Hue and Hoi An

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11 August - We arrived in Hue at about 10am and went out quickly for a wander about the old citadel. There's an old palace there, but it's been pretty devestated by bombs what with being close to the demilitarised zone (DMZ). We had lunch in a restaurant as recommended by our friends at the Lonely Planet which is run by a deaf mute (suspiciously there are two of the same at the next two doors on the street) so it was back to pointing and gesturing to order food, I missed that from China.

12 August - We decided to go for a tour of the DMZ. 6am start, not so good. There wasn't a great deal to see as most of the sites had been bombed or otherwise destroyed since the end of the war, the Ho Chi Minh trail (how the Viet Cong used to sneak down to the South undetected) they showed us has now become a highway! Khe Sunh airfield and the Vinh Moc tunnels were definately the highlights, it seems hard to imagine having to live underground for days at a time just to hide from the bombs (these were civilian tunnels).

13 August - We were woken by monks singing so not in the best of moods, think we missed it yesterday with our early start. It was raining quite heavily so not great news for our planned bike ride to the royal tombs just out of town (former emperors). We decided to take up a motorcycle (moped) tour offered by Bill who seemed to be constantly hanging around our hotel. Apparantly Bill is a Vietnamese name now. Anyway he was working as a translator for the Americans during the war so had a few tales to tell. We headed off for a tomb (only time for one by the time we got around to it) and a(nother) pagoda. The tomb was a lot bigger and more decorative than I had thought so kinda wished we'd stayed a bit longer to do the 2 other tombs which are meant to be better still. Oh well, we get to take another bus that should be even better. We got into Hoi An and went for the super cheap option of taking a fan rather than air con (saving $1 woo). Just about arrived in time for dinner and to find a pub to watch the Charity Shield game in, football season now, I might even start to remember the days of the week...

14 August, Monday. .. Got up late and went to check out the town a little bit. It's quite a small old town but quite pretty, nothing high rise here. Seems to be the place to get tailored suits and custom shoes made for peanuts (or dollars even) no time for that so I bought a pair of sandals on the market instead. We saw some cool old town houses and a couple of museums but most of the atmosphere seems to come from wandering the inexplicably sandy streets.

15 August, Tuesday... Having decided to go for the My Son (temple) sunrise tour where you stand no chance of seeing the sunrise, (at least they were honest) as the bus doesn't leave until after it gets light, we had to get up super early, like 4:30am. There is a site of Cham towers there, one main one and some smaller partially reconstructed/destroyed ones. For some reason some North Vietnamese decided to set up camp here not realising the Americans would bomb everything. It's still pretty awe inspiring stuff though, 7th century architecture that is (some of it) still standing. I think the main benefit of the early tour was that we got to beat the crowds as we pretty much had the place to ourselves which is always nice. Off to get another overnight bus to Nha Trang this evening...

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