I was sitting recently with a former US marine by one of the huge open windows on the top floor of the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon. Our drinks were being served on shiny black tables, and at the bar was a group of rather podgy prostitutes. There is something seedy but fun about the hotel, which reeks of new money: not unlike Saigon — as its inhabitants persist in calling Ho Chi Minh City.
Saigon, and indeed Vietnam, has been transformed since the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union unravelled and the Hanoi politburo was forced to water down its rigid Marxism. The cycle rickshaws, peddled by thin men who had served in the South Vietnamese army, have gone. The streets now swarm with Hondas, and the children of the politburo mandarins shop in Versace.
It was from the bar of the Caravelle that journalists had watched helicopters take off from the CIA building during the final American evacuation from Saigon in 1975.
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