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Ho Chi Minh City, or HCMC, or Saigon. The locals call it each of those things: the official name is Ho Chi Minh City but, they keep saying to us, Saigon is a lot shorter. Anyhow, it is our bookend city – we entered Vietnam via Hanoi and leave via Saigon, and the two cities are far and away the largest towns and the north and south anchors of this country.

Saigon, like Hanoi, is a bit hard to get hold of on a three or four day visit. 12 million people and growing like crazy. Quite a different feel from Hanoi, which is almost as big at 8 or 9 million – much more bustling, far more traffic and especially more scooters, and a more modern or maybe slightly western feel, which may be the historical US presence or possibly the absence of mid-century Soviet architecture and the fact that it is not the capital, and so less caught up in itself. And Saigon is tropical, which Hanoi is definitely not.

So, cruising to the end of 3 weeks in Vietnam and a month in SE Asia, we just leaned in and relaxed (if that is not an oxymoron). We had a gander at the Reunification Palace, the seat of the South Vietnamese administration until, after a couple of tanks barged through the iron gates in 1975, it wasn’t. The Palace, which is a beautiful mid-century modern building built in the early 60s by a Vietnamese architect trained in China and which looks as though designed by Georg Jensen and screams out for some teak Scandinavia furniture, is like a time capsule of state rooms (above ground) and war rooms and escape routes (below) for the pre-reunification presidents. We had a look at the cathedral, made by the French of bricks allegedly shipped in from Marseilles and supposedly based on Notre Dame in Paris, minus the buttresses, with the wrong shape towers and about 15% the size, and fronted by a big statue of Mary, which sure strikes a funny note in this mostly Buddhist country but is an improvement over its predecessor, a statue of a larger than life priest holding the hand of a smaller than life Vietnamese man and explaining the many advantages of Catholicism. As a counterbalance we also visited what I gather was the oldest Buddhist temple, about 270 years old, and larger than lots with a major investment in incense.

And – quelle surprise – we spent a bit of time with food. We went to another big wholesale market, this time sticking to the “dry” section since in 34C heat and given the complete absence of refrigeration the fish and meat sections can get a bit overwhelming for prissy westerners. We also arranged a food tour, which took us to places we would not have gone to, or known to go to, on our own: Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk (which we actually had all over Vietnam); a 10 foot wide place with a few tables and those plastic stools so low your knees brush your ears for a variation on those “keep it coming” Brazilian meat places except that here there was a special vertical rack of 10 small plates at each table, each with an impossibly thin rice pancake, and a wide array of meat and tofu and thinly sliced greens and papaya and fish sauce and fermented fish sauce and some other kind of sauce that was the house special and that we did not enquire too closely into and you just take a plate and roll yourself a custom rice wrapper roll and meanwhile someone is coming around and refilling your rack with more plates and you just pay according to how many plates you go through; and on a different day a noodle soup (not Pho) from another 10 foot wide place with about 3 metal tables that was so rich and with noodles so perfect it was to die for.

And then suddenly we were in a car heading for the airpo