Touch Down

After 2 flights, 3 films, over 6000 miles, 17 hours and several meals later, we have arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). The flights were smooth and pleasant, as was immigration, gratifyingly. We withdrew money and instantly became millionaires (330,000 Vietnamese dong to the pound, thank you very much). It will take some time to accustom ourselves to the mathematics of ordering a cup of coffee and paying with a note that should go a healthy way towards a deposit on a house.

We emerged from the airport into the hot and sticky dusk of the city. Massed ranks of motorbikes fill the streets, some with solo riders, others with couples and occasionally whole families on one machine, charging, weaving and merging with the other traffic in a graceful ballet that always seems only inches away from becoming a pile of twisted metal, before it recovers and flows smoothly on.

Vietnamese is a language in which neither of us has any competence, much to our shame. While the spoken sounds are alien, the written form teases with its familiar Latin script, in contrast to other Asian languages. However, the written word is obfuscated by a frankly alarming scattering of diacritical marks. Dots and squiggles appear above and below the friendly Latin letters, sometimes in both positions at once, changing the character's appearance. On occasion, several shapes are stacked on top of one another in an embarassing and apparently unnecessary superfluity. A challenge indeed.