We had arrived and found ourselves a nice hotel, the original plan was to head to Hanoi on Saturday by train or bus, we would just see how much they cost. We headed out early-ish to the train station to find out 1) if we could get our bikes on the train and how much it would cost. Problem one: we would have to send the bikes up on a different train, not good don’t really like leaving my bike, they would go in the morning and we would go in the evening. Problem two: it was a bit expensive. So we would check out the prices for the buses.
After the hard morning of walking 2km down the road we jumped in a taxi and headed off to the Big C supermarket. We grabbed some lunch there and some things from the supermarket and then headed back to take shelter at our hotel, it was pretty hot. That night it was Indian for dinner which I eat way to much and could really feel it after.
Zach and Elise had decided to head to the Forbidden Purple city the next day and I would follow, we had decide to leave early in the morning hoping to miss the heat of the mid day sun and maybe the crowds as well. The forbidden city was built in 1804 by the Emperor Gia Long, well built by the peasants of the time anyway, it was heavily bombed by the Americans during the war. The Citadel sits gracefully on the northern bank of the Song Huong River with a majestic flag pole sitting up on the outer wall and a massive Vietnam flag.
As we wandered into the citadel it was pretty cool to see all the buildings, a lot are under repair and or reconstruction but this did not really take away the impressiveness of the area. We wandered all around taking photo’s and enjoying the peacefulness of the place. At around 10am it was starting to get hot so we headed back towards the hotel and the sanctity of our hotel and the aircon. We grabbed a couple of Cyclo rickshaws for most of the journey back, let someone else do the work.
The afternoon was spent catching up on the blog, sorting photo’s watching crap tv and then dinner out all together at a restaurant down the road, it was a nice way to escape the heat of the mid day sun. We also tried to book our sleeper bus as this had been decided would be our mode of transport up to Hanoi, the only problem was we had left it to late so would not be heading north on the re-scheduled Sunday night it would be Monday night, which would mean another day in Hue.
The next morning we had decide to head for a river trip to Thien Mu Pagoda and a local floating village, the negotiations were taken care of by Elise, we had the boat for 3 hours, to the pagoda then the floating village. The trip up the river was nice enough, the lady on our boat started bring out all her stuff for sale, it was one of those rides were they do the pushy sale. Great. We managed to put her off till we were on our way back.
The pagoda was really nice, the grounds were well kept, I have not really been looking around at this sort of thing on this trip, it was worth the trip up the river though. I took a lot of photo’s then it was back on the boat to the village, our first pass passed the village was a bit too and we got back to the jetty about 30minutes to early so we made them take us back out, by us I mean Kat and Elise to tell the truth I was not really sure what was going on at the time. We did another run passed the village where we were able to capture some more photo’s. All in all it was a really nice boat trip.
The afternoon was spent having a look at Kat’s bike, her back hub was not very smooth so we were going to pull it apart and have a look if it needed repacking. It turned out that when they had got their bikes serviced in Thailand the people who serviced them had left a ball bearing out, the inner casing was a bit pitted, not much we could do about that now and by the time we had pulled it apart and found this problem it was too late to get a replacement one, that would have to wait till tomorrow we had a more important thing to deal with, dinner.
Elise was breaking away from the fellowship and is heading off towards Lao and then Thailand for a month, she is to meet back up with Zach in Nepal, after him, Kat and Mike head into China and then Tibet. They are doing my trip, it will be sad when I have to leave them at the border. Zach and Elise went out for their final dinner together and Mike, Kat and I headed somewhere different.
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