Motorworld by Jeremy Clarkson Page A

went there, I’d 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 weren’t really people at all, just a collection of Oriental extras on the big screen who got blown up for a living.
    I didn’t 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 six-year-old 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, we’ve 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. They’d 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, they’re all on a day bed, sipping Pimms and having their feet massaged by half-naked Fijians. Vietnam is the most laid-back place on earth.
    Sure, you can’t 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 ofpeople 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, you’d 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 low-wattage 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, we’d been on the go for a while. We’d filmed for two weeks in Detroit, then flown for fourteen hours to Japan where we’d 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 four-hour stopover, on to Saigon.
    Actually, it’s 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 didn’t have the right of way, simply kept going. He reckoned that, as most