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We did a bit of a whistlestop tour through Vietnam covering from from Saigon to Hanoi in just 2 weeks.  We travelled by sleeping bus through the nights to maximise the amount of time we could have sightseeing.  The sleeping bus is essentially a bus with 3 lines of bunk beds, one at each window and one down the middle.  The bunks are fairly cosy and were just big enough for me to fit in but we discovered that the back row of the bus, which is 5 bunks side-by-side, gives you a bit more room so we managed to book onto them for each journey after the first.

We spent most of our time in Saigon learning about the Vietnam War – or the “American War” as it is called in Vietnam – and some of Vietnamese history.  We visited the Reunification Palace one afternoon which has been preserved in exactly how it looked in April 1975 when the north and south we re-unified.  We took a trip out to the Cu Chi tunnels which are a series of underground tunnels which the Vietnamese used during the war.  The tunnels are around 100km long linking various towns and villages in the Cu Chi area.  The Vietnamese used them to spring surprise attacks on the Americans and to enable them to get right into the middle of the American camps un-noticed.  They have widened a 100m section of the tunnels for visitors to experience what it was like.  The tunnels were very claustrophobic and hot and I almost did not make it to the first 20m exit point but once we got there I decided to soldier on.  There were parts where we had to drop ourselves down holes and then lift ourselves up again.  At one point we could only slide along on our bums!