Everything we own is now damp...
Trip Start
Sep 21, 2011
1
34
51
Trip End
Ongoing
Hue, Vietnam
Saturday, December 17, 2011
We arrived in the rain, luckily the hotel had sent a car to pick us up. The hotel seemed nice enough when we arrived. Then we noticed the damp on the walls, and realised that it was damp EVERYWHERE! The hotel staff were obsessive about trying to get us to book tours and travel through them, and every time we passed the desk we were asked 'where are you going today'.
Throughout the days we spent in Hue we did not get dry once. By the time we left, everything we owned (right down to our passports) was damp, to the point where we had to have all of our clothes rewashed at the next hotel.
The rain barely stopped, ranging from light drizzle, to torrential downpour. We did, however, see some interesting sights. The ancient citadel in Hue used to be the seat of government, before the revolution. It was a site of similar scale to the forbidden city in Beijing, until the americans decided to drop bombs and napalm on it during the war. It's now a crumbling wreck, with a few remaining buildings.
We found a nice restaurant called Nina's to have our tea in. She serves Hue specialities at reasonable prices, and also rents motorbikes.
We rented a bike to take us out to the tombs of emperors that scatter the surrounding countryside. We saw the tomb of emperor Tu Duc, which was a lovely compound with some stunning old buildings and a lake. On our way deeper into the countryside to visit another tomb our bike developed a misfire, so we had to head back to Hue. We saw a massive snake making his way across the road, but he turned tail and fled when he heard our bike coming. When we got the bike back to Nina's they told us that it was probably water in the engine (I think if that was the case there would have been no bikes running in Hue at all!) and gave us another bike. The hour was getting late, we didn't think we could be bothered going all the way back out into the countryside, so we just went up to the pagoda, where we saw an old Morris car. It's the same Morris car that Thich Quang Duc, a buddhist monk drove to Saigon to set fire to himself as a protest against religious oppression (the very same monk who features on the front of the Rage Against The Machine album cover). We also got a good telling off from the hotel for renting a cheap bike from somewhere else instead of paying them 3 times as much.
We were glad to leave Hue when the time came, and we weren't surprised when our bus was an hour late ("you should have booked through us" said the hotel staff, who would have charged us twice as much), but we finally got on the road to Hoi An.
