Wonderland: The Motorbike Economy
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam -- The TV screen in a hotel room in Singapore a fortnight ago poured out awful images from New Zealand's Christchurch earthquake. A week later, in Saigon, the earthquake had given way in the news to images of fighting in the streets of Libya. So this, too, is the global village, the whole world watching the same disasters and dramas over dinner.</br></br>But a "Libya" isn't quite the same story in Vietnam as in the U.S. America's great-power status obliges that the center of concern is "the U.S. response." In emergent Vietnam, whose 89 million people make it the world's 13th largest nation, the bigger concern is whether its rapidly inflating currency, the dong, at about 20,000 dong to the dollar, will slow this nation's march to economic power.</br></br>Don't count on it. No one in Vietnam is "marching" to the future. "There's nowhere to walk here," explained a waitress in a Saigon restaurant. "The sidewalks are covered with motorbikes." Saigon has been described as a city of nine million people and 30 million motorbikes. That's an understatement. It is an infinity of motorbikes. Imagine an entire city population riding atop a 100cc Honda or Yamaha. It's impossible to imagine unless you see it.</br></br>One is engulfed by motorbikes seconds away from Ho Chi Minh City airport (HCMC is the city's official name, and though busts and portraits of Uncle Ho abound in public buildings, I never heard anyone in Saigon call it Ho Chi Minh City). Saigon sprawls, like Los Angeles, and virtually every street, from end to end, from morning into the night, is filled with someone on a bike, often with baby sitting in front, holding the handlebars, faces wrapped in large pollution masks, going somewhere, at 35 mph.</br></br>There are cars and trucks, but they look like whales surrounded by schools of fast fish. Welcome to Vietnam, the motorbike economy -- adept, efficient, always in forward gear.