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Published: June 16th 2010
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So we wait around for the train as it doesn’t leave until 2.40am. We get to the station early and sit with the local and not so local Vietnamese people, it seems that we are all waiting for something to happen. The station is closed and there is no information about when the train might arrive (at least nothing in English) but everyone seems to be patiently waiting so we join in. Around 3am the locked gates open the train has arrived.
The only tickets we could get were for a 6 bearth cabin as all the 4 bearth were sold out (one bad thing about not booking anything in advance) so we have no idea what to expect. Still I think whats in a number we are now 1/3 of a good thing or 1/3 a bad one, bearing in mind this is an accountant talking.. We find our carriage and open the sliding door my face must have been a picture as inside the smallest compartment in the world, if not that at least on this train, there are 5 people (all sleeping - one of which is on one of our beds) 4 huge boxes are on
the floor and over half a dozen bags in the luggage racks. The woman on our bed wakes up and crawls out of Shenton's bed, mine of course being unslept in. We try to fit our big bag, two ruck sacks and the guitar into the already full cabin. After some squeezing in, we manage to fit in and get up into the middle bunks and once we are comfortably laid down and the train starts up again I realise that actually this is a really nice way to travel. Though there is a very very old grandma (who must have been deaf) shouting amazingly loud, still the journey proves to be better than anything BR or whatever we have today in the UK can offer, but age it seems has no effect when to comes to being heard! In the morning we pretty much sleep through until 10am. We get up and have a gander about in the train and then back to the bunks. There is no way you can sit up so with with the rocking of the train I am back to sleep. Once we reach Hue I am really well rested and feel that this
is the best way to travel (much better than the seats on the train from Saigon to Nha Trang and for sure miles better than what UK offers up for 10 times less the price.)
By pure luck (again planning is not on our list for this trip) we arrive in Hue at the time of a festival. The streets are full of kites and lanterns and the river at night has beautiful pink lotus sculptures floating on it. It is a very beautiful place and we enjoy exploring the imperial city, even though its forbidden, it is a huge complex of pagodas and temples where once the royal familes resided. It is surrounded by a huge wall with very impressive gates. We have hired a bike today and so after this we head off to the Mu Pagoda,here a monk drove from in an old Morris Minor in the 1960's and in protest against the oppression of buddhists. burned himself to death at a busy intersection in Saigon.The car is still there as a shrine to his self-immolation.
The next place we are looking for are the royal tombs, of which there are meant to be a
few scattered around the country side outside the city, we get a bit lost among the paddy fields and as nothing works on the bike (speedo or milometer) we have no way of knowing how far out of the city we have gone, the tombs are meant to be 13km outside of the city. We soon realise that the petrol gauge is also not working and we run out of fuel. we find ourselves outside what appears to be someone’s house (people sitting around playing chess) although no one speaks any English but before we have had a chance to think about what we are going to do a woman appears with a plastic bottle full of petrol and pours it in our tank and asks us for a dollar! I can’t believe our luck! So we are on our way again lost but with petrol.
As we are driving around trying to find these tombs a lady pulls up beside us and asks us where we are going, we tell her and she says this is close to where she lives and she will take us there. We drive past a couple of tombs and take a quick
picture then it is off to the tomb we are going to visit, that of Minh Mang. The place is fabulous and the king has a huge amount of land for his afterlife. There are buildings for all his needs, including a library and palaces to live in.There is a stone army with stone elephants, horses and stone mandarins, giving him protection and making sure all his after life requirements are taken care of, all this in a setting of beautiful lakes and gardens. There are ornate gates to pass through before you reach the actual burial site of the king , these are on the very top of a large mound which contains all the kings wordly treasures. It is very obvious that the royal family was very important to the Vietnamese.
As we leave the lady says she wants to invite us to her home before we go back to town. We follow her down by the river and go to her home which is very small and basic. We both think it is odd that she lives here are there are no signs of everyday life (no sheets or blankets on the bed , no visible
clothes etc) and she supposedly has a husband and two teenage kids living here too. Anyway we don’t question and the eventually she asks us for money to buy books for her kids. We know this is most likely a scam but she did show us the way to the tombs so we give her some cash (not as much as she wanted which she points out to us) and we are off back into town for the festival, before we move on to our next stop.
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anonymous
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again guys the intrepid report fills my day with adventure ,, thanks for the cosistency and inspiratiuon