Man and Ultraman

It’s been a couple of weeks since I poked my head in this door, but to be fair, I’ve hardly been growing mold on the sofa. Last weekend I was, once again, exploring the pitted highways and byways of southern Vietnam by Vespa scooter, this time up into the modest mountain landscapes of the Central Highlands surrounding the old French hill-town of Dalat, and then down through an endless succession of hairpins and spiraling turns into rice field-packed plains and the oceanside retreat known as Nha Trang.

I flew into Dalat Saturday evening to join up with another of our Vietnam Vespa tour groups, this time a crew of seven who were doing the full Vespa Adventure — seven days worth of scootering from HCMC to Nha Trang. By the time I met up with them around dinnertime, they’d already been riding for three and a half days, having traded the the pang of sea salt and drying fish for the fragrance of fir needles and wood smoke the day before, with the drive up into the highlands from the coast and Mui Ne’s famous white sand dunes. We spent the evening on the outskirts of Dalat, inside one of the traditional wooden longhouses common to the Lat ethnic minority. One of 50-plus such minorities within Vietnam, the Lat can hardly be called Vietnamese; they speak a different language entirely (their Vietnamese language skills are almost nonexistent) and their dress and culture calls to mind Indonesia or French Polynesia more than Vietnam. The evening began with a judicious application of home-distilled rice whiskey, served with two long straws in a pottery jug, which — it became clear afterward — is meant to help visitors loosen up for the singing and dancing that was to come.

The views on the road down to Nha Trang the next day, as always, were spectacular — even along the 20km stretch of mountainside road that’s being resurfaced between Dalat and Nha Trang. The result was a ride that seemed to shake our teeth loose and rearrange our innards permanently. The orange dust of the unsurfaced road covered everything for meters on either side: trees, houses, motorbikes, barnyard animals, sleeping dogs and people. Massive orange clouds billowed up at the touch of a wheel, obscuring the roadway and anything on it in a fog of ochre-colored powder. Visible in glimpses beyong the orange-tinted world of the road was the river, sidling along through hills and forest below and to the left, its lure a song that could not be heard, only imagined. When we finally reached the end of the dirt path, we asked for directions to the nearest swimming hole from a local and plunged as a group into the rishing water beneath a decrepit bridge, some in shorts, some in their undergarments, others wearing considerably less.

An evening in a traditional longhouse with Lat ethnic minority villagers -- from whom Dalat takes its name -- seems more Indonesian than Vietnamese

The group gets an early start the next morning for the downhill run to Nha Trang

The scenery opens up right away

For local shepherds, the mountain roads serve as handy cattle trails

Brunch must be observed, even if it's just for a cool glass of iced tea and a chance to sponge off two hours worth of road grit

Not all of the road down to Nha Trang is paved in the strictest sense of the word

Always leave time for a spontaneous dip in the river (swim trunks optional)

You've got to get out of the city to see views like this.

How does one measure horsepower in a cow?

Nha Trang at last

The beachfront at the Sailing Club, just a few meters walk from Louisiane Restaurant and Brewery

Ancient Cham empire ruins lie just across the bay at Nha Trang

Somehow I managed to miss it last weekend in all the hubbub of our 20-person Vespa convoy to Mui Ne, but The New York Times on Sunday ran an article about Vietnam that made no mention at all of 1) the war, 2) communism, 3) rice fields or 4) the galloping local economy. Unusual enough by itself, but the article also made specific reference to lederhosen, dirndls and Bavaria. What could Vietnam possibly have in common with German culture, you ask, other than breathable air comprised of roughly 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 0.93% argon? According to the Times, that would be beer, as fine an answer as any I can think of.

Ho Chi Minh City is home to a handful of European-style microbreweries, most of which are centrally located in District 1 and some of which claim to brew their beer according to the Bavarian purity law known as the Reinheitsgebot. This trend took off in 2001 when the Hoa Vien Bräuhaus, which had previously been importing Pilsner Urquell, built a Euro-style brewery inside the restaurant with the help of experts from the Czech Republic. Other breweries followed, trying to tap into a domestic beer culture that stretches back at least to the 1890s (that’s when the Habeco brewery, now state run, was founded by French colonialists), was revitalized during the Vietnam War** in the 1960s, and currently produces more than 2 billion liters of beer a year.

I’ve been to the Hoa Vien Bräuhaus on Mac Dinh Chi Street, and I’ll admit to being somewhat less impressed than the author, but then maybe that’s because I was distracted from the beer by a plate of bratwursts that had clearly emerged from a tin of Vienna Sausages just moments before. I’ll give it another try and make sure I’ve eaten beforehand. I’ve not been to Nguyen Du Brauhof or the Lion Brewery & Restaurant (home of aforementioned lederhosen – on wall murals, luckily), but they’re now on my Must Visit list. I wonder what variety of beer goes best with grilled goat testicles? (Disclaimer: not a rhetorical question.)

**Whoops. Apparently I was wrong about there being no mention of the war — and me raving about it less than two paragraph ago.

Say what you will about in the downsides of living in a communist nation whose grasp of modernity operates roughly at the Pleistocene level, officials here know how to prioritize threats to the nation. Elsewhere in 21st-century reality, global leaders gnaw their nails down to the quick over whether the day’s terrorism threat level should be orange, ochre, or hot pink, and can’t sleep at night worrying over whether citizens with preexisting conditions will be able to afford tummy tucks. Here in Vietnam, wise leaders know exactly what the problems are, and they know just what to do about them:

New law could ban sensitive subjects at private schools

Newly drafted regulations released Tuesday aim to prohibit private universities from providing degrees in law, journalism and education, according to Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training.

Having tired of the menace such subjects represent to orderly, Stone Age-era society, Vietnam officials have decided that the teaching of such deviant ideas should be squashed and their practitioners placed in leg irons. The obvious solution is that all higher ed should now be controlled by — cue Psycho shower scene music  — The Government.

Despite the rapid growth of higher education quality in the country, many shortcomings have been found, particularly in the process of establishing new schools. This has urged the National Assembly to put education under its supervision from this year.

In other news, production of stone axes and animal-hide loincloths reached record levels here in the first quarter of 2010.

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.

Most of the chatter around yesterday’s announcement by the Economic Intelligence Unit of its 2010 ranking of the world’s most livable cities has been given over to the fact that Vancouver – presently hosting the planet’s largest convention of jocks and former high-school bullies – nailed a perfect 10 by landing at the very top of the list. Indeed, Canada scores three total spots in the top ten (with Toronto and Calgary), while Australia, at least as dark a horse as Canada, finds its way into no less than four of the top ten positions, along with the Australian Mini Me, a.k.a. New Zealand, which wriggled into number 10 with capital Auckland.

Talking heads have had some fun kicking around the losers at the bottom of the list – Columbo, Sri Lanka; Karachi, Pakistan; Harare, Zimbabwe; and poor little Kathmandu in Nepal (where, adding insult to injury, neighboring Bhutan measures Gross Domestic Happiness instead of GDP). But we haven’t heard much about the middle of the list, those flag-bearers for mediocrity. Partly that’s because the Economic Intelligence Unit wants cash for the full list and prohibits news outlets from reporting the whole thing (although some scofflaw posted it here). But more than that, who really cares about the also-rans?

Well, I do, for one. Yes, I’ll admit the fact that I’m living in Vietnam is more a matter of serendipity and blind chance than careful planning, but still, it’s a little discouraging to find Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi making a nastly little sandich of Nairobi, Kenya, only 15 spots from dead bottom. On the other hand, we’re better than Tehran and Lagos, Nigeria, which I suppose counts for something. And surely it’s worth keeping our chins up about being within poking distance of Mumbai, Istanbul, Jakarta, and, er, Mexico City…

I also can’t help but notice that the mothership for my current place of employment – the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology – is located in the number-three spot on this list. I don’t think it’s a stretch to claim residence in Melbourne by proxy, do you?