No Fixed Abode: Shades of Hue

Fri 01 Apr 2016 - Hue and the Night Bus to Phong Nha

We left our bags in the hotel to collect later and managed an early start off out to visit the Imperial City, a walled fortress and palace within the walled city of Hue, tp get around most of it before the crowds arrive. We entered through one of the 6 impressive city gates and made our way around the forbidden city, outer courts, inner courts, temples and places of worship, gardens and pavilions. The Emperor had started building the city in 1802 to replicate a smaller version of the Chinese Forbidden city and it was still used by the last Emperor until he surrendered to the North Vietnamese in 1945. The whole city only has 10 remaining buildings out of the 160 originally built. This in part due to termites and cyclone damage but also major damage occurred during the war in 1968. There are several projects around the site with international funding to preserve and recreate it to its former glory.

An interesting exhibition explained the history behind the emperors, mandarins, courts, emperor’s mothers, wives, concubines, eunuchs and daily life within the city.

After about 5 hours we decided we’d seen enough and wandered into town to find a place to give us a good lunch to take us through to our bus journey later this evening. We opted for local food, getting quite adventurous in our selections and getting more proficient with our chopsticks.

Full with food we wandered to the riverbank and sat on a bench watching the world go by. Within minutes a lady stepped ashore from a boat in front of us, walked over and started to converse with the customary opening line of “where you from”? After telling us of her children and five generations of boat ownership she moved on to the sales pitch. “You want ride, very cheap”. We politely declined but she kept at it. Eventually she returned to her boat but then reappeared with a box of pop up greeting cards that everyone tries to sell. She was persistent in her efforts, even leaving the box in front of us while she wandered off somewhere else, but she eventually got the message that we were not going to spend anything and returned to her chores.

Back at the hotel we had a spare hour until our shuttle bus picked us up and we used this time to book a couple of train tickets online for an overnight sleeper train to Hanoi. We needed the full hour to do this as the system was extremely slow and with the end in sight we finally reserved our tickets but without paying for them. Whether they will be available at collection time remains to be seen.

The shuttle bus arrived right on time and took us to the bus collection area where we mingled with the young travellers who are here for the Easter holidays. The sleeper bus appeared at 5pm and we managed to watch our bags being put on first so we hopped on and were instructed to take off our shoes and put them in the a carrier bag we were handed. The bus travels overnight to Hanoi so only had sleep couches, on two levels, similar to bunks, no seats at all. We climbed up the little ladder, shoved our daypacks into the footwell and laid back to enjoy the 4-5 hour journey to Phong Nha.

As it was dark the bus lights were dimmed and the the faces of every single young person on the bus were lit up by electronic devices, all thumbing through facebook pages. We’d read stories of how bad these sleeper buses were, but apart from the driver tooting constantly, watching a soft porn music video whilst talking on his mobile phone and driving just a bit too close to the vehicles in front, we felt completely safe strapped in our safety belts.

As promised, the bus stopped outside our hotel on it’s way through to the main town, tooted its horn and two hotel staff leapt out of the darkness to grab our bags, seeing us through check in and to our room by 10pm. All in all, quite a busy day.