On March 29, fresh from a trip to Viet Nam, I made a post about the difficulty of crossing the street in a small country with a lot of busy people and 25 million motor scooters. There's a lot more to the motor scooter story, however. If a motor scooter is your only means of transportation and an important part of your livelihood, you can use it for things that would never occur to those of us who have the luxury of having minivans and SUV's. In Viet Nam, the lowly motor scooter is family transportation, a commercial vehicle and a beast of burden among many other things, I saw scooters carrying dozens of live baby ducks, every conceivable fruit and vegetable, chickens, a side of beef, hundreds of eggs, hay and straw, flowers, stacks of cardboard for recycling, twenty foot long bamboo poles, giant bales of stuffing for furniture and the furniture itself. As long as the kids are little, it's no problem at all for a family of four to go on an outing with the sleeping baby wedged between Dad, who is driving, and Mom on the passenger seat while big brother sits in front of Dad. All kinds of things are sold from scooters. I saw basket vendors, brooms and brushes, pizza, a toy store and lots of mobile bakeries. I watched two guys weaving their way through traffic while carrying a full length mirror. But the most amazing thing of all is in one of the attached photos. Our guide in Hanoi, Huy, needed a new refrigerator. Rather than pay extra to have it delivered in a truck, he recruited one of his buddies who balanced it on the back of his scooter and made the delivery without incident.
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