Today it was a mattress. Admittedly a small Vietnamese one, but still some 6 feet by 3 feet, carried on the back of the Honda upright against the drivers back;

Take up your bed...

her short arms just stretching around the sides, swaying through the traffic on its shaky gravity defying journey to a new home.

Bags of Sweets

The word Honda is used here rather like the word Hoover for vacuum cleaners, meaning a small engined motor bike.

Selling trinkets in the north of Vietnam

They are mostly 90 or 110 cc and very few are Hondas as we know them. Many say they are Hondas, but close inspection shows otherwise, as does the price tag for a new machine of £300; here a genuine Japanese one costs about £1,000. No doubt there is a complex licensing system that allows the Chinese to produce these copies, but it does not result in the standard of reliability we associate with the name in the West - as the Vietnamese often tell you vociferously!

Maybe he feels that as you can't see him, you can't stop him!

The key fact about these ‘Bikes of Burden’ (the title of a delightful picture book - Go to it) is that they spend their lives carrying extraordinary loads. This applies equally to passengers or goods – the distinction between the two sometimes being subtle.

Wardrobes and water being transported in Ha Noi

Westerns, who are typically attain the mass of two ‘normal’ (Vietnamese) people are carried one at a time; but for the Vietnamese that would seem a waste, and three people is the norm. Families by definition are close, and five members may need to travel together - mother and father sandwiching infant, older child behind and small child on the handlebars. What is more arresting is four adults sitting in line, you do look twice and count again!

Five Seater Honda

And that is not the end of it, I saw a picture today of 6 adults sitting in line on an ordinary Honda 90 making it look like a perfectly natural human arrangement.

Getting the right angle for coconut delivery

While the human loads do not threaten one’s concept of gravity (only one’s preconceptions of public intimacy) the cargos certainly do. These apparent gyroscopes stay upright against all the odds, and there are a lot of antagonistic odds out there.

Pigs en route to the butcher

Yesterday evening we met a line of three Hondas each of which had four huge Chinese vases, 5 feet tall and 2 feet across, strapped at the four corners of a square like a cage round the driver.

Boxes of live fish in water

The lighter items can achieve huge volumes of space, popcorn in plastic bales 6 feet across, plastic packages with tails flapping from far out into the road,

Window grill - easy to hold and no wind resistance

or the delightful loads of woven baskets which become works of art in themselves, and indeed one such is preserved in the Ethnographic Museum some 8 feet in all directions with no possibility of seeing the rider – that collection is on a peddle cycle.

It is the heavier objects that make one wince: 10 crates of beer on the back, four between his arms and legs. Or bales of paper which take three men to lift them onto the machine and then are often seen on the road a few blocks away. but maybe it is the sheets of glass I find most frightening.

Cakes

Several feet of razor edges, always held in bare hands (the same people will put gloves on at a temperature of 18 degrees for fear of the cold) steered through what appears to be a seething mayhem of dodging, weaving, turning, swerving, hooting, stalling, revving, fuming machinery. Standard passing space three inches on either side.

Portrait of Ho Chi Minh on a Ha Noi street

Ok the traffic moves slowly. Ok despite the hooting and jostling, the standard of driving is high, delicate and careful. Ok the journeys are probably short, but no one outside a circus act in the UK could carry loads half the size commonly seen here.

Taking a break - Ha Noi style

Everything, absolutely everything, especially the kitchen sink, cooker, washing machine, (and that’s just one bike) goes by Honda. Vehicles hardly ever touch, drivers clearly see everything I see, and more by far; every pot hole, pedestrians diving for the far side of the road, a driver veering inexplicably about, or young bloods zooming from nowhere; all is seen, and the carnage of some 12,000 deaths a year on the roads, is actually a testimony to the skills exhibited – considering the millions of needle sharp judgments that are made every minute of every day.