We reached Saigon (Ho Chi Minh) late on Sunday, Oct 20th. We heard about a great hotel in the heart of the city and decided to check it out. The hotel was great, as were many others that we would experience in Vietnam. As we would find out, Vietnam had the best value and nicest accommodations of the 4 South-East Asian countries that we had visited. After checking in, we enjoyed an evening of dinner and story telling with some of the people from our Mekong Delta trip. The next morning we went to the bank to take out some of the local currency, the dong. After some consideration we decided to go crazy and take out $2,000,000 dong! While it was thrilling to be instant millionaires and see the huge stack of bills coming out of the machine, we knew it was a short lived thrill. 2 Million dong is only $200 Cdn, which would disappear quickly. Nevertheless it gave us a chance to feel like big shots and spend "hundreds of thousands" without batting an eye. Afterwards we booked a hop on/ hop off bus that allowed us to stop at 3 cities along the way up to Hanoi. We had been told so many great stories about Northern Vietnam, especially Hanoi and Halong Bay that we decided we would make our way up north. We spent the rest of the day shopping and dealing with plane ticket changes at the Malaysian Airlines office.

As we were returning to our hotel in the afternoon, we bumped into 2 people that we had met on the ride from hell to Angkor Wat. It turned out that they were with a group of people from our Angkor Wat trip and were doing the same bus ride trip up to Hanoi. We joined the whole group later on for an evening of dinner and drinks.

The next day, we went to see the Cu Chi Tunnels, which were some of the secret tunnels that were used by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam war. The magnitude and sophistication of the tunnels was extremely impressive. The tunnels covered over 250km of land throughout the country and were built with many entrances, booby traps and 3 levels of rooms. We were given the chance to crawl down one of the tunnel entrances, which was difficult to enter, even for people our size. Afterwards we went to see the War Remnants museum, which described the Vietnam War from the Vietnamese side. The museum was slightly anti-American, although we were told it had been toned down considerably since tourism had picked up (it used to be called the American War Crimes museum). It was eye opening and we could not help but feel bad for the millions of Vietnamese people that had died and suffered from the war. We ended the day with a little more shopping, a return trip to Malaysian airlines and a quick dinner. We then boarded the night bus which would take us out of Saigon and up to the beach city of Nha Trang 11 hours later.