Before I went to Vietnam, I had no idea that Ho Chi Minh, the man who led the country out of French colonialism and into socialism, wrote poetry. Or that its capital, Hanoi, was the centre of French Indochina between 1902 and 1953. Or that Vietnam endured 1000 years of Chinese rule until the 10th century. The truth is I knew more about the Vietnam War than the country where it took place. Although the war began the year I was born and ended 10 years later in 1975, I learned about it secondhand through movies that infiltrated my formative years. A few non-US films crept in like Indochine and Scent of the Green Papaya but they did little to combat the onslaught of Apocalypse Now images that shaped my perceptions of Vietnam as a place of tragedy. In the 27 years since the war ended, Vietnam has changed, of course, but its hard to shrug off ideas that linger the way smoke curls from the barrel of a gun, particularly if you start in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon.

The American War

They say Vietnam is like two baskets, each hanging at the end of a bamboo pole. One basket is the fertile Mekong Delta in the south; the other is the equally rich Red River Delta in the north. In between, the country is a slender strip pressed between Laos and Cambodia on one side, and the South China Sea on the other, making it perfect for end-to-end travel between the two international hubs, Ho Chi Minh City in the south and Hanoi in the north.

We arrive in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnams largest metropolis, late one Sunday night. Its midnight but the wide streets are filled with the persistent hum of a thousand motorbikes. They zigzag between lanes and enter and exit the stream of traffic with alarming spontaneity. It might look like chaos in motion, but theres a calm that pervades the traffic. Watch for long enough and the scene takes on the character of a swiftly flowing river, where riders simply flow around obstacles. Its this pragmatic and no-fuss attitude to potential problems that starts me thinking about how a relatively undeveloped country defeated the American military in one of the most controversial wars of our time.

Id come to Vietnam wanting to explore the country, not realising that I first needed to make peace with my own misunderstandings. In any case, its almost impossible to ignore the American War, as the Vietnamese call it, in Saigon. Theres its evocative name, for one thing. Then theres its main attraction 60km northeast: the vast maze of the Cu Chi Tunnels. At their peak the Cu Chi Tunnels spread from Saigon to the Cambodian border and in the Cu Chi area alone there were more than 250km of underground warrens. Although originally constructed in the 1940s to resist the French, the tunnels became renowned for their role in allowing the Viet Cong (local slang for Vietnamese Communists) to communicate between areas cut off by South Vietnamese and US forces; they also allowed the VC to ambush the enemy from their hidden network of entrances.