My travelling companion, a most unquiet American, was beginning to feel picked on.

You would think that she had become accustomed to it by now, having weathered the anti-Yank onslaught of taxi drivers, shopkeepers, anyone really in Europe who on hearing her accent would launch into a diatribe about those arrogant, swaggering, ignorant folks across the pond who had the most stupid president in history and had landed us in all this unwanted aggro.

But in Vietnam, it was a whole new level of awkwardness for, perhaps, the obvious reasons, and all the more disorientating because of the friendliness of the people.

The different perspective on recent history makes an immediate impression from the moment that you hear what we have always known as the Vietnam War referred to as the American War.

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Wandering around the Ho Chi Minh City Museum, a popular setting for wedding photos (six different couples when we were there), the museum’s guide points to a photograph of a local hero.

It was the first stop of our trip and we hadn’t yet adjusted our mindset, so we asked what act of heroism the man had carried out to receive this commendation and were told, with an earnestly helpful expression, that he had come very close to succeeding in blowing up Robert McNamara, the former US Secretary of Defence and architect of the Vietnam (or American) War. The young woman nodded her head and smiled and we smiled and nodded back.

Since the early Nineties when Vietnam first opened up to tourism, the promotional emphasis has been on Vietnam as a country, not a war. And, boy, from what we went on to see, what a country it is.

I was particularly struck, further on in our trip, when we escaped from the already slightly tarnished strip of Nha Trang’s extended beaches in south central Vietnam, by the beautiful drama of the sweeping cliff-drive views – an implausibly stunning amalgam of Byron Bay, Big Sur and the Côte d’Azur.

Hotels and restaurants have been privatised and various international companies are now marketing Vietnam as an exclusive holiday destination. The problem is that the staff simply don’t have the necessary language skills yet to be able to provide the seamless service they would like. But they are so very willing and sweet and anxious to please that even I, with my princessy tendencies, felt rather ashamed of my spoilt Western ways.

The smiling warmth of the people makes Vietnam an extremely appealing place to visit and is all the more striking because of all the horrors its people have had to endure – from the Chinese, the Japanese, the French and, of course, the Americans.

I re-read Graham Greene’s story of The Times correspondent’s betrayal of a quiet American agent provocateur and re-read the story of his Fifties Vietnam war (the French War?) in my hotel room, the palm trees waving in the tropical downpour, down the road from where he wrote his book in the Continental in what was called rue Catinat.

I was struck again by the power of his recoil from the repugnance of war – the description of the canal stuffed with bodies over which their boat got stuck into the human clay. The horrid sight of a mother and her boy: “He was about six years old and he lay like an embryo in the womb with his little bony knees drawn up.… He was wearing a holy medal around his neck, and I said to myself, ‘The juju doesn’t work.’ There was a gnawed piece of loaf under his body. I thought, ‘I hate war.’”

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