Today we had a short liein, then after breakfast walked over to the war museum. Here we hoped to piece together a bit better the history of Vietnam with regard to why the Americans were carpet bombing the North the whole time, what's the difference between the Viet Cong and Viet Minh and why did the French and Japanese keep popping back into the scene.

The front of the museum displayed the American weaponry and aircraft, with little boards detailing their capability, the range and impact of each gun getting increasingly devastating as they went on. It was an impressive display, but these machines had shocking capability for destruction.

Inside there were several rooms, the main downstairs one detailing the use of Agent Orange, a highly toxic environmental agent which destroyed every living thing it landed on, and of course the better known napalm bombs. They had a massive display of photos taken over the last 2 months of this year showing the continuing effects of Agent Orange on Vietnamese people still - crippling physical birth defects and severe learning difficulties still presenting a generation or two down the line. It was horrible. Much less bias here than in the Cu Chi Tunnels, much more factual, but still a slight over-focus on what the Americans did to the Vietnamese people, and less on the North vs South war amongst the Vietnamese themselves. Though perhaps the purpose of the museum was the Viet-American part of the country's history.

It actually left us more confused, battles seemed to spark without purpose and be out of proportion. American forces lied to the American public about incidents in Vietnam, the most notable being when they claimed two American battle ships had been unprovokedly attacked by Viet troops, when in fact nothing of the sort happened, but it allowed the Americans to precede with more carpet bombing - destroying 4000 out of 5800 villages in the North and every single road, bridge and railway line. The French weren't much better, storming the South completely at random and palling up with the Japanese to take the country over, sparked originally by the poor treatment of Catholic missionaries in Vietnam, but turning into a war seemingly for the sake of it.

It wasn't until a few days later that we sat down with the history section of the LP and read through from 1847 right up to 2010 to get a proper sense of the timeline of things. It's a bloody history.

We were thrown out of the museum around half 12 so the guys who sit in the corner going nothing all morning can have a lunch break. So we went down to the market to storm through the stalls picking up all the purchased we had previously investigated on our last visit to Saigon. They make all the North Face backpacks here, so you can buy them in the market out of the back door of the factory for super super cheap, so I did, along with a Mont Blanc watch and a leather bag - all sneaked out of their genuine factories and sold on at prices which made us laugh with the cheapness but still made these Vietnamese a tidy profit. The girls bought some designer bags, which they found out the stall owner's sister would go over to Korea to buy out of the factory and then sell at a marked up price in Saigon.

After this session we dumped our purchases at the hostel and then went back to the war museum to finish the bits we hadn't seen (which we weren't able to do in time for it closing for the evening).

After this, it was a wash and re-pack at the hostel before going out for Hue style cuisine in a very local restaurant and then heading back into District 1 to meet Julia's brother and his friends for the evening.

There we went to Ling's bar (Ling being this crazy Vietnamese woman who enjoyed plying us with alcohol) and then out to the "must do" club in Saigon. Here there was some birthday thing going on, so we stayed for a bit of cake (which ended up everywhere) and a drink, and then headed on to BB club. The latter being a celebrity club where each guest was assigned a bouncer and 1 metre squared area around a table to drink, dance and smoke in. If you moved out of your area, you were forcibly replaced. We were all there in flip-flops and shorts with t-shirts on, whilst the proper Vietnamese guests wore long ball gowns, glittering bejeweled necklaces and carried designed handbags - the men sitting in the corners wearing sunglasses, surrounded by women, happily nodding to the beat of the music and smirking through the bubbles of their champagne glasses. Meanwhile we're all dancing, arms and legs akimbo, sloshing beer all over ourselves.

After this we retired to Ling's bar where I stayed on with Rys, Jimmy and the Irish Owens (who were hilarious) to see in the dawn. Ling was collapsed on a table in the corner. w****s pup-pupped over on their mopeds to offer us special massages for good prices every 10 minutes and tired street sellers would resort to kicking us to get our attention instead of merely standing behind shouting "wan bay sam-sing??".

It was a fun night.