City spirits

My ticket says Ho Chi Minh City but my suitcase is going straight to Saigon the IATA call sign for Tan Son Nhat airport is still SGN. It&rsquos a pleasing felicity. I&rsquom going to Vietnam for the first time but my baggage is mostly a peculiar kind of nostalgia. And as the plane drops from the clouds to circle over the extravagant bends and loops of the Saigon river, glittering in the bright light of noon, I know that I will be constantly reminded that in this city, the past really is another country.

&nbspYes, I&rsquom old enough to remember the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam and the dramatic fall of its capital. And not just from Hollywood&rsquos cinematic reprise. I followed these events in real time, in print. Which is why my temporal lobe keeps up its insistent jingle &ldquoKhe Sanh, Da Nang, Cam Ranh, Napalm,&rdquo it goes. &ldquoViet Nam Cong Hoa.&rdquo And why it copy-edits with such cracked insistence the airport should be Tan Son Nhut. Not Nhat It used to be an American airbase.

&nbspIt doesn&rsquot help that I&rsquom arriving in early February, in the last days before Tet, the Vietnamese &lsquoChinese New Year&rsquo. The Year of the Pig is ending, the Rat approaches. But forty years ago, in February 1968, at the dawn of the Year of the Monkey, the Viet Cong launched a massive offensive across the length and breadth (in this serpentine country it&rsquos mostly length) of South Vietnam. It would be crushed with tremendous bloodshed. But it was a defeat that laid the spores of the Communist victory, seven years later, in April 1975, the Year of the Rabbit.

&nbspI&rsquom a Rabbit myself, in case you&rsquore wondering, from 1963. When you&rsquove been hopping around as long as I have, History gets personal. And so does Geography. Visiting Calcutta for the first time, in the early 1980s, I can remember savouring the sense that I was on the edge of another subcontinent, one that stretched from the Ganges Delta to the Mekong Delta. India Extra Gangem. All geography is fantasy, but my own construction of Indochina has an appealingly romantic aesthetic, of post-colonial torpor, peeling paint and creaky louvered shutters. The tropical verdure, the Graham Greenery. He is baggage too, of course. Lurking in my knapsack is a 1955 first edition of The Quiet American (with the grey, chatai-patterned dust jacket). A time bomb I procured long ago on Free School Street. Still unread.

&nbspThat said, HCMC is a delightfully easy city to roam. The downtown District 1 where I am staying is entirely walkable, and xe om pillion rides are immediately and cheaply available. But I prefer the iconic cyclo trishaws. They may have lapsed into a tourist novelty, with corresponding prices, but I am happy to be taken for a ride.

&nbspI settle into a pleasant rhythm, rising early, walking out to have a hot glass of the dark, buttery Ca phe sua nong (filter coffee with condensed milk), at a pavement stall. Then, a morning round of sightseeing, back for a siesta, and out again on foot in the sociable cool of the evening, in search of a scenic perch for dinner or a drink. At this civilised pace the city reveals itself with an endearing formality. It&rsquos like getting to know a charming and slightly disreputable aunt &mdash the one they all talk about.

&nbspAnd everything they said was true. God knows, this fallen capital has a past, and she flaunts it with roguish flamboyance. The town is encrusted with Belle Epoque townhouses, Third Empire mansions and Palladian galleons, whose custard-washed fa&ccedilades flake and crack like bad makeup. The avenues are fraying seams of colonial elegance, lined with stately, ageing trees, festooned with scarlet banners. Flags of convenience, they survive because they are so easily ignored by everyone &mdash including the Communists themselves.

&nbspIn a city that has seen so many pants-down surrenders &mdash the French, the Americans, the Southern republic &mdash it&rsquos plain that Saigon is still her own mistress. The broader boulevards, remorselessly commercial, are emblazoned with all the gigantic slogans of globalisation. It&rsquos really only in the former Presidential Palace that I feel the presence of that Old Time Socialism. Now called the Reunification Palace, the building is a coolly accomplished piece of architectural modernism the suave cold war capitalism of the sixties and seventies, and its flirtation with praetorian regimes. But some genius apparatchik deserves the Order of Lenin for the brainwave of preserving the palace &mdash its throne rooms and banquet halls, casinos and war rooms &mdash frozen in that moment of triumph and emasculation, on the thirtieth of April, 1975. Apparently they still use it for state banquets.

The palace really gives me the chills but I storm all five floors and the labyrinthine basement bunkers in ten minutes flat. I&rsquom even quicker at the nearby War Remnants Museum, and at the now innocuous Pho Binh noodle shop &mdash a secret Viet Cong HQ in the Tet Offensive. Here I interrupt the proprietor at his lunch but he graciously shows me pictures of his father, Ngo Toai, who died three years ago, a decorated Hero of the Revolution, and I inscribe my hasty gratitude in the Visitors Book. Outside, I interrupt my cyclo driver&rsquos cigarette break again. It&rsquos a widespread nugget of tourist apocrypha that HCMC&rsquos cyclo men are mostly South Vietnamese ARVN veterans, reduced to this profession by the justice of the victors. I know I&rsquom not doing the old pedal pusher any favours, but he&rsquos the reason for my hurry.

&nbspOne night, on the roof of the Rex hotel (once a favourite of US officers, I&rsquom told), I watch the incredible tableau of joyriding crowds pouring down the Boulevard of Nguyen Hue, their headlamps a twinkling river of light. There&rsquos an utterly intoxicating air of optimism, freedom, independence and, well, shopping. The low-testosterone putter of all those small engines is transformed into the confident throb of the swarm. It&rsquos a cliché of Vietnamese resilience, this collective mojo. But it&rsquos also the roar of peace.

&nbspOf course I can&rsquot join it, I can only watch. The perfumes of Tet are tinged with the lingering poignance of that book. The Quiet American&nbspis a slender novel, with a thrillerish plot, but this is not one of Greene&rsquos &lsquoentertainments&rsquo. The story of the ageing English journalist Fowler and his fatal rivalry with the American, Alden Pyle, for possession of the young courtesan Phuong, is charged with a presentiment of the worthlessly prolonged end of imperialism. And for me at least, by Fowler&rsquos voice, thick with the quiet panic of masculine middle-age. It begins on a February evening just after Tet. &ldquoInside my room the tree I had set up weeks ago for the Chinese New Year had shed most of its blossoms. They had fallen between the keys of my typewriter. I picked them out.&rdquo

&nbspI spent a lot of time picking blossoms in his footsteps. &ldquoOne is not jealous of the dead,&rdquo Fowler says, but visiting Greene&rsquos room (# 214) on the second floor of the Continental Hotel on Dong Khoi, the old Rue Catinat, I&rsquom&hellipemerald with envy. Still, I can afford a beer and a riverfront vista at&nbsphis chosen bar on top of the gleaming Hotel Majestic. Here, the ceiling fans still croak above a ruinously restored fa&ccedilade. A wedding cake today, in Greene&rsquos time it was fluid with balconies, still poised at the tipping point between Art Nouveau and just plain Gaudi.

&nbspRoaming the Chinatown district of Cholon, my cyclo guide Hai promised to show me the location of the &lsquoHouse of 500 Women&rsquo where the Quiet American himself had reacted with the same na&iumlve horror as I had on the kerb of Le Lai, when a young woman on a scooter tapped me on the shoulder and whispered in my ear. Her girlfriend, riding pillion, nodded encouragingly. &ldquoNo, thanks, I already have a room,&rdquo I blustered, prompting her to bellow &ldquoYOU PHAC ME HOTEL ONE HOUR&rdquo &lsquo&ldquoIt&rsquos terrible. I wouldn&rsquot have believed...&rdquo&rsquo Alden Pyle said &lsquowith sad awe&rsquo. &lsquo&ldquoThey were so pretty.&rdquo&rsquo They really were. But when we reached Cholon&rsquos central bazaar, Hai gave up the chase. And then he proffered another frisson, in consolation, I suppose. It was a laminated picture of his younger self in uniform. &ldquo1969,&rdquo he said. &ldquoAmerican army.&rdquo

&nbspEven travel writers get the blues.

&nbspOn the crossing at the end of Bui Vien, there is a modest tower crowned with the ultimate brand of my generation &ldquoPerfect USA,&rdquo it says. Down on the street the old cyclo men murmur &ldquoMarywanna&rdquo But for me, in this city, Time is the drug, whispered at every corner.

&nbspReturning to my room, I sit by the second-floor window, watching wandering troupes of lion-dancers chase the Year of the Pig back home. And I finish reading The Quiet American. But at 2am my dreams of 1950s Saigon are shattered by a blast of karaoke singalong from the bistro down the street. &ldquoByee byee&rdquo...Don McLean&rsquos raucous wake for the 1960s, the decade that will not shut up. &ldquoNoisy Americans&rdquo I want to shout, only, they sound like Aussies. Burying my head in a pillow, I summon a gentler lullaby. The soft-spoken Michael Stipe hums another American elegy in my ear. &ldquoTwentieth Century, go to sleep.&rdquo

The information

Getting there

There are no direct flights&nbspfrom India to Ho Chi Minh City, but you could pick a flight that has a stopover in Bangkok (from approx. 30,000). 

Where to stay

It is best to stay in District 1, or in &lsquoBackpacker Central&rsquo, the Pham Ngu Lao&nbsparea. The An An hotel (from $40 84-8-38378087, anan.vn) on Bui Vien Street, is fine and reasonable. Among the high-end options there&rsquos a clutch of nostalgic favourites in the colonial centre of town, including the Continental (from $115 38299201, continentalhotel.com) and the Majestic (from $148 38295517, majesticsaigon.com.vn).