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Ho Chi Minh
After arriving in Ho Chi Minh we checked into our guest house only to be told that they were over booked. Thankfully the owner took us to her Aunties guest house just down the road so that we could stay there for the night. When we arrived she was so nice, and gave us some iced tea, a banana and some sweets. After putting our bags in our room we went for a walk and like everywhere that we have been recently it was so busy, I have never seen so many motorbikes in my life! At the traffic lights there were literally hundreds lined up, it must be the way that everyone travels around the city especially since Vietnam doesn't have tuk tuks.
It was easy to realise from walking around that Vietnam is very different to Cambodia. As it's a much richer country Ho Chi Minh was what you expected from a large city, there were sky scrapers and lots of nice shops and restaurants, and there was no one begging which made walking around the streets a better experience. A lot of people walking around the city wearing conical hats too, which looked so good! Very Vietnamese! Ill have to purchase myself one of these.
The next day we moved into the original guest house that we booked, and they gave us our free breakfast which was bacon and egg on toast!! It was lovely! We then took a day trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels which was quite a long bus ride out of Ho Chi Minh. When we arrived the tour guide showed us around and it really was so interesting to see the lengths that the vietnamese soldiers took to kill the amercian soliders. We were shown the traps that they set and some of the looked like they belonged in the Saw films - I would not like to fight against the vietnamese! We then went to the firing range where we could pay to fire a gun. There was a few choices, an M16 an AK47 and a machine gun. The sound of the machine gun was so loud so we decided against that one, and went for the M16 which we were told was the girly gun - there was nothing girly about it!! We got to shoot five bullets each (yes real bullets) I had to stand on my tip toes so that I could see the target but once I had shot one bullet it was really fun, I felt really cool. After shooting the guns we made our way to one of the tunnels and got to walk through it and it really was tiny, we were told that sometimes the soldiers could spend weeks in the tunnels, I don't know how they coped.
After finishing the tour we went to the night market in the evening. Now getting to the market was stressful as the roads were so busy we thought there was no way we could get across them. We soon began to realise that you had to just walk out in the road of traffic and hope that the bikes swerve around you, which actually worked! Another way of crossing the road was to wait for a local to cross and just stay and close to them as possible. We will be masters of it by the time we leave vietnam.
The market was really good, they had everything you could think of and something that we hadn't seen for a while - Shoes!! They had the most gorgeous shoes, some that you would even expect to see in Topshop and they were only £7! I had to restrain myself from buying some because it was just another thing that I would have to carry and I resent my back pack so much already. After the market we went and had a meal on one of the street restaurants, Jane had noodles and I had chicken sweet corn soup which was just as good as the chippy's :)
We were due to leave Ho Chi Minh the next day to travel to Nha Trang, it will be nice to be by the beach again!
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