We took another sleeper bus from Nha Trang to Ho Chi Minh, non eventful and very comfy!

We spent almost a week in Ho Chi Minh as we had to change our travel plans somewhat. We were going to fly to the Philippines after 3 days here but after heavy floods & two typhoons in Manilla we sadly decided to change our itinerary. Therefore, it was worth seeing out our visa for Vietnam.

On our first day we walked around District 1 where we are staying. We went to the Palace, which looked more like a 1960s library and visited the Ho Chih Minh City Museum then made our way back to the street our guesthouse is on for the normal "celebrating being in a new place" night out. We met a nice English guy from Bradford and reminisced about things like marmite on toast and roast dinners!

We spent a day at the zoo and botanical gardens, it was great. We paid 30p to get in each and they had more animals than Whipsnade/Bristol zoo! See the pics for some of the strange animals we saw.

Our now good friend Gustavo (Brazil) happened to be in Saigon the same time as us so we spent a night on Bia Hoi with him and met some other fellow travellers, one of which Matt owes 50 dollars to for a bet he had with him when we were crossing the baorder into Laos that England would beat Italy in the Euros! It was quite an emotional/drunken goodbye to Gustavo as we won't see him and his friend Kim now until we are in Brazil :(

We booked a day trip to the Cu Chi tunnels - over 250 kilometres of tunnels running under the Cu Chi district of Ho Chih Minh that were built by the Viet Cong in 1968. These are officially the longest tunnels in Asia and they played a huge part in the Vietnam war. It was a good insight into what went on here during the war but Gem did not like going through the tunnels at all - we were bent double and almost had to crawl through, and when the guy that was leading Matt went off in a totally different direction it was picth black. Needless to say when we were invited to go into another part of the tunnel complex Gem refused!!! We were shown how they hid the entrances and exits from the Americans and didn't hide others where there were booby traps, looked painful! In all 1200 Americans and around 50,000 Vietnamese lost their lives here. We were offered the opportunity to fire a gun at a shooting range between 2 of the tunnels and Gem chose an AK47 - see pics, strange experience - very loud and andrenaline enducing!

After the tunnels we were dropped at the War Remnants Museum and spent a couple of hours looking at their big collection of photos and prison displays as well as helicopters, aircraft and tanks. We felt the museum was somewhat biased against the Americans but the heart wrenching pictures of kids still being born today with birth defects due to the 80 million litres of agent orange that the US sprayed over Vietnam. Very sad.

Just like Hanoi we have really enjoyed Ho Chi Minh, again it is a massive place with several districts making it a very fun place to be. Our guesthouse is in the backpackers district so there is no shortage of great food to eat and cheap places to drink!

We have simply loved Vietnam, the people are great and the scenery is fantastic. It has definitely been an easier place to travel than the countries we have been to previously on our trip as the country as a whole is much more developed.

We have booked flights to Jakarta, Java (Indonesia) and leave tomorrow night. We plan to travel North Java then go over to Bali (hopefully we'll bump into our Brazilan friends again afterall). We will then do south Java and go up to Sumatra where we can get to Singapore to stay with Emma for the Formula One Grand Prix.

After deciding early in our trip that we would miss China out, Indonesia was it's immediate replacement. A similar size population to USA (240mil). Consisting of over 17,000 Islands, the largest of which is Java (population 140mil). Indonesia is mainly Islamic so will be very different from our previous travels.