Cambodia and Vietnam travel: the cycles of life

Just back from Cambodia and Vietnam and my head is spinning with visions of the traffic.

A family on the move in Ho Chi Minh City.

Just back from Cambodia and Vietnam and my head is spinning with visions of the traffic. On my first visit to Hanoi in the 1990s, my guide, Mr Tranh, told me, when I asked how to get to the other side of the road, that “you need to be born on the other side of the road”.

Last week, in Ho Chi Minh City, I proceeded with more bravado. Confidence is everything; the pedestrian who hesitates is in peril of being mown down.

Drivers, bicycle riders and motorbike and scooter speedsters anticipate the pace and direction of those crossing and veer and deviate accordingly, in a sort of choreography that has rhythm, timing and even an odd beauty. Horns are there to be honked, and not politely tooted but pressed again and again, with tremendous gusto. Helmets and road rules are entirely optional.

Bicycles are fewer these days in Vietnam’s main cities; motorcycles and scooters imported from China and Taiwan or made locally are cheap and can fit origami-like assemblies of families folded together and ingeniously stacked with parcels and cradled babies. They are like little mobile living rooms and you wouldn’t be surprised to see a pillion passenger cooking a quick lunch and then washing up in a big, metal bowl.

I saw no one fall off or even have a traffic bingle. How is it possible?

There are no clearways or cycle lanes; at rare roundabouts, traffic twirls as if to the call of a metronome.

In Cambodia’s Seam Reap, gateway to Angkor Wat, I had a day of tuktuk travel with Mr Chim. On my last visit, I engaged Mr Chan, operator of Mr Chan’s Best Moto, although perhaps you would not have wanted to see his Worst Moto. He insisted on offering me “fast service”, even though his rackety old contraption couldn’t crack 10km/h and our “day” trip to Angkor Wat, 6km from town, took so long we had to stop for lunch and three toilet breaks and practically needed to overnight.

Nonetheless, I looked for him again along his usual Pub Street haunt (a Tomb Raider cocktail or beer foot massage, anyone?) a fortnight ago but perhaps he has puttered on to better things in his Motorola (accompanied by gales of giggles every time he told me his vehicle’s “special name”).

What we refer to in a generic way as the tuktuk is more comfortable in Cambodia than its Bangkok equivalent and is also known as a moto; passengers lean back with proper legroom and, as Mr Chim points out, “shopping spaces” for, as it soon transpires, special purchases from stallholders and silk providers who are all his most trustworthy cousins..

Then, in the traffic-choked heart of HCM City, I did a night ride for several hours on the back of a vintage Vespa, hanging onto the waist of driver Truong so hard that he may well be permanently marked with imprints of my fingers.

When I did finally open my eyes, it was to a hallucinogenic vision of a transplanted Mr Chan, scattering fruit vendors and chickens in his wake and propelling his trusty Motorola slowly but surely right at us.