Motorworld

by Jeremy Clarkson

  But then again, when he gets some Seven-Up Diablos out on the streets, he’ll have a damn sight more than a million I suppose.

  Fired up with this success story, the Vietnamese government is now doing everything in its power to attract foreign car firms.

  They have slapped a 200 per cent import duty on all imported cars, which puts even the cheapest Korean hatchback way out of reach of just about everyone. A BMW 7 series is £50,000 in Britain but in Vietnam, you’d be asked for £200,000.

  To get any sort of sales in Vietnam, car companies have to make their cars inside the country which creates jobs and, when exports start, brings in foreign cash.

  And as a final twist, the car company can’t do it alone. They must form a 50/50 partnership with a Vietnamese outfit.

  But because Vietnam, everyone knows, is going to be the fastest-growing market in the world over the next few years, few motor makers are put off by the rules. Already, Fiat, Renault, Mitsubishi, Mazda and Daewoo are making cars and vans there.

  But the biggest surprise of all is to be found at the bottom of a primeval backstreet in Hanoi. You pick your way through the foot-deep mud, dodging the oncoming oxen, to the factory gates, through which is a factory that is now making the BMW 5 series.

  BMW sees Vietnam as the first country east of India where they can put one over Mercedes Benz. By making the car in situ, they’ll be able to undercut Merc hugely, but this won’t matter. One Vietnamese put it bluntly. ‘We can’t make cars. We wouldn’t want to buy a car made here because we don’t know how to do it. I want a Mercedes. Everyone here wants a Mercedes.’

  It’s the same story with their mopeds. You can buy a Thai-made Honda Dream for £2,000 but few do. Everyone is prepared to pay an extra thousand pounds because they want the real thing, the one that’s made in Japan. And never mind that there is absolutely no difference whatsoever.

  The moped has become a massive status symbol for the Vietnamese. It’s their first, unsteady step up from the bicycle. It’s the same as going home to your neo-Georgian house in England with a BMW.

  Let me put the moped in perspective here. There are 10,000 cars in Vietnam. And six million mopeds.

  Get up early in Saigon and you will not believe what the roads look like. It’s a moving wall of Honda-ness.

  They’re coming at you down both sides of the road in an unending snake. Some are carrying an entire family — father, mother and three children — some have pigs slung over the handlebars, one chap we saw had a full-height wardrobe strapped to his back. But the danger biscuit was taken by an enterprising chap riding pillion while carrying an 8 foot by 5 foot mirror. It made my teeth itch with fear.

  While standing on the pavement, it looks like a completely random, large-scale demonstration of Brownian motion. At a crossroads you have mopeds coming from all four directions but no one stops. Even though they now have the added distraction of pretty red, green and orange lights, four seemingly solid snakes just seem able to pass through one another.

  The only reason I agreed to take part was because the speeds are low and the worst I could expect in a crash was a grazed elbow. Actually, the producer proved me wrong a few days later by coming off the back of the fixer’s Lambretta and head-butting the kerb.

  It was a remarkable injury, like someone had put one of his ears in a sardine tin key and simply peeled all the skin off his face.

  But when I climbed aboard a Japanese-made Dream and set off, I hadn’t witnessed a single incident. I felt safe. Confident. In control… even though this was the first time I’d ever attempted to ride any form of motorised two-wheeler on the public roads.

  It took a while to eliminate the wobbling but, once mastered, I have to say driving in Vietnam was a piece of spring roll. From the pavement, you can’t see the little signs from other riders, but they leap out at you like illuminated hoardings when you’re in the thick of it.

  At a junction, you know you’re on a collision course with someone coming at you from the left but a little flick of his eyes lets you know exactly which way he intends to pass.

  I guess I was a bit of a menace really, swerving to avoid manhole covers and making unexpected left turns, but as everyone in Vietnam was born on a bicycle and has been on two wheels ever since, they seem to have an innate, inbred sense of balance that would shame Barry Sheene. One day, there will be a Vietnamese world bike champion.

  The best thing about Vietnam’s love affair with the moped is that the traffic moves. There is no such thing as a traffic jam, even when two or three million people are trying to get into the city centre at seven o’clock every morning. This is a transport system without bus lanes, without a one-way system, without traffic-calming measures and it works.

  There are buses though, which, like the trucks in Vietnam, are made out of old bedsprings and wood-burning stoves. And they’re powered by the engines from old vacuum cleaners.

  But you can’t use them to commute. They’re mostly for long-distance travel and are full, outside and in, of peasant farmers and all their year’s produce. It takes two days to get from Saigon in the south to Hanoi in the north and you are expected to cook your own food on the move.

  We’d been warned not to use internal air transport in Vietnam but, when we saw the alternative, we flung caution to the wind and flew everywhere. Mind you, when the pilot took three attempts to hit the runway at Hue, we began to wonder if two days on the bus wouldn’t have been such a bad idea.

  I mean, what’s a bout of cholera between friends? You’ve never lived if you’ve never had a bit of heat exhaustion. And hey, it would have been a laugh being a human indicator for a while.

  Yes, in Vietnam you can be an official, government-appointed human trafficator and it is your job to hang off the side of the bus, yelling at people. You don’t actually indicate what the bus is going to do, of course, because you don’t really know. You’re just there to advertise its presence; that is, if you can make yourself heard above the drone of its 1950s vacuum-cleaner engine.

  The other alternative to the moped is the taxi. But this, really, is not an alternative at all because it will break down.

  The taxis in Vietnam all started out in life many, many years ago as Chevrolets or Citroën Traction Avants. They had a hard life in the tropics and then, after the war, were squirreled away in hidey-holes for fifteen years.

  Needless to say, they were not in good condition when private cars were allowed back on the roads, so the owners used ingenuity. I drove a Chevrolet whose engine, I’m damn sure, was from an air-conditioning unit. Also, it had no suspension at all.

  But most of all, it had been equipped with bench seating for up to twenty passengers. This made the driving position a trifle cramped for a big nose like me; so cramped, in fact, that to get my foot on the clutch for a gear change I had to open the door.

  It became a lot more comfortable after just a mile though because it jammed in second gear and stalled. Its owner wasn’t in the least bit surprised and said he could replace the cogs with some fittings from a bedside lamp he’d found earlier in the week.

  It is vital he keeps that car going because on his estate, he is king. It would be the same as peeping through your curtains and finding that your next-door neighbour had a Harrier GR7 jump-jet on his drive.

  A car there, right now, is an impossible dream. But the moped is just within reach and that’s why so many people spend so much of their disposable income, and a decent chunk of what is not disposable, on one.

  Right now, in Vietnam, it is the only sensible means of getting around. And if it rains, which it does pretty well every day for half an hour or so, they just pull over and climb into their homemade polythene jump suits.

  When it runs out of petrol, you do something even more strange. You see, Saigon is not yet high on the Esso hit list. There are no service stations with shops selling Staffordshire teapot and mint cake combos.

  I was told that there are two garages but, in eighteen days, found neither.

/>   It’s not a problem though because every five yards down every street, you’ll find a kid sitting there with what looks like a urine sample. It is, in fact, a bottle of petrol that he bought that morning, watered down that afternoon and is now offering to you for the tiniest mark-up. He can also fix punctures and would you like to meet his sister? She’s very beautiful? Fresh?

  You don’t get that sort of service in a Shell Shop.

  Time and time again, I was left in no doubt that Vietnam could teach the West a whole lot about civilisation.

  Here is a country where anyone will do anything to help, at a price of course, but that’s what makes capitalism tick. And then there’s recycling. We applaud when BMW announces it has put reusable bumpers on its cars but, in Vietnam, nothing, and I mean nothing, is ever simply thrown away.

  One farmer we met uses his one engine in his tractor six days a week and on market day, he transplants it to his van. At night, he uses it to power his house.

  Then there’s the cleanliness. Everybody’s clothes are spotless. Everybody’s hair shines so brightly you can’t look, and they don’t have Pantene Plus conditioner.

  At night, you can pull over to one of a million families sleeping on the streets and buy a bowl of soup. It’s a damn sight more nourishing than the Big Issue and the crockery squeaks with Nanette Newman freshness.

  In fact, we ate local food from local restaurants most nights and there wasn’t a single loose stool from anyone in eighteen days. More than that, if I had to say where I’ve had the best food in my life, I’d put the bus station in Saigon up there with the Pic in Valence.

  Their spring rolls were like angels copulating on your tongue and then there was the ‘rather burnt rice land slug’ followed by ‘carp soaked in fat’. The translation may have left a little to be desired but the food did not. It was exquisite, cost less than a pound and you didn’t really mind after 23 bottles of Tiger beer that your table was sandwiched between two buses.

  I simply adored Vietnam.

  And you will too, when you go there on a package holiday in a few years’ time. You’ll love the brand-new hotel they’ve built, and the ice-white beaches. You’ll adore the weather and the local cuisine, prepared by an imported German chef, will leave you speechless.

  The traffic jams in the towns will be a bit of a bore though.

  Yes, Vietnam will be a fully paid-up member of the twentieth century, but the world will have lost one of its jewels.

  Australia

  The sheer enormity and emptiness of outback Australia boggles the European mind. If this picture had been taken 100 miles further down the road, it would still have looked exactly the same.

  For a country whose most notable contribution to the world of television is a programme called Neighbours, it comes as quite a surprise to find the nearest big city to Perth is Jakarta. But don’t expect a rugged, hairy-bottomed sort of town. Think more in terms of Milton Keynes and you’re about there. Interesting motoring stories? Er… no. Not really.

  Okay, so what about Sydney, likened by many to San Francisco? Oh come on. San Francisco is the best city in the world, with fine vistas, extraordinary hills, the Golden Gate, wonderful restaurants and an endearing blend of character and cleanliness.

  Sydney is a huge, soulless sprawl where the people are chippy and the architecture is reminiscent of Birmingham. Except that Sydney doesn’t have the International Conference Centre.

  Again, if you attempted to make a motoring programme there, it would last about three minutes. ‘Er, everyone drives Toyota Starlets.’ The end.

  I went to Queensland, too, where the coastline was tropical and unspoiled, but apart from a tendency to drive on the beaches of the Whitsunday Islands, I was still stuck. Cairns had nothing. Nor did Townsville. Australia was turning out to be a dead duck. Until I headed inland.

  Peel away Australia’s coastline and you’re left with an area which is about the same size as America. And yet it has the same population as Leeds.

  In outback Australia there is one person for every square mile and, to put that in perspective, in the Scottish Highlands there are twenty people for every square mile. Australia is enormous. And almost completely deserted.

  Out here is where we would find the real Aussie action. Out here we could pose the question: what good is a car when your nearest neighbour is 300 miles away and there are no roads?

  It’s not as though we’re talking about an arid desert. There are trees and, just below the surface, there are vast reservoirs of water which fell as rain three million years ago in Malaysia.

  Obviously, the soil doesn’t provide lush green Anchor-butter-type grass, but it isn’t useless dust either.

  This means that, every so often, you come across a farm which is so large it is rather hard for a European to get his head round the numbers. We needed to visit one, to find out about life in such remoteness, but were told, time and again, to get lost, in that polite way Australians have developed. ‘Fuck off you Pommy bastard.’ Something like that anyway.

  Thick-skinned perseverance eventually saw us arriving at the truly enormous Wave Hill Station which is near… nowhere really.

  It covers 13,000 square kilometres, making it the same size as Cornwall, Devon, Avon, Somerset and Dorset.

  At any one time, 40,000 cattle are grazing on its paddocks, but even so it’s not the largest farm; not by a long way.

  It isn’t the most remote settlement either, even though the nearest shop is 280 miles away. The nearest pub is a 100-mile trek and to get to the nearest biggish town by road takes eighteen hours.

  To get there, we flew for four hours from Perth to Alice Springs, during which time the view from the window was an unending sea of nothingness.

  Then we climbed aboard a chartered eight-seater twin-prop aircraft for another four-hour flight over another sea of brownness to Wave Hill.

  Actually, that’s not quite true. We had to stop for fuel at a weird little airstrip which, quite literally, was in the middle of nowhere. And yet, in the departure hut, women in brightly coloured, floral-print dresses from the fifties were waiting for their bus to take them into town. A ‘bus’ in Oz is almost always a plane.

  Our pilot refuelled on his own, switched the landing lights on by himself and took off with no clearance from air traffic control. There wasn’t any.

  And two hours later we touched down on the Wave Hill landing strip. All the farms out there have such things because cars are useless. In the Wave Hill garage there was a plane and anyone who drops by does so literally, from the sky.

  If they need a doctor, he comes by air. Schooling for the two children is done over the radio airwaves but if they ever need to get to a football match, it must be done by Cessna.

  There are cars on the farm but they’re used for workmanlike things such as checking on bore holes and mending fences. Mind you, to get round all the watering holes is a three-day job.

  And a damn dangerous one, too, because in the height of summer the temperature almost never goes below 120°F. When we flew in, it was 140°F, even in the evening, and that means it was hot enough to boil a tortoise.

  Certainly, you don’t need charcoal and firelighters for a barbecue out there. Drop a rasher of bacon on the ground and in a flash, you have breakfast.

  It sounds like a hoot but if, while you’re there, your car breaks down, you have 30 hours and then the eagles will be looking for the napkins.

  Before you set off on a cross-country Australian drive, motorists are told to ensure that someone knows when you’re supposed to arrive. And that no matter what, if you break down, you stay with the car.

  It’s all a bit of a fag to be honest, which is why everyone we met on our month-long tour of the outback had a four-wheel-drive Toyota Land Cruiser.

  Until the end of the sixties, Land Rover had a 90 per cent market share and people took the endless mechanical maladies for granted. But then along came Toyota with a vehicle which just kept on going. It wasn’t as stylish but no
one was looking anyway.

  In the very early pioneering days, people only ventured into the outback if they had the toughest vehicle money could buy. Most opted for a Rolls-Royce, not because of the prestige or that flying lady but because it was less likely to break down than a Model T.

  The Australians went mad for the Land Cruiser and in just twenty years, Land Rover’s market share was down to 2 per cent. They had been wiped out, along with most other British memories too. The pound became the dollar and the mile became a kilometre.

  Wave Hill manager Gavin Hoad explained that he would never switch from Toyota. ‘They’re pretty reliable and we’ve had them long enough to know what will go wrong and when. That way we can keep the right spares here.’

  Well they’d have to because the nearest Toyota dealership is a cool 280 miles away on roads which are basically dirt tracks.

  In the Northern Territories there are no speed limits but don’t get excited because realistically, 60 mph is your top whack.

  First of all, there is the wildlife to worry about. A small kangaroo is no big deal — they just burst when you plough into them — and you needn’t worry about emus either. But the eagles, they’re a big problem.

  Say there are twenty vehicles on one 300-mile stretch of road and in one night, they kill twenty animals each. That’s fairly realistic. This means that as dawn breaks there will be 400 fresh carcasses in the ditch.

  So the eagles come down and gorge themselves stupid. And just as they’re enjoying the coffee and mints, you come bumbling along. Mr Eagle is scared and needs to take off but he’s so full he has to face into the wind, which may well be the direction from which you’re coming… at 60 mph.

  It is by no means uncommon for the giant bird with its ten-foot wingspan to be at windscreen height when you collide. Thank you. And goodnight.

  The eagles, however, are less of a danger than the road trains. These gigantic trucks can tow three articulated trailers at speeds of up to 100 mph thanks to engines which just defy belief. Each cylinder is 3.1 litres and for that little bit extra, a turbo is fitted as well.