Day 33 - Sweatsville

After a few hours sleep we braved Ho Chi Minh city proper. It's back to being very, very hot. Hello Sweatsville. (It ended up being a double shower day). We walked out to the Emerald Pagoda. It was one of the more active, less touristy places of worship we've been to which made it more interesting. There was more burning of cardboard goods and two ponds, one with cat fish and one with turtles. Both had random bread rolls and chips thrown in which neither animal was going for. Poor things.

The roads are even busier here however there are a lot more crossing points and more people (not all) respect the green man so getting round is a bit easier. We went for lunch at a random Vietnamese cafe where it turns out the male restroom is also the female restroom and where they wash the glasses. If you walked into the loo in the UK and they were doing that you'd phone the council but here it's all nice and normal. After lunch we went to the Vietnamese history museum telling the story of Vietnam from the prehistoric era to the start of the 20th century. I'm a little sceptical that the piles of rocks could indeed be classified with certainty as tools but apparently you could clearly see the advancing technology. There was a lot of pottery and statues but the best part was reconstructions of different battles that looked like they'd been made by a school class for a history project. Lots of faux blood and spears through little plasticine models. Also on display was an actual mummified body of a woman then found a few years ago - nice.

We dragged ourselves back to the air con hotel. According to the (I'm sure reliable) Apple Health app since we started our trip in February we've walked over 300km! I should be skinny as a rake by now but I think we're cancelling it out with all the iced chocolate drinks and fruit smoothies. We were going to attempt the cinema but I'm pretty confident we both would have fallen asleep so we went for dinner instead at a place round the corner. The waitress was hilariously sullen and had to explain to me how to eat my food (more leaf wrapping) which clearly brought her no joy whatsoever. Others learnings were that an iced yoghurt is not frozen yoghurt as you might guess but a glass of yoghurt with ice in. Go figure.Read more