Two weeks ago I returned from a nine day vacation in Vietnam. There were plenty of reminders of their 20th century wars -- but only in history museums. The museums presented Vietnam's side of the war with the French for independence (1945-1954) and of what we call the Vietnam War and they call the American War (I guess it could also have been described as a civil war). But the Vietnamese do not seem to harbour grudges. People were quite friendly to me everywhere (as I believe they are to all westerners), and not just in hotels but in markets and retail stores and on the street. I was kind of comforted that America's last war was 30 years in the past.

Of course now, since 11 September, war is in the present, and almost surely in the immediate future.

Vietnam professes still to be a communist country, but there seem to be entrepreneurs everywhere. All of the cities have thousands of tiny little retail stores and food shops and service shops one after another endlessly, street after street. It is often impossible to walk on the sidewalk because so many vendors have set up shop -- makeshift restaurants with kiddie-sized plastic tables and chairs serving hot food prepared elsewhere (home?) and kept warm in large metal pots, bicycle repair shops, women carrying two baskets of stuff for sale hanging from a bamboo pole balanced on their shoulders (like scales of justice). They now have private ownership of farm land and homes as well. And people are encouraged to start businesses. There's a stock exchange (well, okay, only six listed companies so far).

There are few cars and fewer buses but, to compensate, millions of motorbikes and bicycles. What little sidewalk space is left unused by the street vendors becomes a motorbike car park. There's a local brand of motorbike, but the Chinese ones are regarded as the best value while the Japanese ones are the best quality. Vietnam is still a poor country -- average per capita income is below US$50 a month. Supposedly, under the communist rules there, even the president of a company cannot earn more than $200 a month -- but I wonder about that.

I went with a Chinese friend from Hong Kong. He must look a little Vietnamese because local people constantly were coming up to him and speaking in Vietnamese. We had arranged our trip with a French lady who is a travel agent in Hong Kong. She had lived in Vietnam and knows it well. Each area we went we had our own guide and a driver. We flew from HK to Hanoi, which was the North Vietnamese capital and is the national capital today. The #1 tourist attraction there is Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum. And, yes, he is lying there watching his guests walk past (silently, of course, since he died in 1969). Guests is not really the right word. Adoring worshippers is more like it. The line of people waiting to view Uncle Ho at any moment stretches for kilometers plural! It is a lifetime pilgrimage for all Vietnamese. Of course, foreign tourists can jump the queue by paying a small fee (under $1 I think), which we did.

The French colonised Vietnam in the late 1850s and remained nearly 100 years. Ho declared independence in 1945 and fought the French until 1954, when he defeated them at Dien Bien Phu. A Geneva treaty split Vietnam into North and South, Ho continued his insurgency into the South, the US got involved in the mid-1960s, and finally gave up -- 50,000 American lives later -- in 1972 I think it was. South Vietnam gave up in 1975 when Ho's army invaded the presidential palace in Saigon.

The French did leave some beautiful architecture, particularly in Hanoi. Street after street of French villas, the cathedral, the post office, the opera house, the governor's residence, and many other landmarks. They also left a tradition of great bread, as they did in Cambodia. (Maybe they could conquer Britain just for a year or two and teach the English how to bake bread!)

Like every other large Vietnamese city, Hanoi has its share of Buddhist temples, exotic food markets, and ancient neighbourhoods. It also has several museums to the war for independence, complete with hulks of US warplanes (there are a bunch of B52s on display as spoils of war) and bombs and such. We also went to the famous Hoa Lo Prison (nicknamed Hanoi Hilton) where Pete Peterson and John McCain and many other American pilots and soldiers were held. In colonial days, the French kept dissidents in there under awful conditions.

Vietnam is a very long (1,100 km) and skinny country. It has 80 million people (that's four times Australia's population, for instance) and 127,000 sq. miles of land. Hanoi is 3 million, Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) is 7 million. To slow down population growth, families are prohibited from having more than two children. Vietnam is highly literate (over 90%). Currency is the dong -- 15,000 dong is US$1. Vietnamese language was written in Chinese characters until 1945, when Ho switched it to Western characters. All words have one syllable, lots of accent marks. (Hanoi is really two words - Ha Noi -- and spelled that way in Vietnam. Likewise for other names.)

De rigeur headgear is the cone-shaped hat for women and pith helmets for men!

After Hanoi we drove 3.5 hours to Halong Bay, then took a boat out for a six-hour cruise in a series of 3,000 uninhabited rock islands that is a World Heritage Site. Very beautiful, even spiritual. We also visited Haiphong and stopped in a tiny rural village -- causing great curiosity for the kids.

We then flew to Danang and visited there, Hoi An, and Hue. Hoi An has 850 buildings built between the 15th and 18th centuries. Plus a wet market right on a river with perhaps a thousand stalls selling just about anything you can imagine, not to mention the unimaginable stuff. We watched a woman using a mortar and pestle to grind up live, crawling crabs to make some sort of paste. Huge baskets full of writhing silk worms not for making silk but for making wine. The occasional pooch skinned and laid out (you can tell by the tail that it ain't beef or pork). Oh yes, oranges are green here (outside); they look like limes. There are ladyfinger bananas (a/k/a emperor bananas), short and stubby, 12-15 for 20 US cents. Snake wine is huge in Vietnam -- literally a dead snake floating around in a clear glass bottle of brandy-coloured wine. Yum.

Hue was the imperial capital during the Nguyen Dynasty, and it is complete with an old Imperial Palace modelled after Beijing's Forbidden City, and nearly as large (or was until it became Viet Cong headquarters during the war and the Americans bombed many of the old buildings). Out in the countryside there are tombs of the various emperors, each unique and spectacular. We had a three hour boat ride down the Perfume River, stopping at a pagoda.

Then another flight to Ho Chi Minh City, still called Saigon by most. Saigon has about 1 million Chinese who live in a large neighbourhood (Cholon) with a giant market and several Chinese temples. There is also a big competing Vietnamese market on the other side of town. Downtown Saigon is modern and prosperous looking with a fair number of high rise buildings, upscale shops and malls, and a very active night life. The USA tore down the old embassy two years ago (too many bad memories) and built a nice new one.

We drove to the Cu Chi tunnels (about 2 hours out of Saigon). Here the Viet Cong guerillas built 200 kilometers of underground tunnels three levels high, where they hid and fought the Americans. We actually crawled a bit through one of them -- after sitting through a very one-sided 30 minute video.

Three of our four flights were on Vietnam Airlines, and I was most impressed. In Hanoi and Saigon you can eat dinner at the best restaurants for US$20 for two people, and that would include one beer each, two starters (Vietnamese spring rolls are the specialty), soup, three main dishes, and dessert. Vietnamese food is a lot like Thai, lots of lemon grass and chilies. Prawns and fish abound inexpensively.

There are tiny (4 inch) salamanders running around everywhere, crawling on walls, windows, and signs. There are French tourists also running around everywhere -- though I didn't notice many of them crawling on walls, windows, or signs.

There are lots of American products in Vietnam. Seems like 50% of the gas stations are US brands. You can get Baskin-Robbins and M&Ms in Saigon. KFC yes, McD not yet. And guess what other American product I saw many of in Vietnam... DeSoto trucks! When did they stop making those -- 25 years ago?