Tag Archives: Ho Chi Minh City

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…

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….