Nothing could prepare me for the pain of waking myself up at 3am on a Vietnamese sleeper train, scrabbling around in the dark for my belonging and clambering off the train into a dark Ho Chi Minh station. Worse still, we arrived early, so it was an anxious rush to get everything together before getting off the train. Bleery-eyed and confused we piled into taxis to the hotel that my tour had booked. We arrived to find the rooms were not ready yet. Sam and I had a back-up plan, though. We’d booked a hostel. So we got a taxi over to the hostel (which was in the backpacker part of town), only to find the place closed and shuttered up. We’d told them we’d be arriving around this time. Desperately we banged on the metal shutter. We waited. Thankfully, a sleepy-looking receptionist appeared and let us in. Our room wouldn’t be ready until 10am, though, so we could have a different room until then. Fine. We got into our small room, with a broken air conditioning unit and partially functional bathroom door, and immediately fell asleep.

Later that day we dragged ourselves out of bed and down to a restaurant just down the street where we refuelled on a delicious full English breakfast. Then we headed out on our first mission – trying to track down a post office to send some of our (now overflowing) collection of souvenirs home. We got directions to the central post office from our hostel and decided we could walk there from the hostel, which, as it turns out, we could quite easily. It took a bit of finding, though. First we wandered into the center of town and passed a shockingly western complement of high street stores. Following the map we found ourselves on a quieter road just a block or two away from the busy high street, and eventually located a rather unassuming building which we determined must the be post office. It was the weekend though, and the post office was most definitely closed.

So we carried on to our next stop, just around the corner – Reunification Palace (also known as Independence Palace). This palace was home to the President of South Vietnam during the war, and the location where the war finally ended when a tank from the North Vietnam army crashed through its gates. Now many of the rooms are open to the public and there are many displays and exhibitions about the war. It was quite interesting, although clearly Sam had a greater appetite for it than I did and in the end I feel perhaps I dragged him out of there a bit. I was getting hungry, though, and no matter how hard I try I really struggle to engage with a museum, however fascinating, for more than 2 hours. So, we deliberated over what to do for lunch and eventually decided that we would try and locate an area only a few blocks (or so we thought!) northeast of us where our guide book showed a number of places to eat.

I’m not really sure what the guide book was going on about. We walked for ages to try and find this mythical street, and eventually found what we thought was the right place, but it was full of bars and clubs which were not open yet. Perhaps we never really found the right place at all. Despite that, we were really hungry by now so we found the one place that looked both open and vaguely appetising, and got a table outside. From then on it was a total failure. Our order was followed by the classic Vietnamese trick of keeping us waiting for about 20 minutes before telling us that the food we’d ordered (a burger) wasn’t available. We deliberated over getting something else but nothing was grabbing us and a lot of things were off the menu. Eventually we gave up and decided to just finish our beers and leave.

We were really hungry by now though, and we wandered about hoping to find a little street cart that might sell us a sandwich or something, but we couldn’t find one that looked nice. In the end we concluded we were close enough to the hostel that we may as well just head back there, knowing that there were plenty of bars and restaurants nearby. After dinner we had a few cocktails at a backpacker bar just a few buildings down from our hostel. We even treated ourselves to some delicious apple Shisha. It was Friday night and the streets were packed with slightly drunk tourists and locals, the bars competing with each other with increasingly loud music and enthusiastic bar staff planted in the streets to draw you in. We battled our wills to stay out and enjoy ourselves despite the early-morning tour we’d booked for the following day.

Our Cu Chi Tunnels trip began with a very early morning. We had been told by our hostel receptionist who booked the tour that we would be picked up from the hostel at 8am. This translated into a man strolling up at 8:15 and walking us round the corner to the tour operators office where a huge crowd of confused-looking tourists were gathered round a number of coaches. We were told to wait. We waited. Then we noticed that one couple in the crowd was in fact our friendly fellow-tourists from Hong Kong! So we chatted to them and discovered they were taking the same day tour as us, and before we knew it, we were being ushered onto a coach bound for the Cu Chi Tunnels. The bus journey was long and hot, but thankfully the seats were quite comfy. Sam and I had a little giggle when we noticed that almost every word in Vietnamese appears to be 3 or 4 letters long. It’s quite a beautiful, if bemusing language, but this makes for some very odd-looking sentence structures! Around 10am we arrived at the historic site and queued to buy tickets to get in.

It was only when we got off the bus, back into the scorching Vietnamese sun, that I realised that my ‘friend’ from Hoi An was here – the offensive Israeli man with whom I’d had a rather heated disagreement a week or so earlier. The rest of the tour was spent trying to avoid eye-contact with him and wondering whether he’d noticed I was there.

We spent a few hours at the Cu Chi tunnels as we were shown around by our guide. He showed us some of the remarkable and rather gruesome traps used by the Viet Cong, and we were given the chance to explore some of the tunnels. The tunnels have been widened since their original use in the Vietnam war, but they were still rather tight. They also had a shooting range, and Sam couldn’t resist having a go with an M15. The sun was beating down and it was absolutely sweltering, but we had a nice time chatting to our friends from Hong Kong and learning about the amazing strategies that helped make the Viet Cong so difficult to defeat.

Early afternoon we were piled back onto the bus and made our way back to town. I slept most of the bus journey back, and before I knew it we were back in Saigon again. We got off the bus and bid another farewell to our friends from Hong Kong before heading back to our hostel for a quick shower before lunch. We were starving by this point so we, rather lazily, stopped again at our favourite spot in town – a bar just two doors down from our hostel that served fantastic fried breakfasts and general comfort food. Feeling bad about my indulgence on Western food, we resolved to have some authentic Vietnamese cuisine for dinner that night, my last in Vietnam. Pleasantly full, we felt as prepared as we could be for our afternoon trip to another of Ho Chi Minh City’s most famous sights – the War Remnants Museum.

I knew the War Remnants Museum was going to be a difficult trip. I’d been warned by plenty of other tourists I’d met along the way. The kind of thing you know is important and that you need to do, but that there is no way you are going to enjoy it. The truth was far worse than anything I’d imagined. Sam and I spent a little time initially looking at the outdoor displays of the War Remnants Museum; aircraft and tanks from the war. Some were Vietnamese, others were American, shot down in battle. Heading inside we looked at an exhibition of art created during the war, and a lengthy exhibition charting the story of the war and it’s global reception. Next, after taking a deep breath, we went into the exhibitions covering Agent Orange, and the ‘War Atrocities’ room. I have no words for what was on display in there. It is one of the darkest parts of Vietnam’s past, and although fascinating, the exhibitions were deeply disturbing. After that I decided I couldn’t cope with any more of the museum, and we left, putting a donation in to the on our way out.

All afternoon we’d been carrying around a pile of souvenirs to post home, in the hope that we’d manage to find the post office open. Armed with a better map and a new round of determination, we headed off towards the post office. Arriving there, we confirmed in our minds that the building we’d found before was indeed the post office, but it was still closed. It was getting late now and I had a meeting at 6pm with my new tour group, who I would be travelling into Cambodia with the following day. So, I hailed a taxi and left Sam to make his own way back to the hostel while I went to meet my new group.

Back at the hotel we’d arrived at a few days earlier, I said hi to Monique and we caught up on the previous day’s tourist activities. It felt strange to be back as part of a tour group again. The 12 of us sat down and the tour guide began to make the most painstakingly long intro I’ve ever sat through. Perhaps it was just that I didn’t feel I really belonged there. Or the fact that I’d heard most of the stuff before when I began my trip in Vietnam. Either way, I couldn’t get out of that meeting fast enough, and I said goodbye to my friends in the group and walked back over to the hostel.

Chatting with Sam, I confessed that I wasn’t totally convinced that a tour was right for me. Through the rest of the evening we discussed whether I should drop out of the group. In the end I decided it was the right thing to do – me and Sam would do Cambodia together instead, at our own pace. Instead of staying with the group in a hotel in Sihanoukville for New Years Eve, we would stay on Otres Beach with his cousin. It sounded perfect. The only problem was that I’d have to tell them. And they were leaving at 7am the following morning.

I dragged myself out of bed at 6am the next morning and rushed over to the hotel. I was dreading having to tell them I wasn’t coming. I didn’t know what to say. I knew my friends from the Vietnamese part of the tour would be looking at me like I was crazy. Yes I was throwing away some money, but I was sure I was going to enjoy Cambodia so much more outside the rigid confines of a tour group. But, I was nervous about it all, so when I arrived at the hotel I spoke to the tour guide and I said that I couldn’t come with them now but I might join them later in the trip. I filled in the necessary paper work, had a chat with Monique and explained what was going on, and, exhausted, walked back to the hostel. I went back to sleep for a few hours, since it was still so early.

Later that day, after another full English at the nearby restaurant, and a stop at a camera shop to get Sam’s fixed, we headed out to find a temple that was mentioned in the guide book. It was quite a walk but we knew most of the streets well by now and the first half of the walk went smoothly. As we began to get closer to the temple, though, the roads didn’t quite seem to line up with the map. We walked in circles for over an hour, constantly in flux between feeling like we knew where we were, and having absolutely no idea whatsoever. Eventually, as it was getting late, we were forced to give up – the temple probably wouldn’t even be open if we got there now – and exhausted from walking we hailed a cab to take us back to the hostel.

We had a final meal at a delicious Vietnamese restaurant (that we had to work hard to find since we were located in a very touristy part of Vietnam, where apparently everybody wants burgers and pizza) and then went for some drinks at a few bars along our road. Back at the first bar we’d been to when we arrived, we met another couple who were travelling and spent the evening chatting to them over cocktails and shisha. We even ended up in a club with them but thankfully managed to get home before 2am ready for our early morning bus to Phnom Penh the following day.

We arranged through our hostel for a bus from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh. This was perhaps a foolish decision, in the following way: I’d checked online and seen that there were no direct bus routes from Ho Chi Minh to Sihanoukville, you had to go via Phnom Penh. This was a little annoying, as we wanted to visit Phnom Penh, but we were rushing to Sihanoukville to celebrate New Years Eve. Knowing that we’d have to go via Phnom Penh, when I booked the tickets with the hostel receptionist I asked about buses to Phnom Penh. It never crossed my mind that we could book a ticket right through to Sihanoukville. When we finally got on the bus, though there were people on there who’d booked all the way to Sihanoukville, and this meant they had a nice short bus-change in Phnom Penh and were already booked onto the bus down to the coast. By contrast, we had to queue up in Phnom Penh and book another bus, and consequently had to wait a few hours for the next available seats. This did have the advantage that we had time to get a little food and stock up, but that’s another story.