Ho Chi, Củ Chi, KFC, Minh

The last stop on our Vietnam trail was the city of Ho Chi Minh.

Saigon, as it was formerly (and still is unofficially) known, is just as crazy, chaotic and thrill-riding as you'd expect it to be, and a fitting way to end our journey through this often intense, and at times insane, country.

Saigon is a city full of dizzying contrasts: hawkers in conical hats walking under huge, flashing billboards; ropey motorbikes roaring through the streets next to perfectly polished Hummers; timeless alleys, lined with ramshackle stalls selling spices and pans, leading to designer malls and gourmet restaurants. Yet, everyone is as much a part of this living organism as the next, adding their own energy and eclecticism to the city's urban mosaic.

Reminders of what the city and its people went through, just one generation ago, are in the tourist trappings (the museums and the Củ Chi tunnels) but today, propaganda about the Vietnam war (or, to the Vietnamese, the American war) is now only contained in the faux-vintage poster shops and group tours led by grinning guides. The American outlets of KFC and Adidas hammered home that point.

While there, we took part in the touristy propaganda - silently looking at horrific images from the war and making our way through a stifling section of the Củ Chi tunnels, an immense network of underground tunnels used by the Vietnamese (in Western history books, known as the Viet Cong guerillas) to bewilder and defeat the Americans.

At Củ Chi, we took a tour through the jungle where a lot of the Vietnam war was fought, and where a great deal of soldiers, on both sides, lost their lives. We circumnavigated bomb craters and booby traps of all kinds that were made by the communist soldiers to capture, kill or maim American fighters when on the ground. I squeezed myself into one hiding hole - not advisable if you are even a little bit claustrophobic, or "big-boned" for that matter.

The tunnels, which have been widened and reinforced for tourists in parts (not that you would know as they are so small and cramped), go deeper into the earth and the Viet Cong and civilians alike lived under there to avoid being shot or captured. We shuffled along inside, our backs bent right over

as we made our way along in the dark and dirt. We bailed out early (you can walk 100 metres) and it was a relief to see sunlight again, I can tell you!

It must have been a terrifying life, living underground, only emerging to shoot at the enemy. So many lives were lost here and the deafening sound of the theme park style

shooting range was quite unsettling.

Another sobering day arrived when I rounded a street corner, looking for postcards, and stopped in my tracks because I was aware that there was something strange with the formation of people ahead of me. A kind traveller approached me and said "if you don't want to be depressed, don't come down here." I looked ahead and could see why everyone had stopped in their tracks. A Vietnamese man, surrounded by a huge pool of blood that was spreading onto the grey tarmac, was writhing around in the road. He had slit his throat and was slowly dying in the centre of a busy street. Stunned, and feeling wobbly, I decided to turn on my heal and leg it back the way I came.

But the image stuck with me all day and I was left wondering what would drive a person to do that so spontaneously and so publicly. That evening, we asked a local guy while sat drinking bia hơi if he knew what had happened. He said, looking very solemn, "love, I can't think of

another reason but love."

Despite their often hard exterior, the Vietnamese are a bunch of hopeless romantics after all. And we left on this note, happy we had experienced this beautiful, unruly country with its formidable, resilient and occasionally charming people, yet glad to be moving on to Cambodia for our next adventure.

Vroom vroom Vietnam!

We spent the next week exploring Đà Lạt (or Dalat), in the central highlands, and then Mũi Né on the south coast by the best transport available in Vietnam: motorbike (sorry mum!).

Motorbikes have surely surpassed walking as the most-used form of transport in Vietnam. Everywhere you go there are people cleaning, repairing, and retooling them; hundreds of shops in each city and town sell helmets, fake designer-print seats and other bike 'bling'.

We wanted a piece of the action.

After another 'throw your hands in the air and declare"only-in-Asia!"' bus journey (involving a group of us being left stranded in the middle of the night for hours and fisticuffs, well almost, with the tour company), we rolled into Dalat.

Dalat, a cool, mountain town where there are no straight streets and no street signs...and no maps. It’s got good French credentials though: for years the French used Dalat as their vacation grounds, building giant European villas up in the hills. Even now, colourful european architecture permeates the place, making it look less like Vietnam and more of a run-down, Alps mountain town. While the town wasn't the lush, green haven we had hoped for, the surrounding fields are home to strawberry, dragonfruit and flower farms and beyond that are crop-covered hills, rolling into the distance.

At night, the streets in the centre of town come alive with street markets selling pretty much everything from food, clothes ('90s throwbacks, mostly), jewellery and more. With a temperate climate, there are stalls heaving with all kinds of fresh, leafy vegetables - glorious vegetables! What I wouldn't give for a good lettuce! (£1.5o, it turned out, that evening in a salad). People yelling and vending to the bitter end made for a colourful circus well into the night.

I'm getting side-tracked, back to the motorbikes. Vietnam was made for travel by motorbike, and the twists and turns of the verdantm central highlands offered coffee plantations, breathtaking vistas, sprinklings of minority villages and a healthy serving of fresh air. The roads were fairly clear and wide but just crazy enough to provide the occasional spike of adrenaline and make me grip onto Med just a little tighter.

We cruised through the mountain passes, surrounded by shades of green as far as the eye can see, trying to ask villagers for directions, followed by endless U-turns and head-scratching and occasional soakings by the monsoon rains.

This was pure freedom and euphoria! Only rudely interrupted, momentarily, by pot holes that made my bum that bit number.

We visited the Prenn and Datanla waterfalls, which cater for Asian tourists and honeymooners, because for Westerners it is surely cheesier than a packet of Wotsits (although we spoke to some who seemed to love them). The waterfalls are nothing short of beautiful, or at least they were 20 years earlier, but the carnival stalls, cable cars, plastic menagerie, ostrich rides and man in a monkey warrior suit made this something more

akin to a tacky theme park than a natural beauty spot. We were perplexed and hurried back to our motorbike, escaping the gaggles of photo-posing, Chinese tourists.

Still, Dalat was a free-wheeling snapshot of the highlands of Vietnam and a nice heat reprieve before our next destination: Mũi Né, which was all sizzling beaches, slapping on suncream and sand dunes.

Mũi Né is a jumbled mix of quiet,fishing village and lazy beach town. As we strolled along the thin, long stretch of beach on our first day, we watched fisherman pulling nets, pushing paddles through the water in round boats and shouting back and forth to each other.

After a few days of languishing by the beach, we teamed up with our new friends, Aoife and Mark, and rented motorbikes. We enjoyed a breezy day on the road: almost conned by a cheeky monk at a long-lost monastery, biking to sand dunes and canyons, that had clearly grown legs and moved since the map was printed, sand sledding with entrepreneurial little kids who would make Lord Alan Sugar proud (as much for their potty mouths as for their money-making schemes), breathing in the pungent pong of shrimps that are dried in there billions at the side of the road to make Mũi Né's famous fish sauce, swimming in the sea on a local beach while in fear of getting robbed, stocking up on beer

during Happy Hour(s) and keeping them in the fridge behind the bar, tucking in with our fingers to platefuls of fresh seafood, and nursing bad sunburn (not mine, for I'm still obsessed with the factor 30).

So, in summary, motorbiking in Vietnam is an incredible experience and can be done safely, it's the odd, hoodwinking monk and Alan Sugar's scruffy, pint-sized protégés that you need to watch out for!

All the Huế to Hội An

We travelled south on the train to visit the cultural heart of Vietnam, Huế. Our expectations for the overnight journey were low and flashbacks from my India train travel made me a little anxious.

We opted for the hard sleeper, and had no idea what, or who, lay in wait in our 6-berth sleeper cabin. But, we were pleasantly surprised by the neatness of the carriage and the politeness of our 'roomies' for the night, and tucked ourselves in on our clean bunks, nodding off to the monotonous sound of the train rolling over the tracks.

We awoke in 'South Vietnam', as the country's divide is still apparent in the people. They were instantly friendlier (and would get increasingly friendly as we made our way to Saigon) and there was a less aggressive feel to the traffic, the commerce and the day-to-day interactions we took part in. We breathed a sigh of relief and settled into Huế.

Previously Huế was the capital of Vietnam and where the Nguyen dynasty chose to build their imperial palace on instructions from their feng shui experts at the time. Huế thrives on culture, is full of history and awash with tragic memories. With this tantalising concoction mixed with the general, Vietnamese desire for chaos, it's an interesting place to pass through and a welcome break on the arduous journey from Hanoi to Hội An.

Over the next two days we explored the citadel and took a lazy boat up the river to visit the monster tombs of the emperors - a chance to gaze at a world of riches, opulence and massive egos!

We had designated ourselves a 'rest day' to help us beat travelling fatigue, and it just so happened that the Rugby World Cup was on, twice. But then the sky burst. Rain gushed down, water pushed its way through the quiet streets of the city and, in just minutes, we were surrounded by flood water. There was nothing left to do but drink beer with new friends (one of which went to the same infant school as me in Cumbria - small world), watch rugby and spectate as people waded, cycled and motorbiked through the new, muddy river that blasted through the street outside.

Thankfully, in Vietnam, we are all millionaires (£29.90 = 1million Dong), so our many hours in the bar came to just £8. As the hours past, the flood water rose and we had to wade through the

knee-deep river to get back to our hotel, passing by a wriggling snake (that made me walk considerably faster).

We went from flash floods to a bus journey with a solvent-sniffing driver, all within 12 hours in Vietnam. C'est la vie in South East Asia!

But the beauty/chaos balance was restored upon arriving in Hội An, with the sun shining down on the crumbling, Spanish-style backstreets. We were treated to a fairytale light show for full moon, known as the 'Hội An Legendary Night'. Flickering candles, cupped in delicate paper cases, lined the streets by the river, incense perfume wafted through the people-filled streets and lanterns hung from every bridge and tree branch.

We watched as people sent the floating candles into the gentle flow of the river to be carried away under the bewitching light of the full moon.

To reach the 30km stretch of beach nearby, we cycled past paddy fields and palm-fringed waterways, by thatched homes and families sat doing their daily chores of washing, fixing, building and cooking. The people in the villages of Vietnam are truly self reliant—growing, killing, and cooking their own meals is a daily way of life. And yes, I must tell you, that one of the staples of their diet, particularly during celebrations, is dog.

Like me, I'm sure you're reading this with a scrunched up face as you imagine your neighbours' poodle being served up, à la carte. Many rural communities in Vietnam have dogs lying around outside, not pets but reared like their cows and pigs. We also heard stories of people's pets going missing (and yes, some dogs and cats are domestic pets, they even have collars), as dog can fetch a lot of money in one of the special, dog meat restaurants.

While this filled me with horror at first, I soon softened as I realised this was just a way of life and, in many cases, survival and was no different to the Vietnamese than the pigs they roasted and the cows they turned into phở bò. What's more, Vietnam is the first Asian country I have visited where the streets weren't roamed and ruled by mal-nourished, disease-ridden dogs.

Still, there was no way we'd knowingly eat dog!

Cycling to the beaches was a breezy insight into rural life. The 'local beach', An Bang, was our favourite, with warm sea and white sands disappearing into the hot haze of the midday sun.

It was hard to leave.

The power of 'Ten' in Ha Long Bay

Late one evening in Hanoi, we were told that, if we wanted to make it to Ha Long Bay, we had to leave at 8am the next morning. There was a storm brewing; the typhoon that had wreaked havoc in the Philippines was whirling its way across the South China Sea and would hit the east coast of Vietnam in three days.

With a UNESCO World Heritage seal of approval, Ha Long Bay sits on the northern ridge of a limestone chain that sweeps up from the Gulf of Thailand and the Angthong National Marine Park. It’s not the cliffs themselves that make Ha Long Bay unique, but rather their sheer number. This huge bay is dotted with nearly 2,000 mostly uninhabited, jagged limestone islands, or karsts.

Meaning "dragon descending" and created over millions of years, local legend says that, when the Vietnamese were fighting Chinese invaders, the gods sent a family of dragons to help defend the land. This family of dragons began spitting out jewels and jade. These jewels turned into the islands and islets dotting the bay, linking together to form a great wall against the invaders. The people kept their land safe and formed what later became the country of Vietnam.

As much as I like this mythical story, it was in fact tectonic forces, not sparring dragons, that slowly thrust the limestone above the water-line. During this process, waves lapping against the stone carved out a number of huge, striking caves and grottos.

Early the next morning, the bus picked us up in Hanoi and zoomed us along, sadly with masses of other tourists, to the coast. In walks Ten into our lives - our terrible, yet terribly brilliant, tour guide, wearing his 4-stripe, 'Adidass' jacket.

The window scene morphed into a dramatic landscape of limestone pillar mountains, jutting vertically up from the water below. The karsts cluster into a mystical array of gray stone, verdant lushness, and boats - or junks - with colonial sails and rudders.

We got dropped at the dock along with the hordes of others. Tour guides scrambled in every direction leading their pack of sheep through the crowds. It was clear our guide was a live-wire from the very start, a hopeless ball of energy, constantly on two mobile phones, who confused us with his directions every step of the way.

After almost losing half our group, we boarded the Chinese-style junk, with its large dining room and upper deck with lounge chairs and potted plants, and started slowly cruising our way around the spiralling crags.

It was nice and quiet on the water —well, except for the dozens of other tourist junks that sailed around us. Oh, and one other thing that just seems impossible to escape in Vietnam. The hawkers. Even out in the calm, quiet waters, tiny women in tiny boats approached, encircled, and surrounded us on a few occasions.

“Excuse me. Please buy something from me.

Oreos? Ritz cracker? I have snack for you.”

These women were the most persistent salespeople I’d ever encountered, rowing with narrow oars well into the night.

Our boat had a great, international contingency and we tucked into a spread of seafood, vegetable and tofu that would become all too familiar over the next 48 hours as we had carbon copies of the buffet at every meal time.

After lunch we headed to the “Surprise cave” (Sung Sot cave) and once inside you can see why. There are three main caverns and each one gets larger than the next, dripping with weird and wonderful limestone formations. Stalactites speared downwards to meet stalagmites all around us.

Next came our abrupt introduction to the floating houses tied together in villages, many of which comprise of just flimsy, wooden structures bobbing up an down plastic-covered polystyrene.

Our boat driver smashed into one of the houses, snapping in half one of the supporting planks of wood. No problem, it would appear. The owners were getting money from us as we all took out their kayaks on the water.

Later, we sat on the top deck of the boat on loungers. The sunshine became softer and softer as it wrapped its rays around each pillar of limestone, bouncing off the moving water. Our boat dropped anchor for the night amidst the sea and stars. Silhouetted against the night sky were the forms of dozens of looming limestone cliffs—it was surreal, and a little chilly!

Ten tried to plan numerous "illegal parties" that night for "the big strong men" and the groups of girls. Despite his best efforts, and hundreds of suggestions that such a party should happen, there were no illegal parties, or at least none that Ten received an invite to.

The next morning we sailed to Cat Ba island, one of the largest islands in Ha Long Bay and home to a dense National Park. And there Ten really came into his own.

"Get on bus," he instructed us in his broken English and pointed. So a few of us start piling on this bus and find a seat.

Ten then looks around him, confused as to where we had gone. "What are you doing on the bus?!" he shouts. This kind of clown comedy ensued throughout the day, including a bemusing boat incident where Med and I nearly lost half our belongings. It was official, Ten was the worst tour guide in Halong Bay, perhaps even Vietnam. But our affections grew.

After a muddy trek to a viewpoint and a trip to Monkey Island, we sat down for dinner in our hotel on the island. In walks Ten, with a huge lump on his forehead and blood coming from his mouth. "What have you done there, Ten?" we ask. He makes a hand-slapping gesture and explains, in between slurping his lips, that he walked into the glass door downstairs. "Do you know what make it better?" he said to the Irish

girls, "I know something." He then gestures to his lip and makes a kissing noise with his swollen lip. You have to admire his persistence.

The next day we floated back to the harbor point as the wind started to come in, back into the scurry of everyone else and back into the racing bus. Ten, in a last bizarre move, gave everyone on the bus a heartfelt apology that he couldn't give us a better trip, before putting a few of the quieter members of the group on the spot by asking how they felt the trip went. All of us at the back of the bus cringed

We said goodbye to the wounded Ten as we arrived back in Hanoi. This time I was prepared for the full-on assault of the city and it seemed just a little tamer than when we left.

Bia hơi and phở bò in Hanoi

With heartfelt memories of Nepal fresh in our thoughts, we weren't quite prepared for the humdinger that was Hanoi.

It’s a political capital city with a robust, hard-faced attitude that more resembles China than South East Asia. I can see why this city wouldn’t appeal to everyone - and it certainly didn't to Med.

In Hanoi, crossing the road became an extreme sport, with a ruthless, kinetic flow of traffic racing through the tree-lined city. Masses of motorbikes swarm through the tangled streets, choking the heart of the city and stealing our peace and quiet at every junction.

We, and other people we met, also felt that tourists weren't made to feel that welcome in the city - we even got shouted at to get out of a restaurant filled with locals before our bums had hit the seats.

Bemused, pining for Nepal, we wondered why we had come

to Vietnam.

We reminded ourselves we were here for more rough and ready travel, more chaotic, Asian experiences, to try new food and witness a new, raw and overwhelmingly unique culture. I tried to keep an open mind, despite the set-backs and the road-crossing drills.

Hawkers in conical hats ply their wares, many speaking French as well as Vietnamese; locals sip iced Vietnamese tea on the street or linger over coffee in Parisian-style cafés, watching life pass them by; ramshackle market stalls, selling anything from caged birds to coffins, line the grand, leafy boulevards.

If you strip back the gaudy commerce and block out the pulsating noise and traffic, Hanoi is quite beautiful - a city with a blend of Parisian grace and Asian pace.

We thanked the French for their wide, attractive pavements with quaint blue and white street signs, for the crusty baguettes we tucked into over breakfast and for the continental architecture dotted amongst the modern, Vietnamese structures. These moments of Paris make Hanoi special, as the smell of café au lait permeates street corners and lakes and parks dot the city - providing a romantic backdrop to the non-stop roar of the city.

But there are still incongruous moments of East meets West in Hanoi. Remnants of the wars are ever present, behind the bricks of museums and in the stony faces of some of the Vietnamese.

There was still a war of words in the Army Museum, with the enemy (be they French or American) painted as evil by the propaganda-laiden displays. We grimaced at the rusty bits of metal that had taken the lives of thousands of men and stood, suspended by horror, looking at the images of extreme deformities in the Agent Orange exhibition. A day on the historical trail left us slightly bewildered but helped us understand the country we were in a little more.

We joined the locals for meal times at the pavement food stations, perching precariously on tiny plastic chairs we've not sat upon since primary school - Med's knees were up to his ribcage.

We tucked into phở bò (noodle soup with beef and bean sprouts) and not so bò phở as I attempted to ask for the vegetarian option, as the sight of the raw meat left out to bake in the day's heat sent my stomach churning. But this was lost in translation as most of the Vietnamese don't speak English and couldn't understand our attempts at their tonal language, so I sucked it up, and swallowed the lumps of chicken fat that mysteriously appeared in my hot bowl of phở. Still, it's only 20,000dong (about 60p) for a big bowl - we weren't complaining.

And then we'd move to some even smaller plastic chairs that spilled out into the road to enjoy bia hơi, a locally-brewed, fresh beer that is served for 13p a glass on almost every street in Hanoi. It is brewed daily and delivered to street vendors in plastic bottles and jugs. Sitting with new friends in the street, watching the lights of the traffic stream past us, we decided Vietnam was going to be a great adventure after all.