End of Thailand-Beginning of Vietnam

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Good eve from Saigon (as it is to the locals),

It'll probably be best to start this one off with the details of the last few days in Thailand which started with a day of dossing around the pool as our transport for a tour didn't turn up followed by the tour itself the next day after re-arrangement. The planned excursion was to an ancient area in Thailand known as Ayuthaya. Ayuthaya was the previous capital of Thailand and was also home to many of the royals over previous generations (although all I could pick up from our 'helpful' guide was that there was a nice king called mambo no.5...or something like that). A heavily Buddhist area, Ayuthaya played home to some of the grandest (yet wonkily constructed) temples and pagodas you're ever likely to see, but I felt at the fourth visit to an area filled with a different named but near identical building the phrase 'when you've seen one, you've seen 'em all' fits perfectly here.

Still, not to be ungrateful it was a very different experience but I am now a bit templed out for Asia I think and may choose like the Buddha himself to recline in bed until some hour that's not 5am waiting for a bus that doesn't come for two days in a row. We were very fortunate on the second day that the security man at our apartment rang the tour company and got them to lay us on a taxi to take us to a rendezvous point in which initially somewhat scarily we were then bundled into a dodgy looking minibus-calm was soon restored when we heard in a German accent the word Ayuthaya.

In all honesty I'm glad the tour was delayed as on the initial morning I was feeling a bit of the Kenny gene stomach which after a dodgy fish stick bought off a stall on the street (it sounds worse in writing than the great idea it was at the time) I, of course was left a little worse for wear by it for the next 12 hours. Still, you learn from these experiences, etc...until the next time I'm hungry that'll be!!!!

In Ayuthaya along with all the architecture there was a friendly atmosphere with some different Germans talking and having a laugh with us, a random Thai family asking me and Tamara for a photograph which was a very new experience I felt a bit famous, and all for just daring to wear check shirts and shorts together!!




That was mainly it for Thailand (bar the odd venture after our excursions down to Khao San Road as that was where the bus dropped us off); and we jetted off to Vietnam in extreme comfort managing to luckily swipe the seats next to the emergency exit so muchos, muchos leg room 😊. Ho Chi Minh City is quite different to how I imagined it -it's much calmer and open than Bangkok was, and everything except the traffic is extremely welcoming and safe feeling. I don't mind the road situation either, when you want to cross you just step out and dodge and weave, scenes reminiscent of Dodgeball and the scene of 'if you can dodge traffic, you can dodge a ball' come to mind.

Our guest house in Ho Chi Minh City is called Ngoc Minh and is located just off a bar and restaurant filled road called De Tham, but it is down a sort of side street alley which initially resulted in a bit of an 'ooh-err' moment but apart from locals cooking on the street and elder folk playing a draughts like game it's remarkably chilled out. Our first day was nothing more than general meandering and a visit to a lovely coffee shop before settling down to watch United get stuffed 😞.

Yesterday however was much more productive and Tamara and I covered nearly all the major tourist things the rough guide suggested....We mooched around Ben Thanh market; visited the Ho Chi Minh City museum (although in my opinion it was barely worth the 75p admission fee but the building it was housed in was spectacular). We also visited the Diamond plaza department store which was en-route after seeing the grand cathedral and Ho Chi Minh's main post office, which from the outside looked more like an amazing french style train station. In the store we decided to take a little trip up to a games arcade floor, the sort that every Hollywood bowl has only better. After deciding the basketball game high score was just out of our reach, we delved into the realms of the uncomfortable for me; a bash on the old dance machine. Anyway to cut a long story short, I don't know which was worse the fact that I then proceeded to wipe the floor with Miss Russell or that there were about 30 Vietnamese people there watching me do it :O.

By far the stand out of Vietnam so far has been the War Remnant's Museum, a poignant collection of stories, photographs, artefactual data and items from the Vietnam war. For someone who wasn't alive when this war was happening and not really studied it in depth at school; it was a real eye opener into the suffering endured and whether the reasoning behind the war justified the extent, a very interesting but harrowing experience.

Today we ventured down towards the Saigon river and took in the remaining sights of the city before and visited a few shops on Dong Khoi road; including a book shop playing Britney Spears (odd enough) followed by Christmas songs!!! John and Yoko's 'War is over' should be saved for December people!!!

To finish I'll just leave you with a little taster of what's ahead..we fly up to Hanoi in the morning followed by a little venture to Ha Long Bay before returning here to do the Cuchi tunnels...so Vietnam is FAR from finished

Hope you are all well back home and enjoying the snow.....it's a chilly 31 degrees Celsius here, a massive drop of four degrees from Thailand.

Much love, James xx

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