I stare from the riverbank at this astonishingly vast and lively world of water. Here, in the charming provincial city of Can Tho in the heart of southern Vietnam's Mekong Delta, it is as if the land is merely an afterthought. Everything is about the river and the way of life it sustains. It is a world of colour and movement, of a comforting spray of cool water on your face as you are rowed back to your hotel at night in a slim stick of a boat, of the sleepy glint of dusk as you trail your finger across the river's surface, of the cough and splutter of a small passenger ferry as it crosses the river to Vinh Long, of the throaty gurgle of a rice boat as it slowly motors to Ho Chi Minh City or Cambodia

It's an old joke, but anyone who has tried to brave the traffic in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi knows that it contains more than an element of truth. Drivers routinely go the wrong way down one-way streets and blithely ignore traffic signals. Any pedestrian attempting to cross at an intersection will find themselves the target of dozens of motorbikes, many of them containing three, or even four people, some stacked metres high with goods going goodness knows where.

Teetering down steep stone stairs in inappropriate shoes and tight white designer jeans is a young, affluent Vietnamese woman. A multicoloured umbrella protects her from the sun and a private guide leads her carefully by the hand. Coming up the other way is a young girl from the local Black Hmong hill tribe, dressed in an embroidered jacket and wearing the tribe's trademark black hat. Her face is creased in effort as she struggles with a large basket of sticks strapped to her back. She stops to let the descending woman pass and they exchange a sideways glance that speaks volumes about the extremes of modern-day Vietnam.

A procession of burgundy-robed pilgrims and their followers kneel on the ancient steps leading down towards the holiest pagoda site of Vietnam, before touching their foreheads to the cold, damp stone. We watch them stand up again, take a few more steps, then repeat the process. "They're from the south," our Vietnamese guide says. "The majority of Vietnamese people are non-religious. Buddhists make 25% of the population, and these monks will make us late for our trail". But I am not in a hurry, understand that is why I am here.