If you are amongst the lucky ones who have traveled to Việt Nam, you may have noticed that one of the most famous attraction is not Vịnh Hạ Long, nor Đà Lạt, Phong Nha, Hà Nội or Sài Gòn, no, the most stunning and kicking attraction is, few would disagree, the means of transportation inside and outside the city!
Who comes from North Europe, America or Japan is used to a rather strict set of rules concerning the means of transportation: the technical state of the vehicle (controlled every year), the amount of passengers, the helmet we have to wear on a bike, the seat belt that has to be fasten on a car, the vehicle’s official approval from authorities, the way the merchandises or luggage are placed, the dozens of recommendations, taxes, and more and more that if I typed everything here you’d quickly get headache.
Vietnamese people seem to have a slightly cooler attitude toward their vehicles. It is so true that I challenge every North European or Japanese policeman to visit the S-shaped country without feeling the start of a heart failure.
It even looks like an unreal picture, so much you can see bikes (looooots), bicycles (many), busses (quite a lot), taxis (lots) and personal cars (fewer) circulate in what we could compare to a beehive: looking like a chaos from outside, but rather well-organized from within.
I mentioned the visual aspect, but two other of our senses are involved in our discovery of Vietnamese transportation: the hearing and the smell. The noise of bikes is everywhere, overwhelming conversations and other sounds. But contrary at what you would imagine, this is not really disturbing. It sounds more like an animated and lively place than an annoyingly noisy one. Moreover, the klaxons work 24 hours a day, bikers and drivers having to use it permanently. Whereas in Europe klaxons are used with an angry intention on an arrogant purpose, in Vietnam it sounds more like a pacific act, to warn other users in order to avoid crashes.
What about the smell? If you are old enough to have known the 70s and 80s, you must remember the smell of burned gasoline that surrounded every street in times of rush hours or traffic jam. With the pressure of ecologists, cars and bikes became quite less perfumed (some people would us “smelly”) and that characteristic tends to vanish in our clean (too clean?) days of the years 2000s. If you are nostalgic of that hydrocarbureted air, jump in a plane and fly directly to Hồ Chí Minh City: the hundreds of bikes and other hybrid machines will quickly put you back into your youth days! Now we still have to figure out if it’s healthy or not, but that’s another question.
Did I say just “hybrid” machines? Don’t mistake me, I don’t mention the very fashionable yet over expensive Japanese cars that feature two engines, an electric one working along with a classic fuelled 4-cylinders, no, I’m talking about some hmmm… bikes, well, machines that once were bikes but that have been interbred with some heteroclite spare parts of other bikes, tricycles, bicycles, cars or trucks, in order to create a new and useful vehicle that doesn’t fit any official category. Westerners used to the TV series “McGyver” will surely have sympathy for it.If those hybrid vehicles can sure transport lots of necessary goods like rice, tires, heavy cement bags, animals soon to become meat, audio and video materials, household appliances (usually the biggest you can imagine), luggage, bananas, fresh veggies, beds, cars spare parts, long metal stems or blocks of wood, coconuts or even the complete content of a street shop, it not necessary needed to have such a big carriage to do it: just a bike will do! It is not uncommon to see a complete family on a single bike, each member –the mom, the dad, two young children and a baby- carrying something on their hands, the dad talking on the phone, the kids playing DS Lite, the mom doing window-shopping while riding. The Western or Japanese policeman I mentioned previously wouldn’t believe his eyes! In Japan, police arrests people who carry a passenger on their bicycle. In most countries of Europe, bikers need to have the appropriate license to have the right to drive someone on the same bike. In Vietnam, all that seems free and permitted. So much that one of the most popular job in big cities is “xe ôm”, a kind of taxi but on a bike instead of using a car. (xe=vehicle, ôm=to embrace. The passenger has to “embrace” the driver to stick to the machine) You can find xe ôm everywhere, in fact you don’t need to do anything, just walk around and they will find you, offering you a ride even if you really don’t need any.
Compared to the huge amount of bikes, cars seem so few there. If you wonder why, just climb into one and enjoy being stuck in a never ending traffic jam, riding as slowly as a pedestrian walks. As a contrast to the sometimes antique bikes, cars are, for most of them, rather recent, if not brand new. Japanese and Korean brands surpass, but you can sometimes hear the typical melody of an old Volkswagen flat-four engine, or be surprised by a customized 1953 Peugeot 203 waiting patiently at a traffic light.
Yes, this pseudo-chaos has its rules, actually. People usually stop at the traffic lights (with some exceptions, though) and are forced to respect the speed limit. To be honest, it is almost impossible to ride fast in Vietnam, the density of traffic being to important to allow any Ayrton Senna-wannabe to train his abilities in the streets or roads.
Outside the city, the roads or highways are also an experience in themselves. You find absolutely everything there, all riding at the same time but at completely different speeds: trucks, busses, tourist cars, taxis, animal carts, bicycles, tricycles, tractors, pedestrians who cross the road, bulldozers, or any engineering vehicle that has enough fuel to join that happy team. :)
Before concluding, I can briefly mention the busses inside the city, that transport anyone for a quite cheap cost under the sound of Vietnamese radio carefully chosen by the driver, sitting on comfortable yet antique skai seats that I don’t remember having seen since the release of the Peugeot 404 in 1960. Oh, just an advice: if you plan to step in or out a bus in Sài Gòn, don’t wait that it stops completely. Actually, busses in Sài Gòn never really stop at the bus-stops, they just slow down and passengers have to follow if they want to step in or out. J That rather appealing picture raises a question, though. In those times of pollution-paranoia, when the slightest thread of smoke is about to trigger screams, tears and public protestations from some ecologists, is it “politically correct” to transport oneself with such machines in 2008? Do Vietnamese people really suffer from more diseases linked to pollution than in Western countries, after all? Let’s leave that debate for scientists, pseudo-scientists, scary VJ’s and politics and let us focus on a more emergent topic: knowing that the bike is the most harm-generating transportation in case of accident (though since last year everybody now wears a helmet –yes, unbelievable!), wouldn’t it be good to encourage the development of low-cost cars for families, like the Tata Nano in India?
Việt Nam is changing day by day, what will be the future means of transportation there within the next 10 or 20 years? Let’s make an appointment then. You want to debate this topic? You agree or disagree with a point or two? You want to discuss wit the author? Don’t wait any more second, join our forum now and express yourself!
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