We’re very gloomy this morning as we prepare to leave the little cocoon of luxury we’ve been nestled in for the past week and return to the world of cold showers and hard matresses. We arrived in Vietnam last Sunday and proceeded directly to Saigon to meet my old dears (mum and grandma), who’d just arrived for a two week visit, and found them in a very pretty colonial hotel smack in the centre of the posh district. When they offered to book us a room for a couple of nights it would have been rude to say no…’We’ll move out to the backpacker area in a day or two though’ we said, conscious of the room rates…eight days later we’re still here, having become almost a permanent fixture by the swimming pool every afternoon. Whoopsy.

Saigon is hot, hectic, ambitious, smart and nothing like the mythologised image of Vietnam that’s been established by one too many films about ‘Nam’ during the war. It has a young, gorgeous population (65% under 35) who seem to divide their time betweeen working, socialising, riding on motorbikes and getting married – I’ve never seen so many brides wandering around. Grandma is obsessed by the Vegas style shot gun chapel opposite the hotel, from which gorgeous girls in meringue-style white dresses continually emerge with small, smug looking grooms.

Aside from bride watching, the four of us have spent a lovely week seeing the sights, eating, frequenting hotel bars, swimming, trying to avoid falling under motorbikes and finding restaurants that serve chips for Grandma.

Only one small fly in the ointment really:  we’ve been under surveillance from the Vietnamese authorities all week. The flu that cannot be named has arrived in Vietnam and it looks like it came in on mum and grandma’s plane…Mum mentioned a sickly looking man on their flight who was wrapped in a blanket with a face mask on, but we didn’t think much of it until we got a polite little note from reception asking us to monitor our temperatures twice a day and hand them at 8am and 4pm. The following day the local news reported 58 cases of pig flu in South Vietnam and we started to get a bit edgy, but the incubation period has passed now and none of us have been quarantined so I think we must be clear.

The old dears depart today and will be reading this in the comfort of West Yorkshire, and we’re returning to our life of relative squalor in the Mekong Delta, about two hours south of Saigon. One more dip in the pool first though…