Well we have been in Vietnam all of 2 days and so far we love it.The country has been ravaged by 17 years of war but the place is alive. Here in the south it almost has a latin american feel rather than the french influence you'd expect. The buildings are tall and narrow and have been painted in an array of happy bright colours. Unlike the rest of SE Asia it also has a strong Catholic influence so there are magnificent catholic churches dotted around and quite a lot of the houses have large colourful statues of christ or the Virgin Mary on their roofs.

It was quite useful for us that the first stop in Vietnam was Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) as it meant we could visit the War Remnants Museum and actually learn something about the history of this country. Unlike the Aussie's and Kiwi's we've met on our travels who were taught about the Vietnam War at school (as their soldiers fought in it) we weren't! The museum was obviously biased against the S Vietnamese and US forces but it did give us a really useful overview.

The musem has pieces of old US machinery abondened when they withdrew in 1973, an exhibition of photos from mainly western war photographers showing the atrocities perpertrated by the South Vietnamese and US forces, some of these pictures were unbelievable and horrific. I'm sure some of the US soldiers had gone mad (or alternatively it was the right place for a certain kind of person!) because what some of them did was horrendous. The final section of the museum was dedicated to describing the treatment of the North Vietnamese prisoners of war by the US and South Vietnamese army. At Tuol Sleng Prison in Cambodia there is a series of paintings done by one of the 7 surviving prisoners to show the torture tactics used by the prison wardens I was therefore suprised to see the same series of paintings in this part of the exhibition showing how the N Vietnamese POW were treated! I have a feeling that the N Vietnamese troups must have been equally as bad but we are not being shown that - they did win after all!

We also went to the reunification palace where a communist tank crashed the gate on the 30 April 1975 the day Saigon (soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City) surrended to the Northern Vietnamese army.

The city seems a really happy and friendly city and on a night has almost a party atmosphere as the streets become lit up with fairy lights! (see the photos)

On our first night we went out for a meal with 2 English couples but on the second night we decided to go to the rooftop garden of the Rex Hotel for drinks. OK I admit I'd never heard of this place before but apparently it is one of those '100 things to do before you die' a bit like drinking Singapore Slings at Raffles (and yes we will be doing that!). The hotel is old and grand and is now dwarfed by it's modern counterparts but it has some genteel charm about it. David ordered a Mojito and I ordered one of the hotels special cocktails called 'Saigon Beauty' which turned out to be a disgusting bluey colour but actually tasted OK.

We have decided to give the Cu Chi tunnels a miss - they are quite a drive away and can be quite claustrophobic and warm to go down. We understand the importance of them to the communist movement of the North and we have seen examples of the booby traps set by the Viet Cong and how whole families lived in these tunnels in terrible conditions.