We arrived in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) at around 6 in the evening & were lynched by the hotel touts as usual. We found a classy establishment called the Titi Hotel which was $10 a night, altho it was walking through someones house to go up to our room as the family were always downstairs with the kids & dogs! Saigon is like a more western version of Hanoi, just as busy but loads more pubs & restaurants & more tourists.

The first day we took a taxi to the War Remnants Museum & to the Reunification Palace. The Reunification Palace wasn't really all that. They had some kind of Christmas bash going on downstairs so we weren't allowed in that bit. The rest of it was kept just as the President had it in the war so it was basically just a 70s style building. The war museum was worth going to but it was horrible. There were tanks & planes outside which were pretty cool but the inside of the museum was full of photos from the war & it was really sad. One section showed pictures of children that were born disfigured due to the pesticides that the Americans sprayed down. There was also tiger cages that were used to imprison people who were then tortured by the Viet Cong. Some really horrible stuff went down & it's hard to believe it wasn't that long ago.

The next day we took a taxi to the post office to post some postcards altho the taxi driver dropped us off miles away from it so we went by our map to try & find the post office & eventually found one & sent our postcards. When we walked round the corner we found the Notre Dame church & right next to it was the main post office! We hope the postcards get to you as we were told to only send them from the main post office othewise they would get sent back! After that we went to a shopping centre & got some Christmas presents for each other, we hung out there for a while as they were playing Christmas music & it was making me feel Christmassy! In the evening we booked our bus tickets to Cambodia to leave the next day.