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

I'VE ALYWAYS HAD A SOFT SPOT for the Vietnamese. They seemed to know something we didn’t - the way they busied themselves, the way they got on with life. I’d heard their country streamed with colour and energy, a heady fusion of ancient and modern. And then there was the business with the Americans, when such a small nation rid itself of a whole superpower. To find out more I decided on a trip from north to south, Vietnam being a conveniently long and thin country and lined on its east flank with what looked likely to be promisingly empty beaches.

My plane delivered me to the capital, Hanoi, and even that first night I was in the thick of it. Up to my balcony drifted the steaming fish smells of the street charcoal stoves and down below the motorcycle lights were like ordered torrents of fireflies.

It was difficult to know quite where to place the city in the great scheme of things - shady boulevards hinted at Vietnam’s French colonial past, as did cafes beside willow trees serving coffee and a decent stick of bread - but you were never far from a stall of pungent tropical fruit or a temple daubed with Chinese script.

Jeans-clad dudes walked respectfully beside fathers in dull and formal suits. The embalmed founding father of Vietnamese communism, Ho Chi Minh, was available for viewing at the mausoleum, yet everywhere there was free enterprise - notably hawkers who could out-hawk any hawkers I’d ever seen.

Bikes!

But most of all what struck me were the oncoming hordes of motor scooters. ‘I’m about to be run over,’ I thought, standing amid the traffic. ‘Repeatedly run over, in fact.’

On they came, laden with pregnant women, pigs, baskets of chickens. Somehow they all missed me and I made progress in the end behind a woman bearing goods balanced at either of a bamboo pole. Her technique was to walk slowly and purposefully with total disregard for the traffic. I made a note to try it myself next time.

But not today. I could better my survival odds by joining the traffic myself. So I was pedalled around on a cyclo - a cycle taxi, much like those appearing in London. There’s a lot to be said for viewing life anywhere in this leisurely way, but especially if you are trying to unravel the densely woven historical and cultural strands that compose Vietnam.

One minute the benevolent eyes of Ho Chi Minh are looking down on you from a placard - some say he looks like Colonel Sanders, of Kentucky chicken fame; the next minute you are waylaid by a hectic clothes market.

I’d been told that Vietnam was the place to have your wardrobe restocked - t-shirts, skirts, trousers, you name it. ‘And all at a tenth of the price!’ a friend had breathlessly explained.

And so it proved. There was clothing stall after clothing stall. Yes, ladies (and, to some extent gents), in Vietnam you can still shop till you drop. But only if you have the physique of a puny child.

‘You like try,’ said a stallholder, proffering some trousers of a questionable lilac hue to the female tourist beside me. ‘Yeah, I’ll give it a go,’ she said - for she was from New Zealand. She tried to wedge herself into the garment, which was optimistically labelled ‘XXXL’.

‘You are too big,’ the stallholder said. ‘I am not too big,’ the tourist said. ‘You people are too small.’

‘What about you buy something else?’ he said, in the ever-hopeful way I’d already come to expect of the Vietnamese.

You like buy some luggage maybe.’ ‘Trousers,’ she said. ‘I came here for trousers.’ Then he produced his whole glorious range: Yves Saint Laurent, Versace, Gucci, Kipling - and not one genuine item among them. ‘First-class photocopy,’ the stallholder said proudly. ‘I’ll take the most expensive,’ said the New Zealander.

Storm the presidential palace

The next day I wanted a rest from all this human traffic and, for a few dollars, joined a boat around Halong Bay. Now I was cutting through clear and clean turquoise waters: ahead and all around jutted steep and mysterious limestone islands.

The cook knocked up an exquisite dish of chillied fish and prawns, then we dropped anchor and I went swimming in what turned out to be almost bath temperature. Closer, the rock islands were starkly barren, vegetation doing well just hanging on. A perching eagle was silhouetted in the dipping sun.

Then back to Hanoi and its indomitable motor-scooterists. Traders and courting couples passed this way and that astride their saddles, a traffic of hope that seemed to express what it is to be Vietnamese. Whatever their heritage, troubles, they were moving on.

Wherever I went in Vietnam, there were signs of this resilience. It was evident further south at Hoi An; it’s here you can get your wardrobe, each item made to measure and then knocked up for you overnight. It was evident among the Hindu ruins of the Champa kingdom: a mini version of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple complex and ruined a further 70 per cent by B-52 bombers. The biscuit-red bricks were held together - in a manner that puzzled archaeologists for years - not with mortar but with a plant resin.

My last leg, to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), was by night train. There was a wealth more to see in this exhilarating and enchanting country. First stop tomorrow, I decided as I bedded down, would be another temple. Then swiftly on to the Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes, now tactfully renamed The War Remnants Museum and apparently a hit even with American tourists.

Then to the Presidential Palace, its wrought-iron gates famously photographed being knocked down by an advancing communist tank. I woke abruptly at 4am, to rather alarming and repeated bouts of martial music from the loudspeakers. But by now, a little like the cheerful Vietnamese passengers camped around me, I was beginning to take everything in my stride.