Hondas in Vietnam

I just finished a 3 day Vietnam trip. It was the first time I had visited Vietnam but somehow the whole place just gave a sense of being there before. Landed at the HCMC Airport and the first thing we noticed were the long queues in the Immigration. These long queues somehow immediately remind me of home, of Indian airports and irritating officials. However, we passed through the immigration without a hitch, booked a taxi at the Airport counter and finally landed in a car which looked very similar to a sumo and had a very weak Air-conditioning.

The first thing I noticed while on the journey to the hotel was the huge number of motor bikes. The roads were covered with Motor bikes almost like flies on a rotten fruit. There are lots of motor bikes in India but the density here was amazing. Later, I was told by a local of the place that there are almost 5 million motor bikes in HCMC – a city of around 8 million people!!! They are called by the generic name “Honda” – so even a Suzuki bike will be a Honda. When we asked him the reason for there being so many of them, he gave an interesting analogy. Apparently, Vietnam opened its economy in 1995 and the economy has seen massive growth since them. The population of HCMC has grown almost 3 times since then because of migration of people in the city to find jobs and participate in the growth story. But the infrastructure has not kept pace with the growth in population and business. He compared HCMC to a child who has grown up to be teenager but is still wearing the cloths he was wearing 10 years back. Amidst this crumbling infrastructure, these bikes are the quickest means of transportation for the average city worker, ensuring that he is able to reach work in time and is able to take his family around in the weekend. An interesting thing to see was that there were almost as many women driving these Hondas as men. In a country which is probably as male dominated as some of the other ones, the economic boom has probably finally created the opportunity to break free which they were waiting for.

More on Vietnam later.