Our first sea day and visiting Vietnam

Our day started well with a leisurely breakfast in the main dining room (MDR). This ship is very different to the P&O ships we have been on as the MDR has a buffet set up in the middle of it for the basics and you also order off a menu for the hot choices.

I am not a breakfast person but I go there for the coffee. Cruise ship instant coffee is notoriously disgusting but in the dining room they serve brewed coffee that is very good.

Some yoghurt and toast and I am done :)
Breakfast and lunch seating is 'as you come' so we will have breakfast and lunch with different people each day. Morning one we had a lovely group and ended up chatting for long after our food was eaten.

After going to a talk about the ports we would be visiting we went to the tour desk to book in our tour in Okinawa, Japan. This will be the only port where we do something structured, the rest of the ports we have decided to wing it!

By then it was 11am and we had to rush off to Ellingtons Bar! I had registered for a Meet and Mingle with people from the Cruise Critic site and RCI put on canapes and juice and hand out lucky door prizes and gifts for attending, of course you also get to meet other people and we chatted to a nice guy from Germany for a while before rushing off again for lunch :)

The night before we received an invitation to a special honeymooners lunch so at 12pm we went and met with the coordinator. There was another couple there as well, Salvador and Valerie from Mexico, and we were escorted to a private table with private waiters :)

Free bottomless Mimosas set the mood and we spent a few hours eating a very leisurely lunch before our waiters wheeled out an amazing cake and sang to us!

There was not much of the afternoon left but we managed to squeeze in a trivia session where we failed pretty badly ;)

Tonight was formal night so we dressed up for our leisurely dinner in the MDR followed by a show called Gallery of Dreams in the Savoy Theatre and then I was ready for bed!

Asides: While meeting with the coordinator we met the penguins from Madagascar! Of course I had to get a photo!

Setting an alarm for 6am just felt wrong but to get the most our of our day in Vietnam we needed to have an early start! We had booked a transfer into Ho Chi Min City and were just going to explore by ourselves :)

Quick breakfast (not so nice people to chat to this time, good Lord some people will complain about anything!) and we were off!

The scenery from the bus reminded me of Port Vila, or at least the smaller suburbs just outside. Small concrete or corrugated iron shops with bags of garbage out the front waiting to be collected. No manicured lawns or pretty yards here, just kilometre after kilometre of the same thing. Strangely though, hidden behind many of the grotty little shops were what looked like pretty terrace houses, would have loved to have got a closer look.

Ho Chi Min is the city with 5 million motorbikes and crossing the road here is an art form! There are pedestrian crossings here but they, like most of the traffic lights, are completely ignored! Even when we had a policeman stopping the traffic so we could cross, the bikes just swerved around him and kept going!

We visited the replica Notre Dame, and then went and saw the Reunification Palace. This is the place that marked the end of the Vietnam War, when the tanks of the North Vietnamese Army rolled through the gates and forced the surrender of the South.
It was very interesting to see the Command Rooms in the Basement along with the very plush upper rooms that have been so well preserved.

I was a bit nervous about going to the War Museum and while we were outside looking at tanks and planes I was fine. Inside was another story as there were 3 floors of rooms that had pictorials describing various phases of the war. Some of the pictures were too gut wrenching for me and I had to leave :(

We were determined to try real Vietnamese food and visited the Ben Thanh Markets, there were some food stalls there that looked great but the overpowering smell from the nearby fish market drove us out pretty fast!!
We found a local restaurant and shared a variety of dishes that were wonderful! My favourite was a pickled cabbage dish.

We had also heard that Vietnam produces some of the worlds best coffee so after lunch we found a coffee shop and ordered a couple of local coffee drinks and I now have to agree, Vietnam produces amazing coffee! If you see some in your local shops buy it, you won't be disappointed :)
We also tried some Vietnamese ice cream, not to my taste but Nathan thought it was okay, I think our flavours were strawberry and taro :p

The drive back to the ship was uneventful, filled with the same scenery of shop after shop after shop and with an Illusionist Show to look forward to after dinner our day was complete :)