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?

Life in Vietnam has its privileges: for example, a karaoke machine on every corner and in a fair portion of the personal domiciles in the city. Did I say privileges? Well, privileges, punishments, it’s mostly a question of semantics, isn’t it? Rather like ‘torture’ and ‘enhanced interrogation,’ not that I’m making analogies.

Here in the developing world, a karaoke machine is as necessary a part of life as the With this simple bit of technology, easily entertained local residents serenade their friends, peers, colleagues, and the immediate neighborhood with “traditional” songs pirated from the Chinese and re-rendered in the vernacular of synthesizers and electronic drum kits. The singers typically do not have any formal training, nor, indeed, bathroom showers in which to train. (Or even bathrooms, judging from the number of Vietnamese men urinating on the side of the road at all hours of the day). This does nothing to dampen their zeal for the pastime, however, and they indulge it with masochistic lust, apparently nowhere more so than in my apartment block.

Given the number of Vietnamese men hopped up on locally-brewed bia hoi and yowling like car-struck cats into microphones every evening beginning at dusk, one might expect there to be more violence — as for example in this striking bit of reportage from the Philippines, where bloody carnage often accompanies the performance of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” among other similarly incendiary fare.

The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

Many karaoke bars have removed the song from their playbooks, and the country’s many Sinatra lovers are practicing self-censorship out of perceived self-preservation.

It seems karaoke-induced butchery is not limited to the Philippines.

In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Karaoke-related assaults have also occurred in the United States, including at a Seattle bar where a woman punched a man for singing Coldplay’s “Yellow” after criticizing his version.

In fairness, you’ve got to admit John Denver and Coldplay will have that effect on people almost anywhere. I find it interesting that Vietnam’s not on that list. After some reflection, I realize this must have to do with the facts that 1) there are no guns in Vietnam (although you can blow up a cow with a claymore if you know the right people), and 2) drunkenness is Vietnam is not undertaken lightly but with the seriousness as befits life in a developing, communist-ruled nation.