Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam

The first thing you notice in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) is the traffic, its the busiest I've seen anywhere. The roads are clogged all day long with thousands of scooters buzzing around the streets like swarms of angry insects. The Vietnamese love to honk their horns at any given opportunity so it is very noisy too. Once our bus got within the city limits it look at least another 2 hours for us to reach the drop off point as it was so busy. Thankfully our hotel was just across the street so we didn't have to venture far with our luggage through the busy streets. Aside from the manic traffic and constant hawkers offering anything from motor bike rentals to drugs we really enjoyed HCMC and stayed there for about 5 nights.

One afternoon we visited the local water park which was a good laugh, it had some slides that I never even knew existed as well as zip lines and other things that health and safety would never pass in the UK! One of the best ones was a really fast straight tube which shot you into a bowl which you span round until you lost momentum and were spat out the hole at the bottom into the pool below!

 The crazy bowl slide on the left

Some of the restaurants we ate at were excellent, in particular one called Zan-Z-Bar which was one of the best meals me and Alba had ever eaten!

We took an excursion to the Cu Chi Tunnels which are a network of underground tunnels that facilitated the Viet Cong during the 1960's during the Vietnam War. From the surface they were undetectable to the American ground troops and they helped save a lot of Vietnamese lives. Some of the traps they made were pretty gruesome with trapdoors leading to pits full of sharpened bamboo spikes- ayaz!

 one of the entrances to the tunnels... tight

naughty!

Our tour guide. Notice he has put his snout in the dummy's hand, what a joker!

One night when we were leaving a restaurant near to our hotel we saw a crowd forming on the street outside. A couple of scooters were on their sides in the middle of the street so we thought there must have been a crash until we saw glass bottles flying through the air and a group of young lads starting going for it trying to glass each other. This lasted for a good few minutes until the Police showed up batons swinging. Never a dull moment in HCMC!