15 Things about Vietnam #15 - The Street

Vietnamese cities are pretty crowded places and the majority of people who live in them aren't rich enough to afford air conditioning, so much of the basic business of life, and the equally important business of relaxation, tends to spill out into the street:

One thing you'll notice when you first arrive here is that at least half the basic economic transactions of daily life happen in the street. In the morning, middle-aged ladies assemble mobile kitchens and sell their wares, drive-by-style, to passing bikers:

At lunchtime and again in the late afternoon, the canvas awnings are rolled back and the aluminium tableware comes out: the street becomes an enormous open-air restaurant, through which various dogged parties pick their way, selling lottery tickets, snack-food and shoe shines.

As well as eating and drinking, a lot of general chatter takes place out of doors. Vietnamese streets endlessly fill and re-fill with half-busy people ever ready to crouch down and start a conversation - or just loiter generally minding each others' business:

Walking any distance along a Vietnamese city street is practically impossible for these and various other reasons. At your ankles there kids you want to avoid whacking into with your knees. Overhead there are low-hanging wires you want to avoid being decapitated by. And round about there are various fast-, slow- and non-moving objects that appear in your path at every turn.

For latter-day Vietnamese who don't have the tech skills to enter the growing market in online sales, the obvious thing to do is get their hands on cheap Chinese consumer goods, lay them out on plastic sheeting and try to interest the passing traffic.

Not that regular businesses have the luxury of off-street parking. In most parts of a regular Vietnamese city, motorbikes come to occupy at least half the space between street and shopfront that isn't occupied by people gabbling:

 

 

In spite of the inconveniences, Westerners tend to find it all immensely picturesque and it's actually a little bit interesting to consider the deeper reasons why.

My guess is it's partly because, at least in places like Australia and the US, a lot of us grow up away from the street, in the relatively sanitized private environment of the family home - since the 60's, with the luxury of a private bedroom and since the 90's with the special joys and miseries of the internet. Down the decades, the sense of physical separation between Inside and Outside has only increased; the more attention parents pay to shrill media messages about the terrors of urban living, the more reasonable it seems to quarantine kids from the evils of the street by providing them with access to the ersatz social worlds of the www.

The increasing separation between Inside and Outside that this leads to is well recognized and widely bemoaned. The aspect of the problem that is harder to think about is the way life has been drained bit by bit from what's left of the Outside - a general social process that has also been underway since at least the 1960's and is not just down to the way Western suburbanites raise their kids.

In downtown Melbourne, where your correspondent comes from, anyone who wants to buy or sell anything, in the street or anywhere else, needs to get a permit. Anyone who goes anywhere near food that is destined for the general public needs a diploma in OH and S. Security cameras (or armed guards) cast their unblinking eyes across every imaginable public space. Drinkers and smokers are alternately taxed death and told to pick up their game. And traffic is controlled to within an inch of its life by a system of fees and fines and ad campaigns which basically suggest that anyone who does anything against the rules is about to unleash a horror movie on himself and his fellow citizens.

If you ride a motorbike, you're pretty much told you're going to die: 

If you run a pub, your life turns into a red-faced affair overshadowed by menacing signage:

And if you generally loiter in the street or try to strike up a conversation with a stranger, you'll get the upside-down smiles and leave-me-alone looks that busy, anxious people tend to give anyone trying to knock them off their pre-established paths. Meanwhile, Sydney and its lockout laws apparently makes Melbourne look happy and fun.  

The catalogue of blandness could go on indefinitely and it would be naive to think that all the initiatives and campaigns and plans that brought about the General Reign of Bland were started by any particular group in society. Governments in Western countries realize that making things bland and regular makes them taxable; insurers insist that the possibility of accidents, seemingly of any minor mishap, has to be anticipated and forestalled; and corporations try indefatigably to corner (or create) markets in all the regularized goods and services that the bland logic of the system demands; acting on all of them, in more or less direct ways, are the opinions of concerned citizens who see particular problems and demand general solutions. The point however is this: taken together, all the general improvements lead Normal Western Humans to feel as if most of the colour has been bleached out of day-to-day life, and city streets in particular.

Now switch to the Vietnamese street, with its moveable feasts, its sprawling sales, its riotous motorbiking. Is it any wonder Vietnamese public space feels manifestly freer to Westerners than the places they come from?

Though some of the sense of freedom surely comes down to the sheer purchasing power of Western currencies (and some comes from sheer unconcern about the political limitations on freedom of speech and association that constrain the Vietnamese themselves), some of it comes from the fact that in Vietnam all of the semi-random encounters and ill-defined public semi-events that make for the fun of urban life are left to get by on their own, without being systematically improved, cleansed and certified.

Yet as fun as Westerners find the chaotic informality of Vietnamese urban life, it's doubtful whether most of them could really cope in the long run. However attractive Vietnamese street life can be made to sound by those who come to the place for 3 weeks, be warned that there are a raft of things that will get to you if you stay for 3 months or 3 years.

The noise of dense urban living will get to you. (As will the routine of good old-fashioned country living.)

The way Vietnamese treat public spaces like garbage dumps will drive you round the bend.

Above and beyond that, Vietnamese people's willingness to live life fully under the gaze of other people will seriously challenge your sense of ownership of your own experience.

Today, in the final installment in this series, a rough guide to the specific irritants and the wider psycho-philosophical issues that are in play in Vietnamese streets and in Vietnamese social life at large.

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Let's start with the Vietnamese sense of urban space, the general sense of "there" that is manifest in the street and in a lot of other places as well.

Perhaps the best way of putting it is to say that in Vietnam there are spaces within spaces. What to Westerners look like simple, indivisible segments of the urban landscape, in Vietnam are home to multiple forms of life, indeed to whole hierarchies of life.

An example. The area in front of the gate of a house in a regular Vietnamese city street, say 6m by 2m, has the same psychic dimensions as a whole street in suburban Australia or America. Like the latter, it can be divided and subdivided for functional or aesthetic purposes; it has its sunny side and its shady side, its corners in which kids and grownups can submerge themselves or show off what they’ve got.

Similarly, a recess in a Vietnamese city wall turns into a miniature barber shop when fitted out with a mirror the size of an A4 page, a chair, a barber and a (male) individual willing to have his crop tended within a metre of the passing traffic:

Step into the real undergrowth of Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi and you'll find a dense network of alleys - in the South called "hẻm", in the North "ngõ". Google maps don't display them and only true locals can guide you through them. Their defining characteristic are houses stacked on top of each other at irregular angles. Seen from above they are every cubist's dream:

Seen from below they're more for lusty social realists. The wider variety of alley make you want to open your shoulders and head for the horizon. In the smaller variety you have to be careful not to elbow roadside diners in the back of the head:

Out on the main roads, you need only look at the traffic to realize you are in a world governed by a more fluid spatial order. When the traffic gets jammed up, the bikes lurch forward foot by foot, their riders within arms length of each other. When thing are flowing smoothly, a strange imperative seems to govern the movement of everything: the imperative to shift into any vacant spaces. (In basic terms, everyone's always cutting everyone else off.)

What still surprises me is how few curses are directed at the owners of all the shiny new SUVs that are appearing each year by the 1000, turning loud, nippy motorbike travel into a vast feat of patience. When everyone rode or a motorbike 20 years ago, the limited available space on the roads was at least divided democratically (the majority got the majority of the limited space). Nowadays driving a motorbike in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi involves the majority watching Vietnam's vulgar middle classes hogging as much space as they dare:

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Constraints of space apply as fully within the family home as they do in the street. Normal Vietnamese boys and girls bunk two, three or four to a room. Again, it's only the rich who can afford to provide their kids with separate bedrooms and even if they do, the bedrooms often don't have intervening doors: Vietnamese parents expect to be able to keep an eye on what their offspring are doing at all hours of the day and the night.

Much of this will no doubt change as the country gets wealthier, but what it means in basic terms is that Vietnam is just setting out on the historical path that Western countries have been headed down for the greater part of 150 years - the path that leads to bringing up children with a demonstrative sense of individuality given physical scope to develop in a private space of its own.

We are talking about the creation of the nuclear family as the normal unit of immediate social life - something which to many Vietnamese still seems like a desperate invention. In the countryside, where 65% of Vietnamese still live, extended families are the norm; houses are often home to three or four generations or several branches of the same family. In big cities, the price of housing keeps many couples living with their folks for most of their married lives. Traditionally, the Vietnamese norm was to "làm dâu" - after marriage, women lived with their husband's folks. If they can handle the blow to traditional male pride involved, some men nowadays choose to live with their wives' folks ("ở rể").

For Westerners brought up in individualized compartments, what it means for all living space to be by definition small and inter-generational can be hard to comprehend. For kids it doesn't just mean sharing with siblings and cousins, it also means sharing with granny and being constantly under granny's now watchful, now solicitous gaze. That this is an intense experience is undeniable, not least because most Vietnamese kids don't just look up to their grandparents or enjoy being spoilt by them the way kids do in the West, they honour their grandparents as if they were half way to being gods. (See 15 Things about Vietnam #12 for a proper run down on Ancestor Worship.)

Clearly for the longest time it was economics that limited the amount of space normal Vietnamese allotted to individual family members or separate social purposes. For most of its history, to be sure, Vietnam has been a poor, agricultural nation. As in agricultural societies throughout the world, big families were the norm because having extra children meant having more hands on deck at harvest time; everybody's life was caught up in a deeply communal enterprise (rice farming) which almost never left farmers with enough money to build big houses.

Culture, however, plays just as important a part here. Having the whole family under one roof in fairly cramped conditions actually makes a deep sort of sense when it's your ethical duty to repay your aging parents for the trouble of raising you by tending to their needs in old age and worshiping their spirits in the central room of the family abode when they pass to the other side. And that, by and large, is still the way the Vietnamese see it.

The abstract question which life put to Vietnamese people - in the past and to a much greater extent today, when the drive to individual self-definition is becoming an ever more forceful part of the culture - is how to maintain a minimal sense of personal autonomy when masses of relatives surround you at home and even bigger crowds of non-relatives continually form and re-form in front of your nose when you walk out the door.

The answer lies in the creation of spaces within spaces.

Here's the key: space in Vietnamese terms is something that comes to be defined mentally rather than physically.

We are not talking here about any sort of high-powered intellectual feat, but an average everyday exercise in slipping into available spaces and spinning whatever extra space you need out of the space between your ears. Just as there are two ways of living a long life – by kicking yourself to be healthy every day of the year in the hope you’ll live to 100, or by making the individual moments of your life swell and distend – so there are two ways of living at ease with the physical limitations of human bodies: either you can thrash out more space for yourself, or you can extend your sense of your space out to infinity, however physically limited it might be in point of fact.

Vietnamese seem to have mastered the latter trick and can seem slightly uncanny to individualistic Westerners who've lost it or never had it in the first place. And the arrangements they come to inside and outside the home - the fact that half of Vietnamese life is lived at or close to the threshold where the relative privacy of the family home becomes absolutely public - is testament to the achievement.

When you're in Vietnam you'll obviously have to adjust your individual spatial settings. At the most basic level, expect to be interrupted - expect interlopers of various kinds to insert themselves into spaces you might have thought you were occupying exclusively. If you go traveling with certifiable Vietnamese folk, expect to have to share a bed with two or three of your fellow travelers (of the same sex). And don't expect them to understand whatever urge you might have to isolate yourself from your fellow human beings, even if it's just for an hour or two. Indoors and out, expect to find yourself retracting a little when you're confronted with a world of other bodies unselfconsciously occupying confined spaces en masse. As a pedestrian, enjoy the slightly miraculous effect of stepping out in front of a fast-moving stream of motorbikes and watching it part to make space for you. And if you're on a motorbike yourself and stuck in traffic, don't expect anyone to apologize when the rear-vision mirrors of other bikes clack against yours in the booming huddle at the lights.     

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A second condition of urban life that locals adjust to easily is noise - an issue that may or may not reduce you to tears of frustration when you first arrive.

Basically, we are talking about the possibility of ear-splitting public or private activity taking place in your immediate vicinity any day of the week, at any stage between the hours of 5am and 11pm.

In big cities - and in a lot of smaller towns too - you will have to put up with heavy-duty building activity. Vietnam is in the process of urbanizing at a cracking pace and that fact is reflected both in its city skylines and in the basic conditions of everyday life. Urban real estate markets are booming and anyone with spare cash is improvising some sort of box-shaped add-on to existing buildings

Or indeed going the whole hog and building his own skinny stack of boxes:

Let's put it this way, none of the owners of any of the boxes worry too much about their neighbour's rest and repose as they go about entering the real estate game. In Vietnam you will get no warning whatsoever if your neighbour decides he wants to play around with a hammer drill on the other side of your bedroom wall.

If you're living in an apartment block and there are Vietnamese families on any of the surrounding levels, don't be surprised if dull thudding noises start up at 6 in the morning. It's probably not the builders. (They'll start at 7.30.) It's Vietnamese housewives using blunt instruments to prepare the day's lunch.

Out on the town, the performance is repeated in various forms that will amaze and disturb you. Some shopping centres direct a permanent stream of heavily-amplified spruiking into the street - something that sounds like a kind of lengthy verbal rendition of a car-crash. Plenty of electronics retailers send a kind of lurid backbeat blaring into the street until late in the evening for no other purpose than to attract attention above the roar of the traffic. Even Vietnamese street hawkers are armed with amplifiers nowadays. Gone are the days when they had to use raw lung-power to advertise their wares; nowadays their repetitive recordings ascend far into the stratosphere and penetrate the walls of expat garrets as surely as the noise of building work.

When you first arrive in Vietnam you might start by thinking that this kind of behaviour makes a mockery of all those notions of community that pretty much define Vietnam in the eyes of the world - and in the eyes of many of the locals too. The Vietnamese have always prided themselves on their ability to take concerted collective action and the fact that they (some of them) banded together to fight off large armies of ruthless invaders is thought by half the world to prove this. So how can they start bashing the walls at 6 in the morning in brazen defiance of any notion of communal peace?

The third morning in a row when you get woken up, tired and emotional, after 4 hours of sleep by copious local racket is the moment when you swear that the Vietnamese collective ethos is a sorry myth.

At some stage you need to face reality though: the locals' tolerance towards noise is so high that the racket creates little disturbance to anyone but you. The fact is the Vietnamese can sleep through anything. Unless she's fully aware that she has sensitive foreign neighbours, the woman wielding the blunt instruments in the flat above yours will assume she's not disturbing anyone. Even if she is aware, she might think racket is something that foreigners in Vietnam have to put up with. (In which case you are really in the Scheisse.)

When I first moved to Vietnam, I had to contend with a phenomenon I came to call the crazy chipmunk music. It took me several weeks to work out that the tinny kids' voices haunting my morning dreams were coming from a local primary school that was using some sort of cartoon soundtrack to gee up the 6 year olds as they filed through the gate in the early morning haze. Either that or some of older ladies doing their stretches in the park were doing something en masse with helium. . .

As I'm sure you've gathered by now, the day begins early in these parts of East Asia; the racket of daily life is not only loud racket, it is racket that starts up shortly after dawn. 5.30 in the morning is to your average Vietnamese what 7.30 in the morning is to your average Westerner; it's the time when many rise, when some have already risen and when only night owls are still fast asleep.

Ho Chi Minh himself, when he was being fêted by the French media in the 1950's, used to hold his press conferences at 6, after doing his morning stretches, writing several letters and washing his safari suits by hand. No doubt the gentlemen of the Parisian press thought he was a man of stern habits. But to Vietnamese he would've just seemed like a regular kind of guy.

It is not clear to me where this tolerance to noise actually comes from and Westerners tend to assume that it has something to do with the noisy disturbances of the War. This seems unlikely for sheer demographic reasons. 60% of Vietnamese alive today were born after 1975. Which means the majority have had no direct experience at all of the saddest and loudest event in modern Vietnamese history.

My suspicion is that the whole thing again has to do with cramped living conditions, which require Vietnamese to sleep and to retain their waking poise through the wildest dances of hell. Perhaps what goes with the habit of operating normally within severe constraints of space is a certain psychological reflex to "retire within yourself", rather than letting yourself be over-stimulated by the noisy, hyperactive world around you. The mental spaces the Vietnamese create for themselves to escape the tight physical spaces they inhabit would on this theory also be quiet spaces into which they can gently step back, in the midst of overwhelming domestic racket.

It will be interesting to see whether as a Westerner you can acquire something of the same mental knack, given that you were probably brought up with a bit more peace and quiet. Actually converting to Buddhism for the sake of acquiring the knack is probably a bridge too far, but my sense is that's the surest way. Buddhism drives the art of maintaining your poise in difficult conditions to a pinnacle of philosophical perfection. No wonder it remains popular in Vietnam - among busy city folk as much as anyone.

As a Western visitor confronted with extreme noise, you might be able to ask the locals to tone it down a bit. But a lot of the time you simply won't be able to create what might seem to you to be sane, peaceful conditions by asking the Vietnamese around you to adjust their behaviour to your needs.

My main practical advice to expats would be - when choosing an apartment in Vietnam be very careful. Go for out-of-the-way places that have a no-dogs policy and preferably as few Vietnamese families as possible; one of the side-effects of the locals' adoration of children is that they let their kids scream and play with brazen electronic toys at all hours of the day and night.

To begin with, serviced apartments catering mainly to foreigners (including the noise-averse Japanese) are probably better than big blocks with lots of Vietnamese owner-occupants. The proprietors of serviced apartments tend to be more aware of Western sensitivities than regular folk. In big blocks of flats with lots of Vietnamese families, the only thing standing between you and surrealism is the demure secretary of the body corporate.

If you want to go part of the way down the Buddhist track, then start by trying this exercise. Stand in the street and eyeball the motorbikes, the building works, the crowds. But listen only to the live column of your own breath as it passes from the inner recesses of your head into the depths of your lungs. See if you can spend five whole minutes paying attention to the moving column alone - not to your thoughts about the moving column - not to thoughts about anything other than the moving column. If one day you can do it for 5 minutes, then the next day try it for 10 minutes. After a month or two you will hopefully have created a little gap between yourself and the wider realm of Vietnamese Racket.

And if none of that works? Find yourself an eco-resort and get well away from the Vietnamese street on a regular basis. Buy some heavy-duty earplugs. Look up the marvelous recordings of raw fan noise on Youtube and plug yourself in when the street is giving you the irits. Try and laugh a little at the way the Vietnamese sleep, or even kind of bask, amid The Racket - it sure beats crying and gnashing your teeth.

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After space and noise issues, the next thing you're going to have to cope with is the mess.

Normal Vietnamese seem to be willing to turf their garbage just about anywhere, either on the assumption that someone else will clean it up later, or on the assumption that it doesn't matter if someone else cleans it up later or not. Again it seems strange that such an obvious tragedy of the commons should unfold in public space in a country where the demands of the collective still trump the needs of the individual in most of the everyday affairs of life.

The problem, unfortunately, is more complex than a lack of everyday environmental awareness on the part of normal Vietnamese. Again it's grounded deeply in economics - modern economics this time. The growth of a local plastics industry has been one of the success stories of the past 25 years; Vietnamese plastics producers compete bravely in the international market, supplying half the known world with packaging and plastic sheets. They also supply the local market with more plastic than the Vietnamese know how to use.

Buy a plastic cup of sugar-cane juice from a street seller and she will put it in a plastic carry-bag, even if you want to drink it on the spot. Buy two cups and she'll put them in two separate carry-bags. (Say you don't want them in bags and she'll look at you as if you're telling her to go hang.) The same goes for just about all Vietnamese street food - in fact for anything you buy anywhere in Vietnam. While you, I'm sure, will do your best to find a bin for the excess polymers - and, of course, feel bad about their existence in the first place - most Vietnamese will just leave them in the gutter. If they've bought their sugarcane juice to drive away with, truck-drivers will hurl the empty plastic cups unceremoniously out the window of the truck while speeding along the highway.

Sounds hairy? The situation is even worse at Vietnamese tourist spots.

The Vietnamese tourism industry has been contracting solidly over the past couple of years for a number of reasons - partly as crazy Vietnamese visa rigmarole keeps putting people off, partly because Russian tourists are doing less of this as the value of the rouble drops:

   

but mainly, I would guess, because of all the stories that circulate online about the filthy mess on the beaches.

To be sure, old-fashioned Vietnamese hospitality and the universal allure of tropical pleasure continues to attract plenty of Westerners.

To be sure, among their number are a few weeping blonde ladies trying to clean up the mess one piece at a time.

But unfortunately the number of locals who picnic in the sand and then leave their garbage behind is much much larger than the number of weeping blonde ladies in this world.

Of course, life hasn't always been this way. Before the creation of the plastics industry, the Vietnamese used banana leaves rather than lunch-box sized polystyrene boxes to transport food from A to B. In the grim old days of post-war rationing, people queued for hours with string bags in their pockets and carted the shopping home on foot. It's just possible that Vietnam's love affair with plastic also has psychological roots in people's desire to consume to excess as a way of covering over the memory of past austerity; surely there's no better way of marking to the rest of the world (or yourself) that more bountiful times have arrived than toting around every single thing you buy in its own individual plastic package?

In a couple of respects, the problem isn't quite as bad as it looks.

The Vietnamese might seem to make a horrible mess of the curbside restaurants that line city streets, however the plastic wrappers and chicken bones they turf under the tables aren't necessarily going to end up in the local canal. Part of the messy, underpaid job of waiters at curbside restaurants is to sweep up the wrappers and bones at the end of the night - not least because the curbside restaurant is often on the front pavement of the owner's house. In effect what diners are paying for is the old-fashioned pleasure of mucking up a bit - all in all, a harmless pastime.

Similarly, although rubbish collection in Vietnamese city streets and alleys might seem unsystematic (each household leaves its rubbish outside the front gate of an evening - in individual plastic bags of course!), what doesn't work formally is made to work informally in a rough and ready way. Large numbers of the urban poor in Vietnam make a living (a very modest one) recycling anything that can be recycled. You can see them going through the rubbish rescuing bottles and cans, or, more often, hear them wandering the streets crying "Ai vé chai" ("Who's selling bottles?") in a strangely plaintive tone - buying old newspapers, plastic containers, aluminium cans and scrap metal for a nominal price and then selling them on to middle men for a tiny profit.

One thing can be said about recycling in today's Vietnam: it's a noble profession plied with dignity and great physical endurance - almost exclusively by middle-aged women.

Vietnamese environmental issues in general are something it would take an entire new entry to introduce. Luckily, the work has already been done for me in Bill Hayton's Vietnam, Rising Dragon (2012). Much of Hayton's focus in Chapter 8 of this sterling volume is on Hạ Long Bay, a fantastical tourist destination on the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam's North East:

 

Hayton makes it clear that Hạ Long Bay is being rapidly spoiled by over-development. Everything that shouldn't end up in the bay seems to end up there, including the coal dust from nearby mines. The waters of Hạ Long, though still a fairy-tale emerald colour, are fast turning into a lifeless toxic sludge.

One of the facts that Vietnam, Rising Dragon digs up: in the year that French film director Regis Wargnier used Hạ Long as a backdrop to his wet green romantic epic Indochine (1991), 100,000 tourists came through each year. Nowadays it is upwards of 1.4 million. Though the management board insists that tour operators cart the tourists' crap away, they don't provide onshore facilities for them to actually dispose of the crap, so most of it ends up just where you'd expect.

The waters of Hạ Long were once transparent in many places all the way to the bottom. Stick your arm in them now and it will disappear just above the wrist - into hell knows what sort of emerald-brown bilge.

Vietnam, Rising Dragon makes it clear that foetid beauty spots are just the beginning of Vietnam's environmental problems: over-fishing is a serious issue along Vietnam's coasts and over-harvesting of tropical hardwoods is a serious issue in the highlands. However, the trickiest issue is not that the central government is unconcerned or unwilling to put stricter environmental laws in place. The system-level issue is that stricter environmental laws are hard to enforce. Strongly worded policy issued by the Ministry for Natural Resources and the Environment is not enough to stop the activities of unscrupulous loggers or wild-life traders targeting unscrupulous local officials with kickbacks. So the tropical human ecosystem of graft, geisha girls and gaping hilltops continues to flourish.

30 years of war certainly changed the face of Vietnam - the Americans notoriously dropped more TNT between 1965 and 1975 than the Allies did in all of Western Europe during WW2. However, the fact is 30 unbroken years of intensive economic development have probably done more to change the Vietnamese Image of Nature than a decade of aerial bombardment. In the olden days (before the 90's), Vietnamese kids were taught to think of their beautiful, hardy little country as having "biển vàng và rừng bạc" - golden seas and silver forests. The moist-eyed slogan has been dropped in recent years as the country confronts some of the unintended consequences of growing wealth and prosperity: deforestation, over-fishing, uncontrolled pollution of waterways, city smog. Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City don't yet give you that horrible day-is-night feeling that Beijing does:

But the press dutifully reports stories of toxic waterways and of whole suburban neighbourhoods contaminated with heavy industrial chemicals and the general public dutifully read them and worry. Even the most casual visitor to the Central Highlands can't help noticing that whole provinces have lost the covering of tropical forest that tourist brochures display with such thoughtless abandon.

The Vietnamese have always had a highly refined sense of artificial nature - the interesting, beautiful and (to Westerners) plain weird ways in which Nature and Art can be made to twist each other into interesting shapes. So you'd hardly expect them to drop the idea of harnessing the natural world to the cart of human improvement - either from a cultural or economic point of view. 

However if they want to have a habitable world of Nature for more than another 30 years, then they're going to have to make some changes. Cutting down on plastic and blowing the tops off less mountains would be a start.

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We're a long way from the Vietnamese street where we started, so let's go back.

While Vietnam has set off in a rush down the path of economic development in recent decades, it's not yet that far advanced.

Likewise, while the urban environment has been rendered a little more regular to make it safe for tourists and to provide basic amenities to the tens of thousands of Vietnamese who move to cities every year, it still contains a lot of the free-form modern urban culture that died long ago in Western cities as they were given over to large-scale commercial spectacle and sanitized, essentially middle class forms of leisure.

The parting advice of your correspondent, as he closes off this 15 part series, is to enjoy the Vietnamese street while it lasts. Above all: enjoy the fast-paced way Vietnamese life shapes itself into informal street scenes. Drink in the street, eat in the street, throw the scraps under the table and watch and listen as the Vietnamese do the same. And make sure you take in plenty of thick black coffee in the early morning breeze, not just late night beer and petrol fumes.

As with Vietnamese traffic, my general advice when it comes to the Vietnamese street is to throw yourself into it - seriously practise living with the noise, try to restrain your tears when you see the Vietnamese hurling their trash out their car windows, get used to living at close quarters with man, beast and fowl: maybe with time you'll even start to enjoy some of the higher-level discomfort that comes about when established boundaries between Inside and Outside start to shift.

If, inwardly or outwardly, you find yourself screaming at the Vietnamese to shut the hell up and leave you alone, then remember: You can always go back to having a room of your own with a high speed internet connection and the imaginary connection it gives you to the rest of the world - the real connection it gives you to some of your deeper desires - once you're safely back at home in the West.

Streets the world over are becoming strange places within the great encampment of the planetary economy: at their worst a kind of no man's land between the interior world of electronically-mediated desire and the ever-distant places and experiences that are the shady objects of the desire.

Vietnam seems determined to join the great encampment and what that means in broad terms is straightening out many of the ways of bent experience. Let's hope that, in doing so, the chaotic ways of the street will be given a general tidy, rather than improved, cleansed and certified in the dull relentless way streets have been in most of the Western world.

Whichever way it goes, the whole process will take a while and there will always be throwbacks.

These are what are still there for your general delectation in the Vietnamese street. So pull up a plastic stool, take a deep breath and orient the general human unit upwards and outwards. . .

15 Things about Vietnam: Part 5

Traffic in Vietnam is a combination of the marvelous and the hairy.

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.