Do a rough calculation. Ho Chi Minh City, on an average day, when everyone's in town for work, is a city of 10 million people. Hanoi, on an average working day, is home to 7 - 8 million. Half the people in both places own motorbikes, meaning that there are between 4 - 5 million of the things in each place. So the streets end up looking like this some of the time:
Or, when there's a heavy downpour during the wet season, like this:
In both places there are some sensational left-turn situations at big intersections which involve a total absence of left-turn arrows: 100 bikes head straight for a wall of oncoming traffic, the world looks like it’s headed for universal disaster and then . . . everything turns out for the best, the 100 left-turners twist their way through the oncoming traffic, there’s what is technically called a “fucking mess”, a few people honk their horns, but everyone comes out the other side, if not with a smile, then at least with all limbs (and hairstyles) intact.
As a pedestrian, you step out in front of the moving wall of bikes and they copiously part to let you across.
This is the beautiful bit, and no doubt it's more beautiful to Western tourists because it goes against all their instincts (above all their instinct to wait for traffic to stop before venturing into the road).
There's also something brutally egalitarian about traffic in modern Vietnam. Middle-class Vietnamese who feel the need to assert their status by driving SUVs are condemned to a truly miserable existence. Outside big cities, Vietnamese roads are sometimes bad enough to give car drivers neck injuries. Inside the city, cars are mobbed by bikers and unable to move at more than snails’ pace. At the lights, drivers are shamelessly gawped at by the circumambient Hondas.
My main advice for coping with the beautiful mess is: don't try to fence yourself off from it, throw yourself into it (carefully). If a big storm blows up, by all means take a taxi. But get used to the idea of it traveling mainly at walking pace. And shuddering from first to second gear and back again as it goes.
For further details, read on.
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When you first get to Vietnam, your natural tendency might be to explore on foot. In small towns and villages, this is always an option. (NB There's rarely a footpath.) In cities though, it's a pain, because the footpaths that exist are used to park motorbikes and to spread out whatever cheap Chinese consumer goods the locals are trying to sell.
Taking a walk means being tailed by hawkers, as well as being gawped at by all the locals who have never seen live blondeness or an authentic "high" Western nose. More worldly Vietnamese will look at you, as you stalk along in the gutter, with a look of bemusement that translates roughly as "There the foreigners go, making themselves ridiculous again."
In villages and small towns, where traffic is pretty light, you should try to work up the courage to hire a motorbike and drive yourself around.
In cities, the best way to get around for beginners is on the back of a "xe ôm", also known as a motorbike taxi or "Hondaman".
Hondamen are to be found at regular intervals along the main streets of pretty much any built-up area in Vietnam, though to start with they may take a bit of spotting. When you arrive in Vietnam, you start by asking – why do so many Vietnamese men enjoy sitting round in the blistering heat, dozing, reading the paper or just gazing in a vaguely wry way out into the haze of busy motorways?
The answer is: half of them are Hondamen sweating for a fare.
You can normally tell they are Hondamen because they have spare helmets draped over the sides of their bikes. If you can’t see any spare helmets but suspect that the sunburnt knock-about in front of you is a Hondaman, raise your hands and make the signal for revving a motorbike, or just say “Motorbike” in an inquisitive tone. This will usually awaken Uncle from his fishing fantasia.
Vietnamese Hondamen, in my experience, come in three varieties: embattled honest squires, minor extortionists and infernal wily tricksters. The first type will probably be driving a beaten-up bike from the late 80's, though that won't stop him being a noble traveling companion. The second type will try to charge you double the going Vietnamese rate for your trip on the grounds that he’s poor and you’re rich (in the minds of all Hondamen, all Westerners are invariably very, very rich). The third type will not enter into any sort of discussion of price before you set off – he will take you the longest route he can think of and then demand an outrageous multiple of the standard Vietnamese rate.
Even the honest squire will consider hard bargaining a totally normal part of his taxi-service. So my advice is – before you go anywhere near the Hondaman, find out what a roughly fair price is for the trip you want to take, bargain with the Hondaman unemotionally before you get on the bike and, if he won’t cop the reasonable price you propose, just walk away. Most honest squires and even minor extortionists will usually come trailing after you – because they know that there are plenty of Hondamen in this world and not all of them are hell-bent on charging foreigners triple the going rate. You know it now too.
Riding on the back of a xe ôm gets a little technical. A "xe ôm" in Vietnamese literally means a "cuddle vehicle". So, as a bloke, if your Western sense of space/male sexuality allows you to do so, put your arms around the waist of your driver and think nothing of it. If the idea of doing this makes you squirm, then – still do it. And if you still can’t, then put one hand on your driver’s shoulder.
As a woman, putting a hand on Uncle's shoulder should be just fine. If you're not comfortable doing so, then lean back slightly and hold on to the back-bar of the bike, directly behind the passenger seat. Uncle won't take it the wrong way if you don't want to touch him. And if he does you should report him to the police.
Handled in the right way, a Hondaman should be a fine option for getting from A to B, but if it's an overview of the city you want, then you need to find yourself a different kind of taxi service - the type that's run by Vietnamese English students. They will take you for a spin up and down the main boulevards for a fraction of the cost of Uncle's time, though be aware that there are conditions attached to this marvelous (sometimes FREE) service: the drivers will want to sit down and practice their English on you afterwards. (I'd say there are far worse ways of spending an afternoon than talking to a perky 22-year old English major trying to get his/her grappling hooks into the Big World Beyond Vietnam; buy your guide a couple of coffees and chances are you'll make a friend for life.)
Intra- and inter-city buses in Vietnam are valid transport options, though don't expect wifi or modern decor. Ho Chi Minh City's buses (which are the ones I've had most experience of) are cheap, over-crowded and they don't normally pause for excess milliseconds at bus stops. Watching a 30-year old diesel guzzler manoeuvre at speed through heavy traffic might give you the shivers to start with, but actual travel on a bus is safe enough, as long as you keep close track of your wallet and mobile phone. Put it this way: I've never seen an accident and I've been here for three years.
Vietnamese bus drivers in fact are another group of unsung miracle-workers operating within the chaos of contemporary Vietnamese life: most of them seem to be able to judge the distance between their guzzler and the curb, plus a range of fast-moving objects on all sides of them, down to the centimeter. In performing their miracles they are ably assisted by a conductor, whose job is to sell tickets and to scream obscenities out the windows of the bus at fools on motorbikes trying to cut in front of the bus.
Inter-city bus-travel is a bit more risky. 75% of Vietnam is covered in mountains. Roads are steep and schedules tight. Unless you're on a proper tour bus, there's no real way of traveling in comfort; you might start by liking the look of the bunk-beds you get to make your little nest in for the night, but rest assured none of them are long enough to fit a Caucasian adult of average height or more. And forget about getting a good night's sleep. Inter-city buses play tinny Vietnamese pop music from the minute they pull out of the bus station. They always (always) seem to be carrying a man with a loud wheeze or someone with a very long story to tell his fellow travelers. The locals can sleep through anything, so it doesn't bother them.
Traveling inter-city at speed of course means traveling by plane and luckily this can be done in Vietnam with moderate ease at a reasonable price. In fact, there has been a vigorous rash of airport construction going on in the country for the past 15 - 20 years, so every medium-sized town with a tourist prospectus and the right political connections tends to have one.
When traveling by plane, there is one main thing to bear in mind: the Vietnamese national carrier, Vietnam Airlines, is government-owned and so has the inside running in the domestic airline market. This has three main effects: (a) flights on Vietnam Airlines, unlike flights on Jetstar and Vietjet, normally leave on time; (b) Vietnam Airlines tickets cost double those of the commercial carriers and (c) Vietnam Airlines flight attendants are vastly cold and surly. Having a comfortable government job in Vietnam does that to some people.
As far as the future of transport in Vietnam goes, Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi are both due to have a Metro system up and running within a few years - hence the enormous concrete pylons going up all over the place in both cities:
Both projects, it has to be said, look at this stage like expensive exercises in enhancing Vietnam's modern urban credentials rather than helping the air of its cities get cleaner. Average everyday Vietnamese, you'd guess, could do without a Metro. Buying a fleet of new buses that don't cough grey fumes into the faces of the bikers behind them, or just ensuring that suburban roads are a little less pothole and a bit more road, would be improvement enough.
Ho Chi Minh City also has plans for a ferry service along the city's waterways by the end of the decade - a project which harks back to the era before the war when Southern Vietnamese life on the water had more charm than it does today. Ferry stations are already going up along the Saigon River and most of the major canals. The only group who are frowning are the city's suicidal amateur fisherman, who currently use the canals, or really any urban body of water, no matter how toxic, to try their luck with a bamboo rod, as the late afternoon sunshine fades from the sky.
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Of course, getting into the spirit of Vietnam means actually driving a motorbike and being part of the roaring mess yourself.
As a driver, the most important thing to bear in mind is that you are going to be cut off constantly. On a good day you'll get a bit of prior notice via an indicator or a back-passenger giving you a bit of a wave. But most of the time you'll just get squarely . . . cut off.
Bikes cutting in front of you are the least of your worries though. Apart from bikes going the same way as you in unpredictable ways, there will be bikes cutting across the traffic and bikes going against the traffic (hopefully along the curb). You can expect to have to dodge hawkers pushing carts, little old ladies crossing through the middle of intersections at their own pace, plus cope with the large amount of buying and selling spilling off the pavement into the side of the road.
And those are the major roads. In the backstreets of big cities, Vietnamese of all ages dawdle down the middle of the road. After about 6 in the morning, the streets around your average suburban market come to resemble the muddy laneways of country villages, where everyone shares the thoroughfare and sometimes the animals take the best bit.
There comes a point though when all of the chaos ceases to seem dangerous and starts to seem liberating. Because there is just so much of it, most traffic in Vietnamese cities moves at no more than 30km/hr, so the worst that's likely to result from a collision is that both parties end up with a few bruises and the bikes end up on their sides in the road. The carnage that the Vietnamese media constantly talks about almost all happens on country roads or late at night, when drunks and daredevils come out to play. There are simple enough ways of avoiding it which I'm sure you can work out for yourself.
Though it moves slowly, daytime Vietnamese traffic, even in dense urban centres, does normally move. There isn't the inherent absurdity of everyone driving a vehicle (a car) that is 20 times heavier than what they'd actually need to get around. And traffic isn't obsessively over-controlled by governments in the hope of insuring five times over against every possibility of accident or giving every type of vehicle its own special section of the road. Red lights in Vietnam are few and far between. Zebra crossings are widely ignored. And the traffic funneling devices that make driving in a Western city into an infantile traffic school exercise are non-existent. Guess what? Nobody seems any the worse for it.
Of course, driving a motorbike in Vietnam requires patience. The only intelligent attitude to the way the Vietnamese constantly break the formal rules of the road is basically - Buddhist. Confronted with all those irksome cutter-offerers, you'd be well advised to do as the Vietnamese do morning, noon and night, when faced with all sorts of noise and mess and complexity: act as if nothing is happening. Because in a deeper sense nothing is. . .
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Given that motorbikes provide the real joy and action of the transportational situation in Vietnam, let's finish today's lesson with a few light sociological observations about biking. You've probably already seen the funny photos of whole Vietnamese families on one bike - dad at the wheel, Toddler No. 1 in front with his nose up against the instrument board, mum at the back and Toddler No. 2 sitting (standing, screaming, etc) in mum's lap. Then there are the photos of delivery guys delivering ridiculous amounts of stuff in a totally cold-blooded way:
Vietnamese mothers are well known for performing heroic feats on beaten-up Hondas, barging their way through heavy traffic with kids strapped into position front and back and the shopping hanging from little side-hooks.
And Vietnamese country folk are willing perform tremendous feats of loving care when their Hondas sustain wounds on the field of economic struggle:
Then there's the whole issue of bikes and romance to consider. For 18 year old Vietnamese boys, having a bike of an appropriate level of hotness is basic to the business of finding a girlfriend. Once this object has been obtained, the most up-to-date teenage ritual is to take a heady spin through the petrol fumes along one of the main boulevards close to the centre of town on a Sunday night, or, even more beautiful and strange, join the roaring huddle of bikes caught in the traffic jams around the main cathedral on Christmas Eve. (If you can actually find a place to park your bike, you don't go into the Church to say your prayers. You stand around in the forecourt, spraying each other with snow out of a can.)
Try driving a Vespa outside certain leafy suburbs in Australia and the US and you might end up having potatoes thrown at you. In Vietnam, on the other hand, a Vespa is a standard item of conspicuous consumption. Vietnamese boys across the board seem to instinctively realize that you can't chat up a girl if you're hunched over a 600CC racing bike with your butt pointing up at your date's nose. That's right, motorbikes have the most romantic potential when the possibility of a bit of "ôm" is lurking.
For Vietnamese girls, there are some delicate questions that need to be asked when it comes to motorbikes and the act of riding on them. Obviously, they need to work out where they're going to put their hands if they're going to let a male of any description give them a lift. Then there's the issue of how to sit: sitting with one leg over each side of the bike obviously feels a bit risqué to some Vietnamese girls, or doesn't suit the dress they're wearing, so they choose to drape their legs over the side of the bike and end up attracting much more attention than they would if they just sat with their legs apart.
Vietnamese men consider it a point of honour to dink the girls they're dating and would consider it unmanly to accept a lift from a girl. Being the driver, rather than the driven, is part of the standard repertoire of Vietnamese gallantry, but if you're an unattached Caucasian male in Vietnam and you don't have an International Drivers Licence, then by all means accept a lift from a Vietnamese girl. With a little bit of luck, she'll quite like being in the driver's seat for once. Tweaking Vietnamese romantic conventions might give the situation a nice little extra =X.
Vietnamese men seem to agree that a woman driving a motorbike all by herself is a damn beautiful thing - which, all told, probably leads to more sleaze than actual romance.
However, the fact that Vietnamese people talk to each other while waiting at the lights, or even while in motion, has its upside too. The miserable psychology of car-use, whereby everyone relates to each other via impersonal rules and cues rather than face-to-face, is not yet in play and hopefully won't be for a long time yet. In Vietnam, where driving basically means driving a motorbike, it also means leaving yourself open, for better or worse, to being seen and talked to by your fellow human beings.
Generally speaking, Westerners seem to define public space in opposition to personal space, carrying the latter with them into the public realm: they expect personal space to be respected, they spend small but copious amounts of energy fencing it off from other people and they invoke it in anger as an ideal when the inevitable infringements happen. That attitude can take some of its ugliest forms on the road: in Australia and the US, some people whose cars are an inviolable extension of their personal being will threaten to kill you if any part of your clothes brushes their bonnet as you cross at the lights.
That sort of attitude will get you exactly nowhere in Vietnam.
For starters, there are hardly any traffic lights to speak of.
The riotous stream of Hondas is all around you, very close up.
Put it this way - if you brought with you from the West any sort of urge to assert your inviolable transportational identity, then you're in for a rotten holiday. Insist on your right of way too loudly on the streets of Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City and you'll end up a pink-faced emotional wreck. And deservedly so.
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