After 25 hours on a bus we arrived in Saigon - this city is unlike anything else we've seen in Vietnam. The traffic is crazier, the noise is louder and overall it just feels more like a Western city than anywhere else in Vietnam. Audrey (a friend from Ireland for those of you who don't know her) was also in Saigon when we were there but unlike us she was staying in a very nice hotel so Gareth and I got all done up in our good clothes to meet her for breakfast over at the Sheraton! It was so nice to catch up with her, always good to see a face from home when you're far away!

The war remnants museum in Saigon is one of the most moving museums we have ever visited anywhere. It starts with photographs taken by foreign journalists who were covering the war from the frontlines and who died as a result of the war, showing the last images they took before being killed in many cases - incredible. It's amazing to think how far war correspondents will go to ensure that the world see the reality of the war, very noble and very tragic.

The majority of the museum looked at the atrocities of the war with photos showing the Americans at the My Lai massacre, where an entire village of Vietnamese civilians were tortured and killed with very gruesome photos, and also the immediate and after effects of agent orange and napalm bombs. It's very gruesome but brilliantly done.And it also showed international reactions to the Vietnamese war with photos of Anti War demonstrations from a huge number of countries and also quotes from the UN attacking the US for their use of napalm and phosphorous bombs at the time of the war.

We also visited the Caodai temple, the Holy See, about 100km outside Saigon.Caodai is a religion unique to Vietnam and it combines almost all major world religions, Catholicism, Islam, Taoism and Buddhism! The temple is a huge and amazingly colourful building with the all seeing eye depicted all over the place as well as images of the Gods of all the major religions and of their three saints, one of whom is the French writer Victor Hugo.

The Cuchi tunnels were next on the itinerary where we were forced to watch a Vietnamese government propaganda film made about the tunnels before the war even ended in 1967! It was painful! We saw the booby traps the Viet Cong used against the Southern and American army and of course the tiny tunnels and their entrance ways that they used to use.My God they must have been tiny! Apparently they've made the tunnels double the size they used to be for tourists and we were still bent double trying to walk through them.

Then we were off to the rice bowl of Vietnam, the Mekong Delta, which feeds the majority of Vietnam with rice and fruit.The Mekong is the 3rd longest river in the world starting in Nepal and working its way all the down and out into the sea in Vietnam. Like most rivers we've seen in Asia it's a dirty brown because of all the clay and mud it stirs up.We spent two days touring around the river and seeing how the people of the Mekong live.A lot of it was pretty cheesy with trips to rice paper and coconut candy factories (I say factories but everything was done by hand!), traditional Vietnamese singers, fruit tasting, python holding (and yes I was petrified) and then lots of little boat trips down the river and its tributaries.

The floating markets were interesting to see with boats selling all sorts of fruits and goods. The people live their whole lives on the boats and they basically act as middlemen, the farmers sell to them before dawn and then the boats sell to the local people throughout the day. They advertise what they have to sell by tying whatever it is to a stick and hoisting it up above the boat. Because the Mekong Delta is so full of water everywhere the floating market used to be the main market, also helped by the fact that no taxes were levied if you sold on water instead of on land, but slowly the market is dying away and soon all of the business will be done entirely on land.

The most interesting part of the Mekong Delta though was seeing how the people actually lived.The Mekong is their life blood, they use it for everything from transport to hygiene. We saw people washing themselves, their dishes, their clothes and even drawing drinking water from the river.