Day 17: Hip-Hip Hu-é!
Hwey!
Hooway!
Hué!
They all sound the same.

Happy Valentines Day!! I had a nice start to the morning with a skype date with Bonnie and Steph. Then Crouton and I caught a taxi to the train station to buy our ticket to Hanoi!

After that we realised Hué was too big to explore by foot and so we asked the taxi how much he would charge to go to the famous tombs and the old Forbidden City, and he wanted to charge us almost $40. So we got motorbike taxi’s instead! Only $10 each on the back of 2 motorbikes.
So much fun!! Not as sketchy as when there were 3 of us on one bike in Sihanoukville. It was relaxing, wind in our helmetted hair, we set off to see the tombs!

The first one had a lot of stairs. I am so sick of stairs. After the Siem Reap temples and Marble mountain stairs, I literally never want to walk up another single stair in my life. Call me lazy, but I see stairs and yell “Nooooooo!!” and when we saw an escalator today I rejoiced! So many stairs. Big stoney ones, little concrete ones, boulders, tree roots… My legs hurt. My butt hurts. And I’m not even losing weight. Death to stairs.

Anyway. First tomb was of Emperor Khai Dinh. He seemed pretty cool. His tomb was epic - The building was all mosaics depicting dragons and flowers and things. So cool. There were lots of sculptures of him and photos from the 20’s too. (refer to future uploaded photos)

The next one was more of the old palace that Emperor Tu Duc lived in, and his tomb was behind it. It was by the water and forest so it was nice but the structure was pretty boring compared to Khai Dinh.

The last one we wanted to see apparently was being restored and it was pretty far away and probably not worth it. So we went and saw a few pagodas instead which were cool. To get to the last one we had to go across this train bridge and the side bits of the bridge for motorbikes and people were really narrow so we had to tuck our knees in, it was pretty cool.

Then we went to the Forbidden City which was like a little city with a huge wall around it, they also called it a citadel. The Royals and their staff used to live within the walls, I believe. But most of it was burnt down years ago. It was still pretty cool to see.

Then we checked out the markets, walked back to our hotel and I am now on a train to Hanoi! It is a 6 person hard sleeper cabin and we are sharing with other Vietnamese people. They seem really nice but dont know English. They let us sit on the bottom with them though!