24th October

After a relaxing and sun filled few days in Nha Trang we reluctantly got on our last sleeper bus in Vietnam and headed for Ho Chi Minh City. After managing to shove some people off the back row (inadvertently, I'll add) we settled down and managed to get some sleep, despite what seemed to be our bumpiest ride yet! We arrived at about 6am and found our hostel down some small side alley with no problems - run by what seemed to be a never ending family with the most adorable kids. We went off wandering round the local area as we couldn't check in until 11am. Got accosted by a legion of restaurant owners and cyclo drivers but we managed to get some quotes for our Mekong river trip and got the travelers cheques changed before heading back and to catch up on some proper sleep. Paul also displayed some impressive bargaining skills and managed to get us a copy of the Thailand Lonely Planet for only 3 quid!

When we finally awoke from our bunk beds (all they had! We were well happy though - think that scene from step brothers and you have it!) we headed off out again, grabbed some street food all for only 2 quid (Paul had Pho and I had Vietnamese stew with some interesting parts of what I only hope was beef) and found a nice bar to laze away the evening (anywhere that sells cheap beer, has sport on TV and a tattoo parlor at the back has to be good!).

25th October

Up early - we'd had every intention of doing a day's walking tour around Saigon but this quickly went out of the window when we got lost within the first 15 minutes. So we hopped on a cyclo each and headed off to the War Remnants Museum and thank god we did as it was a fair old walk. People we'd met had warned us about how hard hitting the museum is but nothing prepares you for some of the images they have on the wall, just shocking - in particular, the pictures of children born with deformities as a result of the use of 'agent orange'. Of course it was a tad biased - you don't hear the American side of the story as they lost the whole thing but still the displays really put into perspective what happened.

We spent a good 3 hours looking round the exhibits before heading over to Reunification Palace for a nose around. Really impressive building and was the place where the tanks of the Viet Cong crashed through the gates when they overthrew the old southern Vietnamese regime in 1975 (history lesson for you all!).

Grabbed some lunch in a 'local' restaurant which, as the only westerners in there, naturally meant we were stared at quite a bit. Even more so when our 'meat' noodles arrived with shrimp and squid rings in it!We then headed off to the Notre Dame Cathedral for a bit more Saigon culture and then the central post office, which was a beautiful French colonial building - reminded me a bit of grand central station in New York…..only it was for post!!

We hopped on the back of motorbikes to get us back to the hotel - made all the more scary by the fact it was rush hour. As you can imagine Paul loved it - speeding in and out of the never ending streams of traffic while blatantly ignoring any traffic lights (parents - rest assured we were wearing helmets!). I pulled the short straw and had the guy on the old rickety moto so it felt like I was going to fall off every time we took a corner!

We ended up catching the Liverpool V Man Utd game in the even after Paul had craftily scouted out some bars that were showing it and then headed off to meet Lynne and Elaine. So good catching up with them and hearing about their new adventures! Plus - Elaine, if you are reading this, I am still very jealous of your tattoo! Spent most of the night sitting in bars and bumping into these two girls we'd met in Nha Trang and who we'd seen in every city since - awkward conversations a plenty!

26th October

We decided against trekking out to see the Jade Emperor Pagoda, mainly on account of our laziness but also because it was miles away!

Headed over to Ben Tenh Market instead, much to Paul's delight, where they had everything you could ever need under one roof - from souvenirs to all varieties of fruit to monkey brains (no joke!). Spent the morning wandering and buying souvenirs I clearly didn't need and then sat in the park for an hour or two chatting to all the random Vietnamese people who came up to us.

One guy in particular must have been chatting to us for a good 15 minutes - asking us whether we were married or not (we've had that a lot while travelling!!) and how you could tell if someone was in love as it was all in the eyes blah blah! This guy then went on to tell us that he'd had 28 girlfriends but that he now had a wife whom he met and married within two months…… soooo urm not sure he was the best person to be listening to about relationship advice. He also had this really nauseating mole on his chin with long hairs growing out of it that he kept stroking - we've noticed a lot of Vietnamese men have it - he referred to it as his lucky hair so there must to some reasoning behind it!

Enough with the lazing around - we then headed over to the Dong Khoi area (posh area!) to see the Opera House, Hotel De Ville (City Hall) and the Ho Chi Minh Museum and ended up in the 5* Sheraton hotel sipping cocktails on in the bar on the 23rd floor! Talk about living the high life. However, I then nearly fell off my chair when I saw the price of the cocktails; only consolation was that it was buy one get one free!! Still, the view from the top was stunning - right out over the while of Saigon. Made sure we stayed until dusk so we could see the lights of the crazy Saigon traffic.

We finished off the day with some yummy street food and a walk in the park where we ended up playing a game of 'hacky sack' (it's the only way I can described it - a shuttle c*** type thing with small weights on the bottom that you have to continuously kick to each other.) with the locals - Paul reckons he's a bit of pro now……naturally I was s***e at it :oD

27th October

Up early this time as we'd booked onto a day trip to the Cao Dai temple and the Cu Chi Tunnels. Took us about 2 and a half hours to bus it out to this temple and talk about anti climatic. It was in the middle of know where and while architecturally it was an impressive building, it was just a weird miss match of three different religions - Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. There was a ceremony talking place as we arrived - the entire congregation were all in white, some wearing head dresses that had that weird 'all seeing eye' symbol on them - to out it bluntly we thought we'd walked in a on cult or something! A more interesting highlight was the monkeys we spotted AFTER we got back on the bus!

It took us another 2 hours, stopping for lunch on the way, to get over to the Cu Chi Tunnels. Our guide - bless him, his English was good but we couldn't understand because of his Vietnamese accent, was an ex Viet Cong solider so it was nice having him to show us around the tunnels. One quite prophetic thing he did say was that 'if you are happy… that should be all that matters - if you go looking for wealth and power, those are the things that lead to war and once that takes hold it destroys everything and you end up with nothing.' Urmm, yeah, not quite word for word there but you get the jist!

We followed our guide through the forests, down some of the tunnel complexes - photo opportunities galore as Paul posed on the tanks and down in the tunnels. Paul also found it amusing to take highly unflattering pictures of my ass as I was trying to crawl through the pitch black tunnels while trying not to panic! Hard to think that Viet Cong soldiers lived down there for months at a time.

Arrived back at about 6pm and headed straight over to the post office (on motorbikes again - hell yeah!). Made Paul write the rest of his postcards, while I was busy trying to send little souvenirs home - BAD IDEA all round - I doubt they will ever arrived on account of the fact that the woman behind the till ripped open my nicely cello taped envelopes to see what was in there - cow! Only to them wrap them back up again and make us fill out a million and one forms all for about a pound's worth of P&P! I was getting a proper rage on - I'd like to say I've learnt my lesson but I'm pretty sure I will end up sending more stuff home!

We end our last night in Vietnam with one last motorbike ride and some street food. Bye bye Vietnam!