Today we Arrived in My Tho (south of HoChiMinh). we had read about a .... And an orphanage in our travel guide so wanted to explore the city to see if we could find either of these read about destinations. We hired a motorbike and drove to the destination on the map (around 2 kms from where we were staying).

The Buddhist temple we stumbled across was like nothing i'd seen - hundreds of bonsais around the gardens of the temple with two huge white statues standing 50 meters tall. We saw a sign saying those wearing shorts were not permitted to enter the temple, so, satisfied with jus seeing the gardens, statues and temple, we turned away. Just at this time, a local man approached us and motioned we could enter, saying 'it is ok, it's about here' (motioning to his heart).

While exploring the inside of the temple we were fortunate enough to sit down and speak with a Buddhist monk, who was very friendly and spoke to us about Buddhism and the relating.

Accommodation: most uncomfortable so far. Bed= stone/ pillows= rocks. Cold shower (but was fairly refreshing), sink pipe ran to open floor and then drained. Paper thin walls (room next door had tv on until late). Anyway, survived the night and welcomed the next day (destination Vinhlong homestay).

Getting to Vinh Long was interesting. We negotiated a lower price than asked to the my tho bus stop to find out, mid ride, that we needed to catch a bus from the highway. Anna and I ended up ended up being split up while my driver phoned a Vietnamese guy, who knew English, that I could speak to about the situation. I had no idea what or where we had to go so just agreed and hoped Anna's driver would take her there too. When I arrived the guy who I had been speaking to on the phone was there, sitting back in a chair surrounded by 4 other Vietnamese guys. Anna was no where in sight and these guys were all laughs and smiles. . I grabbed my phone, found a picture of Anna, showed it to my English speaking... Advisor... And asked, where is this girl? He merrily replied, she'll be here soon. All I could do was hope that these were not similar to those guys you see on 60 minutes who seem to like to kidnap tourists. 10 minutes latter Anna shows up, happy as Larry (my faith in the Vietnamese is strengthened).

We jumped on a small, choc to the brim bus, destined for Vinh Long (where we would go to our homestay). Several pickups, one lunch stop, one bus change, some wonderful conversing with a viet girl who knew no English but tolerated our attempts at Vietnamese, a motor bike ride, a ferry trip, another motor bike ride, a stop for petrol and a semi heated discussion about how much we owed for the rid, and we arrived at our homestay.

It was unbelievably quite here, very different to any other part we'd visited. The guesthouse we stayed at had a bonsai garden so checked that out and the went for a ride on a couple of bikes try had available. When we road through the roads dozens of kids along the paths called hello, laughing and laughing, thinking it was as funny as anything.

The family at the homestay cooked us our best meal by far since being here. It included noodles with vegetables, rice, battered eggplant, tofu, spring rolls and sweets for afterwards. It was frickin amazing.

The next day we went on a tour by boat to the floating markets and a rice (rice papper, popped rice, flavored clumped rice (LCM style), rice wine (banana, snake, pineapple)) factory - by factory I mean simple and well put together... It was great to see how the products we'd been seeing on the streets were produced. Met some good people from the US and AUS.

So that's pretty much at the homestay. Oh, the family had a massive python caged in their driveway that was gotten out for people on tours throughout the day. But, that's about it. Xing chao