Vietnam- Ho Chi Minh City I felt the need to blog about Ho Chi Minh City... massive place for starters! We arrived at 9pm after a 13 hr bus journey from Siem Reap! We did change buses in Phnom Penh but it was literally hop off and hop back on again. After getting our passports checked, about 10 times and filling out numerous bits of paper to cross the border, we made it to Vietnam! We got off the bus and i had already recognised that we were in the right district for the backpacker guesthouses from the map in lonely planet but... a taxi driver came up to us and offered us a taxi, he knew the hostel we wanted to go to and said it was 15 minutes away, hmmm i thought but we got in anyway.. 15 minutes later we got out and paid $15!! The hostel we wanted only had $17 dollar rooms so we ended up above a fabric/silk shop, 3 stories up in a boiling hot room for $10. Later when we went for a walk we realised we had been conned by the taxi driver... where the bus dropped us off was at the top of our road!! It was literally a 2 minute walk! The driver had just been driving around aimlessly racking up the $15 dollars on the meter! I mean how rude!! We had to laugh though because it was so rediculous! Anyway we got over it a few hours later and we had been warned bout the Vietnamese! Doesnt stop there...We went to a market later that day and i was being grabbed from all angles- 'you want dress lady' 'this one for you lady' 'cheap for you' 'YOU WILL BUY A DRESS'- they maye aswell have taken the money from my bag themselves! No, it wasn't quite that bad...anyway, i wanted to get some shorts so i picked some up and, well, that was it- if i wanted to get out of that market alive i was buying those shorts! I had a tape measure round my waist,told i was too fat for a small and 5 pairs of shorts being held up in my face by another woman! i bought some in the end for $10 - way too much but i wanted to live.

Whilst in HCMC we also went to the War Remenants Museum, so interesting but some really graphic photography, to the point of making me heave. Have to admit my knowledge of the Vietnam war is limited so it made for a really interesting morning. We also took a trip out to the Cu Chi tunnels. A huge network of tunnels the vietnamese created during the war, thousands of them lived underground in these tunnels to hide from the Americans. They are so tiny, they had original tunnels aswell as a reconstructed one so that the tourists can go down it and see what it was like. We went 20 meters and had to get out it was so small! It had been made bigger and we still had to pretty much crawl. Brilliant day.

Next stop Da Lat...