Blogs from Hué, Thua Thien - Huế, North Central Coast, Vietnam, Asia - page 68

Well, I followed up the sandwich with an all you can eat pizza place for dinner and a big ice cream sunday the next day. I also decided to book a flight out of Ho Chi Minh City for the 17th going back directly to Bangkok. This means I won't get to see Cambodia except for Angkor Wat but I think I didn't really have enough time to see as much as I would have liked anyway so I'll leave it for next time. I am currently in Hue which is much quieter and much hotter than Hanoi. I am still being hounded by people wanting to give me a ride on their motorbike for an insane fee but it's not as bad. I've had a few conversations with people about their impressions of Vietnam and ... read more

Hue is an interesting city, with the Perfume River neatly disecting the city and as the former capitol of the counrty, the heart of the city surrounded by a defensive fortifation consisting of an enormous brick wall that runs a total of 6 miles around. On top of all this, is a fortified citadel is a walled off area within the walled of area that encloses several acres. All in all, the city provides ample fair for just nosing about. On my first day spent my time wandering the streets and poking around some fairly interesting museums. The following day, on the recommendation of some friends, I bought a ticket to the citadel. The city of Hue was fiercly contested in the Vietnam War, and as a result of the heavy bombing a large part of ... read more

Breakfast at Son Xanh Blue River Restaurant. There were two guys there who were already drinking beer at 7AM! Then we got a bus to Hue, which is also a UNESCO World Heritage site. Stopped at Marble Mountain along the way. There is a cave there, but we didn’t feel like paying the admission fee and racing up to the cave and back to the bus in 15 minutes. The bus stopped right in front of Phu An Hotel and there were touts that got on the bus to drum up business. The place was nice, so we stayed. We had lunch at Omar Khayyam’s Indian Restaurant. Then we walked to The Citadel and toured the Forbidden Purple City, which follows the same layout as the Forbidden City in Beijing. Much of the Purple City was ... read more

Bikes are still important in Vietnam. However, the motorbike has taken the lead as the most numerous and popular mode of transport. I think they are also a big problem in Vietnam. They are noisy, belch out much smoke, driven to fast and in the big cities have made the environment so bad I can’t imagine living there all the time. Some governments in Vietnam have banned the trucks in big cities during part of the day. Some are thinking about banning cyclos. That is the bicycle with two wheels up-front with a small seat between the wheels and the driver sits high in the back peddling his customer around. They have provided much charm to Vietnam and have been a good mode of transportation for almost a hundred years. I think the governments thinking about ... read more

Now here I am in Hué! Flying here was definitely the right decision (yes Boris, you where right!)- sparing me more than one day in a bus. One thing I didn’t appreciate though was the fact that I had about 4 babies sitting in my immediate vicinity- nothing’s wrong with babies, don’t get me wrong please! And I usually don’t have a problem when a baby cries- but when 4 (in one word: FOUR!!!) babies raise their high pitched voices to max noise level- that’s the point where I start to get a little unnerved. But apart from that everything went good on the flight- just one minor incident happened on our final approach into Hué. When all of a sudden I heard a weird and strange, yet familiar sound- the lady sitting behind me had ... read more