After a slightly chaotic, disorganised but otherwise smooth overland border crossing from Cambodia to Vietnam, our first stop in Vietnam was Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) or Saigon as most people still call it. This was where our bus from Cambodia took us and since it's so far south it was a good place to start and then work our way up north.

When I looked out the bus window at some point, after being engrossed on a game on my iPhone for a couple of hours, I was surprised to see hundreds of motorcycles on the other side of the road all going along one after another. I thought it must be some sort of convention or something until I realised these are just the normal streets of Saigon! Traffic is quite literally mental here. I have never seen anything like it, cars, buses, bicycles but mainly motorcycles crowd every street and whizz past from every direction. It's quite hard to describe until you see it with your own eyes but crossing the road seems pretty treacherous. There is never a gap in traffic and pedestrian crossings are completely ignored. Instead you have to just go for it. Walk into the road with 20 motorbikes heading straight for you and just walk at a steady pace and they all go around you but maybe they'll give you a friendly toot to let you know they're going past. Hesitate or panic for a moment and you're in trouble. Sometimes, I found it better to cross with my eyes closed and pretend the roads are empty!

Once we had found a hotel it was pretty late so only had a bit of time to grab some dinner before heading off to bed. We walked passed a street which was crawling with hundreds of travellers all sat on little plastic stools outside a couple of bars. We wondered what the appeal was but decided to find somewhere quieter and more authentic. On the way back we passed the same place and it was even busier. I spotted a sign saying "beer 6,000 dong" and it all made sense. The beers here cost 20p, you can't even buy water for that price! This set the precedent for Vietnam, alcohol here is cheap and the locals drink a lot of it! (So do the Aussies).

Lonely Planet suggested a day tour of HCMC that incorporates all the main sites. We rushed through this pretty quickly as there was a lot on there we didn't want to actually go into but just see from the outside. We walked to the cathedral, a little reminder of England, and thought to even out the stakes we would walk to the Grand Central mosque. Turns out there was nothing grand about it, in fact we walked past it a couple of times and missed it! It was, however, in a seriously posh area, with shops such as Gucci and Rolex nearby and some seriously nice looking hotels. Since this was not exactly the right area to look for a new pair of shorts for Bryan we went to the central market instead. This is a huge building filled with hundreds and hundreds of market stalls. It's quite bewildering as you push your way through the narrow pathways with people grabbing you and showing you their wares, "miss you want to buy?". Eventually, Bryan found some shorts and ended up buying 2 pairs of supposedly Abercrombie & Fitch shorts for a tenner.

We thought we had better go to some sort tourist attraction while in Saigon and the one that looked most interesting in the guide book was the Reunification Palace. We did get a free guided tour in English but actually it was dead boring. It's basically just a load of government conference and meeting rooms etc inside a palace that hasn't been used since the 60s.

Unfortunately we didn't have much time to do too much in Saigon as the 2 nights we were there were mostly spent trying to sort out our China visa which so far has proved impossible. Since we will be flying to Beijing after Vietnam it's becoming quite urgent to sort it out. The problem we have is completely conflicting reports on the internet and from travel agencies and you just don't know what's correct. Some say it's not possible for foreigners to get a China visa but others say it will cost between $80 and $150 per visa but it will take a week to get there. We only have 2 weeks in Vietnam and I certainly didn't want to spend half of it in Saigon. We were offered to have our visas posted up to Hanoi for when we got there but decided this was more than a little risky and decided to leave the visas until we get to Hanoi despite reading that it's near impossible to get a visa there. If we can't get one there then maybe we're just not meant to go to China.