well peoples, I can onky appologise again, for my complete lack of any updates on here for so long! I think I left off at having just arrived in Ho Chi Ming City, so I will carry on from this point!

Basically we arrived in Ho Chi Mign City with the group we were travelling with and arrived at a hotel the tour operator had never been at before. Was a pretty bad hotel. Our room was infested with ants crawling up the walls, in the bathroom, on the beds and all over the floor. We went down to ask the reception peoples to come and sort somthing out for us, but this aparently was at an inconvient time as the football (start of world cup) was on! They grudgingly came up to look at the ants in the room after we made it clear we werent moving from reception. Upon inspection they sent the barman (who was also watching football) up to spray the room with insect repellent. The room was sufficently gassed out with insect repellent, but the ants kept commign back with a vengence from somewhere at the bottom of the wall. The reception guy insisted that there were no other rooms which we could be moved to, and sent the bar guy (who by this point was grumpy at missing so much of the football!) up again for another gassing in the chamber. We couldnt go into the room with all that repellent spray, so it took for the group leader to say that one of us would die, due to asthma, if we were to stay the night in the room, to move us to another room that (miraculously!) was free.

Anyway, more about the country itself. Vietnam was similar to Cambodia in many ways, in that the people look and act similar, the food is not so far off being the same, but has more of a chinese influence, as does the art and architechture of the city. The roads in Vietnam are crazy. I have never seen so many motorbikes/mopeds on one set of roads in my little life. You take your life in your own hands when crossing the road, and thats at dedicated pedestrian crossings with lights and zebra crossings. You have to keepo your wits about you, even when on the pavements, as they will also ride on motorbike on the pavement during rush hour!

The following day after arriving in Ho Chi Ming city, we went for a day trip with a local guide to Cu Chi tunnels, which are the tunnels used by the Vietnamese army during the 70's. The guide who took us was an ex-vietnamese army member and fought in the war against the north of Vietnam. Basically there was a war between the south and the north of vietnam, in which the amercian army got involved and sent troops to asist the southern army troops. The army lived in these tunnels under ground for most of the duration of the war, living off basic foods, similar to green tea and potato like things (cant remeber the name, but it tasted like sweet potato or butternut squash). The tunnels were tiny. the also showed us how they used to make shoes out of rubber, recycling the tyres of their veihcles they used during the war. Was interesting. All of the tunnels have been preserved about an hour outside of Ho Chi Ming City, in the middle of the woods.

That evening we got ourselves out of the rubbish hotel and stayed around the corner of the road in a much nicer hotel for the same price! The following day we spent being total tourists, going to see the post office/ notredame cathedral. The post office is not your average tourist site, but this one is very grand and many people go just to see the main hall, which is massive with huge ceilings and the outer architechture is very grand and all lit up at night. Also visited the zoo the next day, which was cool. There you can feed the elephants carrot sticks over the fences, as they stretch their trunks as far as they can to reach the carrot. After eating a carrot, they say thank you by bowing their heads. How natural this is to their normal behaviour is debateable, but on the whole I didnt think they were too badly kept.Also saw lions and tigers, that had live rabbits in their cages for their dinner that night. The rabbits didnt seem that worried as they hopped around the cage, but we never got to see the tigers/lions kill or eat them. They too didnt seem to bothered that they were there.

The following day was Charlottes birthday. In the morning, Charlotte and I went out to a water park, and had a lot of fun riding the slides and flumes. They had a great slide at the beginning called the twister, which was a normal slide at the top of the ride, but at the bottom turned into a big bowl that had a hole in the middle of it and wsas hanging over a swimmign pool. when you slid into the bowl from the normal part of the slide, it became like your were being flushed down the toilet until you plopped into the swimming pool! Made a total embarassment of myself on the zipwire, as fell off the mintue I went off the platform as the handles were so slippery! According to Charlotte the lifeguard looked worried and peered over into the water to check he didnt have to go in after me, as was quite a height I fell from and I had back flopped it! Hurt at the time, but funny now!

Charlotte and I later went to visit the tailors not far from where we were staying to get some clothes such as kiminos made and other things altered. It is so cheap in vietnam to go. aparently the place to really get it down in Vietnam is in Hoi An, but seeing as we werent going to be visiting near there, we figured we could get it in the city. There are some naff shops for tailoring, but some others are good and very cheap. later we went to the cinema to see the prince of Persia, at a very posh complex. However, being very posh, was not impressed of the toilets being 5 floors down from the cinema! Film was good and we walked back to our hotel. Unfortunately on our way back, Charlotte got her bag stolen by two guys on a motorbike riding on the pavement. Not a great end to Charlottes birthday. We then spent the next couple of hours in the police station. The Police were very slow and very unhelpful. They even made one of us drive back with them to the place where the stealing occured to look for evidence and go through the events....what evidence, the robbers took it?! Of course that little road excursion was fruitless and then on to the paperwork, which was also long and a waste of time! They dont have a reference number system, for claims on insurance (Assuming this is because they dont have insurance in Vietnam!) for Charlotte as she lost her camera. we had to ask the police to give us photocopies of all the paper work they filled out on the incident. Fortunately the recpetionist was very helpful to us and translated everything into English for us.

On the 20th we flew from Ho Chi Ming City to Hong Kong, much to Charlotte's delight, who has some understandable hatred for Vietnam, where we spent a couple of nights. The first night we spent in a hostel in ChungKing Mansions, on one of the main street of Hong Kong. Was a very different hostel experience. The smallest hostel room possible. Everything in Hong Kong is very compact, so in order to shower in the wetroom/bathroom you need to be very organised about what you take in/leave out of the bathroom and move everthing else out of the way! This want helped by the fact that somehow the sink became b,ocked that eve, so we couldnt drain any of the water!The hostel was also located on one floor of the B block of a massive high rise block, completely surrounded by asians/Indians. When we arrived there we felt like we had been trasnoported back to India, for the number of Indians in the block and the oposite block of the road, far outnumbered any other race of people, and we were being haggled at for 'fake rolex's' left right and centre! It was funny they dint even try to conceal the fact that everything they are selling is fake....they tell you that when they offer the goods! The ground floor of the block we stayed in could have been the indian markets of Delhi transported to Hong Kong and the state of the lifts we had to go up in...nearly as bad as the lifts on esates. On the ground floor at the lifts there were cctvs, showing the camera footage of the people in the lifts as they went up. We saw plenty of footage of Indian men with bellies, pulling up their tops, putting hands down their trousers, spitting and nose picking, as you do in the lift! Did not came as sucha shock to us though, as most of Asia has these traits! well this is where I leave off for now. I will be back for another update soon. I am currently in Sydney in Australia, so aim to fully update you with my adventures of China very soon and then some of australia.

I do actually have a good reason for my lack of updates! Aside from my lazyness, China has very strict rules about use of internet, so along with no facebook access at all, in most places in China we were not allowed on the internet being foriegners. will update again soon!