Author Archives: SaigonRob

Nov6

Don’t tell grandma: there’s a motorbike in my lounge…

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I know I must be at least a little bit Vietnamese by now.

During the last few days I realised it was exactly 11 months since I arrived here for six months… and I am still here.

But far more telling of how I seem to be fitting into this city is that I have a motorcycle in my living room. It doesn’t get much more Vietnamese than that. I guess I could put one of those large round saucer-shaped hats on my head and comb the streets for recyclables, but I reckon that would be overdoing it.

So why is there a motorcycle in my living room?

Well, put simply, unless you live in a modern apartment complex, just inside your front door is where you park. In traditional, cramped suburban Ho Chi Minh City neighbourhoods, the alleys which lead to houses are usually only wide enough for motorbikes to access. In many cases, if you meet another motorcycle coming the other way, one of you will have to reverse up because there won’t be enough room to pass.

Some more modern houses have a porch where the motorcycle(s) stand under shelter and there is perhaps a second door into the living room. But for most people here, you drive on home and right up a purpose built ramp into the lounge.

Your motorcycle gets to watch the flat screen TV alongside you.

In our case, you have to step around it to open the refrigerator too (because living room, kitchen, dining room are pretty much the same place in houses like these).

If it’s been on a long run, it will likely be hot and there’s a residual smell of warm oil and chaffed rubber which lingers into the evening. If it’s been raining outside, it will leave a trail of dark, wet tread prints over the shiny tiled floor.

Getting into the fridge just got that little bit harder…

I can almost hear my late grandmother’s loud expression of alarm as I wipe the floor clean with absorbent tissues: Assuming her heart survived the initial shock of discovering a real motorcycle in the lounge, I’m not actually sure which issue would cause her most alarm: that I can actually now ride a motorcycle, that I am leaving dirty tyre prints on the clean floor or that an engine is running inside the house…

Our abode is wide by Vietnamese standards, but at only two stories, significantly lower than most of our neighbours’, whose homes can stretch as many as six or eight floors into the sky. We have double glass doors which have to be opened wide before parking.

I have yet to master the art, but my better half is an expert in driving inside. It’s more complicated than it sounds: the alley is too narrow to allow a proper run at 90 degrees and the steel ramp is barely 30cm wide. So it takes considerable skill to align it at an angle and get both wheels on the ramp in succession. Then you have to judge the power. Too much power and you plough right on into the back of the sofa. Too little and you’re stranded half in the door, half out. You can probably tell why I’m taking my time before assuming parking duties at home…

The bike is a Yamaha Nuovo. It’s primarily black, with bright strips of garish yellow down each side; not our choice of colour scheme, it was all the young guy who rents them had available. (Give me red and black thanks – I’m sure they go faster).

It’s about four years old and travels about 30 kilometres on a litre of petrol which costs about US$1 here. A tank holds about five litres, so for five bucks here you can get youself about 150km which makes these automatic scooters a pretty affordable way of getting about town. And which explains why there are literally millions of them on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City at any time.

It costs us 1.3 million Vietnamese dong a month to rent. That sounds a lot to a westerner, but it equates to a mere A$60 a month. There’s no insurance – if someone “Ali Baba’s it” (a local term) I have to cough up $800 to the renter. But it has a remote locking system with an ear splitting alarm. And if anyone overcame that and tried to steal it, they’d almost certainly give up after a few minutes, such is its frequent reluctance to start!

I’d like to say my licence to drive it fell out of a Weetbix packet, but that would be an exaggeration.

That’s because I don’t have a licence. When I mentioned that in passing to the rental entrepreneur he simply grinned and replied “This is Ho Chi Minh: you don’t need a licence”. Instead I can drive about the city merrily, knowing that if I am stopped an instant “fine” of $100,000 or $200,000 will be issued – between $4.60 and $9.20. Instant as in handed over instantly and on my way instantly. No need for paperwork, you understand…

The Vietnamese believe almost anything can be carried on the back of a motorbike – it all comes down to the individual’s ingenuity in how it is balanced or held while driving. Thus you frequently see large plates of glass being balanced upright between rider and pillion passenger, ladders often coming perilously close to the frequent city curse of low hanging power cables, mattresses (flat – I kid you not!), commercial quantities of crates of beer and giant water bottles, flat screen TVs, dogs, dining tables, cupboards, bicycles, watercoolers and – my favourite – a front loading washing machine!

So I felt right at home when we took the bike on its first domestic excursion – to buy a laundry basket from a shophouse facing Pasteur. It perched between us sideways and we saved a taxi fare for one of us back home.

The only worrying moment was when a policeman took more than a passing interest before deciding it was way too hard to pull us over given we were eight bike-widths into the main throughfare, deliberately avoiding them! I guess that, too, makes me a little but Vietnamese… there’s a definite art in avoiding the thin brown arm of the law on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City…

* My apologies to regular readers for the embarssingly long time since the last post. I now have a backlog of tales to share so will try to get back into a routine. Feedback is welcome, as always.

This is not the Yamaha, but I certainly wouldn’t mind if it was in my living room. I was never really into bikes when I was younger – I was firmly in the four wheel camp. But this Ducati is truly a work of art – it looks very very fast and very beautiful even when standing still!

 

Jun16

The luxury of ‘cool’ and a taste of France.

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The luxury of ‘cool’ and a taste of France.

Retail is my life.

For those who don’t know me, my day job (and night job, early morning job, weekend job, holiday job and every other time of the day, week or year job) is researching, commentating, writing about and photographing retail stores – in all parts of the world.

I create and manage content for Asia’s newest retail information website InsideRetail.Asia, and for 10 years have been a director of Inside Retail Australia.

The majority of the 5800 or so images in my FlickrPro account are of retail stores in Europe, Asia, North America and Australasia.

So living in Ho Chi Minh City – essentially the central point of Asia if you consider the continental stretches from India across to Japan and south to Australia – is a convenient place to pop off to glitzy retail capitals like Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur. As I do.

It also gives me a fair qualification to comment on retailing in Saigon. And before you fear the worst, it’s not that bad!

Many people judge a city’s retail based on the size of its air conditioned, sterile malls and the number of international top-end brands inside them. That’s OK if you have the bank balance to allow you to splurge on Louis Vuitton or Gucci every second weekend, but for the vast majority of us, those retail stores – while admittedly stunningly designed and executed –  are the gleaming fascias we walk past on the way to the stores we can afford to shop in.

I love walking through a new Louis Vuitton store (Shanghai’s Pudong for example), but I love far more the excitement of discovering something new, something unique, something fun or entertaining – something which breaks the mould. If you look carefully you can find such stores in almost every city in the world, no matter how mature the retail market.

Let’s be fair, organised retail in Saigon is still relatively new. By international standards, Vincom would score less than 50 per cent for design with all its dead end corridors and poor pedestrian flows. I have a friend from overseas who walked the entire mall twice and claims he still couldn’t find Phuong Nam book store!

And while I am on it: where else in the world would you find a supermarket with two full display racks of pet toys and a whole corridor of dog beds, but which does not sell pet food?!

Those points aside, Vincom still has an exceptionally good range of food for humans and it is home to one of my favourite stores (so far) in Saigon: Runway.

Inside Runway in Vincom.

This is truly world class: it’s a sort of gallery of new trendy, funky fashion and accessories curated in a collection of adjacent spaces. A focal point is a large round ‘cocoon’ covered in highly polished steel mermaid-like scales which serves as a private dressing room for those who want to try on clothes away from the public gaze.

The amazing cocoon – the store’s centrepiece.

Sure, many of the clothes and homewares on display are beyond the average budget. Not too many Vietnamese people can afford a 40 million dong Alexander McQueen dress, for example.

The store is designed in a large, disconnected loop (it’s broken by a public corridor to the elevators!). This is the back where you’ll find homewares and some very cool stuff for kids.

But wandering through this store, with its winding path and ice cave effect, is like walking through a modern art gallery. It’s an experience, which is what great retailing is all about.

The store was designed by Italian architect CLS Architetti. Cleverly, they caught on to the concept that in a hot tropical area like southern Vietnam, “the real luxury is cold”. So the store is entirely cool grey in colour, from polished cement floors, up.

As Soosi Lee, director of Runway, explained (for a feature I wrote for the June-July edition of Inside Retail Magazine in Australia): “The space is like an ice cave where people can experience a path which is a metaphor of life and rebirth.”

In some places, Runway feels more like a luxury home than a retail store.

CLS used 3D modelling to create the cave effect which was later constructed using 298 curved wooden panels, each with different shapes creating a ripple effect when you look towards the ceiling. Each panel was hand cut then hand screwed together. There is another store from the same Runway folk on the ground floor of Crescent Mall in District 7, called RRR Runway and specialising in what fashion labels describe as “diffusion lines”, subsidiary brands often aimed at a younger demographic.

RRR Runway might be smaller but it is equally compelling. It was also designed by CLS Architetti.

RRR Runway in Crescent Mall, District 7.

French appeal

Another great retail experience is L’usine: a cafe-gallery upstairs above the artist’s arcade on Dong Khoi. Here you can step back into the era when Saigon was part of a French colony. L’usine is housed in a traditional old villa-style building, on the middle one of three floors, with towering ceilings, solid concrete walls and iron-framed windows.

Perspectives of L’usine – (All L’usine images from the company’s Facebook site).

The dining area – which really needs expanding at the expense of retail space, so popular has this venue become with the expat community – features giant tables crafted from sewing factory tables, with solid iron legs and heavy timber panels: you’d never build tables this solid today.

These solid wood and iron tables have to be seen to be believed…

The cafe serves espresso-style coffee, cupcakes from Sweet & Sour, light meals, wine and beer. The walls feature photography or artwork on a rotational basis. Currently, there is a stunning display of historic black and white photos of city life.

The store side of the business offers an eclectic mix of unusual homewares and clothing you’re unlikely to see in the same place anywhere else in Saigon… Or perhaps anywhere for that matter…

From bespoke motorcycle helmets and cute plastic cupcake-shaped sugar bowls, through to hip laptop bags and designer label denim, it’s an ideal destination for the gift-shopper or for an occasional dose of retail therapy.

So, there are two picks of retail excellence from Saigon. I haven’t seen every store in Saigon yet – and I could never achieve such a feat. There are also many more worth a visit – for shopping or just for an experience.

As I opened, retail is my life, so you can be sure of reading a lot more about my Saigon retail experiences – good and bad – in coming months! Next installment, I’ll introduce you to two budget stores perfect for eclectic, distinctive Saigon gifts for guests from abroad…

May4

Saigon strike

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Saigon strike

I love the spectacular weather experiences Saigon throws on its residents.

I know, it’s not a lot of fun being caught in a sudden torrential downpour when you’re on the back of a motorcycle going nowhere in peak time traffic on Pasteur and there is no weather proof jacket to hand.

With the rainy season almost upon us, the thunder and lightning storms across the city are becoming more common. Never before moving here have I seen such spectacular displays from Mother Nature of forked lightning, beautiful bright rays of light ‘cracking’ the sky.

Last night was no exception and for once I had the time to grab the camera and see if I could finally capture some of the beauty.

And somehow I fluked it as the image below shows!

Saigon strike, May 3, 2012.

This is a real photograph (Photoshopped only to balance the colours and contrast). No trickery or superimposing. (For some reason on WordPress the image looks blurred onscreen – but if you click on it you’ll see it clearly, I promise).

Modern buildings like Bitexco Tower – like comercial aircraft – are equipped with lightning conductors to ensure if they get hit there is no damage to the electrical systems. But it sure looks spectacular if you’re lucky enough to capture the moment on camera.

Some people are scared of thunder, others of lightning. I was once staying in a hotel room high above Marina Bay Singapore when an electrical storm hit. My partner at the time lept out of her chair and hurriedly closed the curtains. I was gobsmacked!

Why did you do that, I asked? “Because I’m scared.”

Of what I could never deduce, but I immediately squeezed between the heavy hotel curtains and the windows and enjoyed the show for the next 20 minutes.

Last night over Ho Chi Minh City was a far more enjoyable show.

And afterwards – these storms are usually short, sharp and spectacular – as I headed into town on the back of a motorcycle for dinner, it was cool and fresh and for the first time all day I didn’t like I was breaking out in a sweat.

Roll on the Rainy Season and the entertainment it brings with it!

Above is another shot from the same ‘show’.

Apr22

Don’t blink or it might be gone…

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Don’t blink or it might be gone…

Such is the relentless pace of growth and change in Vietnam, discovering something new in downtown Ho Chi Minh can be an almost daily experience.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen a new store or business open up somewhere in the city and stopped to think “But what was there last week”?  When I grew up in New Zealand we had an expression when driving through small towns “Don’t blink or you’ll miss it”. In Saigon it’s more like “Don’t blink or it might be gone.”

I write this blog in a new bookshop-cafe in the Vincom Centre – a store that did not exist a few weeks ago and judging by the balloons and giant floral tributes mounted on easels outside the door, it celebrated its official opening just yesterday.

I checked the book section out yesterday and discovered they stock my favourite regional current events magazine, SEA Global, a current events magazine published by expats in Cambodia, of all places, which I’d previously only found in Bangkok.
The bookstore, Phuong Nam Book, stocks a modest but eclectic collection of books in English and Vietnamese, features a dedicated eBook counter, including readers, a selection of hip electronic accessories and a range cases and gadgets to complement your Apple toys.

The eBook counter at Phuong Nam Book.

I’m back today trialling the coffee shop section, the imaginatively named Book Cafe, partly because at 10.40am on a Sunday morning, Highlands Coffee down below is completely full – not a single table available, or even space to use a laptop at a counter. A week ago, I’d have wandered further into town, but as of this week there’s at last another coffee option in Vincom (save for the ritzy Armani Cafe, for which I don’t have sufficiently polished shoes, Italian threads or glistening bling, so probably would not be seated).

The coffee is surprisingly good – and the price, a mug of hot latte 40,000 VND, not too bad compared to 59,000 at Highlands. And you get a free glass of green tea.

It serves a limited line-up of food, but all the coffees and teas, hot and cold, you’d expect to satisfy both expat and local palates. And a selection of Vietnamese cakes. The service is prompt and attentive, the whole experience actually more relaxing than a table down below at Highland to be honest…

There’s free wifi (of course), electrical sockets scattered about the floor for your laptop power (mind your step!) and piped elevator music – not quite library like, but relaxing nevertheless.

Speaking of coffee…

Next week’s new arrival in downtown is a new Sony store, built on Dong Khoi where Gloria Jeans once thrived (in a far from relaxing environment) before one day closing without notice and promising to return when Vincom 2 opens just up the road. In October.

Sony is the once aspirational Japanese brand that dominated electronics before it got lazy, lost its innovative streak and started to mass produce cheap lines with dumbed down specs – “our customers can’t tell the difference” a senior executive was famously quoted as saying last year. Now it makes junk for the mass market and these days mass market translates to developing BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) economies, and those smaller ones riding on their coat tails (like Vietnam). So while Sony globally will axe 10,000 jobs this year and lose US$2.6 billion (yes, that was meant to read billion, not  million!) and its once loyal western customer base trade their old Sony products in for nice shiny new Samsungs, the company seems to be broadening its single-brand outlet strategy across Asia.

Why else would Sony open a dedicated store in such a high-rent location as Dong Khoi, within 100 metres of real luxury brands like Gucci and Louis Vuitton and Chanel and the amazing Christian Louboutin shoes?

For a while there were rumours circulating this would be the site of a city’s first Starbucks, a new Pho 24 (yeah, right) and a Brodards Bakery (which it turns out was an earlier tenant, hence the old signage displayed when the Gloria Jeans banners were torn down).

Perhaps a couple of weeks off yet is a new cupcake store, a hole in the wall shop being fitted out on the corner of Hai Ba Trung and Le Thanh Ton – if the signage, which appeared a few weeks back but has now vanished, is to be believed.

Another discovery this week was a gigantic new Trung Nguyen coffee house on the edge of the backpacker region. By Vietnamese standards, this cafe on the corner of Pham Ngu Lao and Nguyen Thai Hoc is enormous. The ground floor has a giant coffee roaster as a centrepiece and a large air conditioned seating area. Upstairs is a giant open air area, with two large air conditioned areas adjacent.

If you’re dining in, they’ll take your order at the table, but downstairs you can buy from Trung Nguyen’s extensive range of coffee products for home use, including beans by grade in bulk by weight.

This location was a building site just a few weeks back – and it officially opens its doors on Monday April 23. So the comfortable lounge chairs upstairs have yet to be scratched. So, too, the smell of fresh varnish and paint has yet to be overwhelmed by that of fresh coffee beans.

It’s pricey – especially for a backpacker area, with a cup (not mug) of Latte around 59,000 VND, pretty much on par with Highlands. But that’s still cheaper than the same cup in a city like Sydney… If only it was hotter and the dreadful piped music (think Richard Clayderman for those old enough to remember him!) played at lower volume!

So many new bars, cafes, stores, nightclubs and other businesses open every week in Saigon it’s impossible to keep up.

And that’s just now. Wait until the new malls open later this year… Times Square and Vincom 2 for starters are sure to bring new retail experiences to the city from off-shore – and hopefully give some local operators a lift up as well!  

Apr15

Lunching with the toys, sleeping in the kitchen

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Lunching with the toys, sleeping in the kitchen

Shopping or dining in Saigon exposes one to opposite extremes of the customer service experience – often in just a single day.

At this point, I should divulge (for those who don’t know me outside the blogosphere) that I’ve spent more than a decade observing, writing about and photographing retail stores all over the world – that’s my day job. So I figure by now I can recognise good customer service when I experience it. And bad.

I’m a regular customer at Highlands, my favourite of a fairly limited offer of espresso-style coffee chains here. At Highlands one can experience the best and worst of Saigon service – sometimes in the same store.

At Vincom Highlands, where I am a regular, some of the staff know me well enough to just check my order without offering the menu (although the new menu this month caused confusion when I decided to indulge in pancakes with strawberries only to discover they’re no longer made – at least my doctor will be pleased). One or two will often give me two or three extra of those yummy little complimentary cookies with my cafe latte, making me feel special and more inclined to return.

But this weekend, I had the opposite service experience at the Saigon Centre Highlands, probably the city’s busiest.

A smiling young male takes my order: a tall cafe latte hot and a croque monsieur – with an egg on top. He sets off to arrange it and I resume writing my blog (the next instalment).

Several minutes later, about the time I would be expecting my coffee to arrive, he returns, this time holding an order pad. “Excuse me sir, can I check your order?”

“Sure,” I say and wait for him to speak. But wait, this is in fact his way of conveying he has forgotten my order and wants me not to check it but to repeat it. So I do.

“OK,” he confirms. “One cafe latte tall. Hot. And one croque monsieur.”

“Yes, with an egg.”

“An egg?”

“Yes.”

He looks confused.

“An egg,” I repeat yet again. Fried. On top”.

I am confused. After all, this dish has been on Highlands’ menu since I arrived here four months ago.

So I quickly open a new tab on my laptop, type egg in the address bar and Google takes a few seconds to display some images of eggs. I point to one of a fried egg on the screen.

“Yes, I know. Egg”. I feel chastised. Perhaps I was, as 10 minutes later my croque monsieur arrives. Without an egg. I gave up.

Hey at least this guy was awake! Well, OK, ambulatory.

The grainy image below was taken on my iPhone one day in Vincom when I was looking for some cooking implements. Fortunately I was not seeking a new kitchen.

But this is an all too common sight in Vietnam: store staff asleep behind the counters, huddled together watching sitcoms on laptops – sometimes at full volume! – or chatting animatedly about their weekend, often while you’re standing confused in the middle of their store trying to catch their diverted attention for some guidance.

Sometimes they’ll be eating their lunch.

Sometimes they’ll do that in the middle of the store. On the floor. In an aisle between stock displays.

I kid you not! Several weeks ago I was in one of the toy shops in Vincom Centre selecting something for my baby niece’s first birthday. I turned to walk down an aisle only to find it blocked by one of the store staff. He had placed a sheet of cardboard on the floor, unwrapped his bowls of food and proceeded to enjoy his lunch.

I couldn’t believe my eyes! If this was a shop house in a backstreet of District 5 or a Sari Sari in Manila, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. But this is in the most modern (well, for another month or two at least) shopping centre in downtown Saigon, a western-style mall…

In my western experiences store staff are forbidden to eat or drink food in front of the customer. It’s considered impolite.

There are two main factors driving the lack of service culture in retailing in Saigon: firstly, labour is cheap and store staff are usually paid little more than a survival salary. Workers prefer to work in an air conditioned store environment to a fan-cooled clothing factory, so they might covet a job in a shop. But retailing is not exactly considered a career here.

Secondly, training is evidently non-existent.

By good fortune more than anything else, Vietnamese-run retailers might occasionally hire staff with their own instinctive abilities that make them stand out above their colleagues: people who smile at customers, for example. Western run retailers – like the owners of L’usine off Dong Khoi – will recruit only staff who know how to smile and make the customer feel important. It’s called engagement and engagement is what makes occasional customers loyal customers – and ambassadors for the store.

But consider this experience from the Geox shoe store in Saigon Centre: I walk in, my attention caught by a pair of official Red Bull Racing team sports shoes (I’m a Formula One addict and a mark Webber fan). I seek my size, but they don’t have it in store. So I try on a pair one size larger just in case – nope, they definitely don’t fit. At this point, the store staff were ready to let me walk out of the shop.

But I am very keen to buy these shoes if I can find a pair which fit. So I ask if the store has other branches in Saigon.

Yes, they do. In the Parkson department store on Le Than Ton.

Does he know if they’d have my size in stock?

Not sure. No surprise there, but it’s 2012 and I’m sure both stores have a phone…

Good customer service would have seen the guy offer to phone another branch and see if they had my size in stock well before I thought to ask him to.

Excellent customer service would have been to suggest I have a coffee at the cafe next door while they had the shoes brought across town on a motorbike – they would have impressed with the service, achieved a sale and had me singing their praises to anyone who would listen (or read!). And a motorbike courier from Parkson on Le Thon Tan to the Saigon Centre would have cost less than one US dollar – to achieve a sale of a pair of shoes worth around $200!

Saigon is becoming home to more and more expats, not to mention the growing ranks of overseas educated Vietnamese returning home having been exposed to many different ways of the world. In years to come, consumers will be demanding higher and higher levels of customer service and retail execution.

The challenge for local operators will be to learn from abroad, improve their customer service offer, recruit better and train better. In doing so, perhaps retailing will become a more serious career option for many Vietnamese.

At the very least we should all be able to shop in stores without tripping over staff sitting on the floor eating their lunch!

Mar18

A late night kiss…

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A late night kiss…

One recent night, very late, I was walking through the city centre heading home when I came across an almost surreal sight.

Picture an empty intersection – no-one moving, not a single car or motorcycle (a rare event in itself in Saigon!). Empty but for two Vinasun Toyota taxi wagons locked in a late night kiss. It was eerily quiet and I felt like I’d walked onto a movie set. If I was in another continent, I’d have expected to see a tumbleweed rolling through the frame at any moment.

So here they were: two vehicles with mashed front quarters interlocked, neither having yielded to the other at the intersection, each calling the other’s bluff until it was too late for one to back down.

There was a small group of people standing in the shadows of an awning on one corner discussing the scene. I’m not sure if the two Vinasun drivers were amongst them: it’s possible they were unconscious. Not from the collision, which wasn’t really that serious, but from the punch-up locals tell me inevitably ensues when these highly competitive taxi drivers come to vehicular blows…
One could write a short book about taxis in Saigon. They have their good points and their bad.

On the bad side there are a lot of shark operators here, though their fleets are thankfully small compared to the good ones. These cowboys are probably the single biggest cause of tourist antagonism in the whole city – marginally ahead of complaints from those visitors who don’t understand that pedestrian crossings in Saigon have no common purpose with the identical looking ones back home…

On the good side taxis are incredibly cheap. Flagfall with the biggest operator – Vinasun – has just risen ‘sharply’ from 10,500 dong to 11,500. That’s 52 Australian cents in total. I forget the flagfall in New York, but in Sydney, the world’s seventh most expensive city in which to live, the standard rate is $3.50. That’s how much you pay just to climb in the cab. And the taxi operators are pleading to raise the prices further!

That said, to a Vietnamese person, taxis are expensive. Locals compare a 30,000 to 40,000 dong fare from my apartment in District 4 to downtown (five to 10 minutes depending on traffic) to a 4000 dong flat fare on an air conditioned bus, a ticket that takes you literally half way across the city. Again the conversion: A$1.36 to $1.81 verses 18 cents. No, that is not a typing error! 18 cents across town by bus! And they’re near-new air conditioned Hyundais (unlike half of Sydney’s 20-something year old rusting fleet).

But back to the late night kiss. The small group of witnesses and, one assumes, the two drivers, were waiting for the police to arrive. But the scene seemed so inevitable. It was an outcome I could not believe I had not seen earlier in my time here. Many times as a passenger in a taxi darting about the downtown District 1 I’ve marvelled at how taxis have missed other taxis. Or motorbikes. Or bicycles. Or pedestrians. Some drivers have respect for their passengers, other road users and the infinitely flexible road rules which apply here. But not all…

Others behave like reincarnated Kamikaze pilots determined to achieve their mission of getting their passenger from A to B with no regard for anyone else on the road or elsewhere.

In the most hair raising of many ‘moments’ in taxis here, one freshly qualified lunatic was in a race against another taxi approaching from the other direction, both turning into the same lane. Fair in the middle of said lane – on one of those strips of painted white lines – was a solitary pedestrian. Looking with rapidly widening eyes at these two taxi racers fighting for the patch of seal he was occupying.

In the end all three stopped. My taxi on the wrong side of the median strip blocking traffic coming in the opposite direction. The other taxi’s front bumper a bee’s-width from the pedestrian by now paralysed with fear. But the other taxi had won the right to be first in line for the lane when the whitened pedestrian cleared the way.

My taxi driver had not finished. He reversed back and raced off after the other taxi – which I recall was from the same company – tooting his horn and raising his fist then at the next intersection, then cutting him off while turning from Nguyen Hue onto Ton Duc Thang. More gesturing, tooting and general teenage-style aggression.

Soon our taxis took different paths, but my guy was by now well fired up. He cut off a motorcyclist he should have given way to on my right, whose handlebars nudged the taxi. He swore (I assume – I don’t know enough Vietnamese to be sure but his lips moved while he blasted his horn and struggled to stay upright.)

When we stopped at my apartment I nearly swore, but settled for a glare, well aware this guy had anger management issues and watches enough American movies to understand four letter words in English… He did not get a tip…

Of course not all taxi drivers are idiots like this. To drive a car in Ho Chi Minh you have to be a little aggressive otherwise you’d never get anywhere. But that does not mean you have to drive dangerously.

Another issue with taxis is their route knowledge. Ho Chi Minh is a large, spread out city and no-one expects every driver to know every street in every district. But that’s why God invented maps. And more recently the GPS.

Alas, taxis here come equipped with neither.

Every Vinasun Toyota wagon comes fitted with an LCD screen playing movie previews, advertisements, clips from a European ‘Candid Camera’ style show and other things to amuse passengers in the back. But not even the simplest of GPS device.

Last night I set off from home to a restaurant in District 6 to attend my cute niece’s first birthday party. I had the address on my iPhone in its very own Note page. The driver read it, nodded, smiled and off we went. (Thao was with me, so language was not a problem, this time). Eventually we get to D6 and pull over to the side of the road. So the driver can get out and ask directions, as the meter ran on.

He gets back in the car and Thao translates the good news: we’re just five minutes away.

Five minutes later we come to a stop. Not at the restaurant, but so the driver can again get out and ask directions… Turns out our destination was just around the corner.

Two nights earlier it took a consultation between three taxi drivers outside my apartment tower to work out how to get to a function venue hosting an Internations event, just outside D1 in D3. It was at the Ly Club on Nam Ky Khoi Nghia – one of the main routes from the airport to downtown. About three blocks from the popular Barbecue Garden restaurant. Hardly an obscure address.

So why did my driver then take me half way to the airport before eventually understanding my rapid gesturing urging him to do a U-turn and head back to the city. A trip that should have cost 50,000 dong had climbed to 136,000 on the meter. I handed him 100,000 to save an argument and he accepted, apologising as best he could.

One thing about Ho Chi Minh City… you learn not to take life too seriously.

For every lunatic taxi driver there is a pleasant, friendly one who tries to engage in conversation.

For every driver who can’t read a road map and fruitlessly tries to demonstrate navigational skills he lacks, there’s on who knows a shortcut I’d never have discovered (like the guy who circled Bitexco Tower this morning to get me right outside Saigon Centre without taking one  congested main street).

As for the late night kiss: Bent and buckled taxis are everywhere around Ho Chi Minh City. But the good thing is, the roads are so congested that if I am ever a passenger in a taxi involved in such an accident, it’s unlikely I’ll be injured. Because even the lunatic racing his colleague wasn’t driving fast enough to cause any real damage – except to the hapless pedestrian of course…

Mar3

Motorcycle Diaries Pt 2

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Motorcycle Diaries Pt 2

Taxis in Ho Chi Minh are very cheap and efficient.

Provided the driver understands where you are going – never a given here even if you show them a name card of the establishment – you can guarantee getting there in one piece in air conditioned comfort.

But what fun is there in that?!

Which is why I’ve started to use motorcycle taxis more and more frequently…

Unlike Bangkok where motorcycle taxis are an official, organised method of public transport and the drivers wear a uniform of sorts and run rosters on the street corners on which they congregate playing cards or board games between fares, it’s all a lot less formal here.

Actually, there is no formality whatsoever.

If you’re new to the city and off the main tourist strips, you may not even notice their existence until one greets you with a smile and mimes holding handle bars. The best way to spot them, is to look out for a guy reclining on his bike with his feet up browsing a newspaper or dozing; the telltale sign he might be a taxi driver is the presence of two helmets hanging from the bike rather than one.

Or he might be staring into his motorcycle’s mirror picking detritus from between his teeth (Isn’t it curious how men will stare into mirrors picking their teeth and women will stare into mirrors searching for blackheads…?)

Waiting for customers

As the weeks passed after my arrival in Ho Chi Minh and I got more confident about knowing where I was headed I started using motorcycle taxis more and more. They’re not really any cheaper than taxis and the quality of some of the bikes is – to put it politely – mediocre. But the majority of the drivers seem well seasoned to the challenges of negotiating Ho Chi Minh’s manic traffic and the seeming absence of any order or road rules.

In other words they’re old.

One regular driver I use – who now greets me like a long lost friend and shakes my hand smiling broadly before passing me a helmet – has only one eye. Yes, folks, I brave the chaos of Ho Chi Minh’s streets on the back of a bike driven by an old man with one eye. But I assure you it’s a very functional eye and this guy is no slouch – I swear I have been on bikes overtaken by others at a rate in excess of one a second and wondering if everyone else around me will have got to their destination, run their errands and returned home again before the smooth warmth of a hot Latte touch my lips!

One day, One Eye was nowhere to be seen so I continued another 20 metres down Ton Dan St to the corner where another driver was dozing. A friend sipping green tea and watching the world go by barked a wake-up call and the driver leapt to his feet and proffered a helmet.

I negotiated the price as usual. This is always essential before climbing on the back… foreigners are traditionally charged far more than locals, which is not really a problem when you’re talking of a fare difference calculated in one dollar if not mere cents, but it’s best to save that extra dollar up front, even if only to protect your fellow expatriates by setting new fare thresholds.

A trip to the city is usually 30,000 dong (about $2.30). Most drivers who don’t know you will start at 50,000, some are even braver (especially in the notorious backpacker district of Pham Ngu Lao; on a visit a year ago I foolishly agreed to 100,000 to travel from one bar to another, which turned out to be a distance of about one kilometre – you can get to the airport for less on a good day in an air conditioned taxi. But after half a bottle of red and a couple of beers $4.50 seems perfectly reasonable…)

Anyway, back to the corner of Ton Dan. I climbed on the back and off we went. Figuratively speaking. This guy’s motorcycle was as sleepy as its driver. One block down the street we slowed to a stop and he turns into a service station. We need petrol. I climb off and wait while 50,000 dong of fuel is poured into the tank – about two litres.

Back on and alas the extra fuel has made no difference to the motorbike’s performance. We struggle along, slowing even more when we come to the bridge over the canal splitting District 4 from District 1 and downtown. For a moment, I feared I might have to climb off and help push!

Downhill was marginally better and the momentum seemed to last until we reached a trio of xich lo drivers waiting by the riverside to dupe foreign tourists into an expensive circuit of the CBD. When we stopped dead. Now what?

Turns out the stop was intentional. My driver had no idea where I wanted to go! Vincom Centre is pronounced the same in English as in Vietnamese but this guy had never heard of the CBD’s largest shopping centre. After much waving of arms, slow phonetic pronunciations, spirited debates and a mysterious exchange of cigarettes and dong we were back on our way.

Thank god these guys aren’t on a meter!

Downtown motorcycle taxi drivers are another breed altogether. These guys – and the occasional women – are far craftier, but their mission seems more intent on extracting money from foreigners and commissions from various not-so-legal entities they carry business to.

When I first arrived I found them very aggressive. Every time you walked down the street someone was calling out “Sir, sir? Where you go? What you looking for?”. If that failed to draw a response the next line was always “You want lady?”. “Massage. Boom boom. Young lady. Very good. I know good place. I take you.”

It was a while before I learned a very simple way of sending them packing. At first I tried shaking my head, smiling in embarrassment. Or just smiling. Then I tired a loud “no thank you”, later “No, no.” Nothing seemed to work. These guys are thick skinned and they don’t derive an income from taking no for an answer.

One woman drive I have met a couple of times is no different. One afternoon in broad daylight she called to me: “Motorcycle?”.

I smiled politely. “No thanks.”

“Massage?”

Then one day I came up with the most effective response of all. Born by sheer accident, or perhaps frustration: “No thanks. I live here. Not tourist.”

It was as if I’d sprayed an aerosol which instantly incapacitated vocal chords! He simply vanished. Like the beautiful woman standing outside restaurants here encouraging you inside who vanish the moment you walk through the entrance.

So there’s the trick folks! If the motorcycle taxi drivers of downtown won’t leave you alone, tell them you’re local.

Just one of the many benefits of being a local in Asia’s most fascinating city!

Footnote: Apologies for the slow posting of late – blame it on a lingering dose of flu, overwhelming amount of work and four days in Bangkok. More to come soon, including Part 3 of Motorcycle Diaries….

Feb12

How to dress like a feather duster…

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How to dress like a feather duster…

I find fashion fascinating.

It’s part of the enjoyment of my weekday life, which is researching and writing about retailing (the part on my online activity that pays the bills and yet still motivates me every day). I enjoy observing the twists and turns of popular apparel fashion as trends finding their way from the often absurd you see on the catwalks on FTV to the every day executions in a store window…

But a few weeks back I was gobsmacked by a display in the window of a fashion store several floors up in the sparkling new Crescent shopping mall in District 7…

The best way to describe it would be the Feather Duster Effect. Yes, women of Ho Chi Minh, it’s now possible to dress like a feather duster!

As the photos show, you can choose the colour. We all know feather dusters aren’t made of brown bird feathers anymore… instead they come in a rainbow of bright coloured synthetic materials… much like these ridiculous dresses in the photos.

I can’t tell you if these alarmingly eye-catching threads are still in the window. If they’re not, it’s hard to imagine where in the world they are now… presumably gathering dust on the racks of a fancy dress hire shop, or maybe en route to Sydney to be worn by an adventurous, attention-seeking, cross dresser in the city’s annual Mardi Gras Parade. (A quick diversion: This is one of a collection of photos I have taken in past Mardi Gras; the event is a photographer’s dream. More here but viewer discretion advised!).

Sydney Mardi Gras 2010 0453

Anyway, neither my fashion-aware female friend who witnessed this horror or I can imagine how one would dress in this (although she did volunteer to do my makeup and lend me her high heels if I was game to try – I passed on that opportunity!).

Let alone where you’d wear it, (other than the Mardi Gras of course).

Anyway, it’s all part of the fun of window shopping.

More on The Crescent in due course, but meanwhile, I’m off to dust the apartment….

Feb5

The taste of Red Velvet

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The taste of Red Velvet
Confession time: before moving to Ho Chi Minh City I used to consider cupcakes the most over rated, boring food fad of all time.

Mouthwatering, no? Wait til you taste it!

I could never understand why cupcake shops were sprouting up all over downtown Sydney and its better-heeled suburbs. Frozen yoghurt I got, macarons, (a more recent craze) I loved. But cupcakes, in my view were destined to be the shortest-lived foodie craze of all time.

Until, as I said, I arrived in Vietnam.

In than a dozen visits to Ho Chi Minh’s best coffee shop L’usine  I got used to watching customers of all ethnicities oohing and aahing over the colourful cupcake collection at the counter trying to make up their mind which one to try. Then loudly exclaiming for every other diner’s benefit how delicious they were (I now know the word ‘yum’ in at least three different languages!).

It took very little persuasion to enlist my sweet toothed friend Thao to put one to the taste test with our flat whites (yes, any Aussies or Kiwis reading this – L’usine serves a flat white as good as any you’d find back home).

Thao chose a Double Chocolate. I was bemused by one called Red Velvet. This turned out to be the most aptly named food of all time because inside it was red and it had a texture of velvet. Soft velvet which melts on your tongue – just like every other flavour available as I have since discovered for your benefit through extensive research (it’s OK, readers, you deserve it!).

My frequent mid-morning workspace...

L’usine’s cupcakes come from a local business Cupcakes by Sweet and Sour whose owner and founder Barbie has a bakery in An Phu where the majority of her daily production run is sold. (Address: Thao Dien D2. Ava Residences. 40/4 Nguyen Van Huong; Open from 10am-6pm.)

A website is coming soon, she tells me, but for the meantime, there’s a great Facebook page with lots of photos and news about special recipes (there’s even a Barbie flavour cupcake).

Having tried Sweet and Sour’s cupcakes at L’usine I now know I got cupcakes all wrong: or rather I must previously have tried all the wrong ones (one delicious cupcake home-cooked by a Sydney colleague being an exception).

The Barbie (Image from Cupcakes by Sweet and Sour Facebook page).

It can’t be that hard to make a cupcake look delicious with colourful toppings, iced decorations and patterned paper wrappers. It’s a lot harder to make it light and airy – fluffy even – in texture, yet tasty and fulfilling. In my past experience it was impossible to achieve all three at once – until Barbie proved me wrong.
After my conversion to Cupcake worshipper I have been through most of Sweet and Sour’s flavours. Red Velvet remains my favourite, but Strawberry Velvet, Vanilla, Lemon Drops and Double Chocolate (very rich; guaranteed to delight any chocoholic) all come very close, depending on the mood of the day. And they cost – at L’usine – just 50,000 dong each (which translates today to A$2.20).

Presentation is everything with cupcakes and Sweet and Sour offers cute boxes for four for those who want to take them away to share with friends or colleagues – or present as a gift. Choose four brightly-iced cupcakes and when boxed it’s like looking into a kaleidoscope.

Barbie has a core list of mainstream flavours, to which other limited editions are added form time to time. The other mainstream varieties are Classic Carrot, Black and White, Caramel Bombs, Choco Coco, Classic Birthday and Roasted Banana.

More are under development she tells me.

Anyway, that’s all for now. I’m off for a flat white.

And the taste of Red Velvet…

Footnote: Finding L’usine can be a challenge for newcomers to Ho Chi Minh City – it’s not uncommon to see bemused tourists holding travel guides scratching their heads! The easiest way: Find the Caravelle Hotel. From the side entrance to the Caravelle (the one through its shopping arcade) take the pedestrian crossing across Dong Khoi St and turn left. After about 20 metres you’ll come to an alleyway full of paintings, a sort of artist’s market. Walk through until you reach the motorcycle parking. If you look above, you’ll see a big sign not visible from the street pointing you to your right. Follow the sign, climb the stairs and walk along the balcony until you smell the fresh coffee!


Jan22

Torture chamber or fitness lounge?

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One of the down sides of living in Ho Chi Minh – or pretty much anywhere in southeast Asia for that matter – is the lack of opportunity for walking.

It’s not that there is nowhere to walk to, it’s just that the humidity is such that when you arrive where you’re walking to, everyone assumes you’ve swum there.

So where I might easily have walked up to an hour a day in Sydney, usually in the cool of the evening to and from the city for dinner, walking here is usually restricted to roaming around air conditioned shopping malls or a short venture to local shophouses for freshly baked French sticks or dragon fruit.

The end result is an unfortunate contraction of Saigon Swell… best described as a rapidly enlarging belly for which in a city full of delicious food, cheap beer and other readily available diet-stretching indulgences there seems little panacea but for more exercise.

That’s how I ended up at the counter of a brand new gym, splurging a whole 3.5 million lucre on a three month all inclusive membership (it’s the only type they sell). Don’t panic, that’s exactly AU$160.43 plus point one of a cent, according to that day’s cross rate. (Mathematical skills, iPhones or pocket calculators are essential here where one Aussie dollar buys you a whole 21,816 dong which, incidentally, is enough to buy a cold Tiger at Happy Hour at a local establishment, or gives you change for two HD quality digitally copied Hollywood movies in the downtown tourist shops…)

For those who know me well, I have a reputation for regarding gyms as one of the free market’s most bizarre inventions: a large building where people can go and strap themselves into sophisticated torture devices and pretend they enjoy stretching, compressing, bending and bruising almost every part of their anatomy. And yet rendition is a crime (Oh of course, that’s not voluntary; right…).

Anyway, rest assured there will be no such torture devices wrapped around me – my intention was purely to find an air conditioned location to walk, cycle or run with a subsequent shower close by rather than be seen with large dark patches all over my shirt…

California Fitness & Yoga opened shortly before Christmas in a converted waterfront warehouse two blocks from my apartment. Which means every piece of equipment from the torture devices and treadmills to the shower booths and kit lockers is brand spanking new. Some of the machines have barely been unwrapped.

Noting the number of expats working on the site and expecting the same sort of hard sell techniques employed by Australian gyms, I made it clear I was only looking to use cardio equipment (in layman’s terms – stationery cycles and running/walking machines) but the manager, Ryan from Seattle, whose bulging muscles made him look a little like a young Arnie Schwarzenegger, gave me a tour of the place nevertheless. Did I say place? I should have said Palace.

This palace is half gym, half lounge bar. Besides the rows of gleaming machines waiting to torture the excess fat off your belly there are gleaming glass-walled studios for yoga classes or pilates – even a pole dancing room with rows of shiny vertical pipes.

“Are you into pole dancing?,” asks Ryan. I must look bemused. Seriously, how is an average male supposed to answer a question like that, when asked by another male? He changes the topic to kick boxing…

Near this room is a lounge. Yes, a lounge, complete with paisley prints on the wall, comfy sofas and coffee tables. All that seems to be missing is the chiller filled with racks of Champagne.

Downstairs, however, there IS a bar. A juice bar. Where a couple of jaded expats are perched, seemingly in recovery mode. No espresso I am assuming. And no vodka shots to blend with the cranberry juice but, hey, this IS a gym I remind myself. It just feels like something far more relaxing…

Back upstairs Ryan shows me the sophisticated screens on the stationary cycles. This is where it can actually be fun! If you speak Vietnamese there’s a dozen local TV channels to select from. If not, you can surf the internet, watch videos on YouTube, play Soduku or other puzzle games, or plug your iPod or USB device in and listen to or watch whatever you like. At any time you can pause and check the distance you’ve cycled, the number of calories burned off and your top speed. Even check your heart rate.

I truly am impressed – very much a first for a gym visit.

Two bikes along from where Ryan is demonstrating all this to me a cute young local girl wrapped in impossibly tight pink Lycra is setting a cracking pace on a reclining exercycle. She smiles at me and for a moment I feel much better about my flabby physique. Until the sudden realisation it’s a smile of sympathy… I suck my breath in, fruitlessly trying to hide the Saigon Swell, but the millisecond long window of opportunity to impress has long since closed.

So that’s how I discovered a gym and came to part with a whole 3.5 million dong.

As gyms go this is far from ordinary and who knows, it may just make for a more comfortable means of toning up a little.

Meanwhile, I have this nagging feeling the gym bunny in the pink Lycra might just be part of a carefully plotted conspiracy to get us expat guys to commit to memberships…