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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The safety laws in Vietnam are an improvement on those in Cambodia. Everyone has to have a license, although to the untutored eye it would be hard to tell. A driving instructor friend gave us a lift to buy some DVDs, and, my god, the man must have nerves of steel.

Anywise, in Cambodia, only the driver has to wear a helmet, and this is rarely enforced. In Vietnam passengers do too.

Or at least, adult passengers do.

For some reason the law does not extend to children. Perhaps their skulls are supposed to be harder?

Or, as Z, who can hop on and off a bike like a trouper (he’s learnt the hard way to avoid the side with the exhaust), said, “Maybe we’re more disposable.”

Saigon moto drivers exhibit all the verve and aggression of a New York taxi driver, without the protective armour. They brake for noone (although they swerve PDQ for buses). They turn at will. And, unlike in Phnom Penh, their vehicles have the vim to reach speeds well outside one’s comfort zone.

Roundabouts, in particular, are a white-knuckle ride, through a web of scooters, coming five or six deep from several directions, everyone hooting to announce their presence and intentions, weaving merrily across and into each other’s paths.

During the school run, mothers in surgical masks come flooding out of alleyways, children in brilliant white shirts clinging to their backs and/or sitting upfront, sometimes with a baby-seat attached to the handlebars, sometimes with Hello Kitty backpacks cramming the front basket.

Set against a backdrop of neon, skyscrapers, street stalls and grand French architecture, it makes for glorious local colour when viewed from a safe vantage point such as, say, a bus or a cafe table.

From the inside? It’s unnerving, whether one is crossing the road (best done slowly, incrementally and at an angle, making like a barn owl with the head) or endeavouring to map-read from the pillion.

We’ve gone the wrong way against heavy traffic after the engine cut out, nipped merrily over pavements when the traffic got too dense, braked sufficiently hard to come off the ground to avoid a head-on collision, carved up cars, old ladies, cyclos, fruit stands, tuk-tuks, even hand carts.

On one memorable journey, the driver would not stop at all for fear of the engine cutting out. We progressed through the 30-second traffic light countdown at a snail’s pace. Which wouldn’t have been so bad had he managed to accelerate when the lights picked up.

I’ve been giving Z my helmet, as one does, but last night, on our way to a restaurant in Don Khoi the driver was panicked about a fine. So an appropriately-sized helmet is on our must-buy list.

We found a stall last night. They had everything from helmets styled as baseball caps to knocked-off-Adidas branding and, Z’s favourite, a Hell’s Angel styled affair with silver Iron Crosses on a black background.

“It’s good,” the saleswoman said definitively, as he tried it on. He liked it too.

I was not convinced. I strapped him up and implemented the classic bike helmet test (cuffing him on the back of the helmet). It didn’t so much slip off as head for the stratosphere.

The saleslady didn’t see this as a problem. I did. I tried to explain in sign language that I wanted one that fitted.

She directed me to a set of very cute helmets, in pink, scarlet and turquoise, styled as flower-printed ladybirds, complete with springy metal antennae.

Z was having none of it. I said we could cut off the antennae, buy some paint and customise it. He was still having none of it.

Since it appears that one size fits all, apart from the ladybirds, which are definitively small, if we can’t find one that fits sir’s sophisticated aesthetic, he will be travelling several hundred miles over the next four months or so garbed as a small, cute ladybird. And, yes, he will hate me.

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The Cu Chi tunnels, twenty miles or so outside Saigon, make the trenches of Flanders look like R&R in Bangkok. More than 200 kilometres of them wind their way through laterite clay which sets as hard as concrete.

Guerillas carved them out using hoes, transporting the soil by hand, and no single individual knew the routes which connected all the separate sets of tunnels.

The Great Escape? Amateurs! For the first couple of years of the war, guerillas emerged from their trapdoors straight into an American base.

The video gives an idea of their size, and their utter concealment, better than numbers alone. Most of the tunnels are between 50 and 80cm wide, and just over a metre or so high.

At pressure points, they are narrower and lower: American “tunnel-rats” sometimes had to widen them using knives before they could squeeze through.

Even the upper level, only a couple of metres below the surface, are cramped, hot and and claustrophobic, even for someone Z’s size, even with exits to the sky every twenty metres or so, even without airstrikes up above, even when you know that the place is clear of snakes. Once in, you cannot turn around.

Ho’s story is pretty typical of a Cu Chi guerilla, a Viet Cong veteran who fought in the tunnel system which laced the Iron Triangle just outside Saigon. Perhaps the only unusual thing about him is that he survived.

“I am born in 1952. And I am Cu Chi guerilla for five years. From when I turn eighteen, in 1970,” he says. “I am born in Cu Chi, and I fight in Cu Chi.”

Some VC fighters, like Ho, were based in them for years, frustrating all American attempts to flush them out with CS gas, napalm, or chemical weapons.

The tiny, well camouflaged trapdoors and connecting tunnels were surrounded with an exotic range of sharpened punji stake traps, from tiger traps to fish cages to vicious rolling spikes, which Ho still demonstrates with the verve of one who built and placed them.

“You want to kill, or injure?” I ask. “When you build them.” I mime death, and injury.

“Injure,” he says. “Always injure.”

Less hypnotised by Ho’s tale than that of Tree, who we met in Cambodia, Z spies a gutted tank and scampers at it. “Mum! Mum! It’s an M-41!”

We learnt at the Landmine Museum in Siem Reap that, to a smart tactician, an injured soldier is better than a dead one. They take more resources, tie up more staff, tie up more vehicles, which is where the idea of landmines came about.

When an invader got into the tunnels, however, killing was required. A favoured method was running the soldier through with a sharpened spear as he moved through a trapdoor between levels, his arms above his head to let his shoulders through.

The body would hang there, bobbing, blocking the only exit, so the comrades who followed behind could neither extricate him nor pass him. They had to crawl out backwards to meet an unpleasant fate.

Three out of four of the Cu Chi guerillas died. (Ho lost three of his nine brothers.) Malaria, dysentery and battle wounds were the major killers, although most fighters were anaemic, malnourished and infected with parasites.

You joined the guerillas only at eighteen? I ask Ho, not sure I have heard him correctly.

“Yes,” he says, giving me a pitying look. “At eighteen you are guerrilla or the army comes for you. I didn’t want to join the army, so…”

Raised on a cinematic diet of fanatical Charlies and gooks leaping out of the jungle or howling in human waves, it hadn’t really dawned on me that many of the Southern guerillas were not particularly keen to fight.

With us, as we trek round, is a gentleman from Melbourne, on a trip home to Vietnam, with his wife and daughters. It is his first visit in thirteen years, her first since they left the country in 1980 ahead of reeducation and labour camps.

They have spent several frustrating days on buses trying to locate the street where she used to live. But Saigon has changed beyond all recognition. Nothing is the same.

“He was doing well, had a business, and he was quite old during the war, say thirty-five or forty,” his daughter explains. “So every time they put the draft age up, he added another year to his papers.”

And, here he is, in his 70s, crawling through the tunnels of Cu Chi on an ineffably Communist day out, complete with black and white propaganda videos from the 60s and dodgy papier-mache models of noble-faced guerillas, before he returns to a Saigon as full of trading and capitalist vigour as it was before the war.

He seems happy. He has done well.

And Ho? How does he feel about Americans now? “It is a long time ago,” he says. “I try to forget.”

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