Vietnam is one of Z’s favourite countries. And not just for the pho (we had our first bowl outside Saigon railway station at 3am after our midnight flight…). He likes the combination of very traditional, slow-paced rural life with big, modern, turbocharged cities.

Me? I loved Saigon, and the everyday people we met. But I found the aggressively entrepreneurial spirit, not to say constant scams and ripoffs, on the tourist trail oppressive. So I got on the plane with slightly mixed feelings.

Last time round, our plan still was to cover three continents and sixteen countries in a single year. This left us, as you might imagine, rather short on time. So we only made it as far north as the nineteenth-century capital, Hue, before cutting west cross-country and into Laos. And we took the bus, not the train.

A big mistake… Because the poignantly-named Reunification Express, which runs from Saigon to Hanoi, is a wonderful way to travel.

You settle into your bunk. Trundle along for 32 hours, reading, dozing, eating, chatting and looking out of the window, lulled by the chuntering of the train. Arrive at your destination perfectly content.

Vietnamese communism may be drowning under a wave of resurgent capitalism, but it’s certainly not dead yet. The journey begins with a traditional pentatonic jingle, introducing a voice artist, clearly channelling Charlton Heston as Moses, who pays eloquent tribute to the “revolutionary vigour of the railway workers” before presenting a potted, and ineffably cadre-friendly potted history of each region you enter.

Visually, the journey is stunning. There are folk in pyjamas and conical hats working their paddy fields. The dry season crop was showing young ears, and the wet season crop was just beginning to break surface or still at the ploughing stage: two lifecycles in one tiny plot.

You ride through small towns, where those ineffably Vietnamese tall, narrow buildings, five or six single-room storeys topped by implausibly tiny triangular roofs, punctuate clusters of bungalows. Marble mountains, karst outcrops like something from a Chinese line-drawing, streams, rivers and lakes, banana farms and papaya orchards, patches of young forest, bridges and tunnels, gently pass you by.

When it comes to personal space, Vietnam is a very different country. As anyone who’s traveled in city traffic, where eight-deep scrums of scooters attain levels of driver-driver intimacy which would get you arrested in the West, will confirm.

Z and I had booked the lowest of the three tiers of bunks in our “hard sleeper”*. And, until we donated his to a girl with a four-month old baby and her grandmother, on the morning of day two, our bunks were virtually café society.

There were the pair of railway workers conducting an office romance. Him cute and rather dumb. She less cute, but very chatty. The ladies from the bunks above catching up on gossip and swapping nail polish. The American freelancer from two cabins down come to catch up on world news. The sister of the young mother’s grandmother, bearing snacks…

And, even though the only language we had in common with all the twelve people who shared our carriage over the course of the journey was my 10 or 20 words of Vietnamese, we shared our food, chatted about the baby, and arrived in Hanoi with that warm, fuzzy feeling about the world which, erm, leaves one a walking target for taxi scams.

The odd thing is, on a second visit, scams roll more easily than they did before. Irritating? Sure. Upsetting? No.

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Pho is one of those dishes, like the classic English fry-up, that only seems to work when served in a grubby, streetside place lined with red plastic kindergarten chairs and populated by troughing locals.

Pho comes in three main varieties. Pork (heo), well-done beef (bo) and rare beef (bo tai), though they will make it with anything in the tourist joints. Most places do one type of meat per day, full stop.

At the heart of pho is a rich, long-simmered, meaty broth, the very essence of umami. Pho arrives at table as a bowl of broth, with narrow, flat rice noodles, topped with slices of meat, or slivers of rare beef, a smattering of chopped spring onion, and perhaps some crispy curls of pork fat or fried garlic.

You enhance this delicious base, to your taste, using fresh lime, vegetables (always beansprouts, sometimes other green things too), fresh herbs (mint, rau rom, basils, corianders), fresh or dried chillis and fish sauce (or soy sauce in the tourist joints), sometimes preserved ginger or garlic, creating your own perfect balance of tang, heat and umami, accented with your choice of Vietnamese herbs.

And, my god, do they have fantastic herbs here!

Slurp up the noodles, spoon down the broth, pick out the garnishes when they have “cooked” to perfection, and you’re away.

At a streetside stall or restaurant, it should come in around a dollar — we’ve paid between 15,000 and 20,000 dong*. Most will only serve one type of meat.

Our favourite place for pho? In an alley round the back of Vo Tan Than Street, just past the War Remnants Museum in Saigon, they serve a stunningly balanced rare beef pho: the meat is delicate, succulent, pink, and the fatty broth has been simmered to death.

We tried a version at Quan An Ngon, Saigon (now on Pasteur, Saigon), which has everyone seems to rave about, but the French colonial villa version, even though they simmer their broth for 24 hours, can’t compete with the plain ole plastic chairs.

In fairness, though, how can a team of chefs who turn out an 18-page menu nightly (or part of it: they were out of ingredients for a lot of the more interesting stuff when we were there), compete with an old lady in a backstreet caff who’s been making pho day in day out for forty, fifty years, and earned her living on that recipe alone?

*Partway through writing this post, we wandered out to a promising-looking pho stall in Hue, then were ushered inside to a place with bamboo chairs. 30,000 dong apiece. Grrr… It’s not the money that matters. It’s the feeling of being stung.

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