Carrie: Welcome to Vietnam! Our first impressions were great - very french inspired so some beautiful buildings, happy smiley locals and absolutely millions of moto's buzzing around (the riders wearing colourful helmets,apparently only introduced and made legal last year but quite the fashion accessory already!).

After a read of our trusty guide books we quickly realised that the 12 days we had left on our visa (due to our re-routing thanks to the wonderful STA) was not going to be enough so we jump on our first moto, get issued with helmets (a promising sign) and start our weave in and out of the traffic (me clutching hold of my Harry Potter 2 that I have just purchased off the street, I am now officially hooked!) The Embassy were next to useless so we decide to use a local tour operator and maybe pay a bit over the odds to get a urgent visa extension, favouring this over being seperated from our passports for a week and picking them up in another city later on in Vietnam. Officially set to be able to stay in the country a whole extra month we get on with what we are hear for sightseeing...

Having already sampled getting around town by moto, next we opt for cyclo's (basically push bikes with chairs on the front) a very relaxing way to travel and you can see alot, providing your nerves can handle traffic coming right for you with their hands firmly on the horn (it's a vietnamese thing!) and moto's shooting past your side. Definately not as relaxing for the cyclo driver as they have to jump off and push when the incline gets too much but we fix a price per hour jump aboard and begin our journey. My cyclo rider is chatting and laughing the whole way round and even pointing out the touristy sites.

1st up, the war remanents museum, basically, the Vietnam version of the war on story boards. Tanks, Airplanes and Helicopters in the yard and bombs/weapons in display cases. Some really graphic shots of people being injured by Napam bombs, including the one that everyone remembers of the girl running down the street and it also went into explaining the side effects of Dioxin and the cruel disfigerations at birth that even now it is still causing. I know that the musuem will have been bias to the vietnam opinion but I can't believe that the USA got away with it, some of the quotes from people in power at the time were horrendous!

Jade Pagoda next and then we plan lunch so not wanting to pay the cyclo drivers to sit and wait we pay them for their 2 hours expecting to say thanks and wave them on their way. Instead they arrupt into shouting and pointing mode and change the price we had initially agreed, we stick to our guns give them their money and head into check out the Jade roofed Pagoda, ie: hide, and hope they are gone when we come out. It's sad to say but 2 months into our travels we have seen a fair few pagoda's and a pagoda is a pagoda! starving hungry and well aware that the rain is on it's way after 10 mins we head for lunch. Sadly this was not long enough for the cyclo drivers to get bored as they spot us and start chasing us up the road, shouting and calling us "nasty ladies"!! Not quite sure what they expected but we legged it directly into the nearest food looking establishment which turns out to be a traditional Vietnamese coffee house. The locals clearly have rain indicators inbuilt in them as it's been raining less than a minute and they are all shooting past on moto's sporting their brightly coloured poncho's, impressive! We while away an hour watching the world go by, just as all the locals are doing, sampling the range of coffee on offer whilst taking a few photo's of the madness outside (rush hour in Vietnam is something else and the rain makes it that much more interesting!) The coffee comes to your table with individual perculator/strainer things served with a layer of condensed milk in the bottom of the cup which makes the coffee sweet and alot thicker than coffee back home, very tasty! We later learnt that whilst we were sat realxing poor Dabbers wasn't so lucky and had got stuck at the Jade Pagoda thigh deep in water thanks to the downpour (he was even preparing himself to bed down for the night!) luckily when the rain stopped the water level reduced pretty quickly leaving Dabbers free to head back to our guesthouse absolutely soaked.

The next day we head out on an organised tour to Cao Dai temple and Chu Chi Tunnels, en-route to the bus pickup we are easliy persuaded to sample some cookies from a lady on the street and we were not dissapointed... The cookies were fantastic! with the added extra bonus that Sozo (the shop she worked for) gave work to and raised money for disabled locals, so eating bad food and feeling good for it too, result! If you are ever in Saigon the shop is definately worth a visit.

Cao Dai temple is possibly the most colourful temple I will ever visit! Built in 1962 the headquarters of the Cao Dai religion which mixes Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Catholicism and Confucianism. This I found to be a very interesting concept and even after visiting still have no concept of how this actually works in practise?! but with only 2 million members in Vietnam it's by no means a majority religion yet. From the outside the temple looked like something out of Disneyland, however the inside was much more like a temple especially as we visited in time to experience the noon mass. The mass consisted of rows upon rows of sitting people praying on 9 levels of steps (the higher your status in the temple the higher up you were allowed to sit) bright red, yellow and blue robes signified the different religions for the more senior and everyone else wore white (an intersting colour choice in a country where washing machines are few and far between!). All of this happened in a language our tour guide says only they seem to understand accompanied by dodgy really out of tune string music. I'm not sure we have to worry about this religion catching on in England just yet!

Templed out we head for some more action packed fun at Cu Chi tunnels. Cu Chi an area that was heavily bombed in the Vietnam war is still home to the underground tunnels that the locals used to escape from the US army and hide underground from bombings. The original tunnels dimensions were 80 x 60 cm so even the vietnamese had to scoot along on their tummies and elbows, we had no chance! Luckily,they had adapted a few tunnels especially for "westerners" to double the size. I got down near one of the small tunnels with a torch to have a look inside, I could barely manoevuer so that I could get my head into see let alone try and crawl along it, they were ridiculously small! Our western style tunnels were still pretty clastraphobic and hot, I wouldn't have fancied spending too long down there (the Vietnamese spent up to 2 days down there sheltering from the bombings!) without 2 days to spare we settled with completing the 100m run underground taking photo's as we went, great fun but we were definately all glad to be back out in the fresh air! Back above ground we had demontrations of how the nail traps and other booby traps worked to impale and capture the US army, all pretty vicious and also watched a video which will probably have to be reworded sometime very soon as it referred to locals being awarded for being great "American Killers", all very strange!

Great thanks have to go out to our tour guide "Slim Jim" or "Thong" who really made the day. He is a real asset to TNK travel and if you are ever in the area you should make sure that you experience a tour with him. Thong, with 20 years teaching behind him swapped to tour guiding 10 years ago to improve his conversational english all part of his master plan so that he can enjoy a quiet retirement back in the Mekong (his home) tutoring students. It worked! his conversational english was second to none and he had also picked up Ozzy sayings, cockney ryhming slang and all sorts of sayings and jokes keeping us amused for the whole day! Sad not to be able to take him on as our personal guide for the whole of Vietnam we told him we were going to "make like a tree and leave" he waved us off happy to have learnt something new and we wandered off happy to have left our mark and feeling like our money had been very well spent!

Carrie x