good condition when private cars were allowed back on the roads, so the owners used ingenuity. I drove a Chevrolet whose engine, I’m damn sure, was from an air-conditioning unit. Also, it had no suspension at all.
But most of all, it had been equipped with bench seating for up to twenty passengers. This made the driving position a trifle cramped for a big nose like me; so cramped, in fact, that to get my foot on the clutch for a gear change I had to open the door.
It became a lot more comfortable after just a mile though because it jammed in second gear and stalled. Its owner wasn’t in the least bit surprised and said he could replace the cogs with some fittings from a bedside lamp he’d found earlier in the week.
It is vital he keeps that car going because on his estate, he is king. It would be the same as peeping through your curtains and finding that your next-door neighbour had a Harrier GR7 jump-jet on his drive.
A car there, right now, is an impossible dream. But the moped is just within reach and that’s why so many people spend so much of their disposable income, and a decent chunk of what is not disposable, on one.
Right now, in Vietnam, it is the only sensible means of getting around. And if it rains, which it does pretty well every day for half an hour or so, they just pull over and climb into their homemade polythene jump suits.
When it runs out of petrol, you do something even more strange. You see, Saigon is not yet high on the Esso hit list. There are no service stations with shops selling Staffordshire teapot and mint cake combos.
I was told that there are two garages but, in eighteen days, found neither.
It’s not a problem though because every five yards down every street, you’ll find a kid sitting there with what looks like a urine sample. It is, in fact, a bottle of petrol that he bought that morning, watered down that afternoon and is now offering to you for the tiniest mark-up. He can also fix punctures and would you like to meet his sister? She’s very beautiful? Fresh?
You don’t get that sort of service in a Shell Shop.
Time and time again, I was left in no doubt that Vietnam could teach the West a whole lot about civilisation.
Here is a country where anyone will do anything to help, at a price of course, but that’s what makes capitalism tick. And then there’s recycling. We applaud when BMW announces it has put reusable bumpers on its cars but, in Vietnam, nothing, and I mean nothing, is ever simply thrown away.
One farmer we met uses his one engine in his tractor six days a week and on market day, he transplants it to his van. At night, he uses it to power his house.
Then there’s the cleanliness. Everybody’s clothes are spotless. Everybody’s hair shines so brightly you can’t look, and they don’t have Pantene Plus conditioner.
At night, you can pull over to one of a million families sleeping on the streets and buy a bowl of soup. It’s a damn sight more nourishing than the
In fact, we ate local food from local restaurants most nights and there wasn’t a single loose stool from anyone in eighteen days. More than that, if I had to say where I’ve had the best food in my life, I’d put the bus station in Saigon up there with the Pic in Valence.
Their spring rolls were like angels copulating on your tongue and then there was the ‘rather burnt rice land slug’ followed by ‘carp soaked in fat’. The translation may have left a little to be desired but the food did not. It was exquisite, cost less than a pound and you didn’t really mind after 23 bottles of Tiger beer that your table was sandwiched between two buses.
I simply adored Vietnam.
And you will too, when you go there on a package holiday in a few years’ time. You’ll love the brand-new hotel they’ve built, and the ice-white beaches. You’ll adore the weather and the local cuisine, prepared by an imported German chef, will leave you speechless.
The traffic jams in the towns will be a bit of a bore though.
Yes, Vietnam will be a fully paid-up member of the twentieth century, but the world will have lost one of its jewels.
Australia
For a country whose most notable contribution to the world of television is a programme called
Okay, so what about Sydney, likened by many to San Francisco? Oh come on. San Francisco is the best city in the world, with fine vistas, extraordinary hills, the Golden Gate, wonderful restaurants and an endearing blend of character and cleanliness.
Sydney is a huge, soulless sprawl where the people are chippy and the architecture is reminiscent of Birmingham. Except that Sydney doesn’t have the International Conference Centre.
Again, if you attempted to make a motoring programme there, it would last about three minutes. ‘Er, everyone drives Toyota Starlets.’ The end.
I went to Queensland, too, where the coastline was tropical and unspoiled, but apart from a tendency to
