Hong Kong Ham

In the middle of Ho Chi Minh City’s backpacker district — amidst a clutter of scooters, food stalls, and pushy kids offering shoeshines — is a little slice of New Zealand. The Cyclo bar and restaurant is home to a giant portrait of Mount Taranaki, a black ceiling painted with silver ferns, and a barrel-chested New Plymouth man named Craig Wilson.

A half-pint of Tiger beer looks like a mere cup of tea in Wilson’s large, soft paws as he sits on the customer’s side of the bar, which he bought six months ago. A towering figure with a firm handshake and a wide smile to match, Wilson seems to be cut from the same pine as Colin Meads. The Vietnamese bargirls that surround him are dwarfed even when he’s seated.

Wilson feels quite at home. “It’s brilliant; I love it,” he says of Vietnam in an accent that has morphed into something vaguely South African. He first came here in 1992, working for Telecom in the northern city of Hanoi, leaving a mortgage and a family behind him.

Today, he’s re-married to a Vietnamese woman — taller than most; a quality he likes — who’s running the bar. She wants to move to New Zealand; he’s in no hurry to get back to a land in which house prices have gone “absolutely crazy”. The compromise was to open an establishment here as a kind of test run. Consequently, while he keeps a close eye on the sports playing on the two large televisions, she keeps a close eye on the receipts. Tonight, when Wilson wants to offer his guests a free drink, she overrules him. A long close-quarters discussion isn’t enough to win her over.

While the Communist country does have some frustrations — stringent noise regulations for the bar being one of the few — Wilson thinks it gets some things just right. Take, for example, the reaction to that war. “They don’t hate the Americans. They just want better for everyone. New Zealand’s got a lot to learn,” he says. The Vietnamese are proof that “despite deep adversity and troubles, you can still survive”.

New Zealanders on the other hand, prone to lopping the tops off poppies, don’t realise how lucky they are to live in such a great country, and they ought to stop moaning so much. “They just have to make an effort to realise they’re brilliant.”

For a moment he switches focus. Looking over to one of the patrons tucking in to some of the restaurant’s local fare, Wilson calls out, “How’s the food, mate? It’s okay? It’s pretty ordinary, but okay, right?”

So far, the bar is doing alright. It’s listed in Lonely Planet, a sure-fire way to pull in punters, but it’s also around the corner and out of sight from the bigger, brighter and much rowdier Go2 Bar, which is often packed at the gunnels with drunken — and otherwise intoxicated — backpackers until the sky runs out of darkness.

Tonight, a Thursday, is quiet, but the next night will be better. Then, some of the expats will filter in to mingle with the tourists. Wilson sponsors a darts team and gets on well with the players, loyal Friday night customers. He’s also got a few friends in high places, as evidenced when he gets on his cellphone — one of 17 million in a country of 84 million people — to chat with the New Zealand consul general, Peter Healey.

Wilson’s main role at Cyclo seems to be to prop up the bar and keep the music playing. Though he’s in his 50s, he’s a great fan of pop-punksters Green Day, and he’s excited when a friend loads 30 new tracks onto the bar’s computer. After selecting ‘American Idiot’ from the playlist, Wilson walks out from behind the bar playing a mean air-guitar, a delighted grimace written on his face.

A keen golfer — he used to play for the New Zealand juniors — Wilson spends the next day in front of the television, watching the US Masters. By 10pm, he’s in jolly spirits, a mug of Tiger beer again in hand doing its best impression of Earl Grey. An hour later, it’s time go home — to catch the golf replays.

Somehow, he folds his pine tree frame onto a small scooter and zips off into the noisy streets.

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I tried to sell this to a couple of New Zealand publications as a travel piece, but the editors, rightly, pointed out there’s not much point in printing a story that’s really just a profile of a bloke who happens to be a Kiwi living abroad. Nothing much special about that. Still, I like the idea of profiles for profiles’ sake, so I’m sticking it up here.

UPDATE: This piece was eventually picked up by the Taranaki Daily News. It was published on May 19.