About 4 minutes after we got into Mui Ne we realised we'd left a bag of our clothes on the bus. The reception staff at our hotel rang up the bus company and they told us they'd drop it round at 1pm, then 5pm, then the next morning. Needless to say, we didn't get it back. Moral of the story: never let anything out of your sight in S.E.Asia! Luckily our hotel was rather swanky (chandeliers in the reception oo-er) which helped us get over it. For the second time in just a couple of weeks we had a bathtub. The TV was huge, the free toiletries were plentiful and the view - well, it was of a building site but you can't have everything.

In between waiting fruitlessly in the hotel lobby for our clothes we had a wander on the beach, where we watched dozens of kite surfers, and ate delicious seafood in the nearby restaurants. I ordered fried king prawns in sesame seeds with chilli sauce and had to fight Jak just to get half. I'm not sure if I preferred it when he ordered barbecue chicken and chips every night and let me eat my meals in peace :-P That night it rained and rained so we watched a couple of films in our room: 'Maid of Honour' and some film about witches starring Nicholas Cage. Both were good.

The next day we went on a tour to the sand dunes that Mui Ne is famous for. It seemed that we'd booked a private tour as we had a jeep and a driver to ourselves. The driver didn't speak a word of English so we had to guess how long we had at each stop. One time we came back whilst he was playing cards and smoking and he made us wait half an hour and another time he was driving off when we returned and we had to practically run down the road after him! The first stop was at a fishing village where hundreds of locals were on the beach picking fish out of their shells and cleaning them. There were lots of fishing boats on the water and large circular fishing containers. The smell was ridiculously strong and it lingered (on our clothes maybe?) after we left. After visiting the fishing village we drove out to the white sand dunes. These were gorgeous: tall and sweeping and sort of how I would expect the Sahara desert to look. We rented plastic sheets and prepared to hurtle down the sandy slopes at dizzying speeds. We must have made a funny sight; each time we attempted it we only made it halfway down the slopes - at a passable but not exhilarating pace - before getting buried in the sand. The climb back up was exhausting, and the wind was so strong that we soon had sand in our mouths, in our hair, all over our clothes and up our noses. It was fun. We then visited the red sand dunes, which were crap in comparison. They covered a much smaller area and the slopes were not as high. Finally, on the way back, our driver stopped at what seemed to be just a stream of water running through the sand. There may have been more to it but there were no signs and we couldn't ask him what it was about in Vietnamese and he certainly couldn't tell us in English. Once back at the hotel we scrubbed the sand - and the fishy smell - off of us. This took some time as we kept discovering more sand every time we thought we'd finished. Once clean, we were going to go for a swim in our hotel's rooftop pool (told you it was posh, we haven't had access to a pool since Oz!) but the strong wind had caused part of the roof to collapse into the pool(!!) so that wasn't an option. Instead we just relaxed and ate some more.

Yesterday we caught another bus to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon. The journey is meant to take three hours but actually takes more than five due to the traffic. We were pretty pleased when the bus stopped two doors down from the hotel that we'd booked as it meant no sweaty traipsing around town with our bags on our backs. Somehow though the hotel had double-booked our room and we ended up in a cheaper hotel around the corner for one night, up what felt like dozens of flights of stairs. We had to check-out of there this morning and wait around until midday to check-in to the room we'd actually booked. No refund, no apology. We were Not Impressed. Although the fact we couldn't go out this morning gave us a reason to lie in, which was delicious after several days of being on the go. Every cloud and all that.

After moving rooms we walked around downtown Ho Chi Minh City and visited the War Remnants Museum. The latter was challenging but a must-visit if you're in town. There are old fighter jets and guns in the courtyard and everyone smiles and poses next to these, but when you get inside the main museum and see the photos of the war victims, and read about the aggressive techniques used by the US army and the long-lasting effects of the Agent Orange sprayed everywhere, no-one is smiling. You can even see the tiny barbed-wire 'tiger cages' used to house political prisoners and read about how they were tortured by the puppet government of South Vietnam. That was too much for me and I had to leave without reading it all :-( Even though the museum was upsetting we are glad we went; it's an important part of Vietnam's history and something that we felt we should make an effort to find out about considering that we are visiting their country.