A Honda dream indeed - Patrick Townsend reports from Vietnam.
Report No. 1, June 4th 2002

Striking at first (and indeed for days to come) is the amount of motorcycles you find on Vietnam's streets. The city here is very loud in an unusual way, as everyone driving on more than one wheel appears to harbour a great love for their bells and horns. It is a noise that accompanies you from dusk until dawn. Imagine a city in Europe, where everyone driving a car presses the horn every other second for about four seconds -. The quality of the horns and bells here is luckily not always top notch - but still...
The second thing that struck me, is how well organised the cities public services seem to be: all day long there's an impressive amount of city workers sweeping the sidewalk and collecting the garbage that people neatly pile up at the roadside. Cleanliness seems alltogether very popular with people here, there's constant washing and cleaning going on in houses and shops.
Houses and shops often come in one: people sell all sorts of goods from what appears to be their living room or bedroom, -as at night you find them sleeping eating or watching television in the same room they were selling CD's during the day.

Hanoi is a very friendly and well organised city. Most things work better than i'd expected and people are extremly friendly and helpful.

Particularely in the north, I expected people to speak french more than english as the foreign language of choice, this turned out to be wrong. Most people speak a tiny bit of english and some speak it surprisingly well, while french seems to be hardly spoken at all.

There's an astonishing amount of young people on the streets and they dress in a very stylish, mostly western sort of way. In the city you realise only occasionally, that you're inside a communist country with what I assumed to be a fairly strict political regime. Life seems surprisingly market orientated and liberal, -this being the surface view I got from a few days in Hanoi as a tourist. There is certainly an incredible amount of small trade going on very openly.

Hanoi is a medium sized city by european standards. The buildings are usually two to four storeys high and most people appear to qualify as architects and builders, as there's a lot of building going on throughout the city and the houses come in very odd shapes. A funny thing is, that the builders appear to live on the building site, more comfortably so as the building progresses. Maybe this works as an enticement for them to work faster on the completion of a house; as it is obviously more comfortable with a roof and a floor than living with just mud and bricks.

Read Vietnam report No. 2 - Ho Chi Minh City