Nice sleep in this morning. Boy, did I need it! I had an iced coffee for breakfast this time - it's what the locals drink & it's like a shot of amphetamine. The hot coffee is revolting because they use sickly sweet treacly condensed milk in it, but I've discovered the proper way to drink it here now. A glass filled up with crushed ice and a tar-like substance poured over it. As the ice melts it slowly turns into an invigorating ice cold sweet & bitter coffee. Like Coca Cola for real men.

Thus motivated, we strode out into the street at the crack of 11am, and hired a taxi to take us way out into the outer city to see the Giac Lam Pagoda. This cost us a whopping 2 million Vietnamese Dong. I have to keep reminding myself that that is only about £7, and then I'm getting so used to the cheapness of this country that I also have to remind myself I paid nearly that for a taxi just to get to Harrogate station on Wednesday, because it felt like a huge amount of money. We came back on the bus from that part of the city for only 10 thousand Dong (nothing at all).

The pagoda was a fascinating place. A Buddhist monastery as well, it dates back to the 18th century. The inside was full of wood carvings, shrines, gods, bells. Barely any other tourists there at the time, but the monks & worshippers don't mind you wandering all over the place taking pictures. It had nice gardens too with old trees, a huge white Buddha, statues and tombs, and a pond with kitschy little tableaux of model Buddhas and gods on little islands.

We then bravely brushed off the advances of all the motorcycle taxi men and did the crazy tourist thing of walking nearly 2 miles in the midday heat along an outrageously busy thoroughfare to Cholon, the Chinese district. We're still new enough here to be fascinated by all the scooters and the life of the city, luckily. In Cholon we visited 3 Chinese pagodas, a bit different, all similar looking but each unique in it's own way. Dense clouds of incense smoke, plus each one has a blazing brazier in the centre of it where they burn offerings (mostly bits of paper). Some fantastic carvings along the eaves of the roofs of gods and demons and what-have-you.

We found a cafe that did a decent stir-fried leaves with rice for lunch, looked at a row of dried herb shops, and then felt very pleased with ourselves on locating a local bus that took us back to within a couple of blocks of our hotel. We're getting to feel like natives (not).

We've come back to the Zen vegetarian restaurant for dinner, where we ate the first night. It looks a little bit shabby, but the food is first rate.