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HO CHI MINH CITY

Well we have loved Ho Chi Minh! Our hotel has been lovely and we have spent our time mooching round the city and relaxing! We have had a gym, spa and pool here and it's been blue skies and 34 degree heat!!! (Much nicer than your Icey weather lol)!

There are loads of cool landmarks and buildings here (I'll post pics now) and we managed to do our most important job here - sorting the Thai visas out! As we will be in Thailand for more than 30 days we need a proper tourist visa (if traveling to Thailand for 30 days or less then no visa is required) - we are going for 38 days so it got complicated (if we had known how much of a nightmare it would be we probably would of arranged that we didn't exceed the 30 days!) but hey ho - we also had to do it in Vietnam and not online in England before hand as we stopped over in Bangkok on the way to Vietnam so if we applied for the visa before this stop over then it would of expired before we re entered Thailand again later this month! When we arrived at the Thai embassy in Ho Chi Minh armed with all the docs (we had already pre filled out forms and had all the necessary documents we were told we needed) the unhelpful Thai man on the desk stated that we needed bank statements (still don't know why when we could prove we were flying out of the country at the end of Jan) and as we were applying for 2 visa's (one each) we needed 2 copies of all the documents (even though they had both of our names on)! I could see the photocopier they had behind him but he insisted we couldn't use it and had to go to find one elsewhere to copy 1 more copy of the same document!! (you can imagine how stressful this was when you can barely understand each other and no Vietnamese person knows what 'photo copy' means!) there we're lots of tears and of course everything was jakes fault!! (Pray for jake) lol anyway after the most stressful day ever running round Ho Chi Minh we managed to get our Thai visas approved! Woo hoo!

We also nearly got ran over 1000 times as in rush hour or when the traffic was bad the scooters/Moto bikes decide to just whizz down the pavements instead! Unbelievable! And then they have the cheek to beep you to move like your in their way!!! This got right on our nerves!!! I ended up protesting and walking purposely in their way ready to take getting ran over to prove a point! Honestly never seen anything like it! Haha

On Tuesday we had a cheat day! Woo hoo! So we spent the day looking for cakes!! We ended up in Starbucks and I had a slice of red velvet cake and jake had a chocolate muffin! Heaven!! Although very expensive!! We are now back on healthy eating until xmas! (Well I am) Booooo!!

Today we were supposed to go to the zoo (jake wanted to go) and after trying to explain to him that I wasn't sure if Asia zoo's treated their animals as good as we do in Chester zoo for example we did some research on trip advisor! Literally every review read 'left feeling very sad and distressed at the state of the conditions' 'very small containers' 'animals clearly in distress and in bad condition' on this note we decided not to visit the zoo and give them our money! Instead we went for a walk and went to the gym before packing our bags ready to check out tomorrow!

Tomorrow we head via coach to Phnom Penh (Cambodia) for 4 nights. We have already sorted our Cambodian visa online as it's tricky when crossing land boarders so hopefully all goes well! Otherwise I will have a meltdown!!!!! Haha

The breakfast at this hotel has been nice and they have had BAKED BEANS!!! YES!! Don't get me wrong they arnt Heinz baked beans but I'm not complaining!

We are getting excited for Christmas now and hoping Cambodia is Christmassy!!

I don't think there's much else to report but if I've forgotten anything I'll add it in to the next blog!

Miss you all loads! And missing marks and spencer Percy pigs like you wouldn't believe!

Love Steph and jake xxxxx