Goooooooood Morning Vietnam!

After a quick swine flu check at the Vietnamese border and having to unload all our bags from the bus for screening only to find that the xray machine was broken, we were on our way to Saigon.

Saigon is a bustling city with crazy traffic, crazy electrical wires and people not nearly as crazy as we were lead to believe. We had been expecting to be ripped off by just about everyone in Vietnam as so many people had warned us would be the case but everyone seemed very friendly, much friendlier than in Cambodia in fact. There was much less hassle in the street from street vendors trying to sell everything from photocopied Lonely Planets to gigantic lighters - don’t get me wrong they were there, they were just much easier to get away from.

Our hotel was down a maze of alleyways which was both really cool and almost impossible to find again. We booked ourselves a hop on hop off bus ticket to Hanoi for the bargain price of $35 - a sleeping bus which had been recommended by a few people.

While we were having breakfast in the cafe across the road from the hotel when an old guy came in with a magazine article about himself and his tours of the city by cyclo. We were sold pretty easily, he was so friendly and the price was cheap and we were leaving that night so a city tour seemed pretty perfect.

We were taken to the art gallery, the War Museum, along some pretty streets filled with antique stores, to a bonsai garden, Notre Dame and to the old post office with commentary all the way. Joel took over cycling for a bit while his guy recovered!

Nightbus that night to Nha Treng, our first and unfortunately not our last experience of Vietnamese driving!

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