All throughout Vietnam, we have always been really impressed with how clean the places we have stayed have been. Everything is a bit more expensive here, and instead of rock bottom double rooms being $4-7 per night, they were now like $10-14, but you do get nicer spaces for your money. Saigon was no different, and after a bit of a faff to find somewhere at the lower end of that scale, we did eventually settle on a nice little room above the local pharmacy run by a very happy smiley old Vietnamese lady. A/C, a window, nice shower, flat screen telly and cable, towels, sheets, bog roll all complimentary....yes..home for the next 4 days..at last we could actually unpack a little and get some clothes washed!

Our newly purchased laptop had been on the blink with keys not working and more failing by the day making typing nigh on impossible (hence the slow updates!) However, we were in luck as Acer have an office in Saigon so we took our sick machine in and, sure enough, told it was covered under warranty, and we could collect it tommorrow with a new keyboard and software...result! India would never have produced such an outcome for us I'm sure :)

We visited the American and Chinese War Crimes Museum to get the Vietnamese take on the "American War". Of course it was skewed the other way, but, there was no doubt that some of what we saw in there does not get painted anywhere near as tragic as it should be when it comes to Western history lessons.

Agent Orange and the chemical attacks used by the US are nothing short of sickening. The real shock was that we are not talking about something that was used purely against Viet Cong soldiers and would only affect them. We are talking about tens of thousands of women and children and as it causes genetic defects, people are born today (or fail to be born) because of defects and mutations caused by the chemical warfare waged 40 years ago. There is no justification for that is there? We had no idea. Almost as sickening is the struggle that US soldiers have and are still going through with the US government to get the care and support they need after being ordered to disperse this stuff on their enemy. Truly shocking stuff.

We took 2 day trips, one out to the Cu Chi tunnels (used by the Viet Cong against the US during the war) and the following day out to the Mekong Delta to get a taste of life on the islands there. We were fortunate that our tour guide fought in the war - as "an American puppet" as he put it - so we got some insight that many do not I would assume. He was quite clear that there was no winners, and that he and others not on the Viet Cong's side still had a lot of sympathy with their then enemy, and really did see them as brothers. (There's some shots of him in the photos while he was explaining how Vietnamese can sit lower and wait in the jungle for longer periods of time than westerns because we sit on toilets rather than squat toilets!) We rounded the tour off with a trip through some of the tunnels and both of us completed the 100m meter or so 2-level course the tunnels created for the benefit of tourists.

The Mekong delta tour was OK, but nothing to write home about really. Apart from Brett taking on a fear of snakes head-on (see photos). It finished off with some awful sounding local music. It was like 6 people were playing and singing 6 different songs. Apparently it had recently been given protected status by UNESCO. And doesn't it need it!! Left to its own devices, nature would weed this out of exisentence pretty quick sharp. I don't mean to sound culturally biased, prejudiced or ignorant, but sometimes things become extint for a good reason. ;)

We rounded off our Saigon experience with some traditional Vietnamese Saturday activities: watching English Premier League football in a bar eating a chicken burger. A bloody nice burger it was too.