The adventures continue moving up through Vietnam...

---

---

So we are continuing to move up north through Vietnam. Our next stop was Hue. This is a cool little city only a few hours from Hoi An.

We planned on staying here around 3 days but found that there wasn't too much to do so we ended up staying one night and making a tour of the city in our one main day there.

To our surprise, this city offered some super interesting sights to visit. It was once the capital of Vietnam and many emperors lived here so there were some impressive monuments to see. Whenever these emperors would die, they would built the most elaborate tombs for them but they looked like these massive palaces instead of tombs by our standards.

That night, we jumped on another night bus. This one wasn't as smooth as our last one. Something about everyone coughing and sneezing in tight quarters makes you just want to get off. Not to mention the odd random guy creaping out the girls, but I stepped in!! (Dont worry Ruth)

We got off at this tiny little city called Nimh Binh. This was actually a very cool city but for very different reasons then we've seen before. First off, outside of the hotels, nobody spoke a word of english and the girls looked like rockstars as we were walking down the street. I guess nobody has seen too many blonde hair girls walking around.

On our first day there, we got 3 guys to take us to the surrounding areas on their motorbikes. This was very fun because they took us through all the back roads and through small villages.

The first place we stopped as this huge rock mountain. We climbed to the top and had amazing views over the surrounding valley. After that, we took about a 2 hr boat right at Tam Coc. We paddled through small rivers going through tunnels and caves all the time having massive limestones mountains around us. We had two ladies paddling us the whole time so I grapped the paddle and ended up doing a big chunk of the work... then they asked us for a tip. I said I should be the one getting the tip after that crueling 2 hrs of paddling!!

Our 2nd day we took off for Cuc Phoung National Park. There we got went to a monkey sanctuary where they have tons of different species of monkeys that are on the verge of being extinct in Vietnam. After that we went for about a 7 km trekk through the jungle. The highlight was finding a good sized snake on the path!! No matter what the size was, I was just happy to see a snake!

After 2 days, itw as about time to leave because we were getting sick of eating at the same restaurant every day. We must have walked into about 5 different places and people just looked at us like aliens. Nonetheless, great experience.

Now we've arrived in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. The ride here was nuts. The road was packed the whole way here yet our bus driver through he was driving an F1 race car. A bit stressful but it's all part of travelling. We've become acustom to the horn being honked through the whole trip.

Anyways, till the next blog. We are off to Halong Bay in the morning.

Cheers!

---