Vietnam - Ho Chi Minh City - Day 7

When I woke today the sun was shining brightly which we thought was perfect for a nice walk around Ho Chi Minh City for our walking tour!

Saigon Post Office - which is just amazing inside and out.

Notre Dame Cathedral

Reunification Palace

War Remnants Museum

Then we headed out for dinner. We love just walking around when on holidays and stumbling across restaurants. I do usually do a quick trip advisor check to make sure we aren't going somewhere really terrible! I can't recall the name of this restaurant, but it was off the main square and was just beautiful. Afterwards we took a stroll back to our hotel to get the 4 kids to bed.

The Reunification Palace was amazing - and so ornate. It was rebuilt after the french left Vietnam. It is now just a tourist attraction.


The War Remnants Museum is very overwhelming. So awful to see what happened during the war. We did think it was obviously very anti-American - so we took that into account as there are always two sides to a story, but it was still very confronting.

Very excited tomorrow we are off to check out the Cu Chi Tunnels!

Vietnam - Hoi An to Ho Chi Minh City - Day 6

Our stay in Hoi An has come to a very sad end. :( We have loved our time here and will definitely be coming back! We highly recommend Hoi An Beach Resort - just beautiful. Here are our final shots taken just after breakfast before we checked out.

After checking out we stopped into the Marble store to have a look at the marble carvings. We were going to have a look at the Marble Mountain but Declan was a bit unsettled and we just wanted to get to the airport. Luckily we managed to get on an earlier flight to Ho Chi Minh City so didn't have to wait at the airport for long at all.

Once we had checked into our hotel - The Liberty Central - we decided to go for a quick walk to check out our surrounds.

We found this great cafe called "Cosmo Cafe" just down the road and had some lunch. The food was delicious, and it was pretty affordable.

After we headed back to the hotel for a bit of a rest so Declan could sleep, and planned our night! We were all pretty full from lunch so knew dinner was going to just be a bread roll.

One good thing about the hotel was we were really close to the Ben Thanh markets. We didn't realise they weren't open at night, so we just wandered about and had some food and decided to head back to the hotel for an early night. We decided we would head back to the markets the next afternoon to do some shopping.

Vietnam - Hoi An - Day 5

Day 5 kicked off the same as all the others.. with a lovely breakfast!!

We were collected by Peter and taken for a buffalo cart ride around the local farming villages. It was quite interesting to see where the rice is grown and see the little huts that people live in. We really tried to show the children how other people live - and that not all people live in large houses / apartments with TVs / internet / air conditioning. It really was quite eye opening.

After our wander around the fields in the buffalo cart we decided to check out China Beach and get a Bahn Mi roll from a cart we had seen there. It was really nice to chill near the beach bar (as it was directly across from our hotel - so was our hotel's property). While Declan and I rested on the lounger BJ and the kids had a dip in the ocean. One of my favourite TV shows was "China Beach", so it was a bit surreal to be on the real China Beach.