We arrived bright and early in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) at about 6am to be greeted by lots of the city already awake and exercising?!?! Anyway we managed to find our hostel amongst all of the hustle and bustle already happening and luckily our beds were ready for us so we got a few hours of much needed sleep before hitting the city for a day of sightseeing!

A few hours late we were out and about and once again roads in Ho Chi Minh were like hanoi, full of mopeds. I would even say worse than Hanoi so crossing roads became a fun task once more, lots of horns being pressed, people driving the wrong way up the roads and using pavements as shortcuts. I think it's quite a miracle that we all have all of our toes left after crossing roads in Vietnam. Our first stop for the day was the Independence Palace where we were given a free guided tour, filling us in on a lot of interesting information about the Vietnamese government and the history behind it. The independence palace isn't occupied by anyone anymore, but is still used for governmental meetings etc. We had the chance to look around a lot of the rooms including; the cinema, the ballroom, the kitchen, the gambling room and even down to the basements where they would escape to in the case of an emergency. After our tour of the palace we were all lacking energy and struggling in the baking heat so grabbed a quick ice cream to refuel. We then decided to head towards the Ho Chi Minh war museum to learn a bit more about the Vietnam War. The museum was really interesting and by the end of it we all felt a lot more clued up about what went on not that long ago! It was then time to walk back to our hostel and book our tour of the Cu chi tunnels for the next day (another early wake up of 7am), which Paul managed to bargain down to a very low price. That evening we'd seen quite a few places to eat around so picked a place that looked popular with the locals, always a good sign of good food! We had a brilliant meal once again, very cheap and very tasty. Amy went for the fried noodles with chicken and vegetables, whilst I chose the fried rice with veg. We then wandered through to the night market as the others were looking for some goodies to buy. The market ended up being pretty disappointing, not very big and not a lot of variety. We decided to have a cheap beer, sitting on little plastic chairs on the pavement, people watching and chatting for rest of the night. It was then time for bed ready for our busy last day of Vietnam!

Up nice and early again and we were on our way to the tunnels. The Cu Chi tunnels were made as a underground system during the war. They were used as houses, schools, hospitals, bomb shelters and anything else you can think of. They made the tunnels tiny so that the American soldiers couldn't fit down there with their "KFC" stomachs as our tour guide told us. We arrived at the tunnels and had the chance to go down a tiny whole and have a quick picture. It really emphasised just how small they were. We were then shown lots of different devices used to injure the Americans, lots of traps which would snap their ankles off or plunge them into a pit of spikes. Not very nice at all! We then got to crawl 120m through a tunnel which went down to 4m (nothing compared to their 12m tunnels!) however the tunnel itself was no bigger than 3ft so it was very difficult to crouch your way through and very tiring. After about 90m we hit a point that got even smaller and we had to get on our hands and knees to try and squeeze through!! The whole experience was amazing but at the same time it made us realise we would have hated to have had to live down them. Some of the Vietnamese would spend weeks down there and we were struggling about 10 minutes. Needless to say the sweat was also pouring off of us by the time we reached the end!

The rest of that afternoon we spent sorting our bags out ready to leave for Hong Kong in the morning and trying to catch up with our diaries. We found another great place for food that night and were served with the biggest portions of Singapore noodles you have ever seen! Just what we needed! We then spent our final evening on a rooftop bar looking out to the city's amazing skyline, drinking 12p beer. It was then time to set our alarms for 2.30 when our taxi was picking us up for the airport and say a sad goodbye to Fran, Paul and Bron one more time before trying to get a couple of hours sleep.

Vietnam has been one of our favourite countries, the people are so friendly, the scenery is beautiful, great food and lots of exciting things to see and do. I think it's a country we will both be back to at some point in the future and would recommend it to anyone (especially if you like the idea of 9p beers!!)

Lots of love Meg and Amy xxxxx