As I write on my wi-fi laptop from our smart, retro-deco fifth-floor Danang hotel room with its sweeping views of the city, I’m sipping a Tiger beer and watching Anzac Day AFL on TV (Bombers victorious). Isn’t that modern? It’s so reassuring to know one’s never far from home in the global village.

Of course we Bombers, sorry Boomers, grew up with a very different concept of Vietnam, with that destructive, undeclared war which went on and on. Right-leaning folk justified the war on the grounds that it would halt the spread of communism. How quaint that concept now seems! The left-leaning saw it as a terrible invasion of another’s country. How I remember those huge Moratorium Marches with youthful radicals chanting, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh”!

All those memories came flooding back as we joined the huge queue on a balmy Sunday morning in Hanoi, our destination Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum. There were only a few foreigners amongst us, most were Vietnamese of all ages paying homage to their great leader and liberator. There was a feeling of reverence as we filed silently past the sarcophagus of ‘Uncle Ho’ as he is known to his people.

Later, as we explored the Ho Chi Minh Museum, I was struck by the relative evenhandedness of the displays and language. Certainly North Vietnam’s army is cast as ‘liberator’ and the South’s as ‘puppet’, but there’s no particular focus on the horrors of that war. Will commented to an American visitor, “Isn’t it remarkable that this relatively poor country could vanquish the most powerful nation on earth.” To which she replied, without any trace of irony, “I don’t think we were really trying.” Oh Mary, really!

Aesthetically Hanoi was a disappointment, the ambassadorial district excepted, and the traffic terrific, literally. We expected The Old Quarter to be like the French Concession in Shanghai. It’s a great jumble, a seething mass of humanity. The considerable number of youthful Western backpackers is surely a testament to its relative cheapness, a factor which may well insulate Vietnam’s tourist trade from the GFC.

Dear readers, I sent Will out on assignment. Believing the press about gay discretion he couldn’t tell gay from straight, and was found drinking in a straight bar by mistake. The gay bar, GC (Golden Cock), was actually next door! He was amused that the leading ‘gay’ sauna, Spa Adam, has only one (unofficial) assignation room, titled in English “Fitting Room”! A meeting by the lake led to fun, including an exhilarating, late night motorcycle ride. Bemused and many Dong lighter I counselled him reassuringly, “Ding, dong darling! The ages of gay man – rice then rent, remember?”

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