To be honest we were all far too tired and too short of time to do anything noteworthy in Hue. We walked to KFC and had some pretty terrible food. Stayed inside with the air-con for about three hours, left in search of the old citadel but only made it as far as the outer walls before giving up and going back to wait for the bus. In our defence it was stupidly hot.
When we got on our bus, we found three pretty sweet beds at the back and had just got comfy before one of the guys on the bus (there is always the driver and another person who runs around organising things) told us that we had to get off the bus because we weren't Vietnamese. We protested, we already waited for the second bus because we were told the first one was for Vietnamese people only. The same person now telling us to get off the bus had also sent us to the back because the front was for Vietnamese people only. Now he wanted us to get off and wait ten minutes for another one. Reluctantly we agreed so long as that guy got off the bus also and waited with us, which he did. Outrageous display of racism, though throughout Asia people are pretty unashamed to say that you should pay more and get less priority for things because you're foreign. Really it's quite amusing (nobody has ever been hostile to us or anything really sinister) but can you imagine the uproar if this happened in Britain?
Twenty minutes later we three honkys got on the next bus only to find that the bus was full, so the same guy approached some more westerners and told them they had to get off the bus and wait for the next one. I apologised to them saying i felt partly responsible but ultimately didn't have a clue what was going on. We had also made that guy promise that we'd get the same seats (they were good seats) on the new bus, so he moved some Vietnamese guys into the westerners seats and we were back in the same position as about 40 minutes ago. I still don't quite understand why this was all going on - but it was certainly amusing. The best thing that can be said for the day is that some of the journeys gave us some pretty impressive views.
The next morning at around 7am we arrived in Hanoi, sadly we had no pickup and were once again being ripped off by taxi drivers who were trying to charge us four times as much money as we should have been paying. We convinced a hotel tout to give us a cheap taxi to his hotel (near where we were staying) on the condition we had a look at the rooms but were under no obligation to stay there. We looked, made our excuses and headed to our hostel for some kip. Great success!
Tomorrow we set off to Halong Bay for three days and then when we get back we will be heading for China. It will probably be a little rushed for the forseeable future so i'm not sure when more pictures and blog posts will be up, but they will soon enough.
This is one of my absolute favourite tunes from Trentemoller's latest album. For me this is about as good as it gets, electronic music at its best. The progressions and mix of different sounds and textures is mindblowing. All of his stuff his great to be honest.
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