Marking my first night in Vietnam by going to a Lebanese restaurant seemed counter-intuitive. Shouldn't I being having Pho, not falafel? In the event, my marinated and slow-grilled whole river trout was outstanding, and Warda restaurant itself, staffed entirely by locals (I guess they have the French in common with the Lebanese) was quite a place: decked out in a campy blues-and-oranges take on Middle Eastern décor.
Our host was the New Zealand consul general Peter Healy, a man who clearly loves where he lives. As a NZTE employee he is, not unexpectedly, a big proponent of New Zealand business coming to Vietnam.
He said that whenever someone asks him about the risks of investing here, he says that he's never heard of a New Zealand company dropping a couple of billion dollars here, but he can think of three that have managed it in Australia, where New Zealand businesses still flatter themselves they can compete.
What Vietnam offers, he says, is "scale and speed": back home, you can't go from 100 employees to 6000. Here, it's an option. And, as my companion Mitchell Pham points out, here, a New Zealand company can still turn up and make a difference: China and India are just too big now. Here, you can get a decent hotel room for $US80 a night. In Bangalore these days, it's all $500 and $1000. And still, the news back home is all Anglo-
Saigon District 1 speaks of fast money and lots of it. Shops packed with Louis Vuitton and Gucci sit around the corner from market stalls stocked with facsimiles thereof. Flat-screen Sony Wega TV sets sit stacked onj grubby footpaths. The fast money - fruit of torrents of investment capital and a 9% GDP growth rate - isn't all spread around.
Earlier, Mitchell and I had a beer on the roof of the Majestic Hotel, which was built by the French and is full of so much art nouveau leadlighting that you figure it has to be fake, but it isn't. The roof overlooks the Saigon River, whose port fixtures wind far away out of sight. The pretty, salmon-coloured pavilion built by the French as the original port centre is still there, dwarfed by what has happened since.
It's hot, really hot. The noisy air-conditioning unit in my room can crank the in-room temperature down to about 28 degrees through the middle of the day if I keep it running, which I do, by slipping my driver's licence in the slot for the room key when I go out, to keep the power on.
We have a huge today today, with various meetings and interviews at Quang Trung Software City, the business park where Mitchell's company, Augen, has set up its Vietnam office. I'm in reasonable shape though. It was nice to be reminded that not all international travel is as gruelling as going to "code orange" America, and not all airports are festering great abattoirs like LAX. Indeed, the transit facility at Changi, where I whiled away three hours between flights, is a big, glamorous shopping mall with free wi-fi and unlimited people-watching.
Entry through Vietnamese immigration was a breeze, although, even after bargaining my taxi driver down by half, I still outed myself as a total rube. It was worth it for the ride. We got barely 20 metres before nearly wiping out a motorcyclist, but the driver made up time impressively by driving large stretches of the journey at speed on the wrong side of the road.
I had some photographs and a short movie of the 5pm scooter stampede, but I've run out of time and we have to head for Quang Trung, so they'll have to wait. Text it is. Bye!
PS: How absolutely classic that Ihug should manage to screw up both POP mail retrieval and their webmail service while I'm away (this may also explain why my smtp wouldn't authenticate yesterday). What on earth is going on there? Anyone who really needs to get hold of me is welcome to contact Fiona for my gmail address.