A Honda dream indeed - Patrick Townsend reports from Vietnam
Report No. 2, June 19th 2002

Ho Chi Minh City is not the capital of Vietnam, but it's certainly it's largest city. We approached HCMC by train from Hanoi, which is about 30 hours further north. HCMC is much larger than Hanoi and is made up of various districts, that line up on either side of the Saigon river. HCMC is a very busy city with large roads that carry a lot of traffic that stirs up plenty of dust. HCMC lacks the calm created by the lakes and parks you find in Hanoi. It has street upon street with markets and small business, craft and trade, plenty of hotels and quite a few buildings that are twenty storeys tall or more.
The city has a fair share of french architecture, scattered with american and italian-style buildings plus many of the thin, three to six storey buildings that are so particular to Vietnam.
Here and there you find the odd abandoned construction site, -one of them a huge complex right in the heart of the city which was to become the local Hyatt hotel. This prime construction site is right beside the local "opera house" opposite of the tall and expensive Caravelle hotel and it seems very odd indeed that such a huge project is allowed to be halted for several years at such a location.
HCMC seems to be a thriving city, there's lot's of big hotels though and there are only so many rooms needed, -it appears someone at Hyatt miscalculated quite grossly with this development.

The majority of visitors seems to be Japanese and the city thus boasts a good number of japanese restaurants and businesses.
Strolling through the city's various districts, you find a certain order in the way a trade or craft occupies particular aereas: There's a street for the motorcycle mechanics, a street for the traders of ventilation systems, a street for safes and security system etc. You find businesses specialising in products that seem very strange to european eyes: battery chargers, the said safes, refrigerators, hinges and so forth.

The amount of motorcycles on the streets of HCMC even outnumber those of Hanoi. Someone told us, for urban Vietnamese people the motorcycle comes before a house and before most other things in life.

The smell in the streets of HCMC can be quite strong, as there are a lot of markets with fruit and plenty of half or fully dead foodstuff.

Read Vietnam report no. 1 - Hanoi

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