more details of the food than Hel’s - I guess that just reflects our different outlooks!J We had intended to go to the City museum that afternoon, but the Palace had taken much longer than we thought, so we decided to call it a day for sight-seeing, so walked back through the city to our hotel. The sheer number of motorbikes in Ho Chi Minh is just staggering. Crossing the road was a real challenge as they just come at you from all directions and traffic lights are totally ignored. It was the most dangerous place to cross the road we’d seen since St Petersburg!! After sorting out our train tickets to Hoi-An, and checking out the internet the day had gone and there was only one more day left!!

The next morning we braved the traffic again to go to the City museum. This was pretty good, dealing with the history of Saigon and the surrounding area right from prehistoric times though to the

present day, as well as having lots of war related exhibits. (So much so that we didn’t feel the need to visit the War Remnants Museum, which apparently had lots of gory photos of the effects of napalm on skin and landmine injuries and suchlike. Not really something either of us fancied!). So that was the morning dealt with - we had booked onto an overnight train at 11pm, so had the rest of the day to kill. We’d decided to go and visit the botanical gardens, listed in the rough guide as being quite big and next to the History Museum, which we weren’t too sure about!! So off we stomped halfway across the city, and paid our entry fee (not much), only to discover that rough guide had been extremely slack with a little detail here, and the botanical gardens were in fact the botanical gardens and zoo!! Great we thought! We’ve just paid money to support a zoo in a country with an obviously extremely dodgy attitude towards animal welfare!! Nice one again Rough Guide!! We got as far as one depressing looking