Arrived in Hue

Yesterday lunch time me and Izzy took a coach for the three and a half hour trip north to Hue. It was the first bus we have taken during day time since we began our trip and it was great to see the countryside that we normally miss in the darkness of the night.

When we got into Hue, a rep from our hotel was waiting to collect us... with two motorbikes for us and our bags (bearing in mind our bags carry everything we need for the next six months). Just as we put our helmets on a car pulled up and they told us to hop in that instead. We arrived at Binh Duong Hotel I, and they told us their best rooms were all full so we could stay in a room on the ground floor and then move tomorrow morning. To be honest, the room wasn't actually that bad, it just didn't have a window, but as promised this morning we moved to a nicer room with TWO windows! Not bad for £3.50 each per night. Our visa for Vietnam runs out on the 9th of January and we're still only half way up the east coast, so the hotel have organised to have a 30 day extension. We can then take our time travelling up to the north, before having to leave. We're thinking we might have to save Cambodia for another trip, because we've got a lot of Thailand to do before we leave for Australia at the end of Feb which is creeping up really fast.

Today we visited the Hue Imperial City, which is a maze of huge walls and moats surrounding buildings, temples and palaces. It was built when Emperor Gia Long took control of Vietnam in 1802, and stayed the capital until 1945 when a revolutionary government took over and declared Hanoi the capital. It was sad to see how run down a lot of it was, and that there clearly wasn't much money being spent to restore it. There were only a handful of people painting the odd building inside the main Citadel area.