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After a very long seven hour bus journey this morning (which I slept for most of) we arrived in Ho Chi Minh City.
One thing I have noticed in both Cambodie and Vietnam is that you can't seem to walk down a footpath without having to go on the road. So basically it's not a footpath at all because everyone and everything is out on the footpath or it has just turned into mud and is impossible to walk on.
My initial impressions of Ho Chi Minh was Chaos; scooters everywhere and the traffic doesn't stop for you at all when you try to cross the road. You basically have to just walk out into the traffic and let the vehicles just weave around you.
We dashed to the war museum before it closed to see the remnants of the war, plus a graphic display of the bias vietnamese view of the war. I was good to see this to educate me, but was also hard going and very tough to take in emotionally.
Tonight we did a quick city tour to see the opera house, the old US Embassy, the famous re-unification palace, the post office?? and the catherdral (Notre Dame) which was also very french visually.
We had street food for dinner in the central market, which was lovely and I tried catfish which was ok...ish!! Dinner was followed by a few drinks in a Vietnamese Kareoke bar where the singers were all wearing Cowboy/girl outfits (very random), then for more drinks in the cheesy backpacker area...
There was a terrifying storm during the night and we woke up to more torrential rain. We still managed to do our day trip to the Cu-Chi tunnels this morning though.
These tunnels were built during the war by the Vietnamese communist soldiers. They consist of a 200km web of tunnels with rest stops in between. We walked for 50m though the tunnels and found it extremely claustrophobic and cannot believe people used to actually go down here.
This afternoon was pretty chilled, had a lunch of traditional Pho noodle soup then a quick whizz around the fake goods market.
We all gathered in one hotel room to get ourselves rady to hop on the 1st of three night trains.
I was pleasantly suprised by the trains, it was actually quite cosy. I was in a lockable room with 3 others lovely girls from my tour group. We all eat our little packed lunches for dinner along with wine and talked ourselves to sleep. The train was extremely rocky and loud during the night, but I somehow go a bit of sleep.
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