Yo yo yo!

Hope you're all enjoying your Monday lunchtime at work or for the retired amongst you, sunning it in the garden. We are in Nha Trang and when we last posted we were leaving Phnom Penh for Kampot. Kampot was up their with the best places that we've been to. Originally it was just going to be a 1/2 night trip because our Vietnam visa hadn't started yet and we had time to kill. We arrived and managed to get a place at a small riverside guesthouse called Samon's Village. It was incredible the bar and restaurant were set on the river and our $8 a night room was a bungalow made from reclaimed wood (Ellie was delighted) and all natural materials. It was cool we were basically in the jungle with a mosquito net minimal electricity and cold water showers.

Kampot itself was so quiet there were hardly any tourists around and it was so different to the big cities where most of the stuff we've been seeing is either near or in. We had a little look around kampot on our first day and rented some kayaks for the afternoon it was good but kayaking in a river with what seemed liked no current wasn't easy. When you stopped paddling the boat also stopped. It was good but the sun was hooooot and we managed to get our first proper sun burn. We spent the second day on a tour of Bokor national park which was so bad it was funny. We were shown around palaces and casinos that were built by the French before the Khmer Rouge forced them to flee. Unfortunately I've seen more character in the garden shed than these buildings which for tourism purposes had re concreted to make them safe and were badly overgrown. The day ended with a river cruise and one of the best sunsets we've ever seen.

We left kampot heading back to the capital to go to vietnam. In true south East Asian style the bus stopped 347826483 times to pick other people up and drop people off and we missed our connecting bus to Vietnam. We were slightly annoyed for about 5 seconds before we found out they'd cancelled our connecting bus anyway due to a lack of passengers and instead scheduled it for 3 hours later. Fun fun fun.

We finally left heading for Ho Chi Minh (Saigon) and the bus we'd waited for turned out to be incredible with free wifi and armchair style seats so not too bad, every cloud. The only downside was that we arrived in HCM at 9pm in the pouring rain and decided that the walk to the hostel couldn't have been that far. We were wrong! It was 15 minutes later and a bag of wet belongings we found our hotel. We went to the room, which had no windows, to find a gecko on the wall a broken lock on the door and a smell of stale smoke. We upped and left and found a hostel nearby which was okay. We didn't want to spend too long in HCM so booked a bus for the following night to Nha Trang.

Our only full day in HCM was spent visiting the war remnants museum which was a good insight to the Vietnam war and Ellie lost her head a few times and has a strong dislike for the Americans now! We took an afternoon tour to the Cu Chi tunnels which were cool, if you don't know what they are google it I think you'll be impressed. We left HCM last night and arrived in Nha Trang this morning checked in to a hotel and hit the beach. It was so nice to see some golden sand, clear water and somewhere to just relax. It's been just over 3 weeks since we've been away and it's been so hectic since we've left it's nice to just do nothing sometimes! We're here for 3 days before heading to Hoi An, Hue, Halong Bay and Hanoi. We'll be in Vietnam for another couple of weeks so we'll post soon.

Safe!