Week 4- Vietnam (HCMC) Day 7

Today we finally arrived in HCMC at about 11am, it had been one hell of a long journey! We were also on and off the bus like yo-yo's. The first time was a bus change in Phnom Penh and then again for a breakfast break. We then had to get off the bus for the Cambodia border and once we got to the Vietnam border we even had to get all our bags off the bus to be scanned.. What a nightmare at about 6am. The overall night bus took around 15 hours, it wasn't too horrendous, we managed to get a decent amount of broken sleep. However, the on and off made it feel a lot worse.

Our hostel in HCMC is really nice and the owners are very friendly. We are at the very top of the building which completely knackers us! Luckily the kind Vietnamese man carried our rucksacks up... I don't think we would have ever made it otherwise! We were really hungry as we opted out of breakfast during the night bus so we headed out to find some food. The receptionist at the hostel suggested Kim's cafe. This was a good recommendation, it was so cheap yet amazingly good food. I had chicken noodle soup and it was MASSIVE. Gemma had morning glory (water spinach) in garlic. We have also been learning to use chop sticks and we want to master it before we leave!

We had picked up a leaflet with tours in before we went to the cafe so we sat trying to plan our next few days. There is so much we want to see yet such little time! We decided to do the day trip to the Mekong Delta tomorrow and the Cu Chi tunnels the following day. We still had the afternoon today so we went to see the Notre Dame Cathedral, The central post office and also the reunification palace. Once we got back to the hostel yet again we did some more planning. We booked our flights from Lao to PhiPhi and looked at more hostels. Wendy (Gemma's mum) has also booked flights to meet us in Oz so this is very exciting!

In the evening we went to the night market and did lots of bartering. The lady in our hostel said make sure you pay half the price they offer. I managed to get a present down from 450,000 to 100,000.. This was after a big argument with a Vietnamese and him shouting 'you crazy girl, f*** you' because I didn't want to buy of off him and I knew other stalls also had the same! We had food at the market and ate like queens! We had half a kilo of prawns which a man came and unshelled for us. We also had noodles with squid and other things we couldn't even work out in (it tasted good) and we even tried snails steamed in coconut. A lady travelling on her own asked to eat with us, which was cool. She was from Oz and was a chef coming over to Asia for inspiration. As you know myself and Gemma are big food lovers so we spent most the evening talking about different cuisines!

I forgot to mention how mental the traffic is here! There are no tuk tuks but literally everyone owns a motorbike so you can imagine what it's like trying to cross the road! You basically have to close your eyes and go for it, hoping that they will all dodge you! It doesn't help that they drive on the otherwise of the road and we keep automatically looking the wrong way! So after a chaotic walk back to the hostel we had showers and hit our sacks!