All Vietnam’s urban centres, and especially Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, would be almost unrecognisable to someone returning to the country after a five yearor more absence.

More variety
Some things would stand out immediately. For example, in the city centres, the jumble of open shops spreading over the broken pavements, war-damaged buildings shored up or in ruins, and poky Vietnamese cafés and ‘bia hois’ have been replaced with smart new Western-style shop fronts displaying international products, supermarkets, neatly paved walkways, and restaurants and bars offering a huge range of menus from all over the world.

From bicycles to motorbikes to cars
Our imaginary visitor would also be surprised by the traffic – not so much the volume (Vietnamese cities have always had busy roads), but by the number of motorbikes, buses and cars. In 1998, bicycles outnumbered motorbikes by at least a factor of three. Today, the positions are reversed. The growth in motorbike ownership has been exponential – so much so that local authorities, with government support, are limiting registrations and even stopping them altogether in the large cities.

Car ownership is also beginning to rise. Sales doubled last year, and luxury brands such as Mercedes, Lexus and BMW are becoming commonplace on city streets.

Public transport
The battered old buses, built on lorry chassis, belching smoke, and picking up passengers wherever they appeared, are now an endangered species. Most have been replaced by fleets of spruce new vehicles painted in bright colours and stopping at regular bus stops. Ridiculously cheap fares, clean comfortable seats, and timetables have made them very popular – both Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi are rapidly expanding their fleets to ease traffic congestion.

More noise than ever
However, our imaginary visitor would be reassured by the noise. Although bicycle bells, and the hooters and thunder of antiquated lorries and buses, have been transformed into a cacophony of motorbike and car horns, the streets are a noisy as ever.

Fin de siecle for the ‘cyclo’
In both cities, the famous Vietnamese ‘cyclo’, or bicycle taxi, ubiquitous in 1995, are dwindling to become tourist attractions, elbowed aside by the cheaper and quicker ‘xe om’ (motorbike taxi), and barred from main streets as a traffic hazard.

Modernisation
Supermarkets have opened up, and are already beginning to eat into a market previously dominated by small shops. Roads are being re-laid, with new drains, pavements and ‘motorbike-friendly’ curbs. City authorities are beginning to experiment with turning some roads into pedestrian-only areas.

The decline of the street traders
Our visitor would soon notice that the number of women wearing a conical straw hat and carrying goods in baskets hung from a bamboo pole has dropped, and that there are far fewer pavement cafes. Faced with a situation of pedestrians being forced to walk in the road by parked motorbikes, street trading and other activities, the police force is now starting to enforce a long-standing (and completely ignored) regulation prohibiting blocking the pavement in some urban areas.

Some things never change
However, our confused visitor would feel more at home upon noticing that plenty of Vietnamese people still wander across the road without looking and ride their bicycles on the wrong side of the road (Vietnamese pedestrians and cyclists still seem to believe that they are exempt from both traffic regulations and using their common-sense).