Ho Chi Minh City

I’m probably one of the few people in the world who can say that a surly taxi driver got his holiday off to the perfect start.

En route to a new life in London, I had arrived at Ho Chi Minh International Airport with nothing more than a notion of riding around the Mekong Delta on an old Vespa and permission from my long-suffering wife to spend a week doing it. And just moments after a long and unpleasant taxi ride in the company of a totally disagreeable taxi driver, I found myself with the keys to a beautifully restored old Vespa in my hand and carte blanche to do what I wanted with it for the next week.

The taxi driver didn’t realise he was doing me such a huge favour. Indeed, after I refused to stay in a hotel his friend owned, he was in no mood to help me at all. On top of the voucher I’d bought from the special taxi counter at the airport to take me to the backpacker district at Pham Ngu Lao, he demanded I pay him another taxi fare. When I refused he got agitated and tried to dump me at each set of traffic lights we came to. He finally lost his temper at the edge of Pham Ngu
Lao, stopping the taxi with a screech of brakes and dumping me and my bags unceremoniously on the pavement.

The first thing I noticed when I’d finished dusting myself off was the humidity. It hit me like a soggy blanket. The second thing I noticed was that he’d dumped me right outside the Zoom Café.

I’d like to say that I knew Zoom Café was Saigon’s only Vespa-themed bar and that it was top of my list of places to visit. Or that I knew that its American owner, Steve Mueller, restored Vespas immaculately and sold them all around the world. But, in truth, the whole basis of my trip to Vietnam was rather vague. I knew Vespas were exported to Vietnam in the sixties. And I knew that I’d like to ride around the Mekong Delta on one. Whether that was possible, whether there were even any roadworthy Vespas left, I wasn’t sure. My research hadn’t progressed beyond an impulse.

The café was evocatively Vespa-themed, with a mural above the bar painted in the style of old French Vespa ads from the fifties. The front half of a Vespa VBB was bolted to the wall, giving the impression that it was in the process of magically passing through. And astonishingly, within minutes of walking into the café I had met and befriended Steve and he had handed me the keys to a 1968 150cc Vespa. It was painted a very fetching shade of bronze and had chrome protector bars that sparkled in the sun. I think Steve may have had a touch of heatstroke because he not only said I could ride around the Delta on it, but he wouldn’t let me pay him anything, either. The scooter was one of his runabouts, he told me, and he wasn’t using it anyway.

After a quick tour of the bike’s idiosyncrasies – a dodgy front brake and a clutch cable with a tendency to work loose – I ventured out onto the roads of Ho Chi Minh City. You know that scene late in Apocalypse Now when Marlon Brando mumbles ‘The horror! The horror!’? I used to think he was talking about the futility of war, but after half an hour riding in the traffic in HCMC I realised he was probably just shaken up after a quick trip to the big smoke for supplies. The motorcycle riders of old Saigon make the VC look like pussies.

There are over three million motor scooters in HCMC and I reckon most of them were in the centre of town that morning. They buzzed about like flies around a cow pat, each intent on forcing me off the road and into a noodle stall. Into the mix were thrown wobbling cyclists wearing conical hats, peddle-powered, three-wheeled cyclos with terrified passengers getting a ringside view from the seat in front, and pedestrians forced to scamper along the road by all the hawkers, motorcycles and small businesses that cluttered the footpath. Riding a motor scooter here wasn’t just a way to get between Point A and Point B. It was an extreme sport.

I was the only person on the road riding alone and without encumbrance. Every scooter bore at least four passengers and some sort livestock as well. One family of three – small by Vietnamese standards – had a dozen ducks, still alive, hanging from the handle bar. Others carried less animate objects: one chap had a double mattress strapped precariously to his back as he wove through the traffic. And another brave pillion passenger held a pane of glass across his legs, seemingly oblivious to what an accident would do to his ability to father children. Every single vehicle on the road broke any number of traffic codes, but they were all allowed to continue, chaotic and unhindered.

The traffic lights offered no respite. Some bright spark in City Hall had decided to liven the traffic up even more by installing traffic lights with a display that counts down the seconds before the light would turn green again. As the counter approached the final five seconds the scooter riders began revving their engines and jostling for the best position at the head of the queue, sending plumes of blue fumes skyward as they took off with tinny roars that would have made Michael Schumacher feel right at home.

I returned to the café in need of a good lie-down and with a new understanding of why Steve was lending me the Vespa. He wasn’t being generous. He was just a very sick individual who got his kicks from watching others suffer.

‘You’ll get used to it,’ he said with a laugh when he saw me. I wasn’t so sure.

My plan was to head south to the Delta as soon as possible, but when I woke the next morning I was still a little shellshocked and instead decided to spend the day browsing the pirate CD shops on Bui Vien and De Tham streets. I wanted to have a closer look at the titles offered by the pirate bookseller girls, too. They walked around with 60 books at a time: photocopied, colour-covered and piled one on top of the other, a thin white ribbon holding them together. An English guy had emailed me from Vietnam once to tell me that he’d just bought a pirate copy of my book No Shitting in the Toilet. I wanted to see if they still had any.

The first bookseller found me as I was tucking into my breakfast, the obligatory banana pancake. She stood before me, politely pulling the ribbon aside so I could see the titles on offer more clearly.

‘Lone Plan-et . . . good books . . . you buuuyyy!’ she whined.

I scoured the pile, hoping to find one of my books, but the closest I got was Stupid White Men by Michael Moore. I asked the girl if she had anything by Peter Moore and she stared at me blankly. I repeated the name, my name, more slowly this time, and again there wasn’t a flicker of recognition. She asked me to write it down and then plonked her books beside my table. ‘I ask my boss,’ she said, scurrying off down the lane.

She was back within minutes with a trim, muscly woman in her thirties who had more than a touch of the Lucy Lius about her. She was not happy at all about being dragged away from the nerve centre of her pirate publishing enterprise.

‘No Peter Moore!’ she spat, giving me the sort of withering look Lucy has become famous for. ‘Michael Moore. It same!’

I could have suggested that a quick comparison of Michael’s and my royalty cheques would quickly clear up that little misunderstanding, but the iciness of her stare and the muscle that twitched in her neck suggested that it wouldn’t have been a good idea. Already a proud owner of the entire Michael Moore oeuvre, I took the diplomatic option of buying a copy of the Lonely Planet Vietnamese Phrasebook. It cost the full four dollars even though it was a fraction of the size of all the other books, but I’m not ashamed to admit that, frankly, the woman scared me.

The incident, as terrifying as it was, did give me an idea, though. I decided to spend the rest of the day asking every girl selling books in HCMC if they had any books by Peter Moore. At first I let them approach me, in the streets around Pham Ngu Lao, pretending that something in their pile of wares had caught my eye. But by the afternoon I was seeking them out – at the War Remnants Museum, in the Internet cafés along De Tham and the restaurants and bars along Dong Khoi, the more affluent part of town. My hope was that when they returned to the warehouse their gang masters would notice a staggering number of requests for books by some bloke called Peter Moore, amongst the usual ones for the latest John Grisham and Joanna Trollope. An illusion that there was a demand for my books would be created and, by the time I got back from the Delta, one of them would be photocopied and have slipped into the Ho Chi Minh City Top 60 as a hot new title.

Well, a man can dream.