After a busy day and night of diving and watching turtles we arrived back at our bungalow around 11am, ready for a thorough shower and a much needed sleep. However, we were determined to soldier on and not waste the day with such luxuries and so borrowed a couple of push bikes from Larry and headed out to explore the island. I felt comfortable with Emma in charge of navigating. If we made any wrong turns I had promised to be in touch with her new school immediately and tell them about the map reading skills of their new geography teacher. Luckily I never had to back up this threat. We first headed to the cemetary. The cemetary on Con Dao is regarded as one of the most important in the country. The island has been used as a prison throughout the centuries and has had a lot of political prisoners as inmates. The Con Dao prisons were places of torture. 20,000 people were killed in the prisons here, 1994 are buried at the cemetary and only 700 of the graves have names.

We then headed across town to the lakes. There are two lakes, each filled with lily pads and lotus blossoms. Some of the locals were fishing in them whilst others were swimming in them and collecting the lotus flowers. On our way back, we looked at some of the prison buildings that were used for the horrible acts of torture. It offered a stark contrast between the natural beauty of the islands and the atrocities that man brought to them.

After dropping the bikes off we headed into town to try and find somewhere to eat, determined to find somewhere better than the restaurant we visited before, which still haunted my nostrils. We found a lovely place and also saw one of the guys from our dive boat; Geoff. We had a nice evening enjoying local dishes, local beers and learning more about the Vietnamese pshyche from Geoff (He'd been living in Hanoi for 8 years). By the end of the evening, we were both running on fumes and we amazingly made it back to the bungalow without falling asleep on the street.