Travelling- A bit like going from Basildon to Wickford by bus. 375 times.
For the cheap price of $22 (a lot of things are done in dollars out here in Vietnam,) we have bought ourselves some ‘Open Ticket’ bus tickets. This means that we can travel down Vietnam’s east coast at our leisure, getting on and off whereever we please. We could have got them even cheaper but instead opted for the slighty more expensive ‘sleeper bus’ option.
There is one important factor that I didn’t take into consideration:
Vietnamese people are, on average, 2 feet shroter than me. Therfore, logically, their beds are also 2 feet shorter than me. Cue 17 grueling hours of my legs being tucked under my chin as I lay horizontally in bed. I was particuarly chipper when we arrived.
Hue is lovely.It is much, much queiter than Hanoi, with moped-horns only punctuating the silence every ten minutes or so, rather than non-stop as in the capital. This brings me to the second point of this post. Nearly everywhere, including other blogs on this website and travel guides and even from other travellers that we have met, I have been informed that Vietnamese people are, to be polite, awkward, and to be brutally honest, nothing short of spiteful. Therefore the two of us arrived here expecting to be outdone at every turn, to have locals be openly rude to us, and to generally find the place a lot tougher than Thailand or any other land. While it is true that this feels like the most foreign place either of us have ever visited, we have generally been welcomed into most places with open arms. The key difference being that Veitnamese people do not seem to put on the constant smiling faces that the Thai’s do. It all feels like the happiness expressed here is much less contrived and centred around money that we have got to spend.
Last night, for example, we went for a tipple or two. Cheap at twice the price considering a bottle of locally brewed Hanu beer costs 30pence. We stopped in at a bar called Bar Why Not? under the recommendation of our Lonely Planet guide and while there, we were treated to an impromptue North Vietnamese language lesson by one of the waitresses. She was genuinly pleased to help us and spent quite a significant amount of time going through different phrases with Lauren. Similarly, in this morning we staggered out of bed at a respectible midday, much to the amusement of the family that run the hotel, to be greeted with smiles and waves, and encouraging cheers when we attempted some of our newly learned llocal language skills.
This bad wrap that the country seems to have makes me hope that we aren’t in for a terrible surprise the further south we head, but even now as I type, Lauren is sharing a joking with the hotel staff.
Tags: Hue, Travel, vietnam
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