20th March 2009

We had the luxury of a 1.30pm bus departure from Mui Ne, so we had a pretty relaxing morning and were waiting for our bus at 1pm. We were surprised when the bus arrived as it was a sleeper bus! They were very different from all other buses we had taken before, as they had small bed like compartments that you could lie down in. In true Vietnamese style, we were asked to put our own bags in the luggage hold and went about finding ourselves a seat. We were soon on our way and were finding the journey a pretty comfortable one, that is if it wasn't for the constant horn beeping that the driver was doing. They seem to be very horn happy in most if South East Asia, but Vietnam was one if the worst. Not that Clare was bored, but she counted over 50 beeps in a minute! Nice and peaceful!!

After a long but comfortable 5 and a half hours, we arrived back in the mayhem of Saigon. Luckily our hotel, The Orient, was just down the road, so we quickly checked in. This was a big mistake as it was worse than we remembered! The bedcwas hard and the room was very small, but we reckoned it would be fine for one night. We were wrong! At 2am we were still awake and just could not sleep on this rock hard bed, so we thought we would stay awake and find ourselves a new hotel at day break. Finally sleep took hold of us at 5am and we grabbed a couple of hours before we set about looking for a new hotel. After a quick walk around Saigon, we managed to find ourselves a decent hotel called 'Lien Ha', so we grabbed our backpacks and checked in. It was much more comfortable than the last place and even had a rooftop pool! After a little rest, we decided to check out the pool. As we made our way up to the 8th floor, past the scruffy laundry rooms, we found the gorgeous pool. There was noone up here and the pool was a very funny colour, it looked like a basin full of stagnant water, complete with floating insects! Needless to say, we never ventured into the water, as we didn't need a chemical peel!

We spent 2 nights at this hotel, trying to figure out what our next move was and desperately trying to find some food with flavour, until we decided that our best course of action was to leave Vietnam and head back to Cambodia. We bought a straight through ticket to Phnom Penh for the following morning and were looking forward to eating a nice steak and onion baguette in our favourite restaurant the Blue Dolphin.