Feb 2 – 3 Mo Chi Minh City

We left lovely Mui Ne at 8am the 2nd, looking forward to a regular sitting up bus promised by the tour agent across the street. Oh no – another sleeping bus! Foiled again, and not happy but away we went. Turns out the lower seats are not bad, but since we hadn’t reserved that one I had to move to up bunk again. For a while I sat next to a Vietnamese women who spoke English and sang with her two year old – that was good. The bus stopped for breaks twice and once in Ho Chi Minh City we were transferred to a van to take us downtown, and then a taxi…! We arrived at the Silverland Yen Hotel – very nice – around 3:30!

We walked a bit, found food and later retreated to the rooftop area to relax and enjoy the view. Later we headed to dinner at nice restaurant called Soul down the street that we heard about from other travelers from Minnesota.

Yesterday we started a little late and it was pretty warm by the time we went to the Reunification Palace. Before we went in talked with a large family touring together -staying in Hanoi and now HCMC for a month at a time. As usual we all talked about our travels and then we went in. I was expecting some more like a museum but it really a large, formal government building that formally housed the president of So. Vietnam, and has many formal rooms. The interesting part for Dirk was the bunker with the old radios.

After tea at the hotel (!) we checked out the well-known, very large Ben Thanh market very full of clothes, inexpensive souvenirs and some expensive jewelry (I wanted silver earrings but they said they were gold and want $100!- nope!) I did buy one inexpensive scarf thinking about the cold on the way home in March.

We joined some women we met in the roof top for dinner – nice!