Motorworld (11 page)

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 described as breathtaking. He drove on whichever side of the road he saw fit and at crossroads, even when he didn’t have the right of way, simply kept going. He reckoned that, as most people have mopeds, if there were to be an accident, we’d be fine.

Then there were the traffic lights – a graphic indication that Saigon is moving with the times. However, though they have been installed and are working, no one has explained to the locals that red means stop or that green means go. To our driver, and to all the other four million people in Saigon, they’re just pretty lights on poles which have no meaning.

By the time we hit the Rex Hotel it was nearly midnight but we were wide awake. So we went to the Q Bar.

And then we went to a dive full of Australians called Apocalypse Now. And then the Caravelle. And then some place where we sat on the floor and another place where we fell on the floor. And then we started to wonder if it was worth going to bed because it was only an hour until we’d have to get up.

So we had a cyclo race instead. The cyclo is a bicycle at the back and an armchair at the front. You, the big nose, sit in the chair while Charlie sits on the saddle, pedalling you hither and thither. To go across town costs about three pence.

However, if you splash out, your chauffeur will pedal
faster which, of course, leads to a silent version of Formula One. The person with the most money wins the race.

There was something rather colonial about sitting there, cross-legged as a local pedalled as fast as he could to try and catch up with the cameraman. But it wasn’t until we found ourselves going six abreast down Saigon’s equivalent of Regent Street that I started to ask myself a big question.

What kind of a country is this?

If you can think of any other big city in the world where you could race in such a way, please let me know because, for damn sure, I’ve never been there.

Vietnam is relaxed because it hasn’t really been exposed to the full horror of the Western tourist yet.

You are occasionally pestered by street urchins who are trying to sell godawful postcards and I was pickpocketed once. But even though sex is very openly for sale, don’t be mistaken: this is not like anywhere else in Southeast Asia.

Because the Americans have been kept out for so long, there’s no McDonald’s, no pavement Coca-Cola dispensers and no one has been exposed to the violence of Hollywood. There are no gangs, and no one wears their baseball cap back to front.

You pay for everything with dollars but the government is trying to stop that. Under pressure from the idiots at the World Bank, steps are being taken to reintroduce the ridiculous dong.

This is a currency that makes the lira look sensible. To buy a street vendor’s postcard, you need a shoebox full of the stuff. To buy an authentic wartime Zippo lighter,
you’d need a Sherpa van to carry the cash. Oh, but don’t be tempted, because on the bottom of a real Zippo you’ll find it was made in Bradford, Pennsylvania.

On the bottom of the Vietnamese equivalent, which is scarred and battered to give that ‘I’ve been through hell’ look, it says, ‘Rocky. Made in Japan.’ Western tourists are stupid but I fear even Wilbur and Myrtle will see through this ruse.

They will, however, be impressed by the products of what was Vietnam’s first car factory. Tucked away in a jungle ten miles from Saigon is a hut where 30 shoeless women and children sit in silence all day, chopping up beer and soda cans which are then bent and folded to become model helicopters, cars and trucks.

And they’re brilliant. I have a Citroën Traction Avant which, in a former life, was a Heineken can. The cameraman paid the designer £5 to make a model of his camera. The guy was a genius but his biggest problem was a complete lack of artwork to copy.

When the producer gave him a dozen copies of
Top Gear Magazine
, stuffed full of pictures of Lamborghinis and Ferraris, he squeaked like a baby. I swear if we’d have given him a million pounds he’d have been less delighted.

But then again, when he gets some Seven-Up Diablos out on the streets, he’ll have a damn sight more than a million I suppose.

Fired up with this success story, the Vietnamese government is now doing everything in its power to attract foreign car firms.

They have slapped a 200 per cent import duty on
all imported cars, which puts even the cheapest Korean hatchback way out of reach of just about everyone. A BMW 7 series is £50,000 in Britain but in Vietnam, you’d be asked for £200,000.

To get any sort of sales in Vietnam, car companies have to make their cars inside the country which creates jobs and, when exports start, brings in foreign cash.

And as a final twist, the car company can’t do it alone. They must form a 50/50 partnership with a Vietnamese outfit.

But because Vietnam, everyone knows, is going to be the fastest-growing market in the world over the next few years, few motor makers are put off by the rules. Already, Fiat, Renault, Mitsubishi, Mazda and Daewoo are making cars and vans there.

But the biggest surprise of all is to be found at the bottom of a primeval backstreet in Hanoi. You pick your way through the foot-deep mud, dodging the oncoming oxen, to the factory gates, through which is a factory that is now making the BMW 5 series.

BMW sees Vietnam as the first country east of India where they can put one over Mercedes Benz. By making the car in situ, they’ll be able to undercut Merc hugely, but this won’t matter. One Vietnamese put it bluntly. ‘We can’t make cars. We wouldn’t want to buy a car made here because we don’t know how to do it. I want a Mercedes. Everyone here wants a Mercedes.’

It’s the same story with their mopeds. You can buy a Thai-made Honda Dream for £2,000 but few do. Everyone is prepared to pay an extra thousand pounds because
they want the real thing, the one that’s made in Japan. And never mind that there is absolutely no difference whatsoever.

The moped has become a massive status symbol for the Vietnamese. It’s their first, unsteady step up from the bicycle. It’s the same as going home to your neo-Georgian house in England with a BMW.

Let me put the moped in perspective here. There are 10,000 cars in Vietnam. And six million mopeds.

Get up early in Saigon and you will not believe what the roads look like. It’s a moving wall of Honda-ness.

They’re coming at you down both sides of the road in an unending snake. Some are carrying an entire family – father, mother and three children – some have pigs slung over the handlebars, one chap we saw had a full-height wardrobe strapped to his back. But the danger biscuit was taken by an enterprising chap riding pillion while carrying an 8 foot by 5 foot mirror. It made my teeth itch with fear.

While standing on the pavement, it looks like a completely random, large-scale demonstration of Brownian motion. At a crossroads you have mopeds coming from all four directions but no one stops. Even though they now have the added distraction of pretty red, green and orange lights, four seemingly solid snakes just seem able to pass through one another.

The only reason I agreed to take part was because the speeds are low and the worst I could expect in a crash was a grazed elbow. Actually, the producer proved me wrong a few days later by coming off the back of the fixer’s Lambretta and head-butting the kerb.

It was a remarkable injury, like someone had put one of his ears in a sardine tin key and simply peeled all the skin off his face.

But when I climbed aboard a Japanese-made Dream and set off, I hadn’t witnessed a single incident. I felt safe. Confident. In control… even though this was the first time I’d ever attempted to ride any form of motorised two-wheeler on the public roads.

It took a while to eliminate the wobbling but, once mastered, I have to say driving in Vietnam was a piece of spring roll. From the pavement, you can’t see the little signs from other riders, but they leap out at you like illuminated hoardings when you’re in the thick of it.

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 Citroën 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?