A Trip to Hué

Today, we had to get up early because we had booked seats on the bus heading north to Hué. It took a while to pack away all our new purchases. At 8 AM, the bus arrived, and once again, we were squeezed into a very crowded vehicle. The driver apparently wasn’t in a hurry, as we made three stops in three hours. At one point, there were only 20 minutes between breaks, so the journey felt like it took forever. One of the stops was at a marble factory, where the prices were so low and the sellers so eager that it was impossible not to be tempted to buy something. We left with a marble elephant for 5,000 dong and a marble Buddha face for 20,000 dong. By around 1:30 PM, we finally arrived. We hopped off at the first hotel, Thai Binh, where the bus stopped. It cost us a total of 10 USD for a room with a balcony and air conditioning. Once again, we decided to rent bikes for 5,000 dong each so we could quickly get a feel for the city and find a bank, plus a shop where we could burn our digital photos onto a CD. Our flash card was getting full, so we needed to clear it out to keep snapping away without worrying about space. Burning two CDs cost us a total of 100,000 dong. It was getting to be mid-afternoon, and we were getting pretty hungry. We found a cozy restaurant along the road to grab a late lunch. It was really cheap—noodles with beef and vegetables only cost 12,000 dong, and a sandwich was 20,000 dong. Back at the hotel, we had the reception book train tickets for us for tomorrow to Hanoi. There isn’t much to see or do in Hué, so we wanted to move on to a bigger city. But we weren’t quite done exploring the town yet, so in the evening, we cycled out to find some bars. First, we found a nice spot for dinner before heading out on a pub crawl. At the bar "Why Not," we struck up a conversation with an Englishman and a Vietnamese woman. They had met here, and she was going back to England with him. At another bar, we chatted with some more English folks, one of whom had broken his foot. He had been run over by a taxi, which is why he had to travel all the way from Vietnam to Bangkok to get patched up, since the hospitals in Vietnam are quite poor.