Ho chi Minh was very busy, it was very built up with lots of sky scrapers, posh designer boutiques mixed with street vendors and markets. There is around 6 million motorbikes in Ho Chi Minh and it is crazy, it is just a sea motorbike helmets shooting around when you look down the streets. But to cross the road you just have to step onto the road and walk in front of them all and they will all move around you, its scary because you just have to make your legs step out onto the road and keep walking even though it is against instinct and you can see bikes shooting towards you in all directions. It is like this because a bike costs around $250 with no tax or anything whereas a car has about 200% tax on it so only the super rich can afford a car, but you still see big expensive cars driving around and even saw a place selling rolls royce and bentleys, no idea how much they would cost as the more expensive the car the higher percentage of tax, sometimes paying 4 times as much as what we would have to pay for a car.

After 5 minutes of getting off the bus we found our hostel and was greeted with ice cold grape juice, it didnt taste like grape juice but was very nice. We were showed our room where we had air conditioning and a tv in it! We decided to do a city tour the next day because it was $9 but included lunch so was very cheap. On the tour we first went to the war reminants museum which was very interesting. It was full of photos from the war as well as planes, tanks and helicopters etc left over. After this we went to china town to view a chinese temple which was very pretty and very intricately designed. We then went to a cafe to try some Vietnamese tea and coffee. We had a small cup of the most expensive coffee in the world, it was so expensive because it is grown specially and then it is fed to a type of weasel and then the beans are picked out of the poo. It tasted quite nice. After this we went to a market which was huge and sold everything you would ever need but it was only really for the locals so we didnt buy anything. While driving we stopped in a factory where they made local art where they decorated wood or vases etc with duck egg shells and sea shells, they were really pretty but very expensive.

We then went to view the former presidential palace, now reunification palace which used to be the home of the president of the south but was where the northern tanks smashed through the gates to mark the end of the war. It was a really ugly building, just big, square and grey, but the inside sounded good as it had poker rooms, nightclub and helipad on the top floor but inside was dissapointing as all the rooms were just big, white and had a couple of chairs in the middle which was meant to be a poker room, nightclub etc.... so not worth the visit. We then had our last stop at the notre dame church and post office which were built buy the French while they were here. The post office was very nice, we had a walk around and looked in some souvenir shops where they sold the duck egg & sea shell art for less than a quarter of the price as the factory, we were next going to the local tourist market so we decided to wait because we thought we could get it cheaper. In the market we had a look around and bought some nice chop sticks in a nice box for cheap. We also bought some weasel poo coffee so all you at home can try some (it was about $6 for 250 grams whereas in the coffee shop it was about $30). We looked at some of the art but they werent as good quality and were more expensive so we then decided to walk aaaaalllll the way back to the post office to buy a painting and a vase. On the way back we bought some waffles and banana paper (thinly sliced banana roasted together to make a sheet) from a street vendor to eat the next day. We got back to the hostel to drop our bags off because they were very heavy, then headed out for some thing to eat, we were looking at all the restaraunts selling rice, noodle, soup etc and then came across a pizza hut...... we decided to go in because they had a good deal of a cheesy bite pizza, a side dish and two drinks for about $13. But when we ordered they ran out of cheesy bites so decided to just get a regular pizza and a side between us as it would be a bit cheaper. We got a side of potato shrimps (shrimps wrapped in hash brown, very nice). They only had two sizes of pizza, regular and personal, we got a regular to share but when it came it was the size of a personal back home, we had three slices each but were too tired to really care. We went back to the hostel, put the air conditioning on and went straight to sleep.