We arrived back in Saigon after an uneventful bus journey down from Da Lat, and the first thing that hit us was the heat.

After the cool air of the mountains, Saigon felt hot, humid and slightly overwhelming.

And busy.

So busy.

Traffic seemed to come from every direction at once, motorbikes filled every available space and crossing the road once again became an exercise in faith.

We left the bus station and headed for the Caravelle, which I had been looking forward to ever since I booked it in Hoi An.

AP was less enthusiastic.

The Caravelle had opened in 1959 and was one of Saigon’s great old hotels. During the Vietnam War it became a favourite gathering place for foreign correspondents, with several international news organisations based there and journalists drinking in the rooftop bar while watching the war unfold across the city below.

I loved all of that.

AP, meanwhile, was doing calculations.

He kept muttering that our two nights at the Caravelle were costing approximately the same as our entire accommodation bill for the previous two weeks.

I chose to ignore him.

There are times when figures simply get in the way of a perfectly good hotel.

What AP didn’t know was that I had also booked us into one of Saigon’s classic French restaurants for the following evening.

I decided there was no need to burden him with that information just yet.

That first evening we headed up to the Caravelle’s rooftop bar. Sitting high above the city with a drink in hand, watching the lights of Saigon spread out below us, it was easy to understand why generations of journalists had made the place their unofficial headquarters.

It was lovely.

The following day we did almost nothing.

After weeks of trains, buses, taxis, walking, sightseeing and generally moving ourselves from one end of Vietnam to the other, we spent a gloriously lazy day beside the hotel pool.

That evening I finally revealed the restaurant booking.

AP took the news remarkably well, although by now I suspect he had realised there was little point arguing.

And the meal was magnificent.

Proper old-fashioned French cooking, beautifully done, the sort of food where you take the first mouthful and immediately stop talking for a moment. We had eaten plenty of very good French food on our travels through France, but this was right up there with some of the best of it.

Even AP agreed it was superb.

Which, given that he knew exactly how much the hotel was costing and now presumably had a rough idea what dinner was going to do to the budget, was high praise indeed.

The next day our wandering through Vietnam came to an end.

We packed our bags one final time and headed for the airport to catch our flight back to Sydney.

It had been a wonderful trip. We had started in the heat and chaos of Saigon, travelled north to Hue, taken that glorious train journey down the coast to Hoi An, then climbed into the cool hills of Da Lat before looping back to where we had begun.

We had travelled by train, taxi, boat and several increasingly interesting buses. We had eaten pho on tiny plastic stools, drunk ridiculously strong Vietnamese coffee, had clothes made in Hoi An, learnt to cook Vietnamese food, wandered through ancient Cham ruins and spent considerably more money than necessary on our final two nights in Saigon.

It had given us just enough of Vietnam to know one thing for certain.

We weren’t finished with it.

We would be back.

Here is a gallery of that trip.