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I'VE never been a fish. Never wanted to be, to be honest, even if I smell like one sometimes. But today we got an idea of what it must be like.

Have you ever watched fish swarm? They swim along by the thousand and suddenly change direction and yet they never bash into each other. And riding out of Saigon is just like that.

Ten million people live in Saigon and they have five million motorbikes and scooters. There are very few cars but there are motorbikes in the way the way the Bible has raining frogs. They're everywhere. Everywhere. Leave the slightest gap and a motorcyclist takes it without a glance, let alone hesitation.

You'd think there are no rules. But there are. Two-wheelers - motorbikes because barely anyone rides a bicycle - have all the right-hand lane. There they are free to dart and weave and overtake on either side at elbow-shaving closeness. Nobody swears, protests or gesticulates. They are fish in a swarm. They understand.

The only interruption comes from the big fish, the lorries, vans and buses. Being banished to the left, they make occasional invasions into the two-wheeler lane to turn right. This they achieve with a blast of the horn, slow but irresistible pushing and a lot of tolerance.

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Might is right but muscles flex with tact, almost with grace. There are nearly 100 million people in Vietnam, a country the size of Italy. But you can put up a house in almost all Italy whereas most of Vietnam is too steep or, because of the rice fields or rainy season, too flooded. There's so little space left that the Vietnamese have to get on or they'd fight themselves to exhaustion.

Well, it was like this for the first 30km. We'd have liked to take the smaller roads on the map but, frankly, getting out of the city was effort enough without going the wrong way and turning round and getting irritable. We went with the flow, with the swarm. We didn't see much but in Saigon there's not much to see. It sounds romantic, a lovely name, but it's not much of a place.

We passed east of the airport where two days earlier we had been delivered by Malaysia Airlines, which plays a prayer on the seatback television as the plane reaches the runway.

And then the traffic eased, even if it was still busy. We headed north and then north-west. But not for 60 kilometres were we in any sort of countryside. Out of the tourist area, certainly, as our interactions with locals and their appeals to have their photo with us showed. But "countryside" was optimistic because the road was a string of ribbon development, people working, eating and sleeping beside the highway that brought their income. We passed little workshops, open-fronted shops, businesses of no obvious purpose and an improbable number of karaoke and massage bars.

It's hard to walk in the backpacker area of Saigon without meeting slender, dark-haired girls in bottom-high mini-skirts. They are the bait for karaoke and massage bars. The rule is that bars that look sleazy probably are. But can all these rural places be like that? The simple number suggests not, but all the same... can so many people really want to sing in front of their friends?

I'd like to tell you more about today but there's not much to tell. The road was broad, smooth and flat. The heat got to us, and the humidity, but the challenges were concentrating in the morning and tedium in the afternoon.

Tonight we have a room for three euros. It's clean, spacious enough and all we need. We've eaten in our room, and eaten well, for a euro and a half. Our guidebook and observation say we are in a town of no great interest. Well, no interest at all, frankly. But we have met nothing but kindness and smiling help from all we've asked for help, to the extent that two young girls broke off from what they were doing to guide us through town on their motorbike so we could find our bed for the night.

We already like Vietnam.