Jeremy Clarkson - Motorworld

When we were choosing which countries to feature in Motorworld, there were important considerations. Would we get a suntan? Were the girls goodlooking? How much was beer? If we were satisfied on these fronts, wed ask whether there were enough motoringrelated stories within the country, and whether each would back a central proposition.

In Italy, all the stories would be about passion. In Detroit, we had a social tale to tell. In India, we wanted to know why so many people were killed on the roads.

The tricky bit was making sure that the story each week was different. Having done fourwheel drive to death in Iceland other countries with lots of rugged terrain went out of the window.

The BBC executives understood this and nodded sagely whenever we discussed it. But why, they kept on asking, are you going to Vietnam? There arent any cars there. Its communist. What if they think youre American? How the hell will you get there? What about visas? And, from the accounts department, How much is it going to cost?

Frankly, my answers were rubbish. I put on my serious face and talked in long sentences, using the words whom and synergy a lot, but the real reason I wanted to go was much simpler.

A year earlier, while very drunk in a Wandsworth pasta restaurant, a friend who had emigrated to Saigon told me what happened in the city centre on a Sunday evening.

He explained that a thousand or more teenagers climbed onto their mopeds and rode round a preordained route. And he said they were all dolled up with no place to go because they dont have enough money. They had to ride past bars full of entrepreneurial bignosed businessmen but they couldnt afford to stop for a beer.

Theyre poor beyond the ken of Western man and yet, he said, they all have mopeds.

It didnt make sense but I could see the visual impact of a thousand or more Vietnamese kids on mopeds cruising the sultry streets of Saigon all night long.

And coupled to the fact that Vietnam had just become the 49th country in the world to have a car industry, it was enough. Vietnam was going to be a Motorworld country.

Looking back, I would say that this was the secondbest decision I ever made; the first being to take up smoking.

Before I went there, Id always thought of Vietnam as somewhere that existed only to line the pockets of Hollywood fat cats. Vietnam was an excuse for Sylvester Stallone to cover his ample frame in mud. Vietnam was a war; not a country.

My only experience of Vietnamese people was either at a restaurant in Fulham or as a lot of scuttling midgets in straw hats throwing hand grenades into Huey helicopters.

In fact, this lot werent really people at all, just a collection of Oriental extras on the big screen who got blown up for a living.

I didnt even know that Viet Cong meant Communist Vietnamese or that Charlie was a nickname derived from the latter half of the VC radio call sign Victor Charlie. The Americans had told me, endlessly, that they were simply a bunch of barbarians who made people play Russian roulette. And that, given half a chance, every sixyearold would put a land mine in my underpants.

The trouble is, of course, that since that last American helicopter heaved itself off the roof of the embassy there, weve heard an awful lot about Nam from the Yanks, but almost nothing at all from the country itself.

And this is hardly surprising. Here was a nation that had fought off the French, only to find that Sylvester Stallone was on his way. Theyd beaten him too and that was it. They shut the doors on what they saw as a stupid, interfering world. And got on with their version of communism.

It was pretty tough by all accounts. Escaping boat people talked of a regime where coloured clothes were not allowed and motor vehicles were strictly outlawed. It made Moscow circa 1963 look like Surrey.

However, running a dictatorship is hard work and people usually tire of the effort, so after fifteen years the Government began to relax. Today, theyre all on a day bed, sipping Pimms and having their feet massaged by halfnaked Fijians. Vietnam is the most laidback place on earth.

Sure, you cant set up in business there without a Vietnamese partner and every film crew has to be accompanied by two government minders, but these are not the sort of people who wear jackboots in bed and gaze longingly at your fingernails. We had a couple who looked like schoolteachers from Somerset.

The Americans have restored full diplomatic relations, the French are back, half the bars have exactly the same clientele as the White Horse in Fulham and the Koreans are building sixteen hotels a day.

In a few years time, Saigon will look like a cross between Singapore and Bangkok. It will be horrid beyond words. But in 1994, it was heaven.

As a general rule, you should never judge a city, or especially a country, by the run from the airport to your downtown hotel. If you did that going from Heathrow to London, youd think all England looked like Hounslow.

But in Vietnam, go right ahead, because our trip from the plane to the hotel was fabulous. There was an almost Mediterranean balminess to the place and the simple lowwattage streetlights only illuminated the nocturnal insect life in their immediate vicinity, so it was unusually dark too.

The daily thunderstorm had just finished erupting and the air was clear and still. The houses, for the most part, were in darkness too and only a few mopeds were out and about.

At this point, wed been on the go for a while. Wed filmed for two weeks in Detroit, then flown for fourteen hours to Japan where wed worked for another two weeks. It had been a brutal month, without a single day off, when we flew from Tokyo to Hong Kong, and then, after a fourhour stopover, on to Saigon.

Actually, its called Ho Chi Minh City these days, but I was too tired for that sort of nonsense.

However, our driver kept us awake with a fantastic series of improbable manoeuvres that can only be described as breathtaking. He drove on whichever side of the road he saw fit and at crossroads, even when he didnt have the right of way, simply kept going. He reckoned that, as most people have mopeds, if there were to be an accident, wed be fine.

Then there were the traffic lights a graphic indication that Saigon is moving with the times. However, though they have been installed and are working, no one has explained to the locals that red means stop or that green means go. To our driver, and to all the other four million people in Saigon, theyre just pretty lights on poles which have no meaning.

By the time we hit the Rex Hotel it was nearly midnight but we were wide awake. So we went to the Q Bar.

And then we went to a dive full of Australians called Apocalypse Now. And then the Caravelle. And then some place where we sat on the floor and another place where we fell on the floor. And then we started to wonder if it was worth going to bed because it was only an hour until wed have to get up.

So we had a cyclo race instead. The cyclo is a bicycle at the back and an armchair at the front. You, the big nose, sit in the chair while Charlie sits on the saddle, pedalling you hither and thither. To go across town costs about three pence.

However, if you splash out, your chauffeur will pedal faster which, of course, leads to a silent version of Formula One. The person with the most money wins the race.

There was something rather colonial about sitting there, crosslegged as a local pedalled as fast as he could to try and catch up with the cameraman. But it wasnt until we found ourselves going six abreast down Saigons equivalent of Regent Street that I started to ask myself a big question.

What kind of a country is this?