Life on Two Wheels

written by Jasmin Krpan

 

At early dawn, when the roosters, real or metaphorical, still roam through their coops, the first morning scooters buzz through the streets. Saigon is a city of three million scooters and motorcycles, usually loaded so much that their riders can barely see the road in front of them; tens of thousands of bikes head out for the first morning supply run of this Vietnam city with a million inhabitants. The bikes are loaded with everything the city needs to live, from the food to be had for breakfast by those lucky enough to still be sleeping, clothes for stores, refrigerators, plastic ducts for plumbing stores, all the way to raw material for textile factories. Motorcycles swarm in from the edges of the city loaded with baskets full of crab from the delta of the huge Mekong River that springs beneath the far away Himalayas. The crab, prepared in a dozen different ways, will feed the hungry business people from the modern office buildings during their lunch break in street restaurants