Traveling in Asia is both epic and insanely easy. You don’t need to know bus numbers, or where the station is. You get picked up, shuttled somewhere you would never ever find, put on a bus, and arrive at your destination. When you arrive, there are swarms of taxi driver sharks looking to take you home. You give them an address, negotiate a price around $1 and you’re at the foot of your bed in a blink of an eye. I mean, we still have no idea how it works out everytime. But we have learned to accept it.
Now, the epic can come in many forms. Bathroom urgency when you can’t say “I need a toilet” in Burmese. Blowing a gasket on a mountain pass and watching your luggage with your MacBook get put on an unknown bus with a destination of who knows where as your vehicle glides out of sight in another direction. Or, perhaps being dropped off in the town you asked to be taken to at 3am at who-knows-where in a town you’ve never been to, never seen a map of, don’t have a guesthouse booked in, and everything is pitch black.
“Ok. Hue.” We were told as we were goon-armed from our sleep and out of the overnight bus and dropped off in a city square, as the bus sped off immediately.
Where do you start when you don’t even have a place that you’re sure has a room available; let alone one you can afford? You start by rubbing the sleep from your eyes and realizing that 2 very sweet French dudes are standing next to you in the same spot. AND they have a guidebook. With a map. So you start waking in the direction of their hotel. Zombie style. The French aren’t as bad as we Americans make them out to be.
Hue was a very important city during the American war. The Citadel, where the king lived, was a palace type place where some important members of the Viet Cong hid during some major battles.
Other than that, it’s a big city with lots of life and not a lot for a tourist to do. Which makes it particularly wonderful. We visited the Le Ba Dang Museum, dedicated to the famous local artist of the same name. He had passed away just 5 days before we saw his works.
We ate some particularly spot-on street food, drank some fresh beers, got Adam some new glasses and we rented a motorbike for the next day. Which wouldn’t be a typical one…