Motorcycle explorations

After I’d lived in Hanoi for a few years, people used to ask me how to make the most of their time in the country. My advice was simple: learn Vietnamese, eat street food, and get a motorbike. This last one was not advice I gave lightly: I knew all too well the dangers of riding a motorbike, dangers made even more acute as new riders adapted to the unwritten laws that govern how people really drive in Vietnam.

Yet not riding a motorbike meant being cut off from so much of life in Hanoi. Taking responsibility for your own mobility meant having to learn the city, its streets and alleys, districts and neighborhoods. It meant getting caught in a downpour and feeling your shoes slowly fill with water but not caring because the weather was warm and you’d dry out soon enough. It meant exploring the city at 3:00 AM and noticing the telltale signs of its illicit economies: a line of motorbikes still parked on the sidewalk, a security guard standing sleepily outside a karaoke bar, dim blue lights still on at a haircut om. It meant riding aimlessly along the Red River and discovering private ferries operating much as they had a century ago before the construction of the Long Bien and Chuong Duong Bridges.

I’d been slow to take my own advice since living in Singapore. I live a 15-minute walk from my office, the public transit system is superb, and taxis usually plentiful and always cheap. But as time went on it began to bother me that I had very little understanding of the city. For me, Singapore existed as a series of isolated neighborhoods linked only by MRT or bus rides. Even worse, I didn’t know where to go if I needed a bowl of prawn mee at 5:00 AM. And so I spent last Friday afternoon at the Traffic Police office in Bukit Batok getting my Singaporean license. The nice aunties at the counter thought they were just giving me a license to drive, but really they were giving me permission to make their city my own, just like I had Hanoi more than a decade earlier.