What a charismatic place to start our trip, HCMC has a wonderful mix of the developed world and the ancient traditions you expect from a city here in the Far East. The first thing I realised was that it is no small fish in the fryer of Vietnam, as it so often is thought of in comparison to Hanoi, the relatively new capital since the fall of Saigon in 1975 when the Vietnam War came to a bloody end. The spralling mass of the buildings took me by surprise as we lan...