We've all met them - those rock-bottom budget bores who boast about the cockroach count in the room and nurse a single beer for hours, droning on about how much they've suffered for their travel pains. They are the same people who haggle with emaciated rickshaw drivers over the equivalent of two pence and think tipping is as immoral as mooning in the Vatican.
Twenty years ago, I backpacked my way round Asia, but despite a fascination with the Vietnam War, I never made it to Indochina. So when I heard that luxury operator Abercrombie & Kent had opened an office in Cambodia last year, I confess to a warm glow. Wherever A&K tread, five-star hotels and impeccable service follow. I may remain a middle-aged hippie in some of my tastes, but I don't believe travel should equate with suffering. Does it make you a better person if you overland by rickety bus or stay in a rat-infested flophouse? 'But you won't meet real people or get up close to anything,' said much-travelled friends. Rubbish. Having personal guides throughout the trip opened our eyes and minds to the immense recent suffering and fortitude shown by both the Cambodians and the Vietnamese. We learnt far more from the individuals we met along the way than from any guide book or group tour.
When we arrived in Siem Reap, starting point for Angkor Wat, Cambodia was gripped by local election fever. Democracy is in its infancy in this once war-torn country and it had been the lead item on the previous night's BBC World News when 20 people were killed in a maelstrom of retribution and corruption. Our guide Ly, pronounced Lee, was beside himself with excitement.
We were surprised when Ly insisted things had gone 'very smoothly'. With 20 dead? 'In my country, that is very smoothly,' he replied. It's a grim truism that life is still cheap in this country where the Khmer Rouge regime, led by Pol Pot, slaughtered two million people during the Seventies.
We soon learnt that absolutely nothing would defeat Ly's infectious enthusiasm, not even his less-than-average size. We were too polite to ask, but he soon told us that his growth had been stunted by malnutrition during the Pol Pot years. At least he was alive - three of his brothers had been executed.
Cambodia is not the first wretchedly poor developing country to see the tourist dollar as its saviour. We winced when Ly said five more four-star hotels were planned for Siem Reap, providing 2,000 more much-needed beds, but he grinned with pride.
As we entered town, he pointed out the patched-up potholes, paid for by a Japanese philanthropist, the children's hospital, funded by the Swedes, and the women unpacking Red Cross clothing parcels from Canada at the roadside. Of course, we felt guilty checking in to the colonial marble-halled opulence of the Hotel d'Angkor, but it's not the only developing country with a five-star enclave, and wouldn't it be worse if we kept our money and stayed away? Throughout the hotel, there were strategically placed charity boxes, seeking aid for mine victims. One day, I saw a tour party of Americans queueing up to stuff in fistfuls of dollars.
We were as fascinated by Ly's story as by the history of the Khmer kings, but he had a job to do and Angkor Wat beckoned. We were right to go at sunset, the time when 'boys and girls come to flirt each other' (Ly's phrase), and the soft-eyed Brahmin cows graze on what would be roped off in heritage-conscious Britain. The temple towers are backlit by amethyst twilight and the air fills with woodsmoke, diesel and joss, the quintessential smell of Asia.
Dating back to the eleventh century, the mysterious stone carvings, friezes and figureheads of Angkor are said to have as many levels of meaning and complexity as James Joyce's Ulysses . Ly couldn't unravel it, but he begged us to try to imagine its construction, allegedly undertaken by 40,000 elephants and 60,000 slaves.
Angkor deserves its reputation and world ranking alongside the Pyramids and the Taj Mahal, but for me it comes well below Ly's 'very special place', which he saved until last, like a magician ending with his best trick. Thanks to a brilliant Unesco initiative, the twelfth-century Buddhist temple of Ta Prohm has been deliberately neglected and looks just as it did when first discovered by European explorers in the 1920s.
It's a bewitching place, still firmly in the grip of the jungle. Giant kapok trees, some said to be up to 200-years-old, have taken root round the crumbling masonry, like the tentacles of a huge stone-eating octopus. In some places, the trees take on an eerie, almost-human form. Screech ing parrakeets, circling crows and the thick afternoon humidity added to the surreal atmosphere. It was hard to leave Ly, but we wanted a beach rest-stop to break up the trip. We chose Da Nang and the famed China Beach where the GIs came for R&R and hamburger barbecues during the Vietnam War. The five-star Furama Resort hotel was almost as eerie in its isolation as Ta Prohm. It's virtually impossible to believe that there is still only one Western-style hotel on such a magnificent stretch of white sand. The guide books say the developers have already bought their plots, but we saw no evidence of building work.
To be honest, we didn't like it much, but we did like Mien (pronounced Mee Ann), our new guide, with us for this part of our Vietnamese journey. Always animated, she became even more animated once she realised that we were interested in the relatively recent history of what all Vietnamese call the 'American War'.
As we left Da Nang for Hue, we corkscrewed slowly up Highway One to the Hai Van Pass. At the top, Mien ignored the views 500 metres down, to explain how this strategic piece of road was much feared by US soldiers as the surrounding hills were riddled with hideouts for Viet Cong snipers. As a result, it was heavily napalmed. That day, the soft curves and dips were carpeted with feathery grasses and wind-blown daisies. In Hue, once Vietnam's capital, Mien continued her expert tour round the nineteenth-century citadel, infamous as the battleground of the 1968 Tet Offensive when the North Vietnamese held the city for 25 days. Thousands died, including many civilians, during the worst scenes of the entire war. She shuddered with emotion as she described the bloody details. But why? She wasn't born until well after the war ended.
It suddenly came tumbling out. Her grandfather had moved, years before the war, to the communist-held north. Her father was a commander in the southern army when war broke out. Suddenly, the two men found themselves fighting on opposite sides. After the war, her father was imprisoned in a re-education camp. To this day, he is effectively excluded from employment, apart from working the land.
Similarly, Mien and her two brothers are denied a university education. It's always good to see things from the other side, and we'd hoped to meet some US Vietnam veterans when we visited Saigon. But things were quiet the day we visited the famed Cu Chi tunnels where the Viet Cong cadres lived for years and outwitted the superior American firepower.
Instead, we made do with a drink on the rooftop bar of Saigon's Rex hotel, the GI's favourite watering-hole, curiously strung with fairy lights and lifesize fake animals, like a Disney set. From there, we could see across the fumes of the city to our hotel, the sleek, tinted-glass Caravelle, completed in 1998 to become Saigon's first five-star offering.
During the war, John Pilger described Saigon as 'an economy based upon the services of maids, pimps, whores, beggars and black marketeers'. Presumably they are still there, but today it feels as international as any other Asian city, with its gleaming banks and oriental tourist gimcrack. Since then, they've learnt how to chill the chardonnay and we were waiting for a bottle in a tourist-trap restaurant when we heard a thin, wheezy American voice behind us. We only caught snatches: 'Captain Johnson said, "What are you doing, man? That's a minefield there."' And yet more ominously: 'Our only thought was just to get in there and take them out.' As our wine arrived, we watched him leave, stumbling with the aid of a stick and his partner's arm, spindly thin, grey-faced and concave with exhaustion.
Next morning, we exchanged nods in the lobby of the hotel. As he made his snail's-pace way across the marble floor, his obvious pain was a reminder of the suffering caused by thousands on both sides of the war. For once, I felt genuinely guilty at staying in the soft-bedded, air-conditioned comfort of a luxury hotel.
Factfile
Jill Hartley visited Cambodia and Vietnam with Abercrombie & Kent (0845 0700 615) as part of a 13-day 'Signature Indochina' itinerary from £2,745 per person, mostly B&B with some other meals and including return flights to Bangkok with British Airways, plus all internal travel by road and air.
