Ho Chi Minh

• 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

WE'D HARDLY LANDED IN Vietnam when I was put in my place. ‘How far is it to the centre of Ho Chi Minh City?’ I asked our taxi driver. ‘If you’re going to travel around the south of Vietnam you’re going to have to learn to call this city Saigon,’ he replied abruptly and quickly drove us to our hotel.

So, although the communist North Vietnamese forced America to give up and go home in 1975 when the name of Saigon was changed to Ho Chi Minh City in honour of the founder of the modern Vietnamese state, to the South Vietnamese, it remains Saigon.

In a city as forward looking as Saigon that speaks volumes.

To those of my generation, Vietnam summons divided memories. For more than ten years in the Sixties and Seventies we watched the flesh and foliage of that country burn in a battle between systems, which split America and much of the world down the middle.

Today, almost 30 years since the war ended, Vietnam might still be a one party communist state, but everywhere in Saigon the spirit of the once hated capitalism flourishes.

All tourists are welcomed with open arms and tills, and the U.S. dollar is an alternative currency to the dong.

Seductive Country

This was my second visit to Vietnam, although my first to Saigon. I went back because I find the country seductive, in the way that France is seductive. The streets in the centre of Saigon could very easily be in Cannes or St Raphael.

Vietnam was part of the French empire for only 80 years but the influence is everywhere. Surprisingly, French is rarely heard. It’s English and Japanese the children want to learn.

We stayed in a hotel on the Saigon River, and could look down on the busy river commerce, the ferries continually disgorging thousands of young people on their motor scooters.

The young Saigonese love their Japanese scooters. Everyone rides without a helmet, but the girls wear masks, like bank robbers, to protect them not just from traffic fumes, but to keep complexions safe from the sun.

French vanity lives on. Vietnamese schoolgirls in white trousers and long mandarin collared shifts wear what must be the most feminine school uniform in the world. And don’t they know it!

During the war most television coverage of Vietnam showed terrible things happening in jungle and mud, so it comes as a surprise to see what a grand, civilised city the French and Vietnamese built.

Glittering glass buildings are going up but it’s the boulevards, lined with towering, shading trees, like an Indo-Chinese Champs Elysees, which impress. Then there’s the Notre Dame Cathedral and a cool basilica of a 19th-century Central Post Office, all marble floors and teak benches, where ancient fans beat away the heat.

In side streets the little stalls and shops pulse with business. There are the pavements with their card games and chess, and a peculiarly Vietnamese kind of pret a manger. Here a lady in a coolie hat and baggy trousers carries two huge baskets hanging from a pole across her shoulders. Setting them down on the pavement she proceeds to feed the shop and office workers with soup, noodles, chicken and fish.

Colorful butterflies

The children who dance around tourists are like colourful butterflies. Hawkers can be a bore, but in Saigon it’s hard to turn them away.

‘Hey, did you know that Graham Greene wrote The Quiet American in the Continental Hotel over there,’ a 12 year-old girl told me in perfect American English. ‘Do you want to buy a copy? Four dollars.’

‘No, thank you. I’ve read it.’ ‘You want to buy some stamps then? You could buy an album in the shop and start a stamp collection. Lots of people collect stamps.’

‘Where did you learn such good English? At school?

‘No. I picked it up from American tourists. Maybe you should buy some postcards.’

I gave in.

The Vietnamese are keen to show off the Reunification Palace, at the end of Saigon’s biggest boulevard Duo Le Duan. It was the president’s palace when the war ended.

It isn’t attractive, put up in the 1960s after the previous palace had been bombed by a renegade South Vietnamese pilot. It does have curiosity value, though. The maps in the primitive basement war rooms are all left as they were the day the war suddenly ended.

Saigon is now a young city of mobile phones, satellite TV, flower decked roof gardens on private homes, and even the occasional David Beckham advertising poster, but the legacy of the war still dominates.

Too interesting not to see

We gave the War Museum a miss, but the Vietcong tunnels at Cu Chi were too interesting not to see. Cu Chi is in woods an hour by taxi outside Saigon. More than 100 miles of tunnels were dug, from which attacks were launched on Americans and South Vietnamese.

A middle-aged Vietnamese guide showed us with some pride the tunnels and how the ways into them (no more than 18in across) were camouflaged. He demonstrated the medieval traps the Vietcong laid in the woods, where pursuing GIs or South Vietnamese would be impaled on spikes.

At one point he invited us to go down a ‘five star’ burrow, a hole made bigger for tourists. I lasted less than five seconds and fled the way I’d gone in.

There’s so much to see in Vietnam that they don’t need to keep harking back. But they are right to show the tunnels. They represent an astonishing engineering accomplishment.

The war raised it’s head again when we took a long taxi ride out to the Mekong Delta.

Hiring a boat with a guide we set off across the khaki-hued river and made our way into one of the tiny canals which anyone who has seen Apocalypse Now will remember.

Today they’re beautiful peaceful glades overhung by tree ferns. But in the war the area was largely controlled by the Vietcong. Our guide’s father, a Vietcong soldier, had been killed there, he told us.

Now local people on slender sampans collect logs, and occasional tourist boats chatter through the giant tree ferns.

Stopping on a small, pretty island, we passed fruit gardens, abundant in pineapples, melons, lychees, papaya and mangos, visited a cottage toffee factory, and drank coconut tea.

Vietnam, particularly Saigon is a country electric with energy. There’s terrible poverty in the slum shantytowns but there’s also a great unquenchable spirit

As we drove back to Saigon at the end of the day, into the endless tide of scooters, it occurred that we were driving into the future.