Still called Saigon by anyone who lives here (even the airport code is SGN), Ho Chi Minh City is Vietnam’s most populous city, with about 8 million people. This is my first trip back since the cycling tour seven years ago and there are some obvious changes. Taxis (metered) are plentiful, easy to flag down, cheap and the drivers are mostly honest. There are almost no bicycles anymore. Motorbikes are still the most common form of transportation but the cheap, Chinese-made bikes have been replaced by Hondas and Suzukis, even Vespas. There are many more private cars, and of course buses, as well.
Vietnam is still very much an “emerging” country. The sidewalks are in terrible shape, with large sections that are uneven, cracked or missing altogether. The power for the building went out once this week, a planned outage I’m told since the grid can’t handle the demand. My apartment, in an old building and what appears to be a converted restaurant (big kitchen, two entrances, a “staff only” sign on the bathroom door), has no smoke alarms no fire escape, and a building door that opens with a key, which you’d better hope you have with you if the building is on fire. All this is would shock a fire inspector in a “modern” country.
Like much of Vietnam, being a pedestrian here is not easy. Often, there are no traffic lights, just traffic circles (roundabouts) or the occasional crosswalk (which seems only to warn drivers to expect pedestrians to cross there). Traffic will not stop for you. Even at a red light, many motorbikes will go around stopped traffic and race through the light, often to turn right, but other times to go straight or left. And motorbikes will often ride against traffic and on sidewalks. Crossing the road, as a pedestrian, is difficult. You just have to believe that traffic will go around you, wait for a time when it’s clear enough that drivers have enough time to see you and and react, and then walk slowly but deliberately across the road, watching how traffic responds. It doesn’t seem like it should work but it does. Though commuting any significant distance by foot is difficult and exhausting. You have to constantly be aware of everything around you, traffic coming from all directions, even on the sidewalk. Today I heard some American guy cursing at motorbike drivers for honking their horns at him. It was on a stretch near a construction site where the road was closed and a wide sidewalk was being shared by pedestrians and traffic. My feeling is, if you can’t adapt to the local customs you don’t belong here.
As I mentioned before, almost everyone commutes by motorbike. It’s common to see couples on the same bike, often with a small child. On my way back from the airport the first day I saw a family on a motorbike: father driving, mother behind him, holding in her arms an infant, head titled back and drinking from a bottle she was holding in the other hand. And then another day, in the back of a taxi slogging through rush hour traffic, I saw a scooter trying to turn left, edging its way into heavy oncoming traffic, and a little boy in the front of the scooter, his head pressed against the small windscreen with a huge, delighted smile on his face.