We arrived in Saigon in South Vietnam after a 6 hour bus journey from Phonm Phen in Cambodia. The journey wasnt too bad, after all the 10 and 12 hour bus journeys 6 hours seems like nothing!!

Saigon was mad, as you arrived in the city the first thing you saw was a sea of motorbikes, there were hardly any cars and the roads were just packed. Crossing the road is an experience, you cant wait for a space in the traffic as there just never is one, so you just have to step out in the road and hope the traffic avoids you, which it does, they just steer round you while your a nervous wreck!! it works though we made it across the roads manytimes, its quite an adreniline rush!!

We had a nice hotel on Saigon and just spent ourf ew days there looking round the city, visiting a huge market where we purchased some souveniers for some of you back home and visited a couple of museums. We visited the war Remnants mueseum which was really quite sad, it was all about the Vietnam war, the most shocking thing to me was the devastation that the chemical that the Americans used 'agent orange' caused and still causes today.

We flew to Danang after our few days in Saigon, the flight was only a couple of hours. We then got a taxi from the airport to Hoi An. Hoi An is about halfway up the country on the coast. The weather was pretty miserable when we arrived, very similar to a drizzly day in England!! We then found out that it is actually summer in the south and winter in the North, so as we headed up the coeast it got colder, Saigon was boiling, Hoi An was not!!

Hoi An was a lovely little place, its well known as the place to come for tailor made clothes, there are hundreds if tailors, everywhere you look theres a tailor!! So Ben decided to get a suit made, it took about 2 days and is pretty good and it was a bargain at only 35pounds!! I had a dress straight off the catwalk made, its Lanvin darling, the real one would cost a couple of thousand, mine cost about a tenner!!

We spent about a week in Hoi An, the village was really prettty there are a lot of old french style buildings and cobbled streets with a river running through it. We had a boat ride along the river which was nice, we didnt get too far as we had a little Vietnamese woman rowing for us but it was nice just to talk to one of the locals.

Our next stop was a place called Hue, the weather was even worse here, it rained nearly every day!! We did a tour of the city which included visiting some tombs of some ancient kings, some Watts(more buddahs) and a boat trip down the river which was not the most exciting as there wasnt much to see!

After our few days in Hue we headed to Hanoi, we stayed on the old part of the city which was good, it was a real insight into vietnam, you could see the locals sitting on the corners of the streets drinking beer hoi (which is about 8p for a glass!).

We had a trip booked to Halong bay for the day after we arrived in Hanoi. We had a group tour which was 3 days and 2 nights. We got a junk boat from Halong city and did a tour through Halong bay to see the limestine karst formations and went to a couple of caves, it was pretty impressive. We spent our first night on the boat, we had a really nice dinner with a really lovely couple from the Phillipines and another from Chile, a few bottles of wine were had!! When bedtime arrived i was not happy, our cabin was oK, the beds were really small and the bathroom was minute but i could live with that, it was the rat pooh on my pillow that i didnt like!! i had visions of the dirty things crawling all over me through the night and ben had a few bits of poop on his bed too!! anyway we moved room and it was ok, although I didnt get a very good nights sleep!! The next day we learned that the rodent boat crew had helped themselves to someones banana that he left on the bed next too him, the whole banana!!

The next day we went to Cat Ba Island, this is where we stayed our second night. The hotel was really nice and the island had a couple of nice beaches although it was too cold to sunbathe!! We were taken to monkey island to see some monkeys obviously, although we only saw two!! we also did a bit of kayacking, through the karsts. Despite the rats, the trip was really good, if we got the chance we would go back and do it again, in the summer though!!

We spent our last few days back in Hanoi, we had a lovely hotel and just spent our days looking round the city, we also got Tony and Guyed by a top stylist for 12 quid each, bargain!!