Sharon: After Steve's unsuccessful hunt around Ho Chi Minh City for the Cookie lady, we set out for our 2 day trip along the Mekong Delta. Our tour guide was Vu, but his nickname was JJ - 'Junior Jim' - as he was tought by Slim Jim and tried his best at all the rhyming slang. Full of it over here they are; not a day goes by without someone shouting 'Luvvly Jubbly' at us! We meet Anne and Phil a lovely couple from Ireland and Dina from Sweden who, bless her, was getting some unwanted attention from this old German guy so we took her under our wing (Hi guys!).

Passing through rice paddies which are scattered with tombs. This is because the cemetaries are so far away, the farmers get buried in quite spectacular tombs on their own land. When we arrived at the river we took a little wooden boat up the river, then boarded a horse and cart to a little place where we stopped for local honey tea and exotic fruit. JJ then parades around with a python explaining that it loves tourists and would anyone like to hold it? I kind of jumped up - 'yes, me!' not realising that everyone else was kind of shifting backwards in a 'you have got to be joking' kind of way.. it was cool, the snake was so heavy and I think after I did it every one had a go. Very exciting so far.

We then did all the touristy things, went to a coconut candy making place where we all had a taster and Steve and Carrie had a go at the snake whiskey - poor little snakes (Carrie tells me it tastes nothing like snakes though) but dont worry relo's, we didnt buy any as a souvenir so there wont be any heading your way. We only paid 25 US$ for the trip but our hotel was really good. The cool gang headed off into the night to try and party like the locals do in Can Tho - karaoke is really big over here so we thought we'd give that a try. However its not like the old classics back home, it's pretty full on - and in Vietnamese. We went into this one place where you get your own booth and all thought 'ooh, yes, this looks like a nice place'. Then we realised that it had a shower cubicle in the booth. I wasn't quite sure why this would be and, as I do have a rather innocent mind, I still dont know why, but the other guys in the group insisted that we leave and try somewhere else. Can Tho isn't a happening place so we got the lady next door to our hotel to get out her finest plastic chairs so we could sit in the street, which is really common here and have beer (where a big bottle is the equivelent of 20p). Unfortunately a rat ruined the party and that was that.

Next day we headed to the wholesale floating markets and a rice factory via Monkey Bridge - a little wooden bridge thing but it wasnt really very exciting - before we headed back on THE most bumpiest road home. It made the border crossing into Cambodia seem smooth in comparison. On the way back we had to cross over the river on a ferry but we all had to get out of our bus and cross the ferry on foot. We notice that it was only us westerners that were doing this and all the locals stayed in their vehicles. Apparently this is because if the ferry sank a bus load of westerners would make headline news around the globe which would obviously have an affect on their tourism. I dont quite get this logic though as we are still actually on the ferry, so will we miraculously float or something? No idea. That evening we join Dina and her mate for dinner at the Good Morning Vietnam! restaurant, which is of course, an Italian.

Next day we set off for a day out at Dam Sen Park which has an ice palace apparently. It's not talked about in any of the tourist centres but it's this huge theme park and Carrie and I got slightly carried away with excitement. We'd only just come out of this massive netted enclosure with huge bats (and eagles I saw after I'd left!) just flying about above our heads when we purchased tickets for the ghost castle. Only we didn't go into the ghost castle, we had to go to up the stairs at the back where we found... a death slide, yippee!! After the flying fox at the Great Wall we are now zip wire extrodinaires and couldnt wait to fling ourselves off the edge over the lake. Carrie went first and took a running jump while I filmed her with her camera from the top. I did hear a little thump at the end when she stopped but no time to think about that, it was my turn to launch out over the water. It soon became apparent that I wasn't sat on anything like I was on the flying fox - I was holding on with my hands and just had this little belt harness saving me if my grip loosened. Well it was pretty high up and I didn't want to lose my flip flops, but I soon got to the end when all of a sudden I started speeding up from the momentum. I had flashbacks to the Krypton Factor and could picture the people landing in the mud with their legs up, although I had a soft wall coming towards me at pace, not flat mud. Luckily my feet took the full impact into the wall of what I later discovered was 2 mattresses. Shaking heavily from my near death experience (maybe slightly over dramatising, but it felt it at the time) Carrie then explained how she had not put her feet up and instead landed flat against the mattress in what I can only picture as a scene from the cartoon Roadrunner when the cyote often got splatted against cliffs. Still not realsing that Vietnam's Heath and Safety regulations might be slightly less stringent than in the UK, me and Steve walked over to the crocodile pit while Carrie kind of hobbled with her newly bruised toes. About a hundred crocs there must have been crammed in the little lake. Amazingly you could get in a caged boat thing and take meat out 'and see the lightning fast reaction of the croc' as the leaflet explained. Steve didn't seem quite so enthusiastic in response to mine and Carrie's pleas: 'oh go on, can we? can we?' but alas the boats weren't running that day. A family turned up and purchased some meat and flung it in over the side. My goodness, the crocs suddenly didn't seem so sweet as they snapped at the food. I think it was at that moment we realised it was a good thing we hadnt got the boat into the lake, just in case there was a hole in the boat or something (what on earth would you do?). It took us to this point to realise why the park wasn't advertised to tourists, assuming if something did go wrong, they dont really want these kind of stories making headlines across the globe either!

But we finally found the ice palace which was a right laugh. There was also an illusion maze and a 3D cinema which scared the hell out of me, much to the amusement of Carrie and Steve. But that was enough fun for one day and it was back to the city to board our first overnight sleeper bus to take us to Nha Trang. And it really was enough of the fun. When they were designing the beds in the buses I swear they must have had a 'how uncomfortable can we make this for the silly tourists' competition going on. You cannot get comfy, the bend in the bed is not where the human spine wants to bend, they are about 2 ft too short, 1 ft too narrow and so bumpy - and if you're at the top you get all the Gs as you go round corners and the driver insists on beeping his horn every 2 minutes, which has been made extra loud I'm assuming for the inflight entertainment.

But all in all, a very exciting start to Vietnam.

Sharon x