Of course in cities there are cabs, often with meters if you are lucky, although these days more and more people are buying cars ostensibly "for hire". Yoke ladies tote their wares, and some bicycles seem to have been there since what the Vietnamese call the "American War." Increasingly trucks bring in produce and everything else from the countryside. But 100cc motorbikes still do some of the hauling of goods from vegetables to hogs and ducks to fifteen feet of rebar if necessary.
The pedicab (cyclo) in the front is a dying breed, so to speak. In the past as often as not they were driven by former allies of the US who most likely one way or another come across hard times. (But I did once have a cyclo driver in Hanoi who could not have been more than twenty but who had only one arm. But he could pedal.)
Given the increasing car and truck traffic in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi (and the accompanying pollution), I was not surprised to read that licenses for cyclos are no longer being issued--except, I assume, for the bright, shiny new ones supplied to guests by some world class hotels, silver and clean cyclos that have a red canopy over the seat, one advertising, for instance, the Hanoi-located Hilton Hotel.
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