Day 113 -

Today we left Can Tho to head to Ho Chi Minh City which is the most major city in southern Vietnam.

We decided that as this is our last month and our last destination in SE Asia that we weren't going to hang around at each place, taking our time as usual, we really wanted to move quickly and get in as much of Vietnam as possible in one month. A lot of travellers that we've met have said that Vietnam has been their most favourite place and make sure that we see as much as we can which is what we intend to do!

With this in mind we set out a sort of route that we wanted to abide by (oh no our first actual plan that we've had since we left!) and aimed to follow it as best we could.

We got a sleeper bus from Can Tho even though it was the day time but we thought it was best that we have a little lie down before our master plan commences...

First flaw in our plan - LUNATIC BUS DRIVERS!! Oh my god if I thought Laos was bad for it, then that was a fart in the wind compared to this! I don't think that the bus driver actually knew that vehicles are fitted with BRAKES! So much for resting, I was clinging on for dear life just so I wouldn't fall off the bunker!

I don't know which I found scarier, going at god-knows-what speed over cliff edges with a visible drop of hundreds of feet or overtaking other buses or large trucks whilst an equally large vehicle was coming at us from the other direction! I mean, come on! Death wish or what?! In this journey alone I counted at least three very near head-on collisions. My poor ticker nearly gave up on me!

I was so petrified when we finally (fortuitously) got to our destination that my only comfort was that all Vietnamese bus drivers surely won't drive like that, how bloody wrong was I....

Oh Anthony on the other hand had a smashing journey so he told me, said that he saw the most spectacular views from the top bunk, oh good for him!

The journey from the bus station to our new guesthouse didn't calm my nerves whatsoever. We had an equally erratic taxi driver who dodged traffic as if it were in a game of Crazy Frog and who had also wangled our meter so that we paid an extortionate amount of money for a very short ride.

Once at our hotel and with two feet very firmly on the ground we were shown our new room, which was really nice in comparison to the front of the building, and we booked a tour for the following day called the Chu Chi Tunnel tour.

We spent of the day WALKING around the city and seeing a few sights whilst trying to avoid being run down by anything with wheels. We also stopped at the nearest bar to get ourselves a well earned double vodka.

Our first impression of HCM was that it was seriously hot and seriously overcrowded yet seriously amazing...

Day 114 -

We got picked up for our tour in the morning and were introduced to Skinny Jim, our tour guide for the day. He was really nice and really funny. He smoked about 80 cigarettes a day so had the huskiest voice ever but a good sense of humour to go with it.

Our first destination was, well actually I can't remember the name, but basically it was a village and a church where the religion of the village covered all religions. The church was really funky, lots of bright colours and trippy paintings, and each member of the church supported all religions. The main ones being Catholic, Protestant, Muslim and Buddhist. The whole idea of it was that everybody is at peace with one another. If for example you were Catholic you would wear blue, Protestants would wear yellow, Buddhist, green, etc but you would all pray in the same room and instead of having Jesus or a Buddha to kneel in front of there was a big Eye that everybody worshipped. Pretty cool hey? How much better would the world be if everybody just prayed to the Eye and it didn't matter if you were pretending that the Eye was Jesus or whatever because the Eye could be whatever you wanted it to be?

I'd say that one of the main downfalls to the religion is that all the Monks and Nuns had to pray in this church numerous times per day and they were so strict with this that they would never miss one. I think the tour guide said that every 5 hours is prayer time so even in the middle of the night they need to wake up and come to church.

We watched one of the ceremonies anyway, which was pretty boring, every time someone struck the dong they had to bow and that was it. The church was in tiers, eight steps I think. A churchgoer gets to move further up the steps towards the Eye at the back of the room for every 10 years that they have been members. There was one male that was on the seventh step but looked so close to death that he'll probably never get to the Eye - you'd be gutted! I wonder what happens when you get to it? Maybe it gives you a little wink or something!!

After here we headed off to the Chu Chi Tunnels. These were the tunnels used by the Southern Communist Vietnamese Army also knows as the VC which stands for Viet Cong (or Vietnamese Communist). These were the Southern Vietnamese people who fought alongside the North Vietnamese Army against the ARVN (Southern Republicans of Vietnam) and the US Army in the Vietnam War.

The tunnels were basically used as hidey holes from the American bomb attacks and used to transport food and weapons, etc to and from various places. The tunnels were so small that I could only imagine that children could fit down them not grown men and to think that they made all of these tunnels by hand!

The tunnels covered such a large area of land that we wouldn't have had time to get to each entrance of them in a day but we were allowed to go down into one tunnel which had been widened for the European Traveller. It went 18 metres below ground and was really claustrophobic and stuffy I had to take one of the early exits out of there as they were so cramped I couldn't breathe and it didn't help that I had some strangers sweaty arse in my face too.

When Anth and the other tourists emerged from the tunnel we headed off through the forest to the shooting range. To shoot a gun was quite expensive but Anth really what to shoot off a M16 machine gun. Well he thought he was bloody Saving Private Ryan or something shooting off that round, everybody else was firing one bullet at a time but Anth just let it rip!

Anyway on the way back to the bus, Anth and I were dawdling behind the group so that Anth could really take in being inside one of the actual warzones of the Vietnam War and he swears that he saw one of Lieutenant Dan's legs sticking out from behind a coconut tree...

On the way back to HCM we really got a feel for the sheer madness of the city. The roads are just so crammed full of motorbikes I'm surprised that anyone can even move. A lot of Vietnamese wear masks as the fumes are just so pungent that it is hard to breathe. At least I wasn't too bothered by the driving today as we couldn't move very quickly as there just wasn't enough room!

At night time we went to Le Pub (hehe) to have a few drinks and I ended up getting rather tipsy just off a few - must be the fumes!

Day 115 -

Today was just a quiet day really. It was our last day in HCM and wanted to see the rest of the city on foot. We walked through a few parks which were really nice and quite odd that they had been placed right in the middle of all of this chaos.

We went to a supermarket to get a few provisions for our next trip and got a taxi back to the guesthouse. Anth found it highly amusing when I asked the taxi driver to take us to Pan Nagu when it should be pronounced Pan Nu (spelling is Pan Ngu so it's an easy mistake!).

In the afternoon we went to a restaurant. I ended up having an argument with the horrible waiter/owner of the place because he doesn't know that difference between a JACKET potato and MASH potato. Oooh long story but basically I ordered a jacket spud (yes I know not very Vietnamese but if it's on the menu they should serve it!) and when it came out they had smothered it with cheese (and I HATE cheese) so I asked for another one. They then sent out the same jacket potato but had taken the cheese off and taken the potato out of the jacket and plonked that on a plate. I said 'no I don't want that either, I want a jacket' so then they sent out the same potato all mashed up so it looked like lumpy mash potato on my plate! Anth had finished his meal by now and I said it doesn't matter I don't want anything. They then were trying to get me to pay for this which I refused to and me and this waiter ended up really shouting at each other in the restaurant before I ended up leaving (without paying ha). Cheeky git! My food is very special to me and in case some of you don't know, I can be very fussy!

Nothing much happened at night we just chilled out and packed so that we were ready for the journey tomorrow.