Vietnam

How's it going Bloggers -

Typically for us we had a pretty eventual journey from Cambodia over to Vietnam. We decided that in order to save both time and money we would use a less known border crossing so we didn't have to travel back up Cambodia from Sihanoukville to Phnom Penh.

Our guesthouse organised a taxi (there isn't a bus - honest) for us to the Vietnamese border for $40, we get stamped out of Cambodia and stamped into Vietnam - what can possibly go wrong..? It's a 4 hour journey and and first 2 hours went without a hitch, we did have to change taxi's but we had our ticket saying we had paid so we thought mothing of it. So after about 2 hours the driver pulls over in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere to get some petrol and this Cambodian guy who spoke really good English gets in the passenger seat says we owe the driver $20 for the petrol. So we are like, "no we dont we have paid our $40 to the border we don't owe him anything" plus we only had $20 left to pay for somewhere to crash that night and get something to eat. We ended up having this arguement for about 25 mins via this Cambodian guy who was translating between us and the driver but he was insisting that he wouldn't take us any further until we paid him.

By this time we had attracted pretty much the entire village to the "show-down" most of whom I dont think had seen a westerner before. We figured if we stayed in the taxi we were fine - that was until the driver went to the boot and chucked our rucksacks down the road.

Whilst we got out and recover our worldly possessions, he span the taxi round and started to drive off. We were getting pretty worried by this point as we really were in the middle of no where and this guy was really going to just leave us in the baking mid-day heat with hardly any money and no means of getting anymore. In the end we negoicated him down to $15 for his petrol and he drove us to the border. This left us with just $5 to get into Vietnam and get somewhere to stop the night. We were pretty worried as we have always been fleeced for money at our previous border crossings so it gave us no bargaining power at all.

At the border we met another English couple and a Canadian couple who were in exactly the same position as us financially, we had $20 between the 6 of us. We decided to all stick together, safety in numbers and all that. As it turns out we got through without a hitch and managed to find a guesthouse in Chau Doc who gave us a cash advance until we could get to an ATM in the morning - happy days.

The following day we all got the bus to Ho Chi Minh City. We have been in HCMC for the past 5 days and its absolutely brilliant! It's probably my faverite place so far. It's like a smaller, less smelly, alot less seedy version of Bangkok - really buzzing place. There are loads of great places to eat (the food is top notch) and excellent bars for a few beers in the evening. It has nothing to do with the fact that a beer is cheaper than a bottle of water! (Don't worry Mum, I'm still doing my 2L of water per day)

We have been pretty cultured too (it's not all about the 40p beers you know) we have done the War Remnants Museum, the Reunifaction Palace, the Fine Arts Museum and the Cu Chi Tunnels which is a series of undeground tunnels the people of Cu Chi built in order to survive the Americans attack. You can actually go down into part of the tunnels which has been restored for tourists - it was absolutley tiny but very cool to think it was all man made and they lived down there.

Yesterday we accidently went to a theme park, we though it was just a regular park, it wasn't quite on the same scale as Alton Towers but fun all the same. I discovered I was really good at rock climbing - who'd of thought..!

Tomorrow we start to head north up Vietman, the plan to arrive in Hanoi the capital in about a 2-3 weeks time. We have booked a bus ticket with has 5 stops we can hop on and off as we please and see as much of Vietnam as possible before our Visa's run out. We are going to contine travelling with our mates we made at the border as we're all having a great laugh together.

Something very bizarre has also happened to me, I have suddenly got really into footie (got there in the end hey) was jumping all over the place last night watching the boys - almost split my beer!

Next stop - Dalat.