Vietnam 04: Hue

Greetings, this time from Hue about halfway between HoChiMinhCity and Hanoi. After flying out of HoChiMinh, we first arrived at HoiAn. HoiAn is a small town known for it’s tailer shops. I tell you, there are a lot of tailer shops there. Streets lined with them. So we couldn’t avoid having a suit tailer made. The rest of the town was strange. Lots of tourists, so you would expect all the shops, bars and restaurants that usually come with tourists. The tailer shops are there, but not many restaurants and almost no bars at all. The few bars that were there closed at 10pm. We did manage to find a bar serving the local beer from draught at d3000, about EUR 0,15. Probably a good idea they closed early :)

 After two days in Hoian, we took the morning bus (about 4 hours, 150km) to Hue. Again a strange town for tourists. A much bigger town, so more streetside restaurants, but almost no bars. We did stumble into The Belgian Bar last night, which served Leffe at extreme prices. The bar is run by a flemish guy, so I had to look twice when a european looking guy showed up at our table to ask for what we wanted to drink. That hasn’t happened the last few weeks. Even worse than talking dutch with the owner, the bar was also the meeting place for the local expats, so we ended up talking to 6 dutch people and one belgian, one of which studies biology in Utrecht. Small world…

Today we took a walk through Hue, trying to find the old citadel and forbidden city. Apart from the map in the big guide, we did not have a map of that area of the town, so of course we took a much longer tour than needed. As everywhere, we attracted the attention of the motorbike and cyclo (riskja) people to get us to let them drive us. This time the guy was much more irritating than usual and followed us for at least half an hour. He could not understand we wanted to walk in this heat and especially couldn’t understand why we didn’t think it was a bad idea that we were walking in the wrong direction. The fun was getting somewhere without tourists and getting an ice coffee without people speaking english. Which we did. Only 2 minutes walk from the forbidden city, just on the wrong side of the entrance. That’s enough from Hue, tomorrow on to Hanoi. The weather forcast looks very bad with thunderstorms and showers. I hope they have it wrong.

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