Vietnam Anonymous Limited: Our First Post

OK - so we made it to Vietnam, and have had a terrific, hectic couple of days so far.

Apparently either the Vietnam govt or some Vietnamese ISPs are blocking blogs from Blogger/Blogspot and it appears that we can't even view this blog ourselves so blogging might be a little tentative for a while. We also have to actually get into the habit of blogging regularly while traveling which might be more complicated than we'd imagined - particularly with editing and uploading photos and videos and whatnot - but will try to post things when we can.

Saigon and Hanoi are both crazy, and beautiful. We only had one transit night in Saigon so we didn't get much a chance to get a feel for it, except for the motorbikes... so many motorbikes... You know that film Attack Of The Killer Motorbikes? It's a lot like that. What? There's no such film? Well, there should be - and it should be set in Vietnam. The plotline just writes itself, right?

Seriously, that was our first/major impression of Saigon, and Hanoi to a lesser extent - a massive, apparently chaotic, swarm of motorbikes of all flavours (mostly scooters), carrying just about anything, and lots of it.

We haven't yet seen a scooter carrying five people, but that can't be far away. It's certainly not uncommon to see a family of four happily/dangerously diving in and out of the traffic on just two wheels, perhaps with mum feeding a baby with a bottle.

After a short while the apparent traffic chaos becomes even more fascinating as patterns of organization somehow emerge. Today we had a coffee in an outdoor cafe four stories above a 5-way intersection (without traffic lights or stop signs - not that it would make any difference) and somehow the traffic could flow in all directions without any (major) incidents. The traffic streams somehow continue to flow continually and simply pass through each other and proceed along their merry way. I've read before (don't know whether it is true) that sand dunes in Africa can actually pass through each other as they get blown along in different directions by the winds, and that each sand dune actually maintains the same grains of sand in the process - well, this is kinda similar.

Of course, at this particular intersection there were also pedestrians crossing the street in every direction too, somehow (mostly) avoiding the scooters and vice versa. Apparently there is some secret code between the bikers and local pedestrians that enables safe passage for all, but when Western pedestrians are thrown into the mix the whole system breaks down and there's chaos everywhere - mostly for the bikers, actually. I took some video from the cafe of the whole drama and will try to post that when things calm down for us a bit.

I feel kinda silly writing a 'first impressions' post devoted mostly to motorbikes - but the bikes somehow dominate everywhere, the sights and sounds (beep, beep!), the dangers and obstacles (both moving and stationary obstacles - where do you think they park all those bikes???)

And then there's the food... delicious, fascinating, plentiful, and everywhere. I'll write about that later. Oh, and the coffee.

Here are a few of the pics that we have taken so far.

Here's an old lady cooking something streetside. Everybody sits in the street on these little chairs that are just a couple of inches high.

Here's a typical scene: an old woman pushing a trolley full of goods. Women seem to do most of the labour here.

This woman is peeling a pineapple on the street for sale. The rule for Westerners is supposed to be not to eat anything that you can't peel or wash or open or otherwise 'guarantee' that it is clean and safe to eat. We didn't buy any of this peeled pineapple!