KEY POINTS:
My mother and I are stuck. Holding hands, we are standing halfway across one of the world's busiest roads, the central Saigon avenue Dong Nguyen Thi Minh Khai.
This is the highway to hell. Traffic is whipping in front of us and roaring behind us. The likelihood of
imminent death has just accelerated from average to high.
I want to go forward. My mother, Anne, wants to go back. We're both pulling so hard we look like modern dancers doing an impromptu avant-garde performance, accompanied by the blare of moped horns. The thought occurs to me that our final moments on Earth are to be acutely embarrassing; street vendors on the footpath are staring at us with derision; oh look, another pair of Westerners about to get flattened. "Aaah!" says Mum in a low, terrified moan, "darling!"
Eventually, with a few mutterings of "come on, come on, we can't go back, we'll definitely get killed," I manage to haul her off the double white lines and into the flow of vehicles. We have four more lanes to cross before reaching the sanctuary of the kerb, but nobody in Vietnam observes such trifles as road markings. Semi-trailers and motorbikes just weave in and out, skirting around locals who, unlike us, stride slowly and calmly across the streets, flapping one hand dismissively at the oncoming drivers to establish right-of-way.
"When you're crossing the road, don't run, and don't stop," advised our friend My Nguyen on our first day in Vietnam, a week earlier. "Just keep walking slowly."
He probably also should have added: "Don't panic, don't drop your shopping bags, don't scream and don't get into a loud argument with a close relation." So far in the course of our 10-day holiday, Mum and I have committed all the above traffic crimes, some simultaneously.
When we make it to the relative safety of the verge (I say relative because not even the footpath is safe from the odd errant moped), we turn and contemplate our brush with mortality. Mum shudders. "Is it too early for a gin and tonic?" It's the best idea I've heard all morning.
When does the balance between parent and child begin to even up? As we barge through infancy and into adulthood, do we stop learning from our mothers? And at what point, if ever, do offspring begin to take charge?
This journey with my mother is an exploration of all those questions. We've always been close, Mum and I; girlfriends as much anything else, a giggly little twosome within our close family.
This is the first time we girls have holidayed together without my father, Peter, whom we've left at home, working. He calls us several times a day to groan in envy at each new adventure: "Oh, I wish I was there," he says when we tell him how much we're loving the noodles in Hanoi or the scenery of Ha Long Bay. We pay little pilgrimages on his behalf; sipping cocktails in the hotel bars he frequented back in the 1960s, when he was reporting the Vietnam War for Newsweek. "Oh, we used to sit there and watch the night sky light up with gunfire," Dad sighs when we ring him from a coffee shop on the north bank of the Saigon River. "It was great."
So when an adult daughter travels with her mother, who takes the lead? There's a shifting influence between us - at some moments, she's the mummy, reminding me to remember my passport or insisting I smear suncream on my neck.
Other times, I seem to be the one in charge; reading the map or remembering which hotel we've booked. Road-crossings are the moments when we battle for control: the innate caution of the matriarch versus the impatience of the child. "Okay," I announce, grasping her hand and looking both ways as she hesitates by the kerb, "ready?"
"I hope we find some nice silk, darling," Mum says one morning over tea in Hanoi. She's reading a story about a textiles entrepreneur in the official state newspaper, Viet Nam News. Its editorial tone is appropriately obsequious, with plenty of earnest reports about the Government's latest pronouncements on sanitation, and inspiring stories about diligent Vietnamese workers bringing glory to the republic.
Across the table, I'm reading my own copy of the paper and I'm appalled by what I see; a story about how up to 72 per cent of households along the Mekong Delta use toilets built over the river or fishponds. That is, human waste is being discharged into the watery home of the fish that will later go on sale at the fish markets.
I rip the story out of the paper. I'm horrified enough on my own account, but I'm dreading what Mum's going to think when she finds out about the sanitary sins of the Mekong. Should I tell her? We are scheduled to go on a Mekong Delta cruise when we get to the south of the country - will she refuse to go if I tell her the truth? Will she announce she's not eating fish for the rest of the journey? Or worse - what if she gets food poisoning from some fetid stir-fry because I haven't told her about the dangers?
This has become the pattern of our holiday - every morning I find something newly appalling in the Viet Nam News that I feel obliged to conceal from Mum. I surreptitiously tear the offending edition before handing them to her, or begin chattering loudly about something else as she turns to the page in question.
Earlier this week it was a piece on how traffic accidents are down; only 971 people officially died on the roads in the month of September, a 1.6 per cent drop from the figure for September 2006. Encouraging, isn't it?
Today, as we luxuriate over ice-cream sundaes in the cool colonial charm of Hanoi's Metropole Hotel, it's the Mekong poo story.
It's one of those mother-daughter inversions; I'm trying to protect her from unpleasantness. Like most mothers, she has a tendency to lie awake at night worrying about illness and gruesome death and other hazards of life, but I'm desperate for her to enjoy this trip - and, to be honest, I'm slightly concerned that I have lured her away from the safety of home into the wide, dodgy world.
I quietly wrestle with the dilemma as we work our way south through Hue and Hoi An to Ho Chi Minh City, knowing the day of our Mekong cruise is approaching. I find myself thinking about it every day - but at a certain point, my motivation for hiding this piece of information changes. At the start, I didn't want to tell Mum because I was afraid she'd veto the Mekong.
Now, as the holiday wears on and we both get a little tired, I feel more and more reluctant about a river-cruise myself. We've spent all our time rushing about; exploring temples and palaces and noisy produce markets; learning how to steam handmade rice pancakes at a cooking class in Hoi An; trudging up the steps of Hanoi's most fascinating ancient restaurant, Ca Cha La Vong, to order the menu's only dish, a spicy stir-fry bubbling in oil.
So the concept of a leisurely day on the River of Poo is less and less appealing. Frankly, I'd rather stay in Ho Chi Minh and drink gin-and-tonics. Anyway, any initial enthusiasm for Vietnamese aquatic tourism has been seriously dented by an hour-long Perfume River cruise we take from Hue. I'd been expecting the scent of jasmine and frangipani from every shaded inlet, but the only scent is raw sewage - and the only shadiness came when we stopped to bribe the local water police. Suddenly, my little piece of intelligence about the Mekong's fetidness has turned from a liability into an asset. Now, if I tell Mum what the Mekong is really like, she'll refuse to go and we can safely ensconce ourselves with a cocktail in the bar of the Hyatt.
So on the rattly little Vietnam Airlines plane from Hue to Ho Chi Minh City, I suggest the idea of opting out of the cruise. "I haven't told you this until now, Mum," I say solemnly, "but there's a bit of a hygiene situation in the Mekong."
I hand over the clipping. It's my trump card, and I'm confident Mum's reaction will be pure horror. How foolish I am. "Ah, yes, of course," she says, folding up the scrap of newsprint and handing it back. "I'd be surprised if any of them had proper sewerage," she adds. "That's Asia, baby."
She turns back to the novel she's been reading. I should have known it was a mistake to underestimate Mum. She might get nervous crossing the road, but she's no neophyte. A decade before I was born, she packed her bags in wintry Yorkshire and steamed off to Bangkok to start her life of exploration; a hot young thing embracing the exotic edge of the world. Back then, life in Asia really was an adventure, before Westernisation tamed the frontier. Today's Orient, by comparison, is a doddle; malls and air-conditioned taxis, a burger bar on every corner.
So I have to be honest about my Mekong reluctance: "Can't we just stay in Ho Chi Minh and have pedicures?" I plead, reverting to the teenage whine she tolerated so calmly through my adolescence. "Of course," she says. "We haven't done nearly enough shopping yet."
So we hit the boutiques, discovering just how different the bustling commercial capital is from the rest of Vietnam. Where Hanoi is Soviet and restricted ("There are no tampons in Hanoi," says a pharmacy salesgirl apologetically, gesturing towards the display of 1980s-style `sanitary towels'), the south of the country is vibrant and unashamedly cosmopolitan. "Around here, we wanted the Americans to win," announces Minh Hung, a skinny young man we meet in Hue, the former imperial capital. "We never wanted socialism," he says, checking his shiny mobile phone for text-messages for the 10th time in an hour.
Strolling through the canopied streets and colonnades of Saigon, as the locals still call it, we dive in and out of shops. As ever in Asia, we're confronted at every turn by beggars and touts. I hand over money when I have my purse out, but sometimes it all seems a bit much. "No, no, not today," I hear myself saying to yet another panhandler, trying not to break my stride. Over the years of backpacking through various third-world joints, I've become accustomed to the poverty; hardened.
More than once in Vietnam, I shake my head at a beggar, only to turn around and see Mum stopping to hand over money. "Oh dear," she sighs when a man with no legs rolls his wheelchair along beside her in Hanoi. She stops to give him several notes. "How much shall we give?" she says as two grubby little kids grasp our trouser-legs in Hue.
One afternoon in Ho Chi Minh City, I follow Mum into one boutique to find her weeping quietly by the door. "What's wrong?" I ask, putting my arm around her shoulders. "That poor lady," she says. Just outside the shop, we'd handed all our spare cash over to a woman whose skin was peeling from her torso, presumably the victim of some wartime toxin. I try to comfort her: "We gave her lots of money, that's all we can do. We can't fix her life." Mum sniffs and nods.
I feel thoroughly ashamed of myself. Mum's compassion has shown me just how hard-hearted I've become - the burnt lady had made me momentarily sad, but I'd given her some change and moved on. My sweet mother, on the other hand, is sobbing with tenderness for a stranger. It's a good lesson for me; being generous doesn't do me any harm. I resolve to change my attitude, and spend the rest of the journey giving as much money as I can stuff into the beggars' hands.
I might think of myself as a grown-up, but this trip has shown me just how much I have to learn from my mother. In return, I can remember to lock the hotel safe, sort out the itinerary, read the map - small prices to pay for the gift of kindness.
And surely, if we're good, the traffic gods will keep us safe, even in the face of the scooter menace? We can only hope - and try not to stop in the middle of the road.
* Claire Harvey travelled to Vietnam as a guest of Cathay Pacific and Adventure World Travel. The trip was her prize as 2007 Travcom Travel Writer of the Year.
