When I first came through Vietnam in June 2008, just after being politely bounced from Japan, I knew I had a friend here, sort of. Two friends, actually – brothers named Steve and Ken Mueller. The Mueller boys had gone to Bishop England High School just a couple of years ahead of me, though I hadn’t really known them then, as it was an unwritten but strictly enforced law at my high school that one could not speak to or acknowledge anyone in any grade below than you, upon pain of the worst kinds of adolescent punishment. (Paradoxically, having a friend in the grades above you was the ultimate coup, made fiendishly difficult by the former rule and often rendered pointless once achieved, due to the fact that your new friend had become, by dint of his willingness to speak to you, a leprous pariah of no use to you or anyone else.)

Steve and Ken had both attended Clemson University slightly ahead of me as well, but I hadn’t really known them there, either, as we’d effectively exchanged one set of rules for another, the new ones being even more rigid and unforgiving – that of the university Greek system. Younger and older were now okay, but fraternizing, as it were, with people not in the frat resulted in a kind of living death – imprisoned in a friendless purgatory, scorned by the ‘brotherhood,’ shunned by the non-Greek population for being in a loathed fraternity.

In any event, I’d managed to keep up with the Muller brothers by proxy in the years after university, and so I knew they’d both left the U.S. shortly after graduating and had been living in Vietnam for some time. It seemed like a good idea to look them up as I was traveling through Vietnam, as I knew nobody else this side of the Korean peninsula, and after attending my friend Andrew’s wedding in Bali two months hence, I would once again be jobless, homeless and without a plan. It felt like a good time to look up dear old friends.

Almost two years later, I’m in business with Steve Mueller. Turns out he’d been living in Ho Chi Minh City for ten years, had a Vietnamese wife and a son, owned several successful businesses including a popular cafe in Pham Ngu Lao ward, and was just about as happy as a pig in shit. One of these businesses, though now winding down, was keeping up with orders for restored vintage Vespa scooters, which he sold and shipped all over the world. (See more on that story here.) The gig was slowing down when I arrived because, in the ten years since he’d begun, other folks had got wind of the international demand for restored vintage Vespas, and restorable bikes had become much harder to find in Vietnam, though labor was still inexpensive.

The result was that when I met up with him on my swing through Saigon in June 2008, Steve was trying to repurpose his Vespa business into a high-end tour company offering guided trips through southern Vietnam’s coastal nether reaches on vintage Vespa scooters. All he needed was a partner to handle sales and marketing. The rest, you can figure out yourself.

Last week, Vietnam Vespa Adventures had our biggest week of business yet – a group of ten young Australians and an American contractor working in Iraq. The tour: three days on the coastal road from Ho Chi Minh City to Vung Tau (via hydrofoil ferry) and then onwards to the the tiny fishing village-slash-local resort town of Mui Ne. Including the Vespa Adventures team we took along (myself, Steve and his wife, Phuong, tour chief Josh Baker and friend Kurt , plus a road crew of three, a driver for the support van, and various other miscellaneous groupies and hangers-on), we had a convoy of nearly 20 people. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the great fortune to ride a classic 1968 Vespa Sport along the Gulf of Thailand, eating authentic local cuisine, staying in three- and four-star resorts, driving through the countryside of a developing nation where life is almost as simple and pure as it was 100 or 1,000 years ago, but I highly recommend it. Fortunately, I now get paid to do so.

Next week, it’s our eight-day tour to Nha Trang. I won’t be able to make the whole thing (classes at RMIT resumed this week), but I’ll hook up with the team in the old French hill town of Dalat on March 6 and join them for the downhill run to the coast. Come to Vietnam some time and join us. I’ll make sure you get a dear-old-friend discount.

The Vespas outside the ferry terminal at Vung Tau, where we orient our guests on how not to die immediately on the roads in Vietnam

The 'adventure' part starts for many with learning to ride the scooters

First stop: Long Hai hills and memorial pagoda, followed by lunch à la campagne

With the Gulf of Thailand mere meters away, it's almost possible to forget about your aching bottom

Not all those we share the road with are lucky enough to be followed by a support van

Nothing amuses the local residents in the countryside more than white people riding 40-year-old motorbikes with expensive new cameras

Workplaces here are still catching up to bleeding-edge technology like the internal combustion engine

Sometimes there ends up being just as much traffic in the country as there is in the city

The fragrance of low tide and dead fish recognizes no national borders

Mom, if you're wondering how I took this photo, you don't want to know

In Italy, all roads lead to Rome. In Vietnam, they generally just peter out and die

Sure, it's hard, grueling, thankless work, but somebody's gotta do it

Ever since moving to Asia on an impulse two and a half years ago, I’ve been donning and alternately shedding personal identities like a character out of a bad espionage thriller. Except that my character has been more Austin Powers than Ethan Hunt. There was the indefinitely jobless layabout expat tourist in Japan, followed by the itinerant English tutor and, after that, unwitting illegal immigrant. I’ve spent three months as an unbathed, shaggy-haired (well, you know what I mean) bead-wearing backpacker hoofing it through a succession of smelly hostels and guesthouses Southeast Asia. Most recently, I’ve played the part of international university lecturer, where I’ve successfully conned Australian communications academics that I’m qualified to teach young Vietnamese students how to be professional communicators. But I have still another identity, a secret double life I’ve been living for almost a year and a half – that of international tour company owner and operator. It’s a far cry from newspaper editor, although the pay is about on a level and I’ll admit the view out the office window is an improvement.

More on my company Vietnam Vespa Adventures later. I’m just back from a three-day road trip up the coast to Mui Ne with 11 guests – a young, hard-drinking Aussie bunch – and my body is insisting on a long weekend of intensive care and recovery from the combined effects of overdrinking, overeating, sunburn, and acute rider’s butt before I resume classes on Monday. For the remainder of the weekend, I’ll don the identity of quietly moaning couch potato.

They love their mannekins in Vietnam. They’re a must-have accessory for every clothing outlet of any kind, no matter how small, how hidden, or how execrable the pirated Chinese-made reproductions they’re pushing. And for reasons known perhaps only to the world’s mannekin-makers, every single one of them presents a prototypical Western physique to the world. There are no Asian features of any kind to be seen in the mannekins of Vietnam. For me this begs the question: are there no Asian mannekins anywhere in Asia? In all my travels in this fair land, I’ve yet to see one. They’re all white, caucasian, often blue-eyed, tall and seemingly caught in mid-speech, articulating something in what’s clearly a non-tonal language: “Real? Real?? What do you mean by ‘real’?”

It’s rather difficult to believe, but it’s been almost exactly one year since I left Japan and became an itinerant in Asia. That number, you may recall, has special significance for me.

It was 11 and a half months ago that the congenitally polite officials of Japan’s Immigration Office took offense at the length of my undocumented stay in their country (“incorrectly documented” is really more accurate) and invited me to take a one-year holiday somewhere – anywhere in the world, really, as long as it was outside the bit of squiggly lines on the map within which lies the word “Japan.” It was an invitation there was no declining. And so on June 5 of last year, I left my first Asian home with slightly less luggage than I’d arrived with, no plan to speak of, even less of an employment strategy, a well-worn-in pair of relatively new hiking boots, and a global recession to welcome me.

It’s been an interesting year. If you’d suggested at that time that in June 2009 I’d be living in Saigon and teaching communications theory at an Australian university to rich Vietnamese kids, I may not have laughed directly at you, but I’d have probably wondered why you were drunk at 8:15 in the morning.

My second semester as a slightly surprised university lecturer ends Friday. My third begins in roughly two and a half weeks. In-between lies the date on which my temporary banishment from the wealthiest, most industrialized, most stylishly eccentric and necessarily vain nation in all Asia ends. My persona non grata status will lose two Latinate suffixes. I will instantly transform from a prodigal son to a where-have-you-been-all-this-time one. The thuggish brutes at the entrance will lift the red velvet rope for me, intone to one another, “He’s on the list,” and usher me into the bright lights and blinking neon fantasy world of modern Japan.

If all goes as planned, I’ll arrive in Osaka International Airport via Malaysia Airlines on Saturday morning at 7:15am – exactly 365 days after leaving. To say I’m looking forward to returning is an understatement on the order of “Sex with that girl from Slumdog Millionaire might not be too bad.” Osaka’s not the prettiest city on earth, but compared to Saigon it’s Shangri La, Xanadu, Neverland and Utopia all rolled into one mouth-watering makizushi. And Kyoto is in point of fact the prettiest city on earth, or at least one of them. Plus, unlike Vietnam, Japan has the benefit of being home to a civilization that’s actually advanced beyond the Iron Age. That’s not necessarily a crack on the Vietnamese people (after all, men pee on the side of the road in both places). But it’ll be nice to spend a little time in a place where the tap water won’t poison you.

Ho Chi Minh City Bus Kills 3 on Motorbike

A public bus ran over a motorbike in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 8 Thursday morning, killing a man, his daughter and his nephew on the bike.

Hoang Binh Duong, 44, was driving his daughter Hoang Truc Phuong and his nephew Pham Hoang Sang to school.

The bus, which had sped down the Nhi Thien Duong Bridge, crashed into the motorbike, dragged the driver and his two passengers for 20 meters and the motorbike for a further 50 meters before stopping.”

About three months ago, I bought a bicycle in Saigon. Until then, I’d been renting a dinky 125cc Honda motorbike from one of the cafes in the District 1 backpacker ghetto known as Pham Ngu Lau, for which I paid about $65 a month. The day after I bought the bicycle, I returned the motorbike to the cafe and walked away without looking back.

This I did for a variety of reasons. I’d recently moved beyond the tourist-choked streets of District 1 across the river to a newer neighborhood in the trendy part of District 7 known as Saigon South. (Please understand that when I say “trendy,” I mean only that the Vietnamese men urinating on the side of the road here make a token effort to hide their peckers, and being stopped by the police and getting shaken down for a bribe is marginally less common.) Out here, the streets are wider, the traffic less menacing, the chances of death by moving vehicle exponentially less immediate. I even found a cozy two-bedroom loft apartment just 2km from the university where I work.

I’d also noticed a worrisome trend in my waist size since leaving Japan. I reckoned this was due partly to recent changes in my diet – fried spring rolls and buttery baguettes instead of sushi every day. But mostly I thought it was because my motorbike was turning me into a walking twinkie.

In Japan, there was nowhere to which I couldn’t either a) walk, b) ride my bicycle, or c) catch a train. Sometimes I did all three; the bicycle I owned there was a smart little three-geared folding number that I often took on the train with me, doubled over on itself like a Hindi contortionist. If I got tired of riding, I could flip down the kickstand and leave it anywhere I liked, unlocked even, and return later secure in the knowledge that it would remain untouched, safe as a sleeping cow in a Mumbai market.

Trains in Vietnam do exist, but they run only between the bigger cities, and riding on one is like sawing off your own leg: slow, uncomfortable, and usually traumatic. Walking to your destination is similarly pointless. The interesting things are just too far apart here, and the hazards to life and limb too great. People look at you with a mixture of pity, perplexity, and amusement; even the locals know not to walk anywhere. Why should they, when they can hop on one of 100,000 or so idling Xe Oms and catch a harrrowing motorbike ride across the city for less than $2? Nor is there any tranquility to be had in walking anyway; traffic is an assault on the senses, and you can’t move ten meters without being propositioned by one of those 100,000 Xe Om drivers, who take the idea of a person walking – particularly a foreigner – as a personal slap in the face.

In Saigon, the only public transportation options are rust-rotten buses that run on no schedule whatsoever, and taxis. Taxis take at least triple the time to get where you’re going as driving a motorbike does, because cars are limited to driving in the leftmost of two lanes. Cars are also outnumbered by motorbikes by about 20 to 1, and the motorcyclists feel no compunction at all about driving in whichever lane suits them at that split second – or on the sidewalk, or down the wrong side of the road into oncoming traffic, if its convenient, which it often is. A precise description is elusive, but imagine if you beat an anthill into dust with a shovel, then sent a remotely controlled toy car through the teeming ruins – and tried to do so without running over any ants. The result would look a lot like your typical Saigon street.

Motorbike riders here also have a breathtaking sense of entitlement to the road. Not just as a group, but individually, too. For example, there’s nothing a Vietnamese motorbike driver hates more than having to apply his brakes. It’s a psychological admission of defeat, a yielding of space and primacy that’s to be avoided at all costs. Case in point: riders emerging from a side street onto a busy highway never, ever stop and look into oncoming traffic before plowing into the stream. Instead they make a very specific point of neither pausing nor looking. It look me a long time to understand this seemingly suicidal behavior. Entire families of four would suddenly appear out of nowhere on a rattling pile of scrap metal atop two wheels, emerging from a parking lot or alleyway without so much as a glance to see who, or what, might be about to run them over – me, in this case. I’d swerve at the last instant, avoiding four counts of manslaughter by mere centimeters, cursing and gasping at the driver’s stupidity.

Only after some months did I realize this is not stupidity (or not stupidity alone) but strategy. Think about it. If, as a driver, you refuse to look at and acknowledge oncoming traffic, then the oncoming drivers will notice this, as they can’t help seeing what’s in front of them. This places the responsibility for avoiding a collision upon the only party who sees that a collision is iminent, and lets the wilfully blind driver scoot into traffic while the traffic flows around and absorbes him. It’s still insane, of course. But there’s a demented sort of logic behind it that can’t be argued with. If only a few individuals drove this way, fatalities would be through the roof. But it’s a system-wide strategy that everyone understands and uses. (This epiphany also helped me to understand one other thing about Vietnam driving codes: The reason the tumult of horns here never ceases is because horns are what Vietnamese people use instead of brakes. Suddenly it all made perfect sense.)

In other countries, parents teach their children to stop and look both ways before crossing. Here, parents teach their children that they mustn’t stop or look under any circumstances. Because then you’ll never get across.

What with all this, I found myself feeling nostalgic for the old days of bicycling to work every day. I pictured myself gliding into the parking area, the wind ruffling what remains of my hair, calves bulging beneath my work slacks, attractive female colleagues turning their heads to watch in slow motion.

What I failed to take into account was that a) it’s a lot easier to justify bicycling to work when it’s the only option, and b) it’s a hell of a lot hotter in Vietnam than it is in Japan.

I bought my bicycle at a little corner shop in District 1. My girlfriend Malo and I have a sneaky strategy we use when I need to buy anything significant in Vietnam. Knowing that, as a foreigner, the price I’ll be quoted is anywhere from twice to five times what a Vietnamese person will pay for the same item, we let her do the bargaining. But just letting her do the talking isn’t enough; the seller will see that she’s with a foreigner, and the price will be just as outrageous as if I’d asked myself. Bargaining under these circumstances is pointless, as Malo will be told it’s her duty as a patroit and a human being to help the seller ensure that I part with as much of my money as can be managed. For a local to try and lowball a fellow Vietnamese person on behalf of a foreigner is the lowest form of treachery.

Fortunately, Malo doesn’t buy into this notion. (Partly this is because she’s from Hanoi, where contempt for South Vietnam is about the same as you’d find among New Yorkers for residents of Mississippi.) So what we do is first identify an item of the sort I want to buy. Then she moves off to find a seller who hasn’t seen us together. Sometimes, after she’s asked for a price and gotten a reply that’s in the Vietnamese ballpark, I’ll sidle up to see how things are going. This usually results in a very pissed off merchant – doubly so if Malo has managed to haggle him or her down from the original asking price, which every sale involves. Sometimes, in order to avoid being cursed and accused of betraying the spirit of Uncle Ho and the entire communist way, Malo will complete the whole transaction without me. I prefer to avoid this, because too many times I’ve been burned by discovering afterward that my idea of what I wanted and her idea of it were not as close as I thought they were.

My bicycle cost me a little more than it might have, because of this – about $175. But a bicycle is something you want to be sure you’re comfortable with. (Still, I paid a lot less than the Australian guy who bought the same bike while we were there.) It’s got 21 gears, which is about 18 more than I need here, the flattest country this side of Ohio.

It’s just a ten-minute ride from my apartment into work. I arrive with the breeze in my exhaust-fumigated hair, calves bulging invisibly under chain-grease-stained slacks, dripping sweat through my work shirt. My female colleagues all turn their heads to watch, and it is with a mixture of pity, perplexity, and amusement.

I know, I know: I seem to have fallen off the map lately; my star has plunged from whatever very modest heights of the blogosphere it had previously achieved. For a week now, visitors to this space have been greeted with only a photo of a winking, leering Bible-thumping, bile-spewing, oil-drunk right-wing demagogue (for which I deeply apologize). But it’s been an especially busy week.

As some of you may know, I’ve recently returned to the ranks of the full-time gainfully employed. As of October 6, I am a Professor of Communications at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Vietnam. Better known here and in Australia as RMIT (not to be confused with plain old MIT), it’s sort of a training ground for the new breed of Vietnamese: an English-only campus of a Melbourne-based university offering degrees in business and accounting, multimedia and graphic design, IT, commerce, and – with the new term beginning Monday – in Professional Communication.

Enter yours truly, who has been tasked with teaching a course called “Visual Language” to fresh-faced hopeful future communicators. It’s a basic course in visual literacy, offering an overview of the way people use images and non-verbal visual narrative to convey meaning in art, film, graphic design, consumer messages, and marketing. Basically, it’s an entire class dedicated to the premise that a picture is worth a thousand words.

How the very smart head of the department got the idea I was qualified to teach this class is somewhat mystifying. Desperation comes to mind. I may also have had some part in it during our interviews. But teaching it I am, and I’ve been submerged up to my eyebrows for the past two weeks in terribly academic-sounding subjects like sight and visual processing, symbolism and semiotics, narrative and expression, spacial organization, aesthetics, propaganda theory, and phenomenology.

It’s also been a crash course in learning how to read and write in British English, in which organisation and utilise are spelled with an S, not a Z (that’s a “zed,” by the way), and colour, flavour, and centre are all words whose relation to modern life appears tenuous, as they all seem to have been lifted directly from The Canterbury Tales or Love’s Labors Lost.

Until last week, my days in Saigon were mainly occupied with drooling onto my new laptop (which has now been stolen, but more on that miserable tragedy later), drinking coffee, and tutoring English three hours each evening at a small private school.

A week and a half ago, however, I was chucked headfirst into the boot-camp-style orientation for new instructors here known as “induction,” a word that can only derive from the way it “induces” ulcers and paroxisms of anxiety about being unprepared to teach your course because of all the time you spend in it. From 9am until 4pm each day, I’m subjected to a barrage of workshops and seminars on HR policy and procedures, IT training, library database searching, work permits, health insurance (Oh, Joy), counseling services, lesson planning, building Powerpoint presentations, measuring student learning, and time management.

It’s a long way from journalism. Though I have found one common area of overlap: the preoccupation with plagiarism in the academic world is at least as obsessive as it is in the world of publishing. (Did you know they have software that can spot plagiarized material? I’m assuming for the moment that those students whose beer money comes from a busy schedule of report writing on commission, as mine did in college, remain safe.)

It’s also a different life from the one I’ve been leading for the past 15 months. I’m now working roughly 12 hours a day. I have an office, a salary, a boss, a passel of health benefits, a legion of wildly international colleagues, and a purpose.

Colour me satisfied.