At the moment I’m doing a little research project on cycling in Há»™i An, a small town in central Vietnam. My research associate over there has been doing the first  interviews and I’m just going through them now. Wanted to share with you this priceless bit from a conversation with a 72 year old farmer who still rides every day.  Back in the day he used to ride 30km on a singlespeed clunker along terrible roads all the way to Danang for work and meetings. It used to take six hours, and there were no food stops at all along the way! But he still loves the bike.

Whenever I have anything important to do or have to see my colleagues at work then I always ride my bike. Going to work, shopping, visiting friends, even going on my rounds of the commune, I go by bike. I’ve been commune Head for thirty years, and although I’m fairly well off now, I still like the bicycle. My children wanted to buy a motorbike and I said “No!”. Because when you but a motorbike it’s like you have an extra mouth to feed, every day you have to spend who knows how much money on petrol, when it needs a new tyre that’s more money, you have to worry about where to park it and if you’re not careful it’ll get stolen. You have to spend a lot of money to look after it. I save loads of money every year by riding my bike—so I’ve got money to eat, to fix the house.

Going out into the street and seeing a lot of people on bikes is  fun! Old people still ride bikes a lot. It’s not that they don’t have money, lots of people have money nowadays, life’s a lot better than before, but they still use their bikes… Back in the day when we could afford a bike we were so delighted, we guarded it jealously. It wasn’t easy! Every day we cleaned it, ran outside to check on it, worried about losing it. For some people a bike is a keepsake that their parents suffered to be able to buy them. Those people might have passed on, but the bike is still here. If you offered them however much money they wouldn’t sell it, it’s a priceless possession.