Several trains a day run between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (most people still call it Saigon) - all under the generic title of 'The Reunification Express'. We are on the fastest which leaves Hanoi at 11 o'clock at night and takes 30 hours to travel the 1,800 km to HCMC, unceremoniously dumping us there at the unearthly hour of 5.00 in the morning. So 'express' is something of a misnomer. But there remains no better way to see a country than by train. And unlike ...

This blog seems to have become obsessed with the Vietnam War! Whatever happened to travelling and just being a tourist? Well for the last few days we've been doing just that - being tourists. In fact we've been on a cruise - can't get much more touristy than that! Well cruise is perhaps stretching it a bit. We've been on a boat for 2 nights sailing around Ha Long bay - about 3-4 hours drive from Hanoi and pretty much a compulsory trip for anyone visiting the cit...

A bit of catching up to do on the photograph of the week - the last being posted on April 14th. How to pick a photo to epitomise Hanoi? My most abiding memory is of the constant traffic but it's very difficult to capture that in a photo. So I've chosen the complete opposite. We came across this man mid-morning, asleep in his hammock, escaping from the din around him. It was only after I'd taken it that I noticed his walking stick. Here is an old man clearly exh...

This rhetorical question is asked by Sylvester Stallone in one of the Rambo films as he cuts a swathe through Vietnam in search of missing American POWs. A deluded attempt by Hollywood to rewrite history or, in fact, an accurate prediction of the eventual outcome of the Vietnam war? I'm writing this sitting in a cafe following a visit to the Vietnamese Women's Museum. This is an excellent museum. The well laid out and informative presentations show how women "co...

Ho Chi Minh was, by all accounts, a very modest leader, just as happy tending his garden and fishpond as plotting to defeat American Imperialism. He is one of the few revolutionary leaders whose reputation survives relatively unscathed. His wish was to be cremated and half his ashes scattered in each part of the country when it was finally united (he died in 1969 before the end of the war). A shame then that, in the tradition of Lenin (whose last wishes were also...