Day 132 - Hûé, Vietnam

I'm on an overnight bus again now and about to leave Hûé for Hanoi. We're travelling with a different bus company now and it's a world away from the haphazardness of the previous one. The buses are exactly the same but this time we got strictly allocated seats, computer printed tickets that we could actually read and advice about where the longest beds are on the bus. Brilliant. I'm now lying down fully stretched out and looking forward to a good kip. My confidence is being only mildly shattered as I've just noticed the driver fiddling around under the dash board and checking the fuses with his torch...

25 minutes later...

I had to stop writing for a while there because when the driver started the engine there was a strong burning smell and smoke started pouring out of my overhead light. I yelled to the driver to stop and he 'fixed' it by yanking all the wires out, snipping them with wire cutters, taping them up, untaping them again then shoving all the wires back in. I've now got a disco light show to entertain me for the evening where they keep shorting. I'm currently hoping for no flames but the stench of burnt plastic is bearable as long as that's all that happens.

Hoi An, as I mentioned before, was a lovely little place. Very easy to walk round with loads of little cafés and restaurants along the river. We visited one of the old houses in the town that was over 200 years old with French and Chinese architecture. The woman told us that about seven generations of her family had lived there and showed us around. It backs onto the river and for the last twenty years or so has flooded every October. Apparently it's due to deforestation in the valley which causes the river to silt up. I guess it's only going to get worse as their population grows and demand for wood increases. Shame really as I can imagine a few more years of that will destroy those houses forever.

We took a day trip to My Son (pronounced Me Sonn) which is Vietnam's most important centre of the ancient kingdom of Champa. Unfortunately, the Vietnamese were using the area as a strategic vantage point during the war so the Americans bombed most of it. Shame really as it was quite lovely.

We left Hoi An and took the bus to Hûé which is more city like. We arrived in the afternoon having left at 08:00 and were immediately swamped by touts trying to get us to book ourselves into their hotels. They even boarded the bus stopping us from getting off while they stuffed business cards, maps and leaflets up our noses. Determined not to be overwhelmed, I uncharacteristically shouted at them and pushed them off the bus so I could retrieve the luggage and get away from them. We thought we'd go a bit off-piste this time and not use a hotel from our trusted Lonely Planet guide. It worked to our advantage too as we ended up paying only £6 a night for a good room with air-con, hot showers, free Internet and a TV.

The guide book says that a typical scene in Hûé is of a tourist walking down the street being followed by at least a couple of cyclos and a moped all offering to whizz you around the city with the tourist shouting back "No, thank you, no". It couldn't be more true. No sooner had we finished our lunch today, a rather intimidating bowl of bubbling, boiling water with onions in it and a plate of raw beef and rice paper, than we were being cat-called by five cyclo drivers all offering their services. Due to the lashing down rain it might have been tempting if our hotel had been any more than 50m away.

Yesterday we did a bus tour of some of the old royal tombs around Hûé. Many of them are less than 150 years old and the last one was completed in 1931; a monument of concrete and ceramic tiles. In some ways it was the most elaborate one that we saw as concrete can be pretty much shaped into anything. The tour guide was next to useless though and was making things up as well as conveniently forgetting to say how many Vietnamese slaves were used to build them. One of the tombs doesn't actually contain the expired emperor; he was buried along with lots of his gold a riches in a secret location. Nobody knows where though as the 200 slaves that performed the service for him were beheaded so they could never reveal the secret. There's gratitude.

This morning we took a walk over the bridge to the North side of The Perfume River. How it got that name eludes me because I can imagine it being far from perfumed in the summer. We strolled around the old citadel, the highlight of which was feeding the greedy carp in the lake and then found our way to The Forbidden Purple City. It may well have been purple once, but now it's barely rubble as most of it has been turned into a vegetable plot following its destruction during the Tet Offensive of 1968.

We're due to arrive in Hanoi at about 06:00 tomorrow morning and will be there for about four days. It should be interesting, and of course the excitement is that if we don't get out of Vietnam before our visas expire we could be in a whole heap of trouble.

Wish us luck trying to book train tickets to Guilin in China.