4th to 8th March 2003, Back by popular demand, our continuing travel journals! You can all stop stressing now and read on…………! Where were we?? Oh yes, Hanoi train station! We boarded the train in Hanoi bound for Hue at 11.20pm, after fun and games with the hotel taxi driver who’d tried to tell us (while getting on the train) there were only seats left, despite having booked and paid for a ‘soft’ sleeper cabin. What he meant was that he’d paid for a pair of seats and pocketed the extra for a sleeper cabin, ‘strangely’ he suddenly couldn’t understand english anymore either...hmmm? He did however seem to understand my waving fist and we eventaully got things sorted out! We shared a four bed cabin with two Vietnamese, a girl and a guy named Binh. Neither spoke english, but pretty soon we were all getting along like a house on fire. I was still feeling under the weather, as I had been since Ha Long bay, the worrying thing now was that I was starting to become disorientated also - not good. Binh could see that I was suffering a bit and kept jumping off the train as we came into a station to get me a bottle of fresh water. We never asked him, he just did it out of kindness. Nice guy. One thing we did notice about the train was that it was a lot smoother that those in Thailand, we could actually sleep!!
We rolled into Hue the following morning and managed to get a room at the Thai Binh hotel, which seemed pretty central. We’d read about the Café on ‘Thu’ wheels in Lonely Planet and decided to head there for a coffee. We were still doors away when we first heard Thu. She spotted us, and yelled at us to come to her café; the place was packed with travellers – a real oasis. Inside, every inch of the café walls is covered with funny poems or thankyou notes from travellers who’d visited over the last few years, you could spend a day just reading them all. I was feeling more ill than ever at this point, my head was screaming and as for Imodium – well, I may have well as stuck it up my ar*e for all the good that was doing! Whilst chatting I explained to Thu how ill I felt, within five minutes I was on the back of Minh’s (her brother) motorbike racing through the traffic to the clinic. The doctors whipped me to the fornt of the queue and next thing I was laid out with medical bits and bobs shoved everywhere. It turned out I’d got a nasty case of amoebic dysentry - not sure exactly what it is, but it sounds bad! Minh then shot off on his bike and got me all the pills on the prescription then took me back to Sarah at the café. We were both relieved it wasn’t Malaria, as I had all the symptoms. I can’t thank Thu and her brother enough, they are totally, totally genuine people, they never asked us for a thing in return and saved me from probably being very ill. Thanks Thu if you read our journal. That afternoon we ambled over to the Citadel which in my opinion was one of the best sights in Hue. While there kids kept coming up and feeling my arms – apparently white skin and the hair on western arms amaze them, it was really funny. Sarah's now curly hair seems to raise an inordinate amount of interest also.
Wow, how much better did I feel after some of the tablets i’d been given, no headache, no churning guts and no dizziness – great! As I felt better we popped back down to Thu’s and arranged a motorbike tour of some of the less accesible sights out of town. Minh drove with Sarah on the back and I got my own bike, while Thu’s second brother drove a guy we’d met called Brad from Houston. We visited Thien Mu Pagoda first, where Thic Quang Duc’s car is kept (the monk who drove to Saigon during the Vietnam war and set fire to himself), Sarah actually got to meet one of the young apprentice Monks. Then disaster struck!! While riding back into town I managed to pile up the bike – what a nightmare. A Vietnamese guy just stepped out in front of me and I skidded to avoid him, the bike slid and I made like the A team and hit the dirt! Amazingly apart from a few scratches I was unhurt, despite half running/half rolling right across the road. The bike was bent here and there, but not too bad I guess. My first travelling close shave! After straightening things out we visited some of the other sites, Thanh Toan Bridge, Bunker Hill (we could see Hamburger Hill from here) plus the tombs of Tu Duc, Khai Dinh and Minh Mang, all pretty impressive places. The real bonus was we managed to find a great curry house in Hue, not quite the Mangla – but pretty good none the less, did get pretty surprised though when a pair of cows came wandering past the restaurant! We met a great couple from Dublin that evening too, Steve & Shauna, we’ve promised ourselves to give them a buzz if we pop over in 2004 and meet up for a pint or two.
Next day we were up at 5.30am (ouch!) for the DMZ tour (DMZ = De-militarized Zone, why it’s called that is a mystery to me? Apparently, the Yanks dropped more bombs there than in Europe throughout the whole of World War 2 – you can’t get much more militarized than that!). A fusty old bus that seated about 15 picked up 21 of us – nice! We started at Quang Tri where there is an old church that has been left as a memorial and is just so shot-up it’s unreal. We saw Con Thien firebase (the first in Vietnam) and also the Ben Hai River, which in 62’ still marked the North-South, divide on the 17th parallel. Next we came to the ‘Rockpile’ along Highway 9, then Dakrong Bridge on the Ho Chi Minh trail. Our last stop before the Vinh Moc tunnels was the famous Khe Sahn command post which was superb, there were bunkers, artillery pieces, weapons to see, also the old runway where plants still refuse to grow after all this time. Even spent shell cases still litter the ground around the base. The tunnels were the highlight though, we decended 22m under the hillside on three levels of hand dug tunnels (not to be confused with the Cu Chi fighting tunnels). It did get pretty claustrophibic inside to be honest, how whole families lived down there I’ll never know.
Before we left Hue, Thu asked us to pop in to see her. Despite only having ten minutes before the bus left she still made us sit and have breakfast, quite confident that the bus was always late! As we left Thu gave us a letter she’d written thanking us for visiting her café, also saying how much she’d enjoyed our company and she hope’d that one day we’d come back. She wouldn’t let us open it until we were on the bus, which we were glad about because we were quite touched when we read it - must be getting soft in our old age! She really is one of the nicest people we’ve met in Vietnam, plus she makes the best chips ever! Next update, Hoi An……………
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