Good Morning Vietnam

Sorry... I couldn't resist the title. It was too cheesy not to. We've been in Vietnam for 5 days now and are still travelling with Ben, which is great. We seem to be watching lots of football, now, though....

We started off in Ho Chi Minh City (most people seem to still call it Saigon!). It is a really big bustling city and we got a hotel room with actual hot water and air conditioning - It was wonderful! We had heard that there was a really great waterpark there, so on our first day decided to head there after a cultural morning seeing some pagodas. The pagodas were very beautiful, with lots of dragons and incence. Unfortunately, the water park didn't exist. Even worse, the taxi driver didn't realise this until we got to the site where it was (before it was demolished!) and charged us for driving us there and back! That evening, we managed to cheer ourselves up with our discovery of bia hoi. It is a locally brewed beer and costs 4,500 dong per litre - about 15p!! It also actually tastes really nice!

We headed out for some serious sightseeing on our second day. We saw the cities major sights, including the Re-Unification Palace and the War Remnants museum. The Re-Unification Palace is the one that the Northern Vietnam communists smashed down the gates of with a tank at the end of the war. The museum was really interesting, but sad and awful too. It didn't really cast the US army as particularly good or decent.

We headed up to Dalat yesterday. It is really high in the hills and is much cooler than it is in Saigon. Both Paul and I are currently wearing trousers and long sleeve tops. The French colonnials really liked it up here, because it reminded them of the Alps and you can really see why! There are big lakes and pine forests and many of the buildings look like ski chalets. We thought we were in Europe until we ordered white coffees and they came ridiculously strong and with condensed milk (we had added more sugar before we realised, too - yuk!).

We met up with a Swiss girl called Nora and have spent most of our time here so far with her and Ben. Ben supports Middlesborough, so we managed to find a bar with the 'Borough - Cardiff game last night... We tried to cheer him up this morning by climbing a mountiain. Not sure how effective it was, but the views were great. Not so peaceful, though as there were a big group of Vietnamese Christians chanting at the top! Tomorrow we're off to find a waterfall with a mini-rollercoaster and a cable car. Then it's back to the beach...