Permission to ride my steed

Upon my fairly sudden move from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City, my trusty Honda steed took the slightly less rapid route and rode the train. Motorbikes here are not really very big, nor very heavy, so it makes perfect sense to send them on the train when the need arises. It would have been a lot more fun to send my stuff by train and ride the motorbike down here, but I left that for the next time! The slow train down here must be smooth because my steed arrived pretty much unscathed, and by now is at home on Saigon streets.

A train ticket for a motorbike is a lot cheaper than a new (or rented) bike, which my motorbike must have caught on to, as it is now demanding some attention. It has not really idled properly for a long time, which hasn’t really bothered me since I got a battery to start it without kicking it. This turns out to be a really good thing, because now it doesn’t stop (the engine, I mean, the brakes are another story altogether). So the routine is this – I pull up on the sidewalk or wherever I am parking (this is Vietnam, sidewalks are for parking not for walking!) and turn off the key, put it in my pocket, take off my helmet and then sort of casually and nonchalantly sit there like I’m just enjoying the weather for a minute or two until the puttering engine slowly but surely stalls out. Clearly a bike that doesn’t stop is more useful than one that doesn’t start, so there is no reason to complain!

After two years of driving motorbike in Vietnam, I decided to get a license. (SHH - Don’t tell anybody about that, it’s just between me and you.) When I first got my motorbike I had good intentions of getting a license, as, you know, it just seems like a good idea. However, everybody that I asked about it just kind of laughed and told me I didn’t need a license. The popular theory goes like this – the traffic cops don’t speak English so as long as you look like an English speaker (or not a Vietnamese speaker, which isn’t hard for me) you won’t need a license. I’m trying to imagine how that theory would fly in America… In any case, I did not get a license right away.

Officially, of course, one does need a license to drive a motorbike here. International licenses are not recognized, however I’m sure that something official-looking with a picture would get you a little slack. I read that the fine for driving without a license was around 3 dollars. Fines like that are hardly worth the paper, meaning that you will end up forking out chai kidogo worth more than the fine so as to avoid going through the hassle of the fine… Fortunately, I never had any trouble with that.

Since I already have a (foreign) motorcycle license, I do not even have to take a test, I only have to complete the following simple process.

- Download a license application from the Transportation Department website – yes they have an English page specifically for foreigners

- Fill it out and take it to the US Consulate to be stamped. So this is a document from Sở Giao Thông Vận Tải Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh which I am taking back to them, but it has to have a stamp on it from the US Consulate. Once I got past the guards and metal detectors and hairy-eyeball-distributing-guys to the inner sanctum, I took a number (from the number-dispensing machine which kept confusing everyone by pausing after you pushed the button, so everyone pushed the button harder, or a couple of times, then it prints out like 7 numbers at once) and sat down in the air condition. The guy behind thick glass, wearing a tie and sporting a full beard, looks at me carefully and says with an officially sanctioned degree of incredulity, “Do you really want to drive a motorbike in Vietnam?!” After settling that, he stamps my paper and I pay $30 and go back out through security into Vietnam again.

- Other paperwork needs to be done at the “Government Office”, a user-friendly name if I ever heard one. I suppose that, lacking any more specific title than Government Office, the place is responsible for everything which all the other government departments don’t want to deal with. In any case, the staff there was rather friendly, if perhaps their actually degree of helpfulness corresponded more closely to their pay scale than to their all-encompassing Government Office title!

Document 1 – a certified copy of my passport and visa, which is straightforward enough, but for the fact that they copied and certified an expired visa the first time, instead of my current one. One does wonder what exactly that certification stamp really means when it is granted to an expired visa!
Document 2 – A translation and certified copy of the translation of my foreign license. That one cost I think all of 8 dollars or so, but they got it right the first time. I had to laugh at the translation though – the word for tank (as in certified to drive a vehicle with a tank trailer for liquids) is the same word commonly used to mean a cardboard box. Maybe this is why all the taxi drivers here laugh when I tell them I used to lái xe tải thùng vận tải sữa – they are picturing a cardboard box full of milk??
After this the helpful lady there sent me to the address of some mysterious office which, at least based on my investigation, had nothing whatsoever to do with getting a license in Vietnam – we’ll call it the Office of Prevarication and Obfuscation.

- After a bit more wandering, equipped with the proper papers, copies, stamps and the appropriate spirit of tolerance toward bureaucracy, I found the Transportation Department. There, they glued my pictures onto my application and sent me off to somewhere else. At that office I was a bit surprised to find another machine dispensing numbers, and then less surprised to find my number about a hundred away from the guy being called up to the counter. After girding up the above-mentioned confidence and sitting down with a blank stare on my face, I was shortly called up to the counter by a very friendly lady who inquired as to why I was waiting. The numbers, she explained, were not for foreigners. Particularly foreigners who could say “hello how are you I am here to apply for my license” in Vietnamese, as it turned out. Discrimination, I have to say, is not a concept which I usually find appealing, but it did save me a couple of hours sitting in a dingy office that day. And as usual, all the Vietnamese people who were sitting there waiting with their numbers, instead of throwing tomatoes at me for effectively cutting in line (albeit under the instructions of the clerk), were very friendly and wanted to chat and find out where I was from and why on earth I was speaking Vietnamese…

After ten days I went back there and picked up my license (for motorbikes, which incidentally are a lot more fun to drive than milk trucks anyway). The charge for my license was about $1.85 (not counting the $30 for the consulate to put a red stamp on an application I don’t think they read anyway and the Government Office fees). So I now have permission to drive my motorbike. Mission accomplished.

I wonder if I need to have a certified copy of anything to convince my motorbike to stop when I turn off the key?

On the Mekong