Hotel Anh Phuong Ho Chi Minh City

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... has been an invasion of coffee shops. This has turned out to be a good thing as they are air conditioned, make a pretty good strawberry smoothy, give free water, and have free internet. I sit at the one opposite the Rex Hotel, flirt with the staff, and watch the traffic. There are lots more cars this year. It makes crossing the street even more interesting. Cyclos are now pretty much only for tourists and I bet that they'll be ...

... booked a massage.

"The Massage'
After first having a foot massage, we went into the massage rooms. Looking up at the ceiling there was a 'hand rail'. This did not bode well. As feared, at one point, the young lady performing the massage stood on your back steadying herself from the ceiling handrail. A 'torturous' experience. As Carol was in a different room to me, I was offered an 'extra service' that I politely refused!
After the massage we could use the jacuzzi ...

... preferred and you get a better exchange rate. Approx 15,000 Dong equal 1 Aus dollar. We grabbed a snack from the bakery for a late lunch and head off to the Ben Tanh market which is only about a 10min walk. We walked inside the markets and just had to laugh at the aggressiveness of the sellers. They would actually grab you and pull over to their store and say you must buy!!! Some aisles we would have 4 or 5 ...

The early morning bus from Dalat to Ho Chi Minh City brought two tired and irritable customers to their final city in a tour of Vietnam.

Two weeks of incessant motorbike horn honking insanity had taken its toll, and the stress of this enormous, highly developed city easily penetrated our tired bodies and minds.

As a result, we were fairly unadventurous here. We disembarked from our bus ...

This morning I went to the tour agency where I’d booked a day tour to see the Cao Dai Temple and the Cu Chi Tunnels. I waited for a bus but our group was so small we only needed a large cab. I was taking the tour with two Italian girls, an Italian guy and his Thai girlfriend. Our guide said he’d been doing this a long time and this is the smallest group he’s ever seen. Usually there are about twenty people.

We drove for over an hour until we reached the Cao ...

Saigon is a complex and somewhat confusssing city, but at the same time it is utterly fascinating and quite amazing!
HCMC is Vietnam's largest city and is by a distance the most Westernised city I have visited in Asia! There is some serious wealth here and the people all seem to revel in the fact that their city still continues to be the country's economic hub!
Although not as beautiful ...

... hundreds of thousands of motorbikes on the roads all somehow riding in some form of organised chaos....but it makes you ask, where the **** are all these people heading?? The small amount of cars that are on the roads were either taxies or brand new lexus', beamers, audi's and the likes...the first sign of a developing country converging with the westerm world.

- The taxi ride was about 20 mins to were i was staying, in that time i would have seen at ...

... I wondered why we got 2 boarding passes :)
Eventually back on the plane and fly to HCMC. All pretty painless!
*********************************** *************************************** *************************************We get a taxi to the DE THAM district and get him to drop us off where the coach did on our arrival the other day hotel we picked out of the book the LAN AHN - they had a room so was please ab out that ...