Lo Kau Foo by David Clement Davies

Lo Kau Foo, answered our driver when I pointed inquisitively at the bowls of gloopy rice paste.

Dai had stopped by a food stall on the edge Highway No 1. The Lo Kau Foo was tasteless, but more appealing than many Vietnamese dishes we encountered. The night before, 'Pox' had appeared on the menu. Shrimps too - fried in 'Butler'. The syphilis turned out to be fox but, even smothered in curry, about as appetising as the eel porridge, the porcupine simmered in tonic medicine, or the pig's womb browned sweet and sour. But you are what you eat and driving through Vietnam we'd set out to discover a little of the country through its stomach.

We started our journey to the guts of Vietnam in Hanoi. There are some wonderful restaurants in the Northern capital. Vietnam boasts something like 500 traditional dishes, while Europeans and especially the French are reclaiming their legacy. Though a Dutch restaurateur explained that to do business here you could still only be a sleeping partner. He grumbled about police pay-offs, and party big wigs entertaining their Veo's, their mistresses, to Chateaubriand and good claret.

Ordinary Vietnamese dine at home, or at the endless impromptu food stands that appear in a crack in the wall and glow like fair stalls in the night. But there is no more exciting introduction to Hanoi's palate than on foot through the market. Nothing edible is ignored. Two old Vietnamese men in berets were breakfasting on mounds of roasted pork, and next door I found the reptile stand. Frogs hopped about in string bags and a fish popped out of its bowl straight into a pool of sea snakes.

I swallowed my horror of snakes the next morning. Literally. The village of Le Mat has been consumed by Hanoi's swelling suburbs, but they still catch snakes for the restaurants here, mostly from the mountains. In the kitchen of the Phong Do restaurant, beyond the serried bottles of yellow snake wine, Mr Dang waved a hooded cobra in my face. He gutted it in front of us, peeled off the skin and popped the heart and bladder into a beaker of rice wine.

"Strong, good," Mr Dang said gravely, wiggling his finger in front of his groin. I wrinkled up my nose in disgust at the aphrodisiac and he smiled with tolerant compassion at my naivety. It was the same look I got declining the offers from Saigon's endless girlie bars, or the suggestions of 'young, young, number one Vietnam' from Hanoi's cyclo drivers.

There were other creatures at the back of Mr Dang's kitchen. Partridges, porcupines and sadly, two weary and frightened pangolins. We soon discovered the lack of sentimentality with which Vietnamese, despite their Buddhist traditions, treat animals. The same lack of sentimentality perhaps with which they treat their own problems. But you learn too how primitively people and animals live together in much of Vietnam, especially among the country's many minorities, like the M'nong villagers in the central highlands. Below a M'nong long hut three children, a fat bellied pig and a puppy sat by the cooking pot as the car pulled up by the lake. Under a beautiful steel blue morning lifting with flocks of cranes, fisherwomen were pressing through the tilting reeds slapping the water with their oars to drive the catch into their nets.

Fish is an essential element on a Vietnamese menu, especially Nuoc Mam, a fermented fish sauce and an equivalent of Soy. It is not surprising, because Vietnam is really one long strip of coast, pounded by the south china sea. Those stilted fishing platforms poking from the water are as traditional a sight as the famous hats or the low slung palms swaying above the red earth.

If the spectacle of animals on the road was enough to make a vegetarian of me, there was always rice. In the fields the whole country seemed at work sowing or reaping, men and women everywhere, bending in lime green paddies combed to yellow in the wind. After a half a century of devastation their labours have restored Vietnam to number two in world rice production. It was as reassuring and strangely moving as the regiments of trees; miles and miles of them, young and straight backed, all replanted after the war.

Dai's white Toyota limped towards Ho Chi Minh City and Saigon's big hotels; the Rex, The Majestic, and Graham Greene's favourite haunt, the Continental. They were heaving with end of year office parties and elegant Vietnamese leaving with presents courtesy of firms like Standard American. As well as Tet and the Millennium, it was the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the Vietnamese Communist party. In the shadow of the looming Citibank building the fluttering red and yellow Hammer and Sickle banners looked jauntily anachronistic. Nearby I saw another stand selling bowls of rice paste.

"Ah, " I cried proudly, "Lo Kau Foo". Dai looked at me strangely and then his face exploded .

"No David, No," he whooped "LO KAU FOO." Dai doubled up in hysterics as he got his revenge for our laughter over the Pox.

"Oh, I see," I blushed and the penny finally dropped, "local food."