“Beautiful and chaos,” replied Thomas, when I asked him to give me two words he’d use to describe Vietnam. We were in Hanoi, having just narrowly escaped yet another almost certain death crossing the street. “Or perhaps ‘beautiful chaos’?” I replied. Because as mad and chaotic as this country seems, it works – they have chaos down to a beautiful art. We gave each other a high-five for making it across the street without getting shmushed into the ground by a scooter, and carried on walking up the road – in the road itself, of course, because the pavement is put to the much better use of motorbike parking, street food stalls and kittens on leashes tied to lampposts.

You hear about how busy Vietnam’s main cities are, you know how many scooters there are, and you’ve seen Top Gear, so you think you have a good idea of just how mad it is. Let me tell you, unless you are there, standing in the middle of a four-way junction, the beeping of scooter horns so loud you can’t speak to your partner, traffic lights being ignored by the millions of scooters (which don’t appear to have brakes) coming from all directions, and all you want to do is get to the other side of the street without having a heart attack, you can’t even imagine just how mad it is there.

How to cross the road in Vietnam

It was on our first day in Ho Chi Min City in fact that we first learned the art of crossing the street. The only way you can do it is by simply stepping out into the stream of traffic and continuing at a steady pace, ignoring the fact that there is a sea of scooters coming at you from both sides. You cannot stop, you cannot get nervous; if you do, the scooters will sense it and get confused, and just swerve into the scooter next to them, bringing the whole thing down like dominoes. We learned the art by following a local girl as she crossed. If it wasn’t for her I’m pretty sure we’d still be standing on the side of the road waiting for a good moment to cross. Let me tell you, in Ho Chi Min City and Hanoi, you will never spot a good moment to cross the street. Never.