Good Morning Vietnam

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The overnight trip from Sihanoukville over into Vietnam was maybe not the smoothest what with yet another extremely bumpy tuk tuk ride, 2 bus changes, passport and immigration control but we eventually made it to Saigon early Monday morning.

We checked into a lovely little hotel which included breakfast, dinner and as much tea, coffee, juice or fruit as you could possibly want before going out to see the city. We ambled around a bit, weaving our way through the rather incredible scooter traffic and noticed something which made us feel like road experts - locals now use us as "shields" or leaders when crossing the road and not the other way round!

Walking around also means ignoring the scooters that follow you onto the pavement and drive alongside you to try to offer you a ride as well as avoiding those who come screaming round the corner - on the pavement - to avoid the red lights!

The covered market and malls were an opportunity for a spot of shopping but we both ended up in hysterics when the whole market seemed to close in on us with people physically grabbing at us and yelling "you buy miss" "cheap for you miss" " have look miss"!

The following day, we were up early for a trip to the famous Cu Chi tunnels used in the Vietnam War. Really interesting and we both learnt a lot but also absolutely horrendous - unfortunately neither of us quite had the guts to crawl under ground for 100m in a ridiculously narrow, dark, low-ceilinged and hot tunnel! We did however learn that JK has got the art of Asian squatting down to a tee - something which supposedly isn't genetically possible!

On our final day, we went on a bit of a walking tour up to Saigon Square with its designer boutiques, past the City Hall, up to Notre-Dame and the Reunification Palace. We also visited the War Remnants Museum which had a lot of old tanks, planes, bombs - you name it - as well as an impressive collection of poignant photographs.

If you thought you'd got away without any mention of food, then you were wrong! We have tried the national dish of pho which is a kind of noodle soup usually with meat, spring rolls and some yummy pork and onion dumplings which we think are called bhan bao!

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