Vietnam

• Lissom with mother - Chiva Som, Thailand
• Perfect harmony - Chiva Som, Thailand
• Battle of the Beaches - Thailand
• Bliss on the beach - Koh Samui
• Freshly Squeezed - Thailand
• Kaleidascope - Bangkok
• Why Our travels with Banana - Bali
• Beautiful Bali looks back to the future - Bali
• Off the Bhutan track - Bhutan
• The Temples of Another Time - Cambodia
• Temple of Secret Smiles - Cambodia
• Celebrity check-in - Langkawi
• My Perfect Moment - Pangkor Laut
• Fantasy Island - Pangkor Laut
• Feast for all the senses - Bali
• On Honeymoon Island, strictly alone at last - Phuket
• Our Ho Chi Honeymoon - Vietnam
• Victory for Vietnam - Vietnam
• You like! You try! - Vietnam
• Why I'll always miss Saigon - Vietnam
• Hanoi's New Dawn - Hanoi
• Saigon Surprise - Ho Chi Minh
• I spy in Shanghai - China
• Shanghai Chic - China
• The Great Makeover - China
• Far East in a Flash - China & Japan
• Cherie blossom special - Japan
• Why they call Hong Kong toy town - Hong Kong
• Mysteries of the secret gardens - Kyoto
• The Geisha Game - Kyoto
• Hong Conquerer! - Hong Kong

A DOZEN YEARS HAS PASSED since I was last in amazing Vietnam. It’s been transformed in that time. Mostly, but not all, for the better.

The speed of change in Vietnam astonishes. But then a decade is only an eye-blink in this country’s tortuous history. Hanoi, its charming capital, had a university 1,000 years ago, before the Normans conquered Britain. Its ruins are still there.

Vietnam is bigger than Italy, 1,000 miles long with more than 2,000 miles of beautiful coastline. Gone are the smashed roads, blitzed forests, shelled buildings. Good highways have replaced those bone-shakers and vegetation has returned to the hills that were burnt by the Americans.

Style, elegance & comfort

The Metropole, a dilapidated hotel 12 years ago has been returned to style, elegance, comfort and good food.

Gone, sadly, are Hanoi’s unlit dusky boulevards free of traffic save the silent sweep of thousands of ancient, stately, old black bicycles. Nearly gone are the rows of artisans scattered over the pavement outside the cluttered shops, crafting pots and pans under flickering lamps. The beautiful children no longer reach out shyly to see what white skin feels like. Banned from begging, they now hassle round you with trinkets and postcards to sell.

The Vietnamese have beaten off all the great powers that assailed them: China, Japan, France, the USA. Yet they retain the charm of the Irish and are brilliant artists, musicians and chefs. And now, freed of much Communist control, they are surging entrepreneurs. Ironically, American and French money is pumping in.

It’s not quite yet the next Thailand, but it’s Asia’s coming place. It’s different. It’s challenging. It’s cheap. The mighty dollar is a parallel currency down to the smallest shop. Take plenty of small greenbacks and credit cards.

Hanoi’s buzzing shopping centre is a few streets away from the pretty, central lake Hoan Kiem. Good silk ties can be bought for $4 (£2.60), two silk scarves for $6, genuine antiques and good modern paintings for $200.

Lunch for $5, decent local beer, swift, smiling service. Even in the eighties they didn’t seem to hate Westerners for what we did to them. Overlooking the lake there’s a good upstairs restaurant, Thuy Ta. At the lake’s top the pagoda that houses a few old monks is always jammed with tourists.

I hadn’t liked Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, before. Now it’s even noisier, not just with its rasping scooters but with sleek cars in traffic jams. There’s smog. That once tatty old hotel, famed in wartime, the Rex, has grown glossy and enormous. It’s food, designed for Western tastes is dull.

Hanoi is as far to the north as Singapore is to the south. We flew there and then took the train to the mountainous far north and the Chinese border. Even in a “superior” compartment the eight-hour journey over bumpy rails is tedious. Lao Cai at 7am was cold, dark, half a kilometre from the Chinese border.

There was still a one-and-a-half-hour drive to Sapa, 5,000ft up in the Tokinese Alps. Mount Franzipan is South-East Asia’s highest peak at 10,300ft.

The road up has been greatly improved. The Victoria Sapa Hotel (which also controls the train) is like an off-season ski resort with good food. The area is full of plunging paddy fields, foaming waterfalls and home to two highly colourful tribes of “minority people”, the H’mong and Dzao, vividly dressed in blues and scarlets.

Back in Hanoi at the Metropole it was a joy to reach comfort again and in the former base of the famous, such as Charlie Chaplin, Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward.

Hanoi was warm and full of sight-seeing and shopping.

Only the grim mausoleum of “Uncle Ho” with its goose-stepping guards, endless train of reverent pilgrims, vast parade ground and swarms of bossy police reminded us of Communist rule. Elsewhere laughing locals openly slanged the government.

We flew down to Hue (pronounced Whay) in one-and-a-half hours.

This earlier capital stands on the enormous Perfume River, with the huge, pink palace of the last, abdicated emperor. It was the scene of ferocious fighting in the “American War”.

On my last trip here my guide, an ex-Viet Cong guerrilla leader, had chewed his red-hot chillies (“good against malaria in jungle”) and showed us exactly where in the Imperial Palace courtyard he had fought the US marines.

In this lovely cityof Hue the huge palace grounds, grazed by goats a dozen years ago, have been restored. There are two good museums, one of antiquity, one of the frightful war.

We sailed along the river, stopping at a fine 17th Century pagoda attended by violet-robed monks and on to the burial palaces of the emperors.

Young entrepreneurs met us on motorbikes at the cliff’s foot. “Jump on!” For $1 they whizzed us across country to a village where children were rolling joss sticks with sandalwood and glue as we waited.

Beautiful & peaceful

Vietnams palaces, lakes and gardens are beautiful and peaceful, if you push on past the tourists.

The best came last. After a stunning drive via Da Nang, close to China Beach, we travelled on past fisherman’s cottages to Hoi An at the river mount. Here are elegant wooden 16th and 17th Century houses untouched by the war, lovely art galleries, tempting silk shops and an exotic market.

Along the enormous beach stands a cluster of recently built “cottages” with gardens and pools. This is the world-class resort Victoria Hoi An.

If this place, blending the old history close by with new luxury, is a beacon, then Vietnam will certainly boom. Come to Vietnam on holiday before crowds spoil it.