The border crossing into Vietnam was straightforward although the bus conductor worryingly insisted on collecting the passports and doing all the border checks on our behalf....Kim was expecting to have to tackle him as he ran off with our passports but he returned them duely stamped and in the end the only eventful bit of the trip was the man in the next seat being violently sick as we reached Ho Chi Minh!

We found a lovely guest house down an alleyway where you had to walk past people cooking, doing laundry and watching TV in open-fronted houses...one old lady stayed in the same armchair for 5 days without moving and we started to suspect she was dead and her relatives were just changing her clothes daily....

Our first night in Ho Chi Minh we had dinner with two Aussie girls we met on the bus- one of whom talked a lot, the other was too scared to venture out (they had missed the temples in Cambodia because she had hated going out of the hotel!) and spent the whole time on her phone to her boyfriend.

We went on a trip to visit the famous Cu Chi tunnels, used by the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War. We ventured down the tiny tunnels which were only 100cm high and 70cms wide...we managed 30m of the 120m tunnel and decided that was quite enough for us! We then got the chance to shoot guns...an AK47 to be precise...we were shocked at how loud it was and how bad our shooting was...good job we didn't have to fight in the war - we wouldn't have lasted long!!!! On the way back we were dropped off in the city in the rain to go and visit the War Museum....we got lost, drenched and then sickened by the horrific photo's in the Museum. The Vietnam War really was horrendous...you have no idea until you come to this place!

We also booked on a trip to the Mekong Delta. We were rowed along idyllic palm fringed waterways, listened to traditional music, tried coconut candy and visited a rubbish Bonsai garden. Kim had another python draped round her neck (larger than Jon-Jon the python in Bangkok) and embarrassingly realised she was wearing the same outfit as last time...clearly Kim now has a python outfit. Our final destination on the trip was to visit a local market. Kim was slightly stunned when a local woman shoved a headless, skinned frog in her face...the frog was still kicking and blood was pumping from its neck. She managed not to scream and instead coolly commented 'not making any frog recipes today thank you'. However the best bit of the trip was the near mutiny that arose when we realised we had to wait over an hour for a bus as they had got the number of seats wrong. People were yelling; a German Vietnamese girl called the tour guide a 'stupid dog';a dutch girl said he was incompetant and a Korean girl went absolutely mad shouting 'prejudice' when the tour guide tried to get her to go off shopping saying 'all Asians like shopping'...Hilarious!!!!!