Mekong Delta Homestay & Saigon

We left Sianoukville in the morning, and started the long journey to the Vietnamese border. We arrived at lunchtime, and luckily we could just give our passports to our tour leader, Bank, who sorted everything out for us while we had lunch. Another 4 hour journey and we arrived at the town of Can Tho. We would be staying at a homestay, spending the night with a family who owned a farm just outside the town. We arrived at the homestay and once we had chosen our rooms we were taken on a tour of the farm. We were shown around the fields where all the different crops were grown, and at the end of the tour we arrived at a bridge which was regularly used by the locals, but to us looked like a few thin branches stretching over the river! We were given a demonstration of how to cross the bridge, and then told that it was our turn to go over it! We definitely weren't as graceful as the locals but luckily none of us fell in!

When we got back to the farm, we were shown how to make traditional Vietnamese rice pancakes, and then we were served a delicious, and massive meal that the family had cooked for us. After dinner, a boy of about 10, dressed in a Man U shirt, came over and asked us if we wanted to play a Vietnamese version of Monopoly! We all played and the boy (named Hy) was the banker, giving out money and translating the cards into English for us. As Marc said, it was strange playing monopoly in a communist country! Hy said that he came to the farm every other weekend, to stay with his uncle, so that he can practice his English with the Western tourists. He was very cute and his English was really impressive!

The next morning, we were taken to another floating market, however this one was more for the locals, selling wholesale fruits and vegetables. To pass the time on the boat, the tour guide decided it would be a great idea to sing each other songs from each of our home countries! They're obsessed with Kareoke over here!

That evening we arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon), for our last night with our G Adventures tour group. It's a manic city, full of mopeds and scooters that don't pay much attention to road laws! Bank gave us some advice to help us cross the roads: "Don't wait, don't stop, don't run, keep walking!"

We went for some farewell drinks with the group, starting in some big, pretty expensive bars, but then there was a power cut which lasted for about an hour, so eventually we decided to venture out onto the street where there seemed to be more lights, and ended up sitting on plastic chairs on the street, drinking beers which cost 12,000 dong (about 30p)!

We got in at about 4am, and we had booked a tour of the Cu Chi tunnels the next morning, which was where fighters from North Vietnam (called Cu Chi guerrillas) would hide out to escape American bomb attacks. So after about 3 hours sleep we ventured down to get onto the tour bus. Our tour guide said that we could call him Slim Jim, and told us that he had fought on the side of South Vietnam in the Vietnam war. He took us around the jungle showing us traps that the Cu Chi guerrillas would set for American soldiers, and then at the end of the tour, and with us feeling pretty fragile from the night before, we got to go down some of the tunnels that the Cu Chi guerrillas used to use. As you can see, they were pretty cramped, and these ones had been widened to twice their original size to fit Westerners in them!

On our final night in Saigon we went for drinks with a Norwegian couple from our tour group, Simen & Froya, on a rooftop bar with great views of the city, and free shots of banana liquor! The next day we headed to the airport to catch a flight to our next stop in Vietnam - the coastal town of Nha Trang.