The endearing mixture of motor bikes, cycles, cars, trucks and pedestrians that characterises the old town

The centre piece of Hà Nọi life is driving, although not exactly driving as you and I know it. I have driven myself in many places including Paris, Tehran and Madras, but I would not drive in Hà Nọi. I am simply not that skilled: you might say I do not have an appropriate grasp of the Vietnamese ‘Highway Code’; there is such a guide, I have seen it, but this is my more light hearted version. Let us start by making it clear that I regard the driving skills here as superb, and the reason I do not drive is through a lack of these skills, rather than a disbelief in them. Driving presents, to the westerner, one of those inscrutable faces of the orient, rendered palpable in a fog of blue fumes, the whirr of Honda engines and the symphony of horns, which, like the more peaceful barring of sheep, proves on examination to be a thousand different voices. To this must be added motion: the motion of a vast seething mass of humanity. But this is far from the chaotic aggressive impenetrable motion that some foreigners suggest it to be, rather it is a vast dance of interlocking steps.

Gathering for the change of lights

If it is a dance there must be dance steps in just the way that our traffic obeys the steps of our code. But here it seems melded from a very different source. The rules are not so much part of some systematic system, but rather have grown naturally: one’s place on the road is part of an organic growth, the outcome of a particular history; one’s own story, one’s own individual private journey; a journey across, for example, this intersection of two hectic six-lane highways. Such a passage, at once intensely personal, and yet totally interdependent on others, has no room for trivialities drawn from a distant set of prescriptions like that of driving on the right or left. (I suspect that officially it is the right here, but evidence from the streets is scant.)

So it is by observation that I would suggest that the steps of this dance, or Highway Code, go something like this: Not a muscle of your face must move whatever happens; eyes must appear to be directed ahead at all times; an air of calm confidence must be exuded; you must never touch another vehicle or person, but must always cut in front of another Honda, car or bus with a gap of less than 3 inches; it is socially irresponsible, with global warming, for you to be seen out on your Honda with less than three people on it, and you should aim to carry 6 persons at all times; at the innumerable traffic lights, you, personally, always have the right to be the vehicle at the front; to pass others without hooting is 12 penalty points on your license; all loads must appear both to defy gravity, and render it impossible for you to see where you are going; as you are cut up by faster drivers you must graciously appear to have allowed them in; if you are not clearly texting with your left hand others may wonder if you are doing something undesirable with it; passengers at all times must sit upright with a relaxed disinterested air and hands resting on thighs, or, if the temperature plummets below 23 degrees, these may be placed in the pockets of your coat – yours or preferably your driver’s.

Convergence of multilane roads in Ha Noi

A caricature of course, but driving into the middle of a sea of a 1,000 oncoming headlights last night, going the wrong way down one of these huge one-way boulevards, with driver Han, I felt it my avuncular duty (he, in best oriental tradition, calls me uncle, which does not help my tussles with the ageing process), to bellow an enquiry about the lack of headlights, well any lights at all actually, on his machine. It's not a problem, he shouts, its just that all – yes all – the bulbs have gone. In hundreds of hours of being on his bike I have never seen him fail to see, hit, or misjudge, anything!

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