Hué and the Vietnam wars

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Hué

The train from Hanoi to Hué was going to be a 12 hour sleeper train, which at first sounded really gruelling. However, it ended up being my favourite way of travelling so far! We went for the ‘soft sleeper option,which consisted of a 4 bed compartment with a table in the middle. Imagine the hogwarts express but with beds instead of seats, complete with its own old lady and a trolley full of weird items I have never seen before! We ate our complimentary Vietnamese pot noodle, I did one of my strongest bowel movements in the small Asian toilet (no sign of the dreaded Delhi belly yet!) and before we knew it we were waking up in Hué at 9am.



The town itself was a bit of a let down. The guidebook we had shadily acquired in our Hanoi hostel promised us a town with lots of attractions to do and see, but the actual town itself was not up to much. The old quarter had some incredibly old buildings in its imperial city, so we spent a day walking round The Purple Forbidden Palace, though most of it had been bombed into oblivion by the Americans. Was a cool place to look around but with not much information around and the guides being both annoying and out of our price range, everything was seen in the first day. So we decided to book a tour to the Demilitarized Zone for the next day, which turned out to be incredible.



The tour drove us to numerous American bases along with the zone itself and the original tunnels the Vietnamese fighters lived in. Our guide was a guy who had lived in the tunnels with his family and had known the villages and people who had been killed by the bombs dropped. It was all very intense and interesting, but the guide was a tubby local who kept supplying the jokes and smiles throughout the tour. Not bad for a guy who admitted being near 80! I would definitely recommend Mr Duy to anyone going to The DMZ.

Noodles were served, as they had for the thousandth time, so once we had got back to Hué we broke and went to an Italian restaurant for some average pasta dishes. Desperate times called for western measures! Just time for a few beers in front of the FA cup disasters and then to bed so we could get up early and move onto Hoi an by bus, being very unsure of how that was going to go as Vietnamese are horrendous drivers.

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