Thai Y Hotel Hue

... fair play if you have the power), some bomb shelter across from hamburger hill (might mean something to someone more educated than us) and a budist temple where we got to witness a prayer session which was cool. (saw a sign that said 'no hue' didn't manage to get photo so just reminding myself)

left for hoi an on the third day as not much else to do in hue.

... Zone), so on Monday we went on a DMZ tour, but it didn't start too well...our bus broke down on a bridge after about 30 mins but once our replacement arrived we were back on track..

Early on in the day we visited an Ethnic Minority Village and then saw the Khe Sanh Combat Base, Ho Chi Minh Trail, crossed from 'South Vietnam' into 'North Vietnam' and also went into the Vinh ...

... an inordinate amount of tombs and cemeteries. The rural people here have one strange tradition: the children are responsible to build the tombs for their parents before their parents die, and the parents also want to see their own coffins before they kick the bucket ("Son, i want the latest model of coffin with the chrome mouldings and fuzzy dice"). How morbid is that?!

Other than knowing that shrimps taste scrumptuous, especially the crispy ...

... I saw something Chinese. Even though the palace wasn't that old (built in 1822, 50 year before the country became a French colony), it style is 100% Chinese. Everything - the layout, the architect, the name of the buildings, the decoration, the costume, the couplets and poems painted inside the buildings - are absolutely, positively 100% Chinese. By the rhythms and rhyme schemes of the poems, I knew the words were supposed to be read in ...

OK arrived off the night train early again and headed straight to the mandarin cafe for breakfast and to book ourselves on the perfume river tour...Mission accomplished we then headed to the pier.

On boarding a dragon boat i fell straight asleep! I was so knackered because we had a total prat sharing a room with us on the sleeper train who insisted on opening the door at 04:30 so i closed it again..then he opened it ...

... and enter the park from there.

We didn’t know much about what we were doing but it all fell into place like it always does. We arrived in the town and were the only two to get off of the bus there. Mopeds came naturally as the moped mafia surrounded us as we stepped out of the bus. Jon had to eat, so he grubbed some street food. We walked out into the hot sun and found our moped guys. They said 50 each, we said 50 for two, sounded good to them, and we took off. The ride ...

... Emperors tomb, which was really impressive a massive site dedicated to his body, his wife and sons bodies and the 104 mistresses he had! We also saw a Japanese bridge that had stood the tests of time for hundreds of years despite being flooded every year and stopped back via another pagoda from which the famous monk who in protest burned himself alive in Saigon, the British Austin car that he drove there is also displayed there.
In the evening we prepared ...

... br>
It turned out there didn't seem to be a closing time since we saw people playing on a tennis court (think they're original? :) as we were leaving so if you arrive after 5pm still try and check it out; it's definitely worth it.

DMZ tour (27/7)

After searching around town for a bit we found the lowest priced DMZ tour and wondered what the difference was in our ticket for $7 and those priced at $15. In the end it didn't seem to ...

... far from the hotel at all, but had to cross the death roundabout once more. Someone up there obviously likes me, as a bus was going around at the same time, and thus blocked all traffic from coming on and running us over! Arrived back at the hotel and found something odd....my powers of losing things had once more triumphed and the key had fallen out of the moped and thus I could not turn it off. I sat there looking fairly horrified until the man simply took Dave's key and ...

... It seemed to be another example of people being unfriendly and unhelpful, we've seen a lot of that here so far in just a few days. Vietnam seems to be a pretty deceitful place so far to be honest, unfortunately we're learning not to trust a word that anyone selling us anything says to us. People in tourist agents, hotels, transport etc will look you in the eyes and lie to ...