On To Central Vietnam

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After getting a minibus for an hour back through the mountains from Sapa to the nearby train station, we were soon back on a sleeper train heading back for Hanoi. Many people, including us, think it's a good idea to get a sleeper train as you get from one place to another while you sleep (or try to) and so you end up saving money, but i'm sure you end up more knackered once you've arrived at your next destination than what you normally would!

So after another sleepless train journey we were soon once again back at the main station in Hanoi being harassed by the usual large group of taxi drivers (even though it was 4:00 am!) and once again being ripped off to get to our next hostel......now we already knew from a few days earlier how much the taxi was, but with it being this time and us just arriving they obviously think we have never been before and so the fare went straight from 31,000 Dong for the both of us right up to 200,000! We had actually arrived way much earlier than we had been told we would and so once we got to our next hostel we had to wake up the poor bloke who was asleep on the floor so we could get in from the rain, it was now monsoon season and so when it rains, it rains!

Once again we were staying back in the Old Quarter as that's where most of the backpacker places are and it seems pretty easy to get around from there so we had planned to stay here for a few nights before then getting the Reunification Express down to Hue in the center of Vietnam. The Reunification Express might sound fancy to some but it's really not, it's no different from all the other sleeper trains in Vietnam, it was given its name after the north Vietnamese had taken over the South and there was suddenly a need to get from north to south and so then the Reunification Express came about to commemorate the whole country finally coming together.

It's not only the taxi drivers and other locals all trying to sell you something that you need to look out for either as we soon found out.......after sitting at the train station for a little while waiting for our train to arrive to take us to Hue, we were greeted on the platform by a happy looking bloke who stopped and asked us where we were from, which isn't unusual at all in SE Asia as many people just seem intrigued by Westerners and want to practice their English, however he then decided he was going the same way as us but said nothing else to us, which we thought nothing of as there were plenty of people all going the same way as us, anyway once we got to our carriage he then followed us into our compartment and sat opposite us on the still vacant bunk bed and then demanded that we give him money for him taking us to the train! I think we were a bit shocked at first more than anything but after a bit of an argument we soon told him where to go and he eventually wandered off a lot less happy than when we had first spoken to him. Once settled into our little part of the train Jade was soon off taking pictures and soon enough the same guy was back but this time with another western couple and they happened to be a little bit further down the carriage from us but it looked like they paid him pretty much straight away, and so with that he decided to have another go at getting money out of me for the same reason as before.......after a few choice words he soon got the message however and we didn't see him again. It seems Hanoi just ended up being a bit of a bad experience for us just because of the way the people are, so not a place we will be returning to any time soon!

After a 12 hour journey and being stuck in a small little cabin with two other backpackers we soon arrived in Hue and were met by two guys from the local Easy Riders, they seem to be in every city in Vietnam, they are small companies that take tourists on day trips out of the city’s to nearby attractions on motorbikes......and so it was a bit of a shock to have them waiting for us. We soon had our bags tied down on the back and before we knew it we were dodging the traffic on the streets of Hue. It turned out they have an agreement with the hostel which we stayed in by giving us a free pick up from the station so they can promote their company and hopefully get you to pay them to take you out for the day, They're actually really good bikers but in the end we didn't get to do any day trips as the weather just wasn't great at all as out of the 4 days we were there we had pretty bad weather for nearly all of them.

We originally decided to stop here as it's on the way to Saigon in the South and it's famous from the Vietnam War and is well known for one of the fiercest thought battles between the Americans and the Viet Cong during the Tet offensive. Here there is a huge medieval type Citadel where the fighting took place and it's full of temples and other ancient buildings, well there's a few but most of it is still ruins from the war but it was still worth a visit, we decided to hire out bicycles and so spent the day cycling around. Apart from this there aren’t a whole lot of things to do in Hue, the main town is tiny but they still have a few good restaurants, local handicraft shops and bars to visit. Aswel as this we had planned to go out for a day to the Demilitarized Zone where the borders between the North and South once was and this is where a number of American military bases were before and during the Vietnam war, and aswel as this there are still some of the Viet Cong tunnels which you can go and crawl through to see how they lived and fought, but with the bad weather we decided to give it a miss and so in the end we didn't actually get to do too much here and so spent most of our time planning the next part of our trip down to Hoi An.

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