Feel the fear, and bike through it

Hanoi's motorcycles do a big job, carrying multiple passengers or all kinds of cargo. Picture / Reuters

Hanoi is a city of motorcycles, jokes and Ho Chi Minh. As a member of the Vietnam generation - in my case, I protested about New Zealand's involvement in the war and was investigated by the Security Intelligence Service for my pains - the looming shadow of Uncle Ho, as the Vietnamese call him, was entirely expected.

But the ubiquitous presence of millions of motorcycles, and the discovery of the dry Vietnamese sense of humour, came as a surprise.

The three aren't entirely unrelated, however. Rather in the way Winston Churchill's rhetoric, a stoic spirit and a defiant sense of humour saw Londoners through the Blitz in an earlier war, Vietnamese credit Ho's leadership and their humour and courage with giving them victory in what they call the French and American wars.

"Vietnamese are very brave," explained Hoi, my guide, as a motorcycle drifted blithely into the path of our vehicle, forcing a bit of violent braking.

"In the war they did not mind crawling through the fields taking explosives up to American tanks.

"Now they are not afraid on the roads. They drive anywhere. That is why so many get killed. I think 13,000 died last year. They are not scared of anything."

They also like a joke, even a feeble one. When I responded to this explanation of Vietnamese driving with the comment, "Heroes in the countryside, crazy in the city", Hoi and the driver laughed so much I feared they might crash the car.

But you need to be bold to drive in Hanoi - or, even to cross the road as a pedestrian - because the roads are chaotic, even by Asian standards. Whereas Bangkok is a notorious sea of cars, Hanoi is a river of motorcycles, and a turbulent one at that.

The wheeled torrent reaches its peak in the city's tumultuous old quarter, where 2sq/km of tightly packed ancient buildings, sometimes only 3m wide, house an estimated 80,000 people and goodness knows how many motorcycles.

Here, metalworkers weld on the street, families sit in front of their homes to eat, furniture-makers plane wood on the footpath, embroiderers squat on the kerb to sew, shops spill out the door and motorcycles are everywhere, parked on every spare space, cruising the narrow alleys and being lovingly repaired in front rooms.

The capital officially has a population of 3 million but locals reckon if you add all the people living there illegally it is really more than 4 million.

And, they claim, if you include the torrent of workers and traders who pour in from the countryside in the mornings, there are probably 3 million motorcycles (not to mention quite a few cars and a huge number of bicycles and trishaws) cruising round the city each day.

That may sound an exaggeration, but once you've seen the vast swarms of motorcycles buzzing down every road it's all too believable.

Those motorcycles do a lot of work. Most of those zipping through the streets at rush hour have at least two people on them and twice I saw a family of five on a single machine.

Others are used to carry incredible amounts of cargo. In the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology one of the exhibits is a bicycle carrying 84 fish baskets which a local fisherman once used each day to go to work.

It's an impressive display, but no more amazing than the the sights you can see on the highways all the time - motorcycles and bicycles laden with mountains of baskets, 5m lengths of bamboo, full-grown palm trees, bags of cement, sacks of fruit and vegetables, assorted household goods and what seem to be entire hardware stores.

I passed one motorbike laden with a huge pig which must have weighed at least 200kg. My guide said this was nothing. "I have seen them with two pigs that size and once with two buffalo."

This was hard to believe but he hadn't finished yet.

Chinese motor bikes, the cheapest and probably still the most common, are notorious for their unreliability and especially for suddenly bursting into flame. "We say if you carry your pig on a Chinese motorcycle you may carry it and also cook it," he chuckled. "Chinese efficiency."

I had barely set foot in the country when I had my first taste of this Vietnamese love of making jokes about anything. Hoi - who was aware I'd been on the go from 4am to 1.30am the previous day - smilingly explained that he would pick me up at for my tour at 3am.

All I could think of by way of a riposte was to say I had a gun in my bag and would shoot anyone who disturbed my sleep before 7am. He giggled delightedly and thereafter constantly asked about my gun.

And so it continued. Much effort was put into trying to persuade me we were going to a bar which served snake testicle wine or restaurants serving dog meat, which I wouldn't have minded trying, actually.

Every time our car came close to hitting a dog the guide and the driver shouted, "lunch".

While I was distracted trying to photograph an old woman working in a vast area of rice paddies Hoi tried to hide by lying down in the stalks. When I crept up behind him, shouted "bang" and said, "You'd be no good as a Viet Cong", he was ecstatic and told just about everyone we met for the rest of the day about the good joke.

But, while jokes about the war are now okay, Ho Chi Minh is still taken very seriously.

In death, Uncle Ho is everywhere. His picture and his sayings adorned nearly every home or building I visited, except, I think, the hotels.

The heart of Hanoi is "Ho Chi Minh's Relic Area" with the mausoleum where his embalmed body is displayed, the Presidential Palace where he worked, three different buildings, including a traditional house on stilts, where he is said to have lived, the pool he stocked with fish to help feed the city, and the Ho Chi Minh Museum - one of half a dozen around the country - commemorating his life.

The brochure for the area explains, "A visit here will teach us more about Uncle Ho's simplicity and modesty. And we shall be proud of him, respectful for a great mind, a staunch revolutionary will, a great virtue and ideologist, and a man who has dedicated his fife (sic) to the cause of revolution and people."

All this is a bit much, even for someone for whom the Vietnam War was a seminal event, but happily even one of the museum curators couldn't resist introducing a wee joke at the expense of the Americans.

One of the displays symbolises the failure of the United States effort to conquer Vietnam by showing a full-sized model of the 1958 Edsel car, one of the most notable flops in American commercial history, produced by the Ford Motor Company under the leadership of Robert McNamara, who later went on to be US Secretary of Defence during the war years.

A bit subtle for most museum visitors, maybe, but still a good joke. And very Vietnamese.

* Jim Eagles travelled to Vietnam as guest of World Expeditions and Singapore Airlines.