The uninjured driver was urging his large pink passenger back on to the rear of the motorcycle. Instead, the cabbie left me at the Victory Hotel on Tran Quy Cap, next to Hanoi's secondary train station. Old bicycles whizzed by, their riders' conical hats floating through the steamy heat. The equally pungent smells of sidewalk cooking and sewage prompted me to open the hotel's doors and go inside. Vietnam in the 1990s is a land of contrasts.
Differences are more than geographic.
The Reunification Express train runs almost the length of this narrow country, but most of the people I would meet in the next month would never leave their home province. Taxes are minimal, if paid at all. Socialized medicine doesn't exist - it's pay as you go, and many don't. And karaoke is a national pastime. Inside Ho Chi Minh's icy air-conditioned mausoleum I caught a glimpse of the revered leader's embalmed body as guards kept us moving and enforced silence.