On Easter Sunday we left Ho Chi Minh city at half past seven in the morning for a bus ride to Phnom Penh, taking in the Cu Chi tunnels on the way. The tunnels were used by the VietMinh during the Vietnamese/American war, and took twenty years to complete - starting in 1948 and finishing in 1968. Most of the entrances are still hidden, and Simon and I had a go at getting into them (they're tiny!) We were taken around the area and looked at different hidden entrances and lots of the different traps they used to catch the enemy (ingenious but very, very nasty). It was fascinating, and hard to imagine what it must have been like during those days in the war. The temperature was in the mid-thirties so you can guess how warm it was inside the tunnels. They have opened up a couple of the tunnels and made them slightly larger so that Westerners can actually get inside them, which we did.

They have a shooting range there and you can buy bullets to use in either a machine gun or an AK47, and it's quite eerie because while you're in the middle of the forest looking at the tunnels, you can hear gunfire. Four of us had a go with the AK47 - the bullets were quite expensive and so we shared a few rounds. Simon and Gary had four shots each, while Sarah and I had one (our choice not the boys'). I've never fired a gun before and it's not something I would like to do again. And they're ridiculously loud too - you only get to wear ear defenders when you're firing the gun and so every time someone else's shot rings out you lose your hearing for a minute or two. We also had a snack of tea and tapioca which is what the VietMinh used to have at mealtimes. Tapioca is a bit like raw potato and not particularly nice but they dip it into crushed peanuts and sugar which is actually quite tasty.

It was a fascinating place to go. Simon studied the Vietnam war as part of his history GCSE thirteen years ago, and the tunnel system used by the VietMinh was one of the things which really stuck with him. It was great to be there and to be crawling through the tunnels, and at the same time strange to remember learning about them and the tunnel rats when he was 15 and now to find himself actually there.

We said goodbye to Thi, our Vietnamese tour guide, at the border and climbed off the bus with our backpacks to cross the border into Cambodia. It was blisteringly hot but thankfully it only took about forty-five minutes to get out of Vietnam and into Cambodia. We boarded a new bus and stopped just past the border at a truck stop for lunch, and then spent about five hours on the bus driving to Phnom Penh. We arrived in the early evening, at another lovely hotel, and a few of us headed out for dinner that evening to an Irish bar called The Green Vespa and had roast dinner - our first since Hong Kong in February!