Hue, Danang & Hoi An

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Okey Dokey

so I'll keep it brief - we caught a night train from Hanoi which was a nightmare - 6 hard bunks in a room smaller then my backpack! and we were the ones in the middle with old Vietnamese men above and below us coughing, farting and generally pleased with themselves having come to Hanoi for the day! To top it all we got the news that Tony's heart op had to be cancelled at the last minute! Dulce was just about resigned to going home!

Anyways despite it all we got some sleep and woke up in Hue - which is a town with a lot of history; both the Chinese and the Americans were in hoooge battles with the Vietnamese for this town and lost. BUT we decied to keep on going. So after the luxury of our night train and a huge amount of deliberation with shady Vietnamese bus and taxi drivers, we opted for a local mini bus to Danang bus station.

God bless the Vietnamese, they are a loving race and they seemt to like nothing better then sitting on my lap on long bus journeys or cuddlling my legs! We spent 4 hours going from Hue to Danang with nine people sitting on four seats at the back of a bus :-) Dulce had some old woman rubbing her feet for the duration and I had a college student sitting mostly on my lap asking me about Ireland (and know its not what you think! If only it was) and some other bloke playing his phone with one arm going round my leg to allow him to reach his keys!

Danang station is an old American army base. Its a dust bowl about a mile square full of clapped out buses with chickens flying about, motor bikes being loaded onto the roofs of buses and hundreds of very shady blokes. the touts just envelope the bus as soon as you pull in and try and get you to go with them, wherever it is that they go. Any who after no sleep on the train and cuddling my little Vietnamese friends on a bus for four hours I wasn't in the mood for riding on the back of a 40 CC moped with Dulce, driver and two back packs for an hour to Hoi An so very politely told them to f**k off!

Eventually we found our next and final bus in the never ending (but comical) trip to Hoi An. This was simplicity itself - a direct bus with a two guys on it that took a shine to Dulces blonde hair! It was great, I was like her pimp - they lifted our bags on and off, waited while I got water and even tried to negotiate a motorbike to take all of us (at once) to the Thanh Binh hotel in Hoi An!

The Thanh Binh absolutely rocked, a great guest house with A/C and a pool! it was heaven, especially with the 30 plus temperatures and hoiking backpacks around for two days! We spent four lovely days there getting suits and dresses made, playing by the pool, seeing some of the local sites and generally chilling out and drinking with some people that we met in Halong Bay and on the bus. The further south you go the people become noticably friendlier to westerners and Hoi An was the first time that we had seen anything other then the frantic side to Vietnam!

Four days later we left for Nhathrang, with suit bags hanging off backpacks and a whole lot of extra weight to lug

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