Sihanoukville-HCMC

The young Swedish couple, Malin and Yohan, who had just taken over the Malibu Bungalows, said they hope to remain on the mellow Cambodian seaside for five years of "just breaking even." Unless they are opera fans---the port of Sihanoukville has a commercial center and a beach area but not much else---it should be a satisfying sojourn on the Gulf of Thailand.

The Malibu is eight or ten thatched wooden bungalows spilling down a steep hillside among banana and lime trees, with a quiet beach at the bottom, rocky on one end and sandy on the other. Yohan said, "When Swedes travel they don't travel to somewhere but from somewhere." The Malibu, though, is worth any effort to reach. It has a beflowered, terraced restaurant above the cottages serving banana pancakes for breakfast and rice dishes or club sandwiches for lunch. A few hundred yards to the north is the Sokha Beach Resort, an $180-$500 a night joint with an air-conditioned gym and guards to chase the riffraff (us) off their beach, but lacking the sweet simplicity of the Malibu ($35). We stayed four nights.

Bus travel in Cambodia can be good where the roads are decent. We traveled from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh by bus, then down to Sihanoukville. So the $16, eleven-hour trip from Sihanoukville to Ho Chi Minh City seemed like a good idea, and it was. The air-conditioned Hyndai coaches are roomy enough, plus on the windows you get bright pink curtains with white ruffles. Joe said he felt as if he was perched inside a sea anemone. I thought I might be in Barbie's playhouse. There were music videos, too, about young Cambodian couples having relationship issues, which on the rockier segments of highway neatly combined lovesickness with motion sickness.

One of the things you feel inside a Cambodian bus is powerful. The might-makes-right highway rules make for a speedy trip. The driver was not reckless, but it was his clear intent that everything and everybody should move aside as he barreled along. Every several seconds he blared his horn to make sure his intentions were known across the land. Ducks and geese and tuk-tuks scurried, sometimes with nanoseconds to spare. Once, Joe said---though not loudly---"Somebody should take that horn away from him."

We switched buses in Phnom Penh, and the conductor coolly appraised our Vietnam visas, which we had obtained in Sihanoukville. The bus company, Sorya Transportation, wanted no trouble at the border. And there was none. The Vietnamese immigration station resembled a Florida Turnpike Burger King, and the staff there moved us along with an almost identical cool indifference. (One immigration official did ask Joe if he wanted to buy a phone card.)

The first thing that hits you about Vietnam is its infrastructure. That is, it has some. Laos, poor to begin with, and Cambodia, ravaged by the loss of an entire generation of smart, skilled people, often just barely seem to function. Vietnam welcomed us with an impeccably maintained four-lane highway and crowds of people along it looking well-groomed and purposeful. Many of them appeared to work in the tidy garment factories we saw. Even the rice fields seemed greener. In two areas the fields were dotted with dozens of kids flying kites.

In late afternoon, as we approached Saigon (as it's still called by most of its residents), the crowds and traffic thickened and then thickened some more. Soon we realized we had seen the future, and the future was riding motorbikes! It wasn't just a sea of motorbikes, it was galaxies, entire milky ways of motorbikes. It was a Busby Berkley "Gold Diggers of 1935" production number of endless bevies of motorbikes that just kept coming and coming and coming. It wasn't done with mirrors either. Vietnam's 60 million people own over 8 million motorbikes, and the highest percentage of those are in Ho Chi Minh City, population 6 and a half million. In the midst of this, our bus felt like a big (inedible) bug being carried along on a sea of army ants. Not militaristic army ants, though. As in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, the men and women on HCMC motos looked serene in their nicely ironed shirts and slacks as they maneuvered silkily in the fuming borderline-chaos.

We had heard conflicting reports on HCMC. Foreigners who had lived here came to love it. Visitors often weren't so crazy about it. The rap is, it's big and hard to get around in---imagine New York with no subways and few buses and everybody on motorbikes---and the people are pushy and and always on the make. Oh, but wait. That IS New York with motorbikes. And many of the same things we like about New York---the good-natured brashness, the variety, the mental keenness and agility, the center-of-the-known-universe confidence or even arrogance, the neon, the racket, the sense of danger and possibility---you feel all this every time you walk out the door in HCMC. It's New York-East. Or, since they were founded around the same time, maybe New York is Saigon-West.

Not that I have walked out the door of our hotel, the Bi Sai Gon in Minihotel Alley, as often as I would have liked. I came down with a case of the toot-toots (I blame some dubious Cambodian fried rice) 12 hours after arriving here. With the help of antibiotics and the exquisite pho (chicken rice-noodle soup) from our little hotel's little restaurant, I am almost fully recovered. And so we'll have a report in a few days---maybe from Hue, where we go by train on Wednesday---on Joe's busy HCMC life (still no photos for the blog, alas), and ours, which is about to resume.

Note: Our visas call this country the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. But the Vietnamese are plainly too smart for Marxism. Their charging-away economy---8 percent a year growth---is pure market mayhem, and it's working. Their politics are still Leninist, though, and you have to wonder how long that can last. That question---here and in China---has to be the big one in Asia's speeding-motorbike future.