This part of the trip was unofficially called Hue (pronounced Hway) in a day. After an overnight train from Hanoi to Hue, we dumped our stuff at the hotel and hired motorbikes, each with our own personal driver for the day. And can I say how much cooler we looked on our bikes passing all those tourists on their 56 seater coaches. That’s right lads, we have bikes, what do you have? Oh, a bus. Right. That looks like fun.
It was so awesome and probably the busiest day we have had so far – the city is smaller and more suburban and Hanoi, but we rode right out into the countryside and saw rice fields and local villages, visited an amazing woman who has one arm and makes beautiful conical hats with intricate designs you can only see when the hat is held up to the light, and saw the kings tomb and temple.
We were served lunch by monks at a monastery, viewed spectacular mountain scenery, and had a try at making insence sticks from scratch. Which was fun, but my extensive talents obviously don’t extend to insence making, so I didn’t take it with me, mostly for everyone else’s safety.
We saw an old colluseum where elephants and tigers used to fight (The elephant always won. Why did you even ask?) and travelled by boat down the river to a pegoda temple worshipped by monks and nuns in Hue.
By the time we flew home on our bikes with the wind in our hair (sorry, had to add that in, it was too tempting) we were utterly exhausted and yet so elated we had seen such beautiful landscapes and the very best of Hue in a day.
That is, until it came time to tip our driver, and I had no change so had to give him a 80,000 tip. 80,000 man – that’s like 8 beers. Which hurt, it really did. The guy probably went home and enrolled all his kids in tertiary education. But it couldn’t be helped. So it was a quiet night.
-Sarah
Sarah