Just when you think that the traffic in Ho Chi Minh city can't possibly get any crazier, there's Cholon. The city's Chinatown, Cholon has all of the noise, crowds and chaos that you find in the other districts - but intensified, concentrated, as if a whole metropolis has been compressed into an impossibly small space. At its heart is the central market building, surrounded by a network of narrow roads containing countless street stalls. Here, the workings of the city's commercial life are stripped bare and exposed on the streets; everyone is buying, selling, bargaining, transporting goods from one place to another. Around the market, motorbikes swarm through the streets and become trapped in narrow bottlenecks. Competing with them for space are tuk-tuks, cyclos, the occasional car, and bicycles garlanded with trussed-up live chickens and ducks. The noise is overwhelming, the smell worse; the exhaust fumes combine with the odours from the market: slabs of raw liver, dried shrimp, fish sauce, drying meat, and the piles of rotting vegetable scraps on the ground. If the stench doesn't ruin your appetite, there are plenty of food vendors around, some of which operate a beautifully efficient "production line" approach. At the end of the line, the vendor serves up plates of fried rice with duck; to the left is a dead duck being chopped up on a slab; further on is a whole dead duck in a pot of boiling water, about to be plucked; and live ducks sit at the other end of the line, looking completely oblivious to what is going on next to them.

I had reached Ho Chi Minh City from Dalat, a few days before New Year. My visa was running out, it was almost time to leave Vietnam, and I had many contrasting feelings about the country. For every kindness I had received from someone, there was someone else (usually working in the tourist industry) who was working a scam. For all of the fascinating culture and natural beauty of the places I'd visited, there was a feeling of frustration that it was so difficult to travel away from the Open Tour bus route. I was starting to feel like one of a flock of sheep being herded from city to city on the bus, and was getting impatient for a change of scene - in particular, I was excited about getting to Cambodia and Angkor Wat. I booked a place on a boat up the Mekong to Phnom Penh, leaving Ho Chi Minh City on January 2nd, which left me time to see in the New Year - and a couple of days to explore the city.

I had expected the War Remnants Museum to be a display of Party Propaganda - after all, its former name was the "Museum of American War Crimes" - but it turned out to be nothing of the sort. The focus was not on the history of the war or its causes, but on its effects. The museum is a tribute to the power of photojournalism, and the walls are covered with pictures from the front line. A family wade across a river to escape an air raid; a hill-tribe woman looks sideways at the rifle barrel that is held against her head; and there is the famous photograph of the naked girl burned by napalm, running along the road away from her devastated village. The nationality of the people in the photographs becomes irrelevant - a picture of a soldier whose legs have been blown off by a land mine evokes the same emotions in the viewer regardless of whether that soldier is Vietnamese or American. These were pictures of the effects of war on ordinary people. Along a wall in another gallery were photos of the journalists and photographers who lost their lives in the war - whose belief that the world needed to know of its effects was stronger than the fear of dying.

Perhaps the most disturbing section of the museum dealt with landmines and "experimental weapons": the mines designed to main, not to kill (since a wounded soldier is more of a burden to the enemy than a dead one); the cluster bombs which scatter mini "bomblets" over a wide area (many of which fail to explode until years later, when trodden on or picked up by a child); the "flechette" bombs that, on explosion, shoot out hundreds of sharp metal darts. The photographs of the victims were obviously shocking, but I was more troubled by the thought of the people who design these things. Somewhere, these people have the job of sitting at a desk and coming up with new and more imaginative ways of blowing bits off other people - while at the same time disregarding the long-term effects of these weapons on civillians. Maybe this detachment from the consequences of their actions is so complete that, at the end of the working day, they go home and sleep quite soundly with a perfectly clear conscience...

After the war museum, you could say that the Reunification Palace provided some comic relief. The official guide who showed us around spoke with an air of great reverence about the grand furnishings and artwork in each room, but I found it impossible to keep a straight face. The grandeur of the marble corridors and lavish reception rooms was offset by the hillariously kitsch decor, which could have come straight out of a 1970s interior design catalogue. The main conference room looked like the lair of a bond villain, with its long table of polished hardwood and sinister black leather chairs; the "recreation" room was complete with a wooden dance floor, and I imagined government ministers donning John Travolta suits and trying out their Saturday Night Fever moves. I honestly did try to appreciate the historical and symbolic role of the Palace, but somehow was unable to take anything seriously.

I think that this mood of silliness extended to the New Year's Eve Party that night, where I drank a silly amount of Vietnamese rum, and joined in the silly dancing to some very silly music. But I still had time to reflect that I had never started a year with less direction to my life, less certainty as to the future. I had no idea what the next months of travelling would bring, or what I wanted to do with my life when I returned home. Strangely - and I'm sure not just because of the alcohol - this felt like quite a good situation to be in.