Hue

After a lovely day on the junk boat we returned to Hanoi for an afternoon. Since we hadn't seen much of the city we decided to follow the Californian man since he was going for a walk. As it turns out he was set on finding McCain's memorial from the war. We couldn't care less about McCain or where he fell into a pond, we were pretty much in it for the walk... and ice cream. After getting horrifically lost we decided to head back home. To our disgust Groud announced that we would be travelling to Hue by night train. We have previously expressed our deep loathing of trains after the five days without getting off, so you can imagine our horror. It turned out to be quite painless, although Hanna did manage to fall out of the carriage whilst disembarking. She survived.. barely... fat bruises on her elbows, muddy skid marks up her body and a few scratches. She claims someone "pushed her"... yeah riiight.


I was craving bananas so bought some from a man at the platform. I asked him what I owed and he replies "Lighty Pive"... I asked again... he repeats "Lighty Pive"... I asked him a third time and by now he is getting annoyed and screams "LIGHTY PIVE!! LIGHTY PIIIIVE!!". All I wanted was some bananas and instead I was getting abused by a Vietnamese man. Finally I flung a note at him and waited for my change. Turned out he was trying to say Ninety Five... oh well at least I got my bananas in the end.
Hue was rather uneventful. The weather was really bad, it rained all day but we were luckily very well prepared. We had a tour guide who, when standing, reached my hip. He was 30 years old and absolutely tiny. Mini-man showed us what he called a "Bagoda" as well as a few temples, a tomb and the forbidden city.

Bagoda. Seven layers for good luck.

Vietnamese Nun reading outside Temple

The highlight of our time spent with miniman was when he decided to sing a goodbye song into the microphone on the bus. The first few minutes were painless since he sang a Vietnamese folk song, however he then decided to sing "Yesterday" by The Beatles. His English was not quite fluent so he made up his own rendition of the song "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so fart away..." and so on... I had to bite my own tongue to refrain from laughing, and knew that if I looked at Hanna we would both die of hysterics.

For lunch we went to a local restaurant with a mute owner. We were all given free bottle openers (constructed with a plank of wood with a screw). All guests were allowed to graffiti on the walls.

This woman was showing us how to use our bottle openers the correct way.
Karate chop was the trick.

Our hotel was quite luxurious. We got a bed each in a room to ourselves and a relatively clean bathroom. There were even flowers on our beds! We were so excited and ran to the window to check out the view... that's when reality set in and we remembered that we are still budget traveling.

A room with a view