Imperial Hue

... to Vinh, no longer needing a mechanic. We saw a Russian guy on a bike, who took one look at the Minsk and could not believe his eyes. He laughed, telling us to throw it away and buy a Honda. Charming!

That brings me to Monday.

We spent Monday driving for the town of Dong Hoi, which was about 150km south of Vinh. Along the way we met Adam, a 40 year old from Carlisle who was also on a Minsk. We all stayed in the same hotel that night.

The weather was getting bad ...

... thoughts Jon and had about him. But were shot down. We were confused. It really hit me when he asked me over for coffee that night. I told him that I appreciate the offer but I’m only into girls. Jon took off to Hanoi and I went to my room and rested.

I took off at 8 the next morning. Met a big jacked up half African American half Vietnamese guy from Houston in the lobby. He has family in Denang and invited me to look him up. He was a clubber, not my scene, plus I didn ...

... find that the alley where we're staying is completely flooded and so are the nearby main streets! We start wading around Hue, up to our knees in some places, and head for the Citadel. It turns out to be a bit of a disappointment really (the never ending torrential rain doesn't help) as most of the (very large) site is all ruins and there's not that much to see. After a few hours of grumpy trudging about the place we call it quits and head back to the hotel.

Amazing, through the ...

... practically had the entire place to ourselves.

We spent around an hour or so wandering around looking at all the beautiful architecture and building designs. Many temples in Viet Na have small, elegant dragons on the edges of the rooftops and I love taking pix of them. The buildings are all spread out with lush green nature thriving in and around them. The sun setting on the buildings was perfect and really the whole place is super tranquil ...

... place, they were each designed by the men themselves, so were individual according to each emporers taste. Quite weird thought of emporer wandering around thinking 'well this is nice, but it is essentially focused on me being dead', quite morbid no? They were very peaceful places, probably for this reason, with little pavilions set on lily filled lakes and landscaped gardens set around traditional chinese temples. However, mopeds are apparently like pringles, once you pop ...

Hue Hue, wir sind in Hue :-)

Hier gibt es eine Zitadelle, in der frueher die Emperors gelebt haben und diverse Graeber ehemaliger Staatsoberhaeupter. In Hue kommt jeder vorbei, entweder auf dem Weg nach Hanoi oder um von hier aus ueber die Grenze nach Laos zu gehen.

Jedes Hotel bietet hier Touren nach Laos an. Mit dem Bus direkt ueber die Grenze kostet der ganze Spass ca. 15 US$ pro Person und ist ...

... to drink the water and i will only get sick for a day or two but i don't believe them and still use bottled water to brush my teeth & drink.
Apparently there is a pill foreigners should take every 3 mths or so to kill intestinal worms or something but i havent really looked into it yet - gross.
As I am sure mum told some of you I got hit by a motorbike on her last day here.
Completley my fault running out onto the road ...

... loved to spend another day here to look around the DMZ and explore the tunnels, which are supposed to be less touristic that the ones down south. Unfortunately they're also a bit more difficult to get to and I just don't have enough time to do it. I already know that I want to come back here at some point though, I had to miss out Sapa too, in the north, which looked amazing, much better than the trekking I did ...