The View
Why Stuart’s mileage has taken a sudden plummet – and he’s grateful for our cities as well as our country.
WHEN AT THE end of this year I’ve completed my Walk 1000 Miles and am thus called into a strip-lit interrogation room by the editor’s office in the forbidding underground HQ of Country Walking to have my year’s walking reviewed (I’m JOKING! They don’t do this! Hardly.) they will notice a strange lacuna in the month of April.
‘And what were you doing then?’ will bark sinister top brass Procter and Hallissey as they indicate (I’M JOKING AGAIN) the distinctly sedentary nature of the first 10 days of that month, when suddenly my usually fairly decent weekly totals dropped by several score. I wasn’t being lazy, honestly. But I did spend a week in a city where no one walks; Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon in the south of Vietnam.
HCMC, as the locals abbreviate it, has some nine million people and eight million motorbikes. It bustles with energy and throbs with a relentless pace that seems to never slacken. From the crack of dawn until late, the streets teem with traffic, swerving, weaving, yet somehow never colliding, a symphony of motorbikes and honking horns. It is undeniably vibrant and exhilarating. But to those of us who like to walk, after a day or two it can start to – to use a technical term – ‘do one’s head in’. Nobody walks here. The pavements are too congested with parked bikes, road works and street vendors. You take your life in your hands crossing the street. Plus it’s too hot. When I was there it never dropped below 37°C which in the old money is something insanely large.
Pining for the simple pleasure of walking between trees or across the park or down to the shops or the bus, I began to wonder if it could be the worst city in the world for pedestrians. It seems it has rivals all across South East Asia. Jakarta is bad apparently; most visitors giving up and taking taxis everywhere. Manila gets terrible reviews too for its sprawling nature, heat, puddles and potholes.
Ironically it seems inconvenience for walkers can be a consequence of either poverty, as in some developing nations’ cities, or affluence, as in the good old US of A –
