by Sally Hammond

Come with me to the Mekong Delta. Safe now. No longer a battlefield. 

Today the latte-coloured canals networking the paddy fields are quiet in the sunshine. Occasionally we see fishing nets - huge triangular things anchored to the shore by a long pole that people walk out on, tightrope-fashion, to a point where it tips to either raise or lower the net. That's one way to fish.

At Chau Doc, close to the Cambodian border, we are taken to see another way. Here catfish are raised in fish farms before being transported live, to the fish processing factory. As they grow they are kept in a cage the size of a large house underwater, and I watched, pinching my nose, as they were fed foul-smelling fish food through holes in the floor.

The Vietnamese have a proverb: 'A fish pond is like a bank where you get money when needed', and indeed along the canals, every little thatched house has a pond in front, or a fish trap in the canal. And a TV aerial on the roof.

The villagers grow bananas too, and there are stands of bamboo, coconut palms, paw paws, and outside the front doors, singing birds in cages, and beside them, a rack of freshly washed clothes hanging - giving a new definition of drip dry in this tropical air.

'Rice and fish are like a mother and children' is another proverb And certainly 'mother-rice' is everywhere. Circles of rice paper dry on wicker screens beside the canal, the same wrappers I greedily enjoy each night at dinner, wrapping a bundle of fresh herbs and prawns. At one village we visited an open air factory and watched as ladles of rice paste were spread on a steaming cloth, cooked for a moment then deftly lifted off and laid out to dry.

Rice turns up in almost every dish, every course. There are stirfried rice noodles for lunch, sticky rice for dessert, and even, at one place, chefs in a pavilion frying rice paste to create airy basketball-sized rice balls.

A trailer of ducks passes us and I decide I would not want to be a duck here. I mostly see them upside down, handfuls of them their rosy webbed feet clamped in a man's fist; or somehow contained on the back of a bike, off to become dinner somewhere.

But it is the people themselves that amaze me. It would be easy to mistake the fragile beauty of the women, and the calmness of the men for weakness, but their aggressors over the ages have learned otherwise. Like iron-lined orchids, they have faced all comers forever, it seems, and prevailed.

Indomitable, they somehow resemble too, this mighty Mekong that fans out finally over 194,000 square kilometres. At 4184 kilometres in length, it is the eighth longest river in the world, and 50 million people in the six countries it flows through (if you count Tibet as a separate country) depend on it to some extent for their prosperity and survival.

Only navigable from Laos, 1600km from the source, it is nevertheless fed by melted snows high in the Himalayas, and fuelled by monsoon rains. Both combine to cause the annual flooding, which the people somehow shrug off and deal with. "The sediment is good for the crops," I am told. And that's why the delta region is so rich agriculturally - one of the greatest rice growing areas of the world.

Improbably fragile timber bridges arch over some canals, and if you are lucky you will see, crossing them, a line of schoolgirls dressed in flowing white uniforms and wearing those comical, conical bamboo hats called nons.

Huge boats ply these waterways too. Disproportionately large, they are still vital to the economy to move the produce and products. But there are dozens of smaller, narrow, boats too, five metres or so long. We took a tiny one to see a sanctuary for white cranes, another to visit a Khmer village, and yet another to pass between bigger craft at the floating markets. At one village we watched some being made from local mahogany. 'They take two days to make and last 20 years,' our guide informed us proudly.

But if the water craft are many, they are outnumbered by the masses of motor scooters, bikes, and buses. The occasional car or truck with horn blaring, lights flashing, overtakes with confidence, even though they seem inevitably on a collision course with something else. Barp, barp, scattering chooks and children, we all overtake, and somehow manage to survive a thousand times before we reach HCMC, which still is more routinely referred to as Saigon.

Near Chau Doc, at Tuc Dup, a VC cave hideout almost thirty years ago, now red flags with gold stars - Vietnam's flag - mark the grassed rocks and give the bouldery hillside the appearance of the world's most difficult golf course. Some caves have been peopled by wax figures of VC's defending their hideout, and a map in the garden cafe at the base shows what it must have been like with aircraft strafing the hillside, swooping helicopters, fires and unbelievable noise.

Today the scene is quiet, bucolic almost. The loudest sound is that of the whipper-snipper keeping the grounds in order. Visiting tourists can hire paddle boats on the minute lake, and bougainvillea and oleanders and tropical flowers now cover the scars of war.

Talk to the locals, and the Vietnam War becomes the 'American War'. Or they'll simply ask 'which war?' because this country has for centuries been in the crosswires. This lazy S-shaped coastal strip that meanders over 3000 kilometres from its northern border with China is hugely desirable. Whole generations come and go, always under the threat of invasion, always fighting to survive.

And then you realize that this century's Vietnam War in the Mekong Delta, is the one that has been waged forever. The battle to stay alive and feed the family. To survive.

But you know too, that they - these people with an iron core - will succeed.