I had a clear, but disconnected, preconception of Saigon. I'd watched the American evacuation in 1975 live on TV, the last of the Chinook helicopters lifting panicking people from the American embassy compound or from the roof terrace of the Hotel Rex. I'd seen the movies; The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now and recently the remake of The Quiet American. All these images had coalesced into a picture of Saigon that I was to find out partly fitted reality and partly did not. For a start, it's no longer Saigon - it's been re-named by the victors of the war, now it's Ho Chi Minh City.
Flying in from Singapore takes you in over a huge urban sprawl. Five million people live here and it's not high-rise. The cab ride into the city from the airport gave a glimpse of how five million people deal with their congested roads. The only reason it's just about manageable is that three million people have motorbikes rather than cars. Never have I seen so many Honda 50s, they're omnipresent and pervasive. The motorbike is to Ho Chi Minh City what the water buffalo is to the provinces - it's a mode of transport and it's a beast of burden. It's a people-carrier, I did see a family of five on one, but our guide told me that six is not uncommon. It's a means of transporting goods - I saw one with eight beer crates mounted on the pillion, another carrying an impossible number of boxes and one that had been converted into fire engine. This last one could barely move, saddled as it was with huge hoses and two pumps mounted like panniers on the pillion.

What the newly arrived tourist also discovers is that the traffic has very little urge to stop. Rather like Naples, the red traffic light - where there is one - is more of an advisory sign than a command to stop. Pedestrian crossings need a different technique than that used on European crossings, plus a stout and fearless heart. Again it's similar to the Neapolitan model, you fix your eyes firmly on the other side of the road and you begin to walk across, looking neither to the left nor the right and keeping up a steady pace. This last bit is important. By keeping up a steady pace the motorbikes can avoid you by predicting your movements and going either in front of you or behind you. Lose your nerve and stop like a rabbit headlights and you'll likely as not be hit. Crossing roads in Ho Chi Minh City is the most common cause of tourist accidents.

Tourism is a new industry in Vietnam. Until 1990 the communist government kept to a strict isolationist policy. Since then citizens have been given the right to own property and to trade, so the capitalist ideal is a flourishing and vigorous plant here. Turning a buck is what life is about and really, a buck is they want. The indigenous currency is the dong, and one US dollar buys you 15,500 of them, a euro about 18,000. Obviously this is a cumbersome unit to transact business in, unless what you're buying costs less than a dollar. But in Ho Cho Minh City the preferred currency is the US dollar. Most of the shops quote their prices in dollars, where a price is quoted at all. Like Naples, like a souk in a medina, the asking price is just the opening gambit. It all depends on how much time you have to spend, the longer you haggle the less you'll pay. Be sensible though, an hour spent haggling over two dollars is not making good use of your time.

In the street you'll learn soon enough not to make even the most fleeting of eye-contact with anyone. As soon as eyes engage they'll be right over trying to sell you something. The most common sales technique goes like this. 'Hello, Johnny. You want to buy a hammock?' 'No thanks.' 'You want to buy a hammock?' 'No, thank you.' 'You want to buy a hammock?' 'No I don't. No. Not today.' 'I sell you good hammock.' 'NO. I DON'T WANT IT.' 'I sell you cheap.' 'ARE YOU DEAF? NO. NO HAMMOCK, OK?' 'Why you shout at me?' This technique of pester-power must work from time to time or they wouldn't do it, but it drove me crazy. And no, I never did buy a hammock.

What you can buy if you like, are old masters for $50. The commonest one is Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers', but just about any painting by a major artist can be bought. There are galleries all over Ho Cho Minh City's centre with paintings on display and artists at work on new ones. You can of course bring a photo of your favourite old master and they'll copy it for you to perfection. I nearly bought a Roy Lichtenstein, but a bulging suitcase stopped me. Leave room in your suitcase for DVDs. You can buy them for a dollar each. I have no doubt whatever that the royalty element is paid in full, so I bought fifty. You go to a market, find a DVD stall and they'll bring you a seat and a box of DVDs. When you've finished going through the box, they'll bring you another. And another, and another and another until you cry 'Cease, desist, I have enough viewing hours here to fill the next three years of my life.' Amongst my buys were 'Finding Nemo' and 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen', which are only being released now in Ireland.

For the first couple of days I photographed the street signs. Vietnamese uses the European alphabet, a legacy of the French occupation. It's a mono-syllabic language, so familiar names like Vietnam are actually two: Viet and Nam. This is also true of Ha Noi and Sai Gon. Reading signs, then, is easy but keeping a straight face is harder. The schoolboy in me giggled incessantly at signs like 'Long Dong' or a restaurant called 'Soon Phat', but eventually I got over it, stopped giggling and stopped photographing them. Until I saw the sign 'Phat Phuc', which broke me up all over again.

There are things that any self-respecting tourist has to do in Ho Cho Minh City. No visit is complete without a morning coffee sitting in the Hotel Continental, and in truth, if there's anything that's an historic remnant of the French occupation it's probably the decent coffee in the city. Not far from the Continental is the Hotel Rex, whose rooftop terrace was the site of some of the last American evacuations of Saigon. Anyone with a sense of history will want a drink here. As you gain confidence and start to walk the side streets, you'll notice that the selling is more aggressive, the prices are lower, the shops are more chaotic, no prices are on display, yours is probably the only Caucasian face on the street and from many of the doorways, the sweet, musky scent of opium wafts out. What most defines the streetscape is the narrowness of the buildings. It's not just a city thing, even on the highways between cities the buildings are narrow. At times they're very deep, at times they're very tall, but a building that's more than four metres wide is a rarity.

There are also the covered markets to explore. Some are really big like the Ben Thanh, about the size of a city block and stuffed with stalls. It's worth knowing that just next to it is a good noodle bar, Pho 2000. It's traditional, it's cheap and President Clinton ate there. In the market there are wonderful silks, either in bolts or made up into traditional wear. The stall-holders are quite aggressive here, if you don't make eye contact they'll tug at your sleeves to engage you. If you find physical molestation by strangers hard to handle, shop in the main boulevards. For men there's the joy of wristwatches. You can buy a knock-off of any brand, although Rolex is the most copied, especially the Oyster surrounded by diamantes. Very bling-bling. If you want to buy one, check the movement first. The cheapest and nastiest are the Chinese quartz movements powered by battery. Spend no more than €15 on these. Next up is the Seiko self-winding movement, which makes an acceptable watch. Depending on the casing, anywhere between €25 and €60 for these. Best of all is the Rado self-winding movement, which in a good Rolex knock-off will cost about €100. But it's a watch that will last and will give years of good, if imitation, service.

What Vietnam is maybe best known for is the beauty of its women. In the streets, in shops, you'll see them - long-limbed and fine featured, often in the traditional costume that emphasises their slim waists and figures. As an honoured guest of Tiger Beer (Vietnam) I was taken one evening to the New World Hotel, one of Saigon's modern high-rise hotels. They have a disco there called 'Catwalk' where the music is loud and the girls are breathtakingly beautiful. 'Are there any working girls here?' I asked. 'They're all working girls,' replied my host. The system was extraordinary to watch. There's an inner bar with glass walls which keeps the sound of the music down a bit. If you sit here (and you're male) the girls' minder - known as their 'mummy' - will introduce her brood to you. You get a line-up of a dozen girls right there in the bar which you can choose from. It's very clear that to get to work here only the most beautiful girls in a city of beautiful women need apply. Any one of these girls might easily have had offers from major modelling agencies, all of them were truly stunning. Me? Like any good journalist, after observing the niceties, I made my excuses and left.

Ho Cho Minh City is like a lot of other big cities, it has its share of hawkers, hookers and hustlers preying on the unwary or the unguarded. But within reasonably easy reach of the city are two readily available tours. The first that we tried was the tour to the Mekong Delta, a name that evokes all kinds of memories and images for me. The Mekong is a long river, rising way to the north of Vietnam in Cambodia and its flood plain and delta lies to the south-east of Ho Cho Minh City. It's been depositing silt since time immemorial, so the whole delta area is soft clay and easily workable into paddy fields. The picture that gets imprinted into the memory is of the paddy fields, the workers with the white, conical straw hats, perhaps a water buffalo pulling a plough or grazing, and the odd heron chasing the meadow frogs below a cloudy sky.

The main highway to My Tho on the east bank of the delta was a heart-stopping drive. The rule seems to be that all motorcycle traffic takes the inside lane. That leaves the outside lane for all four-wheeled vehicles. To overtake a slow truck then, the technique is to wait for a gap to appear among the motorbikes, nip quickly into the inside lane, overtake, then get back into the outside lane before you mow down any motorcyclists. I found the best technique for maintaining composure was to look out of the side windows. We pulled up at the riverbank in My Tho where a riverboat was to take us to Tortoise Island, going past the fishing village on Dragon Island. Tourism is in its infancy here on Tortoise Island. You land, are given tea and a serenade, then you walk through the plantings of a market garden. The equatorial heat, the humidity and the rich alluvial soil means that all crops are grown in abundance. A new farm industry was there, making coconut candy from the coconut milk, all very artisan and all very good. I met a python here, who curled affectionately around my neck.

But of all the trips accessible to the Saigon tourist, none is more evocative than a trip to the Ben Dinh tunnels of Cu Chi. For over twenty years, beginning with the war against the French, the Viet Cong dug over 200 kilometres of tunnels. Centred on the village of Cu Chi, these tunnels form a complex network stretching from here north to the Cambodian border and south to Saigon itself. The area around Cu Chi was designated the 'Iron Triangle' by the Americans, aware of its strategic value. To eliminate the Viet Cong threat from here the Americans deforested the area with Agent Orange and Napalm, bulldozed villages and forcibly removed the inhabitants that they could find. The rest moved underground. Whole villages moved into the tunnels. Beneath the ravaged surface there were hospitals, schools, shelters, meeting rooms and sniping points. There are three levels of tunnels, the deepest from 8 to 10 metres deep. From these tunnels assaults could be launched on places as far away as Saigon or on the American airforce base at Cu Chi, headquarters of the 25th infantry division, under which the tunnel system ran.

Part of the tour involves trying out the tunnels. Humid and foetid, claustrophobic and cramped beyond imagining, I managed about 50 metres before returning to the surface. I couldn't imagine crawling 50 kilometres like this, living without daylight or fresh air for weeks at an end. My leg muscles were sore for ages just from this tiny sample of what the Viet Cong did day after day, year after year. What boggles the mind is that sheer ingenuity and force of will were sufficient to defeat the largest military machine on the planet. The Americans were aware of the tunnels' existence, but not of their extent. They even had a special troupe, the Tunnel Rats, whose job was to explore the tunnels and engage in hand-to-hand combat in the subterranean darkness. The Viet Cong's defence was the booby trap. Made of simple bamboo or recycled iron, the ingenuity of these devices is awe inspiring. The viciousness of some of them had a profound psychological effect on the Tunnel Rats, whose every inching exploratory movement could bring them to a horrendous and lingering death.

Back on the surface there was a bit of fun to be had before leaving. You can go to the firing range, and for a dollar a bullet you can fire a Kalashnikov AK 47, an M16 Carbine and various types of light and heavy machine guns. My M16 kept jamming between rounds, boring enough when you're just firing off a few rounds in fun, but it must be seriously disturbing if it happens when you're under fire. No such problems with the AK 47, however.

I can't finish this without a word or two on the food. For the few days I spent in Vietnam my hosts at Tiger Beer took me to wonderful restaurants, most memorably the Temple Club and the Mandarin where the food was truly exceptional. Memorable too was the Bo Tung Xeo restaurant, a typical Vietnamese middle-market restaurant where the menu listed both snake and scorpions. The snake was off, but a plate of fried scorpions came for the adventurous diners. Tasting like a cross between pork crackling and crab, it takes a strong stomach to put these large, venemous decapods into your mouth. It's true, too, that wine isn't the best accompaniment to Vietnamese food. I insisted on cold Tiger at every meal to the delight of my hosts, rather than overpriced imported French wine, and I remain converted to the combination.

For the moment, outside Saigon, Vietnam is still unspoiled. Your euro goes a very long way, the people are charming and hospitable and the food is wonderful. Makes a change from Ibiza.