After getting the ferry from Catba Island I arrived in Haiphong which is apparently the 3rd biggest city in Vietnam after Saigon and Hanoi. Although this is a big City there were absolutely no other tourists and no one that could speak more than a few words of English, which is fine off course but just makes travelling that much more difficult and interesting
I only spent the one night in town and had a good walk around the place. It was a lot more laid back that Hanoi and everyone was very friendly and seemed genuinely surprised to see a foreigner walking around. I got heaps of smiles and waves from the local kids to which was nice.
The next day after a lot of broken English and gesturing I managed to find my way onto one of the local buses to Hue in which once again I was the only foreigner. The bus I luckily managed to get on was a true sleeper bus with 3 rows of bunk beds and was easily the best bus I have been on yet. That was a good thing in the end as it took about 15 hours to travel around 600 kms! This ended up being a really good experience though as we stopped for lunch and dinner on the way and ate some authentic Vietnamese food and drank local beer and I got a good insight into how people live here. One of the people at my table also insisted on paying for my drinks even though I tried really hard to pay for theirs which was really nice. I think they got some entertainment out of watching me sitting in the small plastic chairs and try to eat rice with chopsticks. I showed them some music on my ipod which a couple of the younger guys got a kick out of.
Haiphong Hotels
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